Mission as Ministry of Reconciliation

Robert Schreiter

• Publisher: Regnum
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781908355263
• eBook ISBN: 9781912343300
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

There is hope – even if it is "Hope in a Fragile World", as the concluding chapter of Mission as Ministry of Reconciliation puts it. At the very heart of the gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of hope and reconciliation. Nothing could be more relevant and more necessary in a broken world than this Christian message of hope and reconciliation.... I would like to congratulate the editors of Mission as Ministry of Reconciliation, for they listened carefully and planned with farsightedness. … This rich book offers a valuable elucidation of the importance and the understanding of mission as ministry of reconciliation. It expounds its practical implications in a variety of settings. It unites perspectives from different church traditions, including the Lausanne Movement and the Catholic Church. It takes the interfaith aspect into account and also speaks about the socio-ethical implications of mission.

From the Foreword by Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tvei

PART ONE

PERSPECTIVES ON MISSION OF RECONCILIATION

THE EMERGENCE OF RECONCILIATION AS A PARADIGM OF MISSION: DIMENSIONS, LEVELS, AND CHARACTERISTICS

Robert Schreiter

It has become commonplace in missiological circles to organize thinking about mission through the use of paradigms or models. David Bosch’s ground-breaking work on the history of mission (1991) first set the standard for thinking in this way by the use of the language of “paradigms”.¹ He took the language of paradigm from the work of historian historian of science Thomas Kuhn,² who organized a scheme presenting patterns of change in scientific innovation as organized into implicit frameworks or paradigms that guided research. Bosch’s proposal continues to shape our description, analysis and critique of mission. In their magisterial work, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today,³ Today,³ Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder speak of “models” – both to describe historical forms of mission as well as to reflect upon contemporary ones. If we use the idea of models as a heuristic device, Clifford Geertz’s distinction between “models of” (as descriptive) and “models for” (as normative) is useful.⁴ By making this distinction as we think about approaches to mission, it allows us to see how models of mission arise out of the praxis of missionaries as a response to the world around them, as well as how they might serve as normative theological models for appraising and guiding any future praxis.

I would like to use the framework of models in this essay to examine one important development in mission that has occurred in the past quarter-century, namely, the emergence of reconciliation as a model of and a model for mission. By so doing I hope to sketch something of how this model has been developed, and how it relates to other paradigms of mission that are at play in the Christian oecumene today.

The Emergence of Reconciliation as a Model of Mission

The second half of the twentieth century ushered in both crisis and opportunity to the understanding of Christian mission. The struggle for independence from colonialism in many parts of the Global South led to a profound questioning of the very nature of mission itself. Was mission simply part of the imperial schemes of domination and exploitation by Europe? Should the presence of foreign missionaries in newly independent lands be tolerated at all? Such searching questions seared the very heart of mission as it had been understood among the churches of the Global North, both churches in the newly founded World Council of Churches as well as the missionary religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church. For the latter, the breakthrough that refocused the crisis of the “why” of mission into a renewed sense of the “how” of mission came in the 1981 SEDOS Seminar on the Future of Mission.⁵ There a hundred missionaries, mission scholars, and leaders of those missionary orders pondered together these questions of “why” and “how“. What resulted was a fourfold way of seeing the “how” of mission: mission as (1) proclamation, (2) dialogue, (3) inculturation, and (4) liberation of the poor. The significance of this outcome was two-fold. First of all, it focused more directly on the interaction of missionaries and those to whom they had been sent, rather than giving attention only to the task or charge of the missionary; this created a greater sense of mutuality in mission. Second, it made the concrete contexts of mission the starting point for reflection rather than a priori concepts of mission. Or put another way, an effort to discern the missio Dei as it was unfolding in specific places provided the prompting toward renewed missionary praxis.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union were the first of a series of events that reshaped the context for mission. This demise of a bipolar world order had two immediate impacts that were to reverberate through mission. The first was the freeing up of the nations once part of the Soviet bloc in central and Eastern Europe which opened the opportunity for a revitalization of the Christian churches there. But in the rush to rebuild and evangelize it became apparent that deep divisions ran through churches and society. Many church leaders had been severely compromised by being part of the surveillance network of government informers. Civil society had been effectively destroyed by the communist regimes there. Such things would have to be confronted and healed.

The second impact of this demise of a world order was to be seen in the upsurge in the number of armed conflicts taking place in countries of the Global South and parts of the Global North (especially the Balkan Peninsula), as well as the Rwandan genocide. The conflicts happened within countries rather than between countries. What this meant was that the rebuilding after the conflict was even more difficult since combatants were often neighbours. The genocide in Rwanda brought that point home even more. Missionaries often found themselves in the midst of violence, and churches were often being called upon – as one of the few remaining credible actors in civil society – to lead peace processes and efforts at rebuilding society. These were tasks for which the churches were unprepared. The end of apartheid in South Africa put a spotlight on this role of the churches there in a special way.

Other events in the decade pushed missionaries and churches into roles as agents of reconciliation. The commemoration of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas prompted the United Nations to declare 1992 the Year of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous peoples in the Americas, in Australia and New Zealand and elsewhere, used this opportunity to testify to their suffering (and in some places, near-extinction) by European colonial powers. This prompted nations and churches to consider how to heal these grievous wounds. The year 1994 saw the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, an event that underscored the worldwide pattern of violence against women.

The end of the bipolar political order and the consolidation of neo-liberal capitalism as the sole worldwide economic system became more evident with the advance of globalization. The effects of globalization included an increase in migration (the majority of migrants today are women and are Christian), more multicultural societies, greater polarization in societies (due to growing economic inequality around the world and social hyper-differentiation in wealthy cultures⁶), and a compression of time and space through information technology and the media. These effects produce new fissures, divisions and wounds in society, often at a quicker pace than such effects did in the past. Within the Roman Catholic Church in the United States and in countries in Europe, the revelation of the sexual abuse of minors by the clergy has added an additional layer of challenge for reconciliation and healing.

In the midst of all of these challenges arising from human interaction, yet another challenge began to loom ever more largely: climate change and the consequences this would have within the coming decades.

It is out of this miasma of violence and division that the theme of reconciliation began to surface as a compelling response to all that was happening in terms of mission.⁷ By the turn of the twenty-first century, it had been a theme for the British and Irish Association of Mission Studies (2002), the WCC’s Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (2005) and the International Association of Mission Studies (2008), as well as a perspective explored in the Lausanne Movement at Cape Town (2010) and elsewhere.⁸

It had become evident that the world was in need of reconciliation in so many places and in so many different ways. Reconciliation – with its implications for healing and for service – was something people expected to find in the churches. The churches and missionaries found themselves drawn into work for reconciliation at many different levels. Why did the events of the 1990s spawn such an interest? Some suggest that the utopian visions that had played such a role beginning in the optimistic 1960s (in the theology of hope and the theologies of liberation) had crumbled in the face of the challenges that the end of the Cold War era now portended. Reconciliation was a more modest way of building the future by attending especially to healing past wounds that could compromise future well-being – be it the wounds of war, of social injustice, of exploitation of the earth. We are probably still too close to all these events to have a clearer picture. What is clear, however, is that reconciliation provided a model of twenty-first century mission. We now turn to how reconciliation is a model for mission, based on Scripture and a theology of reconciliation arising out of missionary praxis today.

Reconciliation as a Model for Mission: Biblical Foundations

The theme of reconciliation is prominent in the Scriptures, even though it is spoken of directly very little.⁹ The word “reconciliation” does not appear in in the Hebrew Scriptures, although there are powerful stories of reconciliation, such as that of Esau and Jacob, and of Joseph and his brothers. Even in the New Testament, the language of reconciliation is largely to be found only in the Pauline writings. Indeed, Paul’s message has been called a “Gospel of reconciliation” inasmuch as he had experienced being reconciled to God and the followers of Jesus by a gracious act on the part of God, not due to anything he himself had done.

Most of the earlier theological literature on reconciliation focused on what has been called the “vertical” dimension of reconciliation; that is, God’s reconciling humanity to God’s own self. Indeed, this vertical dimension constitutes the central Christian narrative of what God has done for humanity. It is presented concisely in Romans 5:1-11:

“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ; through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely therefore, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”

It is this vertical dimension that the sacraments – baptism, Eucharist and reconciliation especially – draw upon as their source and place in Christian life. Indeed, much of the liturgical language of the churches focuses on this vertical dimension of reconciliation.

The interest in reconciliation as a model for mission that began in the 1990s continues to draw its life from this vertical dimension. For this vertical dimension is the foundation of all Christian discourse on reconciliation: what God has done for humanity through Jesus Christ. What is new is the deeper exploration of the “horizontal” dimension of reconciliation; that is, reconciliation between humans, as individuals and as groups. This too is rooted in Pauline teaching in three sets of biblical passages: 2 Cor 5:17-20, Eph 2:12-20, and its cosmic consummation in Christ in Eph 1:10 and Col 1:19-20.

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away: see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Perspectives on Mission as Ministry of Reconciliation
• Part II: Experiences of Reconciliation Locally and Globally
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover