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Mission

The Missionary Movement and History

Following on from my last post, here is a longish quotation from Andrew Walls.

The missionary movement is now in its old age. It is not a useless and decrepit old age. There are situations where it provides the most effective, perhaps the only foreseeable means of making any witness to Christ or any proclamation about him. There are many others where the surviving apparatus of the missionary movement is all that remains, till better means appear, to express and realize the universal fellowship of Christ’s church and to make possible real sharing between its various parts. But the conditions that produced the movement have changed and they have been changed by the Lord of History. And the church has been changed out of all recognition by the agency of the missionary movement itself…

Nor does the old age of the missionary movement imply the end of cross-cultural missiona – though it may raise questions about who does the crossing.

From The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission ofFaith by Andrew Walls (p.261)