Tag Archives: Church: World

Fault Lines

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I am beginning to fear that the greatest fault line in the Church today lies between those in the West who feel that their theological and exegetical heritage is the only valid one for the church and those in the developing world who are developing their own indigenous theologies as they read the Scriptures faced by very different realities.

Vinoth Ramachandra captures this in a strongly worded post:

A group of North American pastors calling themselves The Gospel Coalition of International Outreach is engaged in what they call “a mission of Theological Famine Relief for the Global Church”. They state on their website: “We are partnering with translators, publishers, and missions networks to provide new access to biblical resources, in digital and physical formats. Our goal is to strengthen thousands of congregations by helping to equip the pastors and elders who are called to shepherd them.”

Sounds loving, until one asks: who decides who is theologically famished and who is not? who selects what “resources” to send the famished? who decides what constitutes “equipping” and who should be doing it? The answer is always the same. A small group of white, well-to-do American or British males. We have experienced such paternalistic, colonial “mission” before- others deciding what is the “Good News” for us, what is “sound doctrine”, which authors to read and whom to avoid, etc. They have exported their theological blind-spots and sectarian rivalries, reproducing carbon-copies of themselves in the global South rather than nurturing real leaders. The learning and theological traffic is all one-way.

Of course, the West still has something to contribute to the growing worldwide Church, but we also have a great deal to learn. The very fact that the church is growing like wildfire in the two thirds world, but is declining in much of its historic heartland should indicate to us that not all in our theological garden is rosy.

This question is explored in more depth in the recent edition of Encounters Magazine which features a longish lecture by me on ‘Reading the Bible With the Global Church‘ along with responses from scholars from four continents. You might enjoy reading it.

Women and Leadership in the Church

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The question of the role of women in Church leadership is one which gets a lot of airing both in Christian circles and in the wider press. However, it’s one that we rarely touch on here at Kouyanet. This is mainly because it isn’t an issue which impinges directly onto our areas of interest. However, when I came across this piece by Onesimus, I decided that I had to post a link to it. There are a couple of points of interest: it is written by an Orthodox scholar based in Kenya (though with an evangelical background), but most importantly it takes a slant on the question that I’ve never seen before.

A few thoughts on Church ‘leadership’ as we find it in the New Testament.  First we must understand that ‘leadership’ is not a New Testament word; it’s a modern word.  Leadership implies authority, initiative, direction, management and control.  In many ways, leadership is a power word, and assumes a perspective on the world around us and takes on a certain posture and demands a certain course of action.  Leadership is a man’s word and its context describes a man’s context.  Today churches of all kinds have seminars on ‘leadership’. We give our shepherds three easy steps on being a more effective leader.  So many of our churches are so large that we need our ‘leaders’ to become more effective managers.  All of this is intended to enable our churches to function as effective institutions.  But none of this is found in our New Testament.  In fact, the emphasis throughout, indeed the direct teaching of Jesus himself and the apostles takes us in the exact opposite direction.

Jesus’ followers were to be different.  They were not to be like certain Gentiles, who lived to lord it over people.  Nor were they to be like certain Jews who were keen to maintain the perks of position and power.  Instead, Jesus’ followers were to be different, known for putting the needs of others before their own, known for being like slaves in their readiness to do whatever for whoever was needy, known for being like Jesus himself.  ‘If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I have set you an example that you also should do as I have done to you.’ (John 13:14-15)  In this Jesus leads by example.  He takes on the posture of a slave, and for those homes too humble for a slave, the posture of a woman.
Immediately after Jesus offers the disciples the bread of his body and the cup of his blood, a quarrel breaks out as to which one of them should be the one in charge over the rest of them. ‘Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors.  But you are not to be like that.  Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves.  For who is greater, the one is at the table or the one who serves?  Is it not the one who is at the table?  But I am among you as one who serves.’ (Luke 22:25-27)  This is only one of several examples that I could point to where the disciples import their cultural understanding of leadership into what Jesus is calling them to do and be, only to have Jesus present them with an alternative vision of what it means to be his people that is so radical and unexpected that his disciples simply cannot fathom it.
I wish to suggest that it isn’t just the disciples who had trouble fathoming Jesus’ vision for discipleship and for the community of disciples that would be known by his name.  Every generation of Christian church has struggled with the profound temptation to import the surrounding culture’s understanding of leadership and authority into the church.  I want to suggest that when one looks at the historical record, one finds that the Church has repeatedly taken the easier road and abandoned Jesus’ blueprint in favor of the way it’s always been done.  The evidence for this can be seen everywhere throughout the history of the Church to the present day.  At almost every point, the church and her ministers look nothing like what Jesus was talking about and calling his followers to be and do.  The discrepancy is simply shocking.

If you wan’t to know how this is applied to the question of women’s ministry, read the whole article.

Books I have Read: We Are Not the Hero

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A few evenings ago, we had dinner with a friend who has been involved with a developing mission movement in one corner of the world. Over many years, our friend and her colleagues have been patiently building relationships with local church leaders and supporting them as they get involved in reaching outside of their church boundaries. Our friend feels that they are at a point where things are about to really take off.

At the same time, she fears for the future of the work they are doing. A large, US based agency is looking to come into the country and ostensibly support this new mission movement. However, this support comes with strings. In particular, this agency wants to get things done quickly and years of patient building relationship building are being sidelined in the hurry to get things done. Younger, tech-savvy guys are given preference to older, wiser and more respected local leaders – something which just isn’t done in that culture. And so it goes on.

The leaders of this large agency would do well to read We Are Not the Hero by Jean Johnson. Subtitled A missionary’s guide for sharing Christ, not a culture of dependency, this hard hitting book takes a good look at some of the mistakes commonly made by Western missionaries working in the minority world. However, this is not a “let’s beat up the missionaries” sort of book. For the most part it is full of excellent advice and suggestions as to a more positive way forward. Many of the books I mention here are of a reflective or theoretical nature. We Are Not the Hero has a good theoretical underpinning, but is extremely practical in nature.

One might have thought that things had moved on and that we don’t need books like this anymore – sadly, this is not the case.I’m not sure that I’d want to make it compulsory for all Western missionaries to read this – but they’d better have a really good excuse if they don’t!

Thanks to Nora for drawing my attention to this book (when are you going to start blogging again?).

Patrick Johnstone on Bible Translation

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The importance of a people proudly having their own version of the Bible cannot be under-estimated for the preservation and advancement of its culture. This was true for the Armenians, Goths, Georgians, Ethiopians who have long been Christian. It is equally true for the Kurds in the Middle East, the Kabyle of Algeria, the Konkomba of Ghana and the Quechua of Peru and Ecuador. The 21st Century will possibly see the extinction of 2000 languages. The most effective preventive for this is the translation and use of the Scriptures. It gives added weight to the Vision 2025 of Wycliffe Bible Translators and other Bible agencies to see the initiation of translation work into every language now without the Bible and for which the speakers of that language desire it. This is likely to be a further 1,500—2,000 languages.

From Bible Translation and the Cross-Cultural DNA of the Church.

You can find out more about Vision 2025 here and the latest statistics on the availability of the Bible in the world’s languages are also online.

Books I have Read: Carnival Kingdom

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I have to declare a slight interest here. I know a number of the authors and editors of this book and they were kind enough to let me have a copy for free.

That being said, I can honestly say that Carnival Kingdom is an excellent book and one which will interest many readers of this blog. Subtitled, Biblical Justice for Global Communities, the book explores why in which the topsy-turvey, first-will-be-last Kingdom of God can and should interact with the world we are living in. This isn’t a comfortable book and calls us to reassess the way in which the Christian faith should impact all aspects of social and political life.

This isn’t a ‘page turner’, you are unlikely to stay up all night wondering what happens in the last chapter, but it does repay careful reading and reflection. The various essays which go to make up the book are through provoking and creatively presented. As with any multi-author book, different sections will appeal to different readers, but there is something here for anyone who is open to being Biblically provoked.

Carnival Kingdom is also available for The Kindle, though it isn’t so easy to make notes in the margin. The book is a product of the Justice Initiative a group that are well worth following; you can find links to their Facebook page and other things here.

Churches and Mission Agencies

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The 20 Schemes blog raised an interesting issue this week:

We have seen a sad development in modern evangelicalism.  Churches believe that they exist to make disciples of their own local community.  Churches send money to a missionary society in order for that society to make disciples of other nations.  We have cut off the local church from its commission to make disciples of all nations.

It is the local church that is commanded by Christ to go and make disciples of all nations.  It is the local church that we see on the pages of the New Testament sending, supporting, and equipping church planting missionaries to go where the gospel is not yet known.  The missionary movement has never been divorced from the local church – it is the church.

However, it would be wrong to read the article as being opposed to missionary agencies, it isn’t. A later paragraph reads:

If we trust in the sufficiency of the Gospel and if we affirm our call to go to the nations then we must accept that every church has great missionary potential.  So missionary agencies, on the whole, are not the problem.  We need experts to provide support, training, guidance and a credible infrastructure within which gospel workers can work.  The problem is when the church see’s the agency as the “sender” of the missionary and therefore becomes detached from the responsibility the church has to make disciples of all nations.

This question of the relationship between churches and missionary agencies is a key one. I would suggest that mission agencies, Wycliffe included, have tended to have a low view of the Church’s role in mission. However, I would also suggest that this is changing rapidly.

When I mentioned this issue on Twitter, it turned out (unsurprisingly) that Simon Cozens had already written a post on this question.

The relationship between the church and mission agency is basically one of attitude. The attitude really ought to be that the mission agency is helping the church get its members involved in world mission. For some reason, it’s become, in many cases, the church seeing the mission agencies as poaching their would-be missionaries and redirecting their loyalty away from the church. Agencies, now viewed with suspicion, find themselves having to go into churches with a more apologetic attitude.

What do you think?

 

 

Theology of Mission or Missionary Theology

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At the same time, the traditional Western approach to theological education has been widely rejected elsewhere in the world. By now we are all familiar with the critiques developed in South America, but elsewhere around the globe voices are raised against an approach to theology that is perceived to be too academic, too abstract and too remote from the actual tasks of mission and witness in a religiously plural world. Thus, some years back John Mbiti observed that the curricula used in theological seminaries in Africa showed them to be ‘very much out of touch with the realities of African culture and problems’. Mbiti asked,

Have we not enough musical instruments to raise the thunderous sound of the glory of God even unto the heaven of heavens? Have we not enough mouths to sing the rhythms of the Gospel in our tunes until it settles in our bloodstream? Have we not enough hearts in this continent, to contemplate the marvels of the Christian faith? …. Have we not enough intellectuals in this continent to reflect and theologize on the meaning of the Gospel? Have we not enough feet on thjs continent, to carry the Gospel to every corner of this globe?

Mbiti’ s words clearly imply that Christian theology developed in Africa will be inextricably bound up with mission. Indeed, they reflect an awareness that a fundamental shift has occurred by means of which the real centres of spiritual vitality and missionary expansion are now located in the Southern hemisphere. Consciousness of this change is widespread in the Third World, and theologians in Africa, Latin America and Asia increasingly ask whether the churches in the West have yet awoken to the reality of this new era in Christian mission.

This quote comes from A Theology of Mission or a Missionary Theology by David Smith. From the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 13:1 (Spring 1995). The paper is very accessible and rather short (9 A5 pages). I can’t think of a reason why anyone interested in mission or the growth of the Church would not read it. Twenty years after its publication, this paper has proved to be remarkably prescient.

More excellent theological and biblical studies journals are available at BiblicalStudies.org.uk, thanks to the excellent work of Rob Bradshaw.

Moo On Bible Translation

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The Proclamation Trust blog has four nice, concise points about Bible translation taken from a talk by Douglas Moo (you can find the whole presentation here):

  • it is important to read theology out of the text rather than the temptation to read it into the text
  • all translations have to think about meaning – you can’t simply translate words. A literal Bible is not, by definition, a more accurate Bible
  • translation is important because translation is a form of communication; therefore you always have to be asking for whom you are translating (all preachers should be thinking this way)
  • the general and steep decline in the ability to read and comprehend has huge implications for Christianity given that it is based on the interpretation of a book. Churches have not really begun to grapple with this sea-change

The only point which I think needs comment is the final one. Moo is dead right to highlight the way in which we can no longer assume that people (in the western world) are fluent readers, able to handle a text as complex as the Bible. It is also true that Churches in the West have not really begun to get to grips with this issue. However, those of us working in Bible translation and church-planting around the world have been wrestling with this issue for many years and there is a huge body of experience and literature that the western church could tap into. I fear, however, that Churches in Europe and North-America would prefer to reinvent the wheel, rather than build on the experience of others.

The Future of Theology?

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First, let us recall that within the last century there has been a massive southward shift of the centre of gravity of the Christian world, so that the representative Christianlands now appear to be in Latin America,Sub-Saharan Africa, and othe rparts of the southern continents.This means that Third World theology is now likely to be the representative Christian theology. On present trends (and  I recognize that these may not be permanent) the theology of European Christians, while important for them and their continued existence, may become a matter of specialist interest to historians (rather as the theology of the Syriac Edessene Church is specialist matter for early Church historians of today, not a topic for the ordinary student and general reader, whose eyes are turned to the Greco-Roman world when he studies the history of doctrine). The future general reader of Church history is more likely to be concerned with Latin American and African, and perhaps some Asian, theology. It is perhaps significant that in the last few years we have seen for the first time works of theology composed in the Third World (the works of Latin American theologians of liberation, such as Gutierrez, Segundo, and Miguez Bonino) becoming regular reading in the West-not just for missiologists, but for the general theological reader. The fact that particular Third World works of theology appear on the Western market is not, however, a necessary measure of their intrinsic importance. It Simply means that publishers think them sufficiently relevant to the West to sell there. Theology is addressed to the setting in which it is produced.

Andrew Walls; from The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture.

I’m going to be exploring this with students on the Bible and Mission MA at Redcliffe College this week – what are your thoughts?

My New Year’s Wish for the Church in the UK

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You know what? I’d love to see the church in the UK hitting the headlines because it is talking about Jesus too much, this year.

All to often, it seems to me, the church is in the news because it is talking about itself, very often in ways that are indistinguishable from the wider culture. It seems as though the church is fascinated by status; arguing over who can and can’t hold authority and do certain jobs (with a good dash of sex and sexuality added to the mix). Then there are the stories of British Christians being persecuted, which pander to a romantic view of Britain as an old-fashioned Christian nation.

The problem with these narratives is that they distort the reality of the church. When synods and church councils become the main story, the faithful work of churches in streets and parishes across the country is ignored. When we obsess about the right of Christians in the UK to wear a cross to work, we turn our eyes away from the real, life and death, persecution of Christians in Nigeria, the Middle East and elsewhere.

More importantly, when the church becomes the story, we are no longer pointing people to Jesus and to his Kingdom. Ours is a life changing message about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, about his Spirit’s power to transform individuals and society, about forgiveness of sin and reconciliation with God and mankind.

Yes, I know that the politics (especially the gender politics) of some branches of the church in the UK are complex. I know, too, that it is becoming difficult to express Christian faith in some contexts in the UK.

However, we mustn’t let the world squeeze us into its own mould of status seeking and victimhood. We have to challenge the world with the awkward, feisty and counter-cultural message of a God who suffered on our behalf and who calls us to full allegiance to him.

Easier said than done, perhaps. Especially with a media who are ever eager for a sniff of conflict or controversy. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if at the end of 2013, the papers were complaining that Christians were spending too much time talking about Jesus?

Blog of The Year

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For the last five years, around this time, I have announced my favourite blog of the year. This prestigious award is rigorously judged according to strict criteria.

  1. They must post regularly
  2. They must be consistently interesting
  3. I must like them more than other blogs for whatever subjective reasons I choose.

There are a number of blogs which I have mentioned in previous years that deserve a mention again this year.

Last year’s winner The Beaker Folk of Husbourne Crawley continues to be barking mad and inspirational by turns. But they won last year and they’d only get big headed if they were allowed to win twice in a row.

Antony Billington’s blog continues to be the place to look for news about new journals and books. In a siminar vein, Rob Bradshaw’s site BiblicalStudies.org.uk, while not a blog as such, is a wonderful resource for online journals and serious theology.

Getting back to blogs, there are lots of missionary blogs out there which give good insights into the day to day life of missionaries. You can find a more or less up-to-date list of Wycliffe blogs here. However, to win blog of the year, a writer needs to reflect deeply on issues related to missionary life and work; good stories are not enough. There are a couple of stand-out examples of this sort of thing:

  • Simon Cozens, a missionary in Japan, writes a thoughtful blog which often flirts with controversy.
  • Mark Woodward, works in Tanzania and often has very wise reflections on his experiences.

However, neither of these bloggers writes often enough to be awarded the prestigious Kouyanet blog of the year award; good though they are.

And herein lies a problem. It could be that I’ve just been too busy to be involved much online, but my perception is that there isn’t much interesting happening in the Christian blogging world. There are a few celebrity bloggers who get lots of hits and attention, but when push comes to shove, they don’t actually seem to say very much (I won’t name names). There are lots of good blogs out there which are of interest if you know the people involved or share their interests, but which don’t scratch where I itch.

So, for the first time since 2007, I will not be awarding a ‘blog of the year’ award this year. Could the missiological blogsphere please take note and do better next year. Thank you.

Books of The Year

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What with one thing and another, I’ve not read as many books as usual this year and I’ve reviewed even fewer. But for the record; here is a list of book reviews that have appeared on Kouyanet in 2012.

I told you I haven’t written many reviews this year.

Other books which I have read, which I should have reviewed include Simply Jesus – Who He Was, What He Did, Why it Matters and How God Became King – Getting to the heart of the Gospels by Tom Wright. These two explore broadly similar themes about the identity and work of Christ and both deserve a wide readership.

There are a heap of other books, too numerous to mention, which I should have reviewed at the time and which will now go un-remarked.

The first is a bit of a cheat. I haven’t actually finished Western Christians in Global Mission: What’s the Role of the North American Church? yet. But I’m two thirds of the way through and I am convinced that it is one of the most important books I’ve read in a while. The title more or less tells you what the theme of the book is. Though obviously focussed on the situation in the US, this book has a great deal to say to the Church in the UK too. Anyone involved in leading overseas mission from the UK should read this.

The second book that I would highlight is one that I’ve quoted from a number of times, Mark Noll’s Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. This is, perhaps, the best overview of Church history that I have come across. By focussing on twelve pivotal events in the past two millenia, Noll manages to catch the main social and religious currents that have shaped the Church. Like most books of it’s type, it is distressingly Eurocentri; one day someone will write a history of the Church which gives greater emphasis to the historic churches in Asia.

I find it hard to choose a best book I’ve read this year; but if pushed, I would name The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit by Mike Reeves. This is an excellent little book which gives a superb introduction to what it means that God is Trinity. It is a very short book, but engaging and deeply through provoking. I can’t think of a reason why any Christian would not read this book, but don’t just take my word for it…

Recent years have seen a number of books designed for a lay readership that sweep the doctrine of the Trinity off the dusty shelves of irrelevance, helping us see that God’s trinity radically shapes every part of Christian faith and life. Here is one of the most lively, readable and stimulating to appear”. –Jeremy Begbie, Thomas A. Langford Research Professor at Duke Divinity School, Duke University

A final honourable mention for the year goes to The Holy Trinity: Understanding God’s Life by Stephen Holmes. This is a longer and weightier book on the Trinity, which is aimed squarely at Theology Students. However, if you have read and enjoyed The Good God, you might profit from having your mind stretched a little further.