Tag Archives: mission

Unmuzzled Oxen

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Over the years that I’ve worked in mission leadership, I’ve faced some difficult situations. Like any leader, I have to deal with tough decisions, conflict and criticism; they go with the job. Sometimes when faced with a difficult situation I’ll say; “this is what I get paid the big bucks for.”

Of course, the point of the comment is that I don’t get paid big bucks. I have a grandiose title, but Wycliffe don’t actually pay me a salary. (Read more about how we are funded here.)

So, if I don’t get paid a salary for doing my job, what do I get paid for? Well, another slightly cynical saying of mine is that I don’t get paid for doing a job, I get paid for writing letters (or emails and blog posts, to bring it up to date).

Let me unpack this a little.

Those who generously support us in or work very rarely get to see what we actually do. This is just as true here in England as it was when we lived in Africa. Our work is carried out at a distance from those who pray for us and who provide the finances to keep the mortgage paid. The only way that people know what we are doing and what we are accomplishing is by reading the letters, emails and blog posts that we produce.

This means that there is a huge temptation to put a positive spin on things in our communication. We want people to support us and we want them to be encouraged by what is being achieved through their support. It is very easy and very tempting to make things sound just a little more exciting or encouraging than they really are. I picked up on this in a little booklet about praying for missionaries which you can find here (share it with your friends). We try and make our letters as honest as we possibly can – but the temptation to spin is a hard one to avoid.

I was prompted to write this post by reading this from Jamie. It’s funnier, blunter and better written than mine, so you’ll probably want to read it! It will be all over Facebook in the next couple of days, anyway!

It’s kinda scary when you think about it, but Christian Missions is a billion (that’s BILLION, like, with a B!) dollar industry – with virtually no oversight, no standards of practice, and no hiring requirements. To top it off, it’s shrouded in a cloud of overly spiritualized language, easily manipulated to allow people to believe that more good is coming from their missions dollars than is necessarily true.

By the way, if you would like to test the accuracy of our newsletters, you can sign up to read them on the sidebar of this blog.

Oh, and if the title of the post makes no sense to you, then take a look here.

Cross Cultural Mission: Come On, If You Think You Are Hard Enough

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A few weeks ago I was chatting to a friend on skype when they mentioned that they could hear the sound of gunfire and looting in the street outside while they were typing.

When I was a student, one of my friends had a poster on her wall that said “every day with Jesus is a happy day!”. I sometimes wonder where me and my colleagues have gone wrong!

As I mentioned yesterday, at one time or another every member of our family suffered from malaria during our time in Ivory Coast. I defy anyone to feel happy when they have a malaria headache, a raging fever and a severe bout of d&v; it’s even worse, when you have to watch your kids suffer from the same thing.

Mind you, other friends and colleagues have had tougher times. I know people who have been (unfairly) dragged through the courts in a foreign country, mugged in the street, robbed with violence in their own homes and the list goes on. Some friends have lost children to tropical diseases and others have lost their own lives to disease, violence or accident. In all of these cases it was because people had put themselves in harm’s way because they were following Jesus.

Yes, Jesus has promised to be with us in all circumstances and he is; but it’s tough. We grow through experiencing hardship; but it’s tough. God blesses us as we are obedient to him; but it’s tough. God promises us peace and contentment; but it’s tough. We have to learn to rejoice in all circumstances – and we do; but it’s tough.

Every day a happy day? Not quite.

Of course, not all cross-cultural missionaries face disease, violence and death; some live relatively peaceful lives, often in idyllic situations. Even so, living far from home and having to operate in a different language and culture is far more stressful than most people at home realise.

If you are looking for excitement and variety; them cross-cultural mission work might be for you. If you love the idea of making amazing friends from around the world, then give it a thought. If you are excited about seeing God at work and joining him on his mission, then go for it.

But…

If you aren’t prepared to take the tough stuff: find another career.

Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it.”

Credo on the Trinity

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Thanks to Antony Billington for pointing me to the latest edition of Credo Magazine, which is devoted to articles about the Trinity.

‘One of the dangers every church faces is slipping, slowly and quietly and perhaps unknowingly, into a routine where sermons are preached, songs are sung, and the Lord’s Supper is consumed, but all is done without a deep sense and awareness of the Trinity. In other words, if we are not careful our churches, in practice, can look remarkably Unitarian. And such a danger is not limited to the pews of the church. As we leave on Sunday morning and go back into the world, does the gospel we share with our coworker look decisively and explicitly trinitarian in nature? Or when we pray in the privacy of our own home, do the three persons of the Trinity make any difference in how we petition God?’

You can find the magazine here (where you can also download it is a pdf). There is some excellent material here, including articles by the authors of the two best books I read on the Trinity last year: Mike Reeves (The Good God: Enjoying Father, Son and Spirit) and Stephen Holmes (The Holy Trinity: Understanding God’s Life).

However, while I don’t want to complain about an excellent magazine, there is a glaring lack of any serious discussion of the issue of mission. Perhaps this isn’t surprising, but it’s a shame.

I suspect that this is partly due to the general apathy to the area of mission which typifies much of the Western Church at the moment. In all probability it didn’t even cross the mind of the editorial team to include anything about the issue. I also believe that it reflects something of the confusion about the interaction between our understanding of the Trinity and mission practice. This was discussed in post on Kouyanet last week.

If the editors of Credo want to return to the subject of the Trinity, I’d gladly offer to write something on mission for them!

Meanwhile, don’t let my gripe stop you from reading an excellent magazine.

Books I’ve Read: Comprehending Mission

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I’m grateful to Simon Cozens for drawing my attention to this book. Following up on Simon’s book recommendations can be an expensive business at times, but in this case, it was well worth it.

Comprehending Mission: (American Society of Missiology) is an outstanding book. If you consider yourself to be a bit of a tiger when it comes to missiology or mission studies, then you simply have to read it. No ifs, no buts.

Subtitled The Questions, Methods, Themes, Problems, and prospects of Missiology, this book gives the best and most comprehensive introduction to the literature of mission studies that I have ever come across and is destined to become a standard text for students of the subject. If you’ve not read Transforming Mission by Bosch yet, then Comprehending Mission shouldn’t be at the top of your reading list – but it should be close.

The six main chapters could each form a basic introduction to their own field and are worth reading on their own merits:

  • Bible and Mission
  • History of Mission
  • Theology, Mission, Culture
  • Christian Mission in a World of Religions
  • The Means of Mission
  • Missionary Vocations

I’ve already quoted from this book a couple of times and I’ll probably slip in a couple of more quotes in the next week or so.

What do We Mean by The Mission of God?

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A while ago, I wrote a post entitled Missiology is Meaningless which suggested that missiology was too broad a term to be used without qualification. Terms like missiological reflection and missiologically informed are tossed around, but they can mean very different things to different people, depending on their starting point. Lately, I’ve noticed the same thing with the term mission of God and its Latin version missio Dei. People talk about doing things in the light of the mission of God without ever really defining what they mean by the term, despite the fact that mission of God or missio Dei is open to a wide range of interpretations and definitions.

A nearly ubiquitous concept in mission theology today is the phrase missio Dei. The idea of a single mission rooted in God’s nature at the very least stands in heuristic tension with the manifold and often competing ventures launched by churches and other organizations dedicated to missionary outreach. It is customary now to talk about the wide variety of ends to which the term missio Die has been ut since it came into general circulation shortly after the 1952 Willingen conference of the International Missionary Council. As we will see, these different applications of the term draw on more than one set of scripture passages, as successive attempts have been made using this or related terms to establish a biblical foundation for the theology of Christian mission. John Flett has closely examined the origins of the term missio Dei. He concludes that the undoubted attractiveness of this formulation in the postcolonial era has obscured its basic incoherence, due to the illusory or nonsubstantial way mission theologians have related this concept to the doctrine of the Trinity.

From Comprehending Mission: The Questions, Methods, Themes, Problems, and prospects of Missiology (American Society of Missiology) by S. H. Skreslet pp. 31,32. Emphasis mine.

I’m not sure I agree entirely with this statement, but I have to admit that the more I see the phrase missio Dei being used without being unpacked, the more I feel that the phrase is losing any useful meaning.

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?).

Trinity and Mission: A Reading List

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I’ve just come across an excellent paper via Academia.edu written by my friend Mark Oxbrow of Faith To Share. It is a short review of the literature on the subject of Trinity and Mission and   it looks as though my Amazon wishlist is about to get an awful lot longer. Here is the first paragraph:

By far the most significant advance in missiological discussion during the second half of  the twentieth century was the acceptance within a wide range of theological traditions of  the Missio Dei theology first advanced by Karl Barth and Karl Hartenstein in the 1930s. Reviewing that development at the end of the century Andrew Kirk writes, in his What is Mission? Theological Explorations (1999) “To speak about the Missio Dei is to indicate, without any qualifications, the Missio Trinitatis”. Missio Dei theology, which has its origins in Barth’s essay Die theologie und die Mission in der Gegenwart (1932), (although the terminology was only introduced by Hartenstein two years later) gained wide acceptance after the 1952 International Missionary Council, meeting at Willingen, Germany. That gathering saw the Missio Dei as expressing its desire for a new, postWorld War II and post-colonial, understanding of mission. They saw that that mission is not a programme of the church, but rather an attribute and activity of God, bringing God’s redemption to all creation. From Willingen onwards the study of Trinity and the study of Mission have been almost welded together.

Books I’ve Read: Not So Secret

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IVP recently asked me to write a commendation for Graham Orr’s excellent new book Not so secret. I was more than happy to do so, and this is what I came up with. If you buy the book, you will discover that the publishers only used one fragment of a sentence from my carefully crafted prose – but hey, it’s a great book!

“Imagine what it is like being a cross-cultural missionary. The embarrassing early days when you are learning the language and can’t work out what it is you want to buy in the shops and you don’t have the words to apologise to your neighbour when your toilet overflows into the flat below. Then later on you have to try and understand how to function as a church in a society with very different social conventions, work patterns and religious background to everything you have ever known before. Then again, perhaps we don’t need to imagine what it is like to physically cross-cultures. There are many cultural difficulties and barriers associated with sharing the gospel in post-Christian Britain, it’s just that they are so familiar, we don’t always recognise them.

In “Not so Secret”, Graham Orr, a long term missionary in Japan shares his experience of making friends, building community and sharing the love of Christ in a situation which is very different to the North of England where he grew up. But this isn’t just another book of encouraging and amusing missionary stories (though it is that). Using his experiences in Japan as a starting point and reflecting Scripture and on time spent as a Church leader in the UK, Orr encourages us to rethink how we can live as missionary Christians in our own culture. This is a challenging, thought provoking and ultimately heart-warming book. There is a lot of talk in missionary circles about being a reflective-practitioner. If you want to know what that means, read this book; you won’t find a many better examples.”

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?

 

 

Mission, Money and Power

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The New York Times has a fascinating and rather disturbing video linking US missionaries and funding to the persecution of gay men in Uganda. They won’t allow me to embed the video here, so you will have to go over to their page to watch it; it lasts about 8 minutes.

I realise that gay-rights is a controversial issue at the moment, and that’s not an issue I want to get drawn into, too much. It seems to me that whatever your view on the subject, the idea of homosexuality being punishable by the death penalty, or preacher asking who is willing and ready to kill gay men is abhorrent.

The reason why I’ve brought the issue up on this blog is that I believe it raises some important questions for Christian missionary and development agencies.

  • To what extent is it appropriate for Western Christians to use their money and influence to shape policy in Churches and governments in other parts of the world?
  • Do we really understand the impact of the way we work in other countries?
  • Why are their so many missionaries preaching to crowds in a country which claims a higher percentage of Christians than the USA?
  • Why is there so much focus on sexuality and so little focus on corruption and justice?

As you can see, I find a good deal to be concerned about in this video; not least because I’m worried that more responsible Christian agencies will be condemned by association.

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.