Author: Bulk Importer

The goals of mainstream mission and missiology have gone widely unmet. The Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM) proposes better methods for reaching those goals. The AVM has advocated the methods of local languages and local resources. This article expands the vulnerable mission methodology to include local thinking style. In particular, Western missionaries need to use oral thinking styles rather than the analytical thinking style that creates dependency in oral societies. Missionaries must decide whether to supplement local methods with foreign “strength” or to accept the vulnerability of using only local methods.

As a missiologist who has observed a lot of missions and churches in a lot of countries for a lot of years, I want to try to position “vulnerable mission” against the broader backdrop of trends in missiology and mission practice today.2 My hope is to help the rest of the mission world connect more easily with what we are talking about in this conversation, so that fruitfulness and glory to God may connect more commonly in mission practice just as they connect in John 15:8.

Underlying the paper is my personal conviction that we in the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission have a theme that ought to resonate with a lot more mission scholars and practitioners than our current circle. What could or should we be saying that we are not saying clearly enough to find more people who are already doing or desiring something akin to VM, no matter what label they put on it?3 In this paper I will try to answer my own question, and I invite you to answer it even better.

I will compare and contrast the theory and practice of mission in three areas: the goal of mission, the methods of mission, and the big question that Western missions face today. Along the way I will relate VM to the three trends or camps of mission with which we overlap most—partnership, self-sufficiency (overcoming dependence), and orality (storying). This brief exercise will require some sweeping generalizations that readers may wish to challenge.4

The Goal of Mission

If we look at the Edinburgh 1910 missions conference and its coordinated planning to turn this into a Christian planet by planting churches everywhere, the methods appear to have worked even beyond the planners’ dreams a century ago. Churches have been planted across huge stretches of previously unevangelized territory.5

But if we look at Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods book from 1912, we have to ask, “What kind of churches?” The goal in Allen’s terms was self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating churches.6 For our purposes, and to save us getting bogged down in the long debate about the adequacy of that famous Three-Self Formula, let me use three more recent and roughly parallel terms: contextualized, sustainable, and missional. These are very prominent in missiological writing in the last 40, 20, and 10 years respectively, and it seems almost everybody writing about mission now takes them for granted as three marks to look for in a healthy church.

But what is the state of the church globally? The harvest does not match the three-part goal very well. For the vast majority of the world, believers and unbelievers alike, Christianity appears to be more culturally foreign, money-driven, and confusing than contextualized, sustainable, and missional.

Allen’s goal	Current buzz words about goal	Frequent results
Self-governing	Contextualized	Foreign
Self-supporting	Sustainable	Money-driven
Self-propagating	Missional	Confusing

I am not saying that twentieth-century mission was a waste or a failure or that the global church is a basket case, needing rescue by us as if we are the enlightened part of the world. But I am saying that we have not yet arrived at well-contextualized, sustainable, missional churches (even in the West), because if we had, the missiologists would have quit talking about these things. They would be losing their jobs for being behind the times, writing another book about contextualization. They keep their teaching positions because they are focusing the next generation on the things churches do not yet have but that missiologists think churches should try to get.

In case you need any reminders that the church has not yet arrived at sound mission practice, here are three very painful ones I have recently encountered, all indicating that the bull-in-the-china-shop approach to missions is alive and kicking:

• Steven Ybarrola concludes a 2008 article by sadly noting, “It was twenty-six years ago that I was first exposed to this application [of anthropology to mission work, that is, of contextualization] at the U.S. Center for World Mission. However, in my experience . . . I still find this perspective to be largely lacking.”7
• Two weeks ago I was requested to answer a few survey questions for a researcher, one of which was, “The multi-language translating software can be used to translate foreign languages. The use of SMS, multimedia, internet, and satellite services can enable followers of Jesus Christ to communicate the gospel with non-believers, whose language is different, more efficiently and effectively than a missionary physically going to a nation in which the native language is different.” I’ll admit that I checked “strongly disagree,” but only because there was no option that said, “violently disagree.”8
• Three weeks ago a missions pastor friend of mine returned from a trip where he heard a veteran missionary say, “Satan has taken full advantage of the short-term missions movement in [his Asian country]. We would be so far ahead of where we are if no teams had ever come.”9

To sum up, VM does not propose different goals than mainstream mission and missiology.10 We are arguing that the mainstream methods of reaching those goals are not achieving them very well. The contextualized, sustainable, missional church is not here yet.

Better Methods of Reaching the Agreed Goal, Including Oral Thinking Style

As someone has said, “Stupid is not doing stupid things. It is doing the same things and expecting a different result.” Let’s apply that to mission.

The biggest shift in mission from Western countries in the last twenty years is a massive increase in short-term trips and short-term workers (a year or less). In a sense, this is a new “method,” but in a deeper sense, it is the same old method of the colonial era, putting monocultural, ethnocentric people into cross-cultural settings.

In a way it is worse, because now that quick trips are possible and affordable, the trippers have no time to grow out of their ethnocentrism and no clue about why they should. They stick to the methods that ethnocentric people can use, even though these fly in the face of the goals of mainstream missiology. They rely on English or a personal translator, they operate as “haves” among “have nots,” and they cannot begin to imagine doing mission with an oral approach to life rather than an analytical approach.

Missiologists and most advocates of partnership in mission know this kind of mission activity will not reach the goals of mission, so they make some major improvements to the ethnocentric model, such as advocating that Westerners do things with people instead of for people. They promote these better methods even among short-termers whenever possible.11

Goal	Partnership methods	Short-term mission methods
Contextualized	English or local language	English only
Sustainable	Prime the pump, or top up local resources	Provide from outside
Missional	Simplify the message	Operate analytically without realizing it at all

VM takes the whole thing one step further, though none of us are claiming that VM methods are the silver bullet that will solve everything with one shot.

Goal	VM methods	Partnership methods
Contextualized	Local language	English or local
Sustainable	Local resources	Prime the pump, or top up local resources
Missional	Local thinking style	Simplify the message

VM has been very explicit about the first two methods (local language and resources) and has not yet said much about the third, that is, local thinking style. We have assumed that oral thinking style is naturally built into local languages and resources, but I believe it might be helpful to raise it to the status of a third defining mark of VM.

What is a “local thinking style”? In the broadest strokes, there are basically two styles—oral thinking and analytical thinking. Various labels have been used for these two styles.12 I am indebted to John Walsh for the following explanation which greatly helped me on this point: “When people routinely assume that the opposite of orality is literacy, they are making only a superficial contrast. The real contrast is not oral vs. literate. It is oral vs. analytical.”13 In other words, an oral style is a story or narrative or holistic style of thinking as opposed to a conceptual style that breaks everything down into pieces and then connects the pieces. Oral thinkers apprehend whole ideas; analytical thinkers comprehend them one piece at a time.

Again in very broad strokes, the preferred local thinking style is analytical in the West and oral in the Global South, though oral thinking is growing quickly among younger Westerners and analytical thinking is widespread among people with a lot of Western education, regardless of their home culture. The aspect of this relevant to our discussion is that the vast majority of mission today is undertaken by analytical thinkers working in contexts where oral thinking is the preferred local style.

Let’s return then to the earlier comment about doing mission with “an oral approach to life.” This hit me like a bombshell while I was giving some guest lectures in a Central Asian seminary a few years ago. I was talking about Bosch’s overview of paradigms of mission throughout church history14 and the question was asked, “What is a paradigm?” My on-the-spot attempts to answer did not shed any light for the questioner. In later reflection I realized that a paradigm is a tool that an analytical thinker uses to compare two or more systems. Non-analytical (oral) thinkers do not use that tool because they never undertake that task. They simply do not look at their worlds that way.

Further, I realized that every lecture by a foreigner and every book in that seminary library (except the biographies) was structured for analytical thinkers and was basically lost on the oral ones. I understood why a Scottish faculty member at the school had said, “We try to get them to answer the questions on an exam but often all they do is give testimonies.” The entire seminary system was set up to turn oral thinkers into analytical thinkers rather than to capitalize on their natural strengths as oral thinkers.

Whether that illustration was helpful or not, here is the abstract description of the problem. Outside money is often used for mission methods such as building a seminary or paying a salary for a church planting pastor, which are seen as the best or only means to the desired goal, such as a strong church or a successful outreach plan. There may be several Xs in a chain; for example, Bible schools (X1) are seen as the means to theological orthodoxy (X2) and spiritual maturity of pastors (X3), good study habits using good study tools (X4), and quality sermons (X5)—in order to reach the goal of mature believers and a mature church.

But the vision of the “mature” church may have been flawed in the beginning because it assumed that genuine disciples are analytical thinkers and their leaders must use analytical methods to help them grow. Look at the financial implications of this ethnocentric assumption.

Biases That Go with Assuming a Mature Church Must Be an Analytical Church

1. Professionalization—the leaders are the best analysts; laity tag along.
2. That kind of leader needs special schooling for analyzing the Bible.
3. A congregation must be big enough to support a professional pastor.
4. That size of congregation will need a building.
5. The building, the schooling, and the pastor all require major funding.

Alternative Model If a Mature Church Can Be an Oral-Thinking Church

1. The laity can be involved in developing the theology of the group.
2. Special schooling not required for leaders; they can be apprenticed.
3. Congregations can thrive and sub-divide though too small to support a pastor.
4. Buildings are optional.
5. Little or no funding required.

It boggles the mind to think how much Western mission effort and funding have gone into things the alternative model does not need at all. It also makes one wonder how many of today’s Western missionaries are missing golden opportunities for fruitful witness that they could seize if they could adapt to an oral thinking style. Here are a few examples, which have a few advocates but in my experience are usually regarded as quirky interests of a tiny minority.

• Ethnomusicology. Music shapes the faith and life of emerging churches more than anything else. How can it be a sidelight of mission? A network of Christian ethnomusicologists is encouraging wider use of the kind of Christian music development that happened spontaneously in the VM churches.15 Let this become a mainstream pursuit. Cultural outsiders cannot do the composing and choreography but they may legitimize it for the local composers, give a little guidance for it, and act as cheerleaders while the new music emerges.
• Proverbs. Proverbs are distilled oral thinking, masterful carriers of profound truth. How can these be incidental to preaching and witness? Why not routinely build them into mission work. For example, here is an ethnographic project for a one- or two-month short-term experience for a college student: “Write a paper of five pages or less that answers this question: What are ten local proverbs that every missionary who comes to this place should learn on arrival, and what would they know about the local people if they really grasped these proverbs?”16
• Festivals. How can festivals be so neglected? They are communal events celebrating the great acts of God in the biblical story, intriguingly and graciously open to outside observers, involving music and drama, processions, symbols, colors, and many layers of meaning.17 Westerners are festival-deaf and festival-blind, but the rest of the world is fluent in festival. I would love to see us change the dominant paradigm for mission from a war to a festival, so that we automatically think of ourselves more as carriers of joy than agents of force. Might the festival be so effective that it would have an even greater impact on both evangelism and discipleship than sermons do?

A shift to an oral thinking style would also go a long way toward helping us understand and utilize the shift that N. T. Wright, Dallas Willard, and Scot McKnight are calling for—the recovery of the biblical “gospel of the kingdom” as opposed to an exclusive focus on the “gospel of salvation.” I cannot summarize that here. I only want to note that the “gospel of salvation” (our standard way of preaching and teaching the gospel in the West) is an analytical gospel, that is, it breaks the gospel into concepts and pieces, while the gospel of the kingdom is a narrative and is much more intelligible to oral thinkers.18

Emphasis on local thinking style would reinforce the other two marks, relate VM to the familiar Three-Self Formula, and point us toward another emerging mission network (the International Orality Network) as a naturally ally of VM.19 It would also align VM squarely with the healthy trend in missiology to attend to thinking style as an aspect of worldview. This is greatly needed because the message has not got through to many mission practitioners and even mission agency leaders yet.They do not comprehend the orality issue and do not assume it as a core aspect of mission strategy in nearly the same way they assume contextualization and sustainability.

Perhaps most importantly of all, emphasis on local thinking style would make our vulnerability more obvious to us than the other two marks. As Mary Lederleitner said in her paper, “It is always hard for people with a lot of money and education to learn from those with less.”20 But our money will not help us become oral thinkers, and our education, since it is so analytical, will actually hurt us.

The instant we try to shift from analytical to oral thinking, we know we are off our turf and out of our depth. Local oral thinkers are the experts, and we are in kindergarten, so we have to let them lead and learn from them as they do. When we ask them how to write a song, quote a proverb, hold a festival, or explain the gospel in an oral way, we know we don’t know!

This is a huge challenge, almost incomprehensibly different than our analytical ways. I ran into it as I worked with oral thinkers in Lesotho a generation ago, and I tried to explain it to my American supporters this way: “Teaching the Bible in Lesotho means teaching parts of the Bible we don’t often read (like Hebrews) to teach truths we don’t understand (like purification) to meet needs we don’t feel (like body-soul cleansing) by using methods we don’t like (like memorization).”

Once I taught a two-day course on worldview at a YWAM training base in England and included some of this material on thinking styles. At the end a Swedish student commented, “Now I see not only why I felt lost for most of the six months I served in Tanzania. I can see for the first time just how lost I really was!”

If missionaries among oral peoples tried from the beginning to shift to oral thinking, they would find out much sooner “just how lost they really are.” Then they would slow down, invest much less money and energy in poor (i.e., analytically based) mission strategies and programs, and do much less damage before they started doing some good.

The Huge Methodological Choice for Western Missions Today

If VM methods—local language, local resources, local thinking style—are so much better than others, where are they working? It is a fair question. If Jim Harries has come up with such a valuable theory, why has his own VM approach to theological training not yet caught fire in Western Kenya, spread across Kenya and even to other countries? Where’s the beef in the VM theory?

The answer is hiding in plain sight, and it is a lot bigger than Jim or any of the rest of us. Arguably the three most fruitful mission movements in the entire twentieth century were three that operated almost entirely on VM principles. (I realize these do not fit with Jim’s definition of VM as an issue of Westerners working in the Majority World, but bear with me.) The three movements are African indigenous churches, Chinese house churches, and (to a lesser extent) the charismatic movement in Latin America. Mainstream mission thinkers and leaders are fully aware of all three and generally admire them, yet they seem not to have grasped the implications of their fruitfulness. Consider this:

The AICs [African Instituted Churches] have shown how much mission can be done for free. It takes no money to retell the story of the calling of the founder or to tell people about one’s own walk with God. It takes no money to pray for someone to be healed. It takes no money to sing and dance or to write a new song that praises God. It takes no money to receive dreams or prophetic revelations from God. It takes no money for each member of a congregation to stand up and speak in a service. It takes no money to be freed from alcoholism, wife-beating, jealousy and witchcraft. It takes no money to become an honest, hard-working employee.21

The massive success of VM is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. In our new century in India, Mongolia, the Philippines, and across the Muslim World, things are beginning to happen that look very similar to Africa 100 years ago and China 50 years ago. And the movements are typically working on VM principles because they have no other options.

If it is true that in the twentiety century God spread his kingdom most widely by VM methods, and if it is true that he seems poised to do the same thing in the remaining “neglected corners” of the earth in the twenty-first century, then we in Western missions need to ask ourselves one huge question, perhaps the biggest question facing Western churches, the Western mission establishment, and the next generation of Western missionaries: Complement or copy? To what extent does God want us to use our strengths (methods and resources) to complement the groups and churches who are using VM by necessity, and to what extent does he want us to copy their VM methods ourselves by choice, leaving our “strengths” on the sideline?

Complementing seems to be the obvious choice if we are thinking of the global church as a body where different members have different functions. For example, groups like Gospel for Asia promote mission by combining the money of the West with the manpower of the East. There are many more nuanced variations on this model, which is the premise for all forms of partnership. But in light of Paul Yonggap Jeong’s paper in the present issue, we have to recognize that every attempt to complement is an attempt to do mission from a position of strength. We want our strength to complement their effort in some area where they are weak.

VM is pointing out that the body is not working like it should when one member acts like Saul trying to help another “weaker” member, David, by offering some armor. That is interference not body life. It comes from the kind of well-intentioned thinking that says, “We are stronger than you, you need what we can provide, we are willing to help you, so accept it as God’s provision for you through us.”

Sometimes this thinking is true; God is providing by this route, but perhaps not nearly as often as we think. I believe a great deal of what is interfering with the carrying out of the Great Commission today—the foreignness, the money-centeredness, the fuzziness of the message—is largely the result of many Davids accepting Saul’s armor and trying to fight while they wear it.

We in the wealthy countries have to become much more self-critical. Are our strengths really strengths? Is David’s weakness really weakness? It all depends on what the Lord of the mission wants to do and how he wants to do it. If we assume that our money and technology, which look like strengths from a human perspective, are what God is most likely to use to get his mission done and to bring glory to himself, won’t we forget to check with Jesus, the general director of the mission, whether he actually wants to use our money and technology in each particular case?

Are we not overlooking 1 Corinthians 1 as the default setting for mission—God using the weak to confound the strong? Are we not relegating that “weak” and vulnerable method of mission to those who are too poor to be able to afford to do mission the way we do it?22 Are we not assuming that people do mission from a position of strength if they can and from a position of weakness if they must?

Three Requests for Readers

While we consider the mega-issues of oral thinking style and “complement or copy,” there are three very down-to-earth activities I would love to see readers engage in. I am doing them already and benefiting, but I am only one person. We need to multiply this.

1. Getting more perspectives on VM from Majority World people whose contact with the West has not persuaded them to approach mission like Westerners (we’ve been confining the dialogue mostly to Westerners). For me this happens mainly through ongoing communication with a house church pastor in Central Asia.
2. Discovering where and how VM overlaps with other movements and trends in the mission world, particularly “partnership” and “orality” (we’ve been describing ourselves mostly in isolation or in contrast to others). For me this means staying in touch with the COSIM and ION networks.23
3. Finding and sharing more success stories about VM in practice (we’ve been refining the VM theory, and I’m still mostly doing that in this paper). For me this means promoting Thomas Oduro’s book Mission in an African Way.

Conclusion

There is broad consensus among the overseas churches I am familiar with, missionaries, and mission scholars that the Western missionary movement has not produced the desired amount of the desired fruit, and that the shift to emphasis on short-term mission is not helping much if at all. There is widespread work on method improvement, especially among advocates of partnership.

VM takes things a step further, advocating much greater reliance on local language and resources than we currently see. I am proposing that we also advocate a much greater reliance on oral thinking as opposed to analytical thinking.

There is a very difficult choice for the next generation of Western Christians. Should they complement the “weak” VM of the Majority World church with their strength, or should they forego their strength and copy the VM that the Majority World uses by necessity?

If God is in this, then we need to widen the VM circle and connect with others among whom he is also stirring. It is his mission, and it ought to be done in his way(s), which we can find in consultation with others he guides.

And here is the heart of the matter for VM. If missionaries and mission agencies are so interested in bringing more glory to God,24 why would we not cut back on the mission methods that are failing to bring much glory to him? Why not replace them with a more vulnerable strategy, one that for its inspiration harks back to the cross, the resurrection, and Pentecost instead of the conquest of the Promised Land? Why not pay the prices of vulnerable mission and bring to God the glory that vulnerable mission in his name brings?

Dr. Stan Nussbaum is Staff Missiologist of GMI Research Services and Adjunct Professor at Wheaton College. He has also taught the Breakthrough course at the Overseas Ministries Study Center in Connecticut, at the World Link Graduate Center in Portland, and (including earlier versions) in England, Korea, Malaysia, India, Egypt, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Congo (Dem. Rep.), and Nigeria.

Bibliography

Bosch, David J. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series 16. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

Butler, Phill. Well Connected: Releasing Power, Restoring Hope through Kingdom Partnerships. Colorado Springs: Authentic Publishing, 2005.

Christian Storytelling Network. http://christianstorytelling.com.

Coalition on the Support of Indigenous Ministries. http://cosim.info.

Elmer, Duane. Cross-Cultural Connections: Stepping Out and Fitting In around the World. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002.

Hiebert, Paul G. Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008.

The International Council of Ethnodoxologists. http://worldofworship.org.

International Orality Network. http://oralbible.com.

Johnstone, Patrick. The Future of the Global Church: History, Trends and Possibilities. Colorado Springs: Biblica, 2011.

Krabill, James R., ed. Worship and Mission for the Global Church: An Ethnodoxology Handbook. Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2013.

The Lausanne Movement. “The Lausanne Standards: Affirmations and Agreements for Giving and Receiving Money in Mission.” Documents. http://www.lausanne.org/docs/standards/lausanne-standards.pdf.

Lederleitner, Mary T. Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2010.

Lingenfelter, Sherwood G., and Marvin K. Mayers. Ministering Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Personal Relationships. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

McKnight, Scot. The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011.

Nussbaum, Stan. American Cultural Baggage: How to Recognize and Deal with It. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005.

________. “Vulnerable Mission Strategies.” Global Missiology 10, no. 2 (2013): http://ojs.globalmissiology.org/index.php/english/article/view/1135/2630.

________. Waking Up to the Messiah. Morton, IL: Enculturation Books, 2011.

Oduro, Thomas, Hennie Pretorius, Stan Nussbaum, and Bryan Born. Mission in an African Way: A Practical Introduction to African Instituted Churches and Their Sense of Mission. Marturia series. Wellington, South Africa: BybelMedia, 2008.

Rickett, Daniel. Making Your Partnership Work: A Guide for Ministry Leaders. Enumclaw, WA: WinePress, 2002.

Standards of Excellence in Short Term Missions. “The 7 Standards.” http://www.soe.org/explore/the-7-standards.

Vulnerable Mission. http://vulnerablemission.org.

Winter, Ralph, and Steven Hawthorne, eds. Perspectives on the World Christian Movement: A Reader. 4th ed. Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2009.

Ybarrola, Steven J. “Avoiding the Ugly Missionary: Anthropology and Short-Term Missions.” In Effective Engagement in Short-Term Missions: Doing it Right!, edited by Robert Priest, 101–119. Evangelical Missiological Society Series 16. Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2008.

In this manuscript, I share key experiences from my sixteen years of cross-cultural ministry in Cambodia in regard to mobilization of local resources. Additionally, I speak of Jesus’ incredible ingenuity for affirming and mobilizing local resources. Through personal experiences, biblical examples, and insights from others, I challenge cross-cultural Christian workers to avoid imposing outside resources, but rather facilitate local people to mobilize their local resources.

God had informed Moses that he was to return to Egypt and lead the Israelites out of their mental and physical prison into a land groomed and cultivated by God. Moses asked God with a great amount of pleading in his voice, “What if they do not believe me or listen to me?” God responded to Moses, “Throw that old rickety stick aside and let me give you something worthwhile for the task!” Surely, God did not respond in such a manner. Rather, God asked, “What is that in your hand?” (Exod 4:2).2

God did not give Moses additional resources but rather affirmed and used what was already in Moses’ hand. All missionaries should adopt the same question, both as a working question on the field and as a driving principle for their mission paradigm. A question that asks the local people, “What is that in your hand that God can use?” In the book Walk Out Walk On, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze share about communities that have learned to work with what they have to create what they need.3 If we were to turn this into a Moses-type question, we would ask: “What can you and God do with what you have to create what you need?”

In this article, I will share “aha moments” that I have experienced during my sixteen years of cross-cultural ministry in Cambodia in regard to mobilization of local resources. In addition, I will speak of Jesus’ incredible ingenuity for affirming and mobilizing local resources.

I was riding with a group of Cambodians in a truck to a village. In a ministry setting, most of these Cambodians were very timid and unsure of themselves as communicators of Jesus Christ. But, there in the truck they communicated with animation, passion, and confidence. What was the difference? They were interacting with stories, proverbs, riddles, and songs versus logical explanations and debates. In that very moment the truth dawned on me—I had imported and forced my teaching styles on the Cambodians. I cleverly taught the Cambodian believers how to study and present the Word of God through systematic theology, definitions, outlines, reasoning, apologetics, and interpreted narratives. While some of those who learned from me sorted out how to communicate like a Westerner, their Cambodian audience looked at them with blank stares.

I had made a huge mistake. I imported my resources and modes of teaching and communication. It was time for me to be the vulnerable one—not them.

I gathered up all my Western-oriented materials that I had written in the local language, tossed them in a cabinet, locked the door, and threw away the key. Then I started asking the Cambodians the Moses-type question: “What do you have in your hand?” The Cambodians revealed, “We have stories, drama, symbols, rituals, parables, riddles, ditties, poetry, music, songs, and dance.” Indeed, these were the resources of communication that the Cambodians could use for all aspects of ministry: planting the gospel, discipleship, training, teaching, counseling, and so forth. My duty as a missionary was to recognize, affirm, and learn how to use their local resources. I liken the missionary’s role to that of a cheerleader. We do not have to tell others how to play the game or play it for them, rather we cheer them on saying, “You can do it!”

I entered the Cambodian church and looked for a place to sit down. My favorite time of the week was when I could praise and worship God with Cambodians in the local language. While I was worshiping, I noticed a Cambodian man worshiping in a way different from all the others. I curiously leaned over to take a closer look. At that moment, I realized that the man was blind. Unlike the others, his posture represented pronounced reverence. He worshipped God the exact way a Cambodian would behave in the presence of a king or someone important: bowed lowly, no eye contact, and both hands tightly pushed together, pressed against the chest. The others worshipped standing straight up, seemingly making eye contact with God, and hands lifted upward with armpits showing. This experience would not be so bad, if I were not the one who planted the church.

I had made another a huge mistake. I imported my form of Western worship. Why? I knew better, but I wanted to plant a church before I could grasp the indigenous music of Cambodia. Since a real church needed formal worship—so I thought—I took a shortcut and introduced some Western songs translated into the Cambodian language and modeled modes of worship from my experience in North America.

Again, I should have asked the Cambodians, “What is in your hand?” They would have answered, “A roneat, a pia, a chapey, a tro, a skor. We use pinpeat, chreing chapey narrative singing, ayai repartee singing, shadow plays, melodies that tell stories, lullabies, mohori ensembles, plengkar, ramvong, and so forth.” I should have continued to ask, “What is the most culturally relevant form of worship for you?”

It was time for me to be the vulnerable one—learn, adapt, and facilitate the Cambodians to produce their own indigenous hymnody: “a body of hymns and spiritual songs which are composed by members of an ethnic group and thought of as being their own.”4

A local Cambodian pastor requested that I work alongside of him to train a church planting team. I remember the first training session well. I made the following request: “Please, each one of you share your story of how you came to know and walk with Christ.” Their stories were similar: “I received free eyeglasses. . . .” “The Christian organization gave us rice. . . .” “I was given a job with an NGO. . . .”

I knew we were in trouble in regard to planting healthy indigenous churches. In a matter of months, the church planters requested eyeglasses, rice, and connections to job opportunities to share among the people with whom they were planting churches. Additionally, they expected material goods and financial compensation for their effort in church planting. I had matured enough to know that the moment I gave subsidies to the church planters and material goods for them to use as handouts, I would have created unhealthy dependency on me. Subsequently, the local pastor and I encouraged the church planters to remain bi-vocational and find ways to share compassion with their local resources—visit a patient in the hospital, work side by side on a project, teach a child to read, and any other compassionate acts that start with what is in hand.

Imported teaching styles, worship forms, and welfare evangelism were all detrimental to the process of mobilizing local resources for the sake of healthy indigenous churches that make a difference in their Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria (Acts 1:8).

Almost on a daily basis, I receive emails from Africa, India, and Asia. The emails are always requests. “Please come and do crusades. Please conduct seminars for our leaders. Send materials, books, and DVDs. Will you partner with us?” Most emails state a little something that informs me that the invitation involves money. All the emails are from seemingly well-established leaders. What does this reveal to me? It reveals to me that something went wrong in the birthing and early development stages of those churches and organizations. The planter or those giving birth instilled a mindset that resources from the inside are inferior.

Capable leaders are driven to look constantly outside themselves to the West for their human and material resources. Instead of mobilizing people and resources around them, they make pleas to those completely removed from the context. These churches and ministries are sometimes kilometers apart from one another. Instead of reaching out and collaborating with one another, they bypass capable disciples of Christ in their own villages, districts, states, regions, countries, and continents to ask for help from the point farthest from them. In my perspective, it is time for the West to ask, “What can you and God do with what you have to create what you need?”

Yesterday, I received an email from India. The sender of the email has completed master of divinity and master of mheology degrees. This minister is now pursuing a PhD in missions. The purpose of the email was to make a request for books, DVDs, and magazines to do research on the house church movement. The composer of the email expressed that he wanted the resources for free because he could not afford to buy materials for his research.

One reason local Christians in places such as India feel the need to look to the West for resources is because Western missionaries and churches have conveyed the message that the educated and the affluent have some sort of edge in fulfilling the Great Commission. We have introduced structures and paradigms that are complicated, expensive, and definitely not mandated by Jesus for the purpose of making disciples in all nations. It is slightly ironic that the Indian gentleman came full circle. In other words, he has spent a significant amount of human and material resources to eventually research the house church movement, which has a secondary name: the simple church movement—a method that intentionally promotes simplicity, low maintenance, usage of local resources, and reproducibility. I have two books on this subject sitting on my desk entitled The Church in the House: A Return to Simplicity and Simply Church.5

Keep in mind that simple does not mean inferior. On the contrary, simple has an element of purity, authenticity, depth, and of course reproducibility. “It is not that the content is simplistic or shallow—it is often very profound—but the pattern for doing it is simple and therefore easily reproduced.”6

Being seminary trained or well funded certainly were not key ingredients to fulfilling the Great Commission for the disciples or Paul. Ben Chikazaza, a church leader in Zimbabwe, answered his own question:

I wonder what the apostles Paul and Peter would say if they came down and saw the state of the church today? They would be shocked at the amount of money needed to convert one soul today! God help the African pastor to remain simple and obedient. The apostle Paul preached a simple gospel and could not demand what was rightfully his for fear that he would be disqualified. David refused to fight Goliath using King Saul’s armour and we cannot fight our battles using the world’s armour. Many of God’s servants are so heavily loaded with materialism that they cannot lift a hand against the enemy.7

Jesus was born right in the midst of local resources—a manger in the town of Bethlehem. As you follow Jesus’ journey through the Gospels, you see that the only resources he introduced from outside the community were himself, the disciples, and signs and wonders. When Jesus entered a community, he utilized resources that already existed in that context to fulfill his ministry. He preached in existing synagogues (Mark 1:39). He preached and had dinner with tax collectors and so-called sinners in homes (Mark 2:2, 15). Large crowds caused Jesus to teach parables from boats along lakeshores and the beatitudes from mountainsides (Mark 4:1; 5:1). When a Samaritan woman came to draw water from the community well, Jesus led her into a saving relationship through himself, the living water (John 4:7). Jesus rebuked demons out of a man and sent them captive into a herd of pigs, which committed suicide by frantically running off a steep bank into a lake (Luke 8:33). He taught the people many things in parables using everyday objects and experiences (Mark 4:2–3). A withering fig tree along the road became a prophetic object lesson (Matt 21:19). The disciples brought a donkey to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and had Jesus sit on it (Luke 19:35). Jesus took bread during a holiday meal, broke it, and gave it to the disciples saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Jesus poured water into a basin and washed the disciples’ foul-smelling feet, then dried those feet with a towel that was wrapped around him (John 13:5). Jesus died hanging on a cross made of local wood and was laid in a local tomb, located in the garden near the place where Jesus was crucified (John 19:17, 41–42).

You never read about Jesus opening a duffle bag or a crate to unleash resources on the people. He never requested that Judas give funds to the people to enable them to build a church. He did not send out the disciples with ample supplies and donor funds to set up humanitarian projects. Even when Jesus miraculously fed five thousand people, he accused those recipients who received a free meal of being interested in merely filling their bellies.

Jesus expected the same from his disciples. He trained his disciples on-the-job with local resources and sent them out without even sandals.

There’s a great harvest waiting for you in the fields, but there aren’t many good workers to harvest it. Pray that the Harvest Master will send good workers to the fields. It’s time for you 70 to go. I am sending you out armed with vulnerability, like lambs into a pack of wolves. Don’t bring a wallet. Don’t carry a backpack. I don’t want you to even wear sandals. Walk along barefoot, quietly, without stopping for small talk. When you enter a house seeking lodging, say, “Peace on this house!” If a child of peace—one who welcomes God’s message of peace—is there, your peace will rest on him. If not, don’t worry; nothing is wasted. Stay where you are welcomed. Become a part of the family, eating and drinking whatever they give you. You’re My workers, and you deserve to be cared for. Again, don’t go from house to house, but settle down in a town and eat whatever they serve you. Heal the sick and say to the townspeople, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” (Luke 10:2–7; The Voice)

Jesus had church; he didn’t make church. Jesus had church at a water well, in homes, on the mountainside, and in a boat. He made disciples using fig trees, parables, demons in pigs, donkey rides, meals, and washing feet. Jesus was the first to instruct people to share and be generous among the needy; but He did this very thing through loving relationships and creativity, utilizing that which was locally available. Local resources served as the color for Jesus’ artwork of discipleship making. He saw what was near him and turned it into a parable. He used everyday articles to make a life-giving point. Homes and seashores served as his mobile pulpit.

On the contrary, we are so quick to introduce our resources from the outside. We race to set up buildings and impose foreign organizational structures. Missionaries and sponsors serve as conduits of money. While Jesus modeled church in an everyday context, we model church in ways that can only be sustainable through our funding. Both Gailyn Van Rheenen and Jonathan Bonk echo this reality:

“Western temptation is to conceptualize and organize the missionary task on an economic level that can only be sustained by Western support and oversight.” This has resulted in the development of mission strategies which are “money intensive,” signifying that one must have a lot of capital to do Christianity Western-style.8

Josphat Charagu, a pastor in Kenya, expressed to me that the missionaries organized their mission work according to a Western context with complete disregard for the African context and thought. David Phillips, founder of the Nomadic Peoples Network, has revealed that the Western, imported model of church caused nomads to count Christianity as a faith for the rich who can afford to erect and maintain buildings—not a faith for communities who intentionally move from one place to another. A camel herder’s statement says it all: “When you can put your Church on the back of my camel then I will think that Christianity is meant for us Somalis.”9

Pastor Charagu told me how one day he arrived at his church and saw a pile of rocks dumped right in the front of the entrance. He became upset and exclaimed, “I have had enough with our neighbor; he continues to make things difficult for us!” Pastor Charagu called the head of his men’s department to complain. The department leader responded, “Pastor, slow down! The neighbor did not unload those stones in front of the church. One of the cell groups brought those today as part of their contribution to build our permanent church.” Pastor Charagu was utterly encouraged to see the church members give sacrificially and without provocation.

This community of believers plans to build their church using a method called “divide and rule,” which is used by local politicians. Unfortunately, politicians abuse this method, but they plan to implement this approach in a righteous way. In this “divide and rule” manner, different people will be responsible for different facets of building the church, such as the drawing plans, stones, roofing, pillars, windows, and so forth.

The ingenuity, sacrificial commitment, and resolve of Pastor Charagu and his church are an example of the beauty of mobilizing local people and local resources. It is what happens among the people who use local resources through dependence on God and on one another that make the difference: prayer, sacrifice, faith, companionship, gift sharing, creativity, teamwork, capacity building, and perseverance. I guarantee that when you see an elaborate structure built with outside funds, you will NOT see the make-a-difference characteristics that you would observe among a community that has built its own church or creatively found ways to do church within existing structures (homes, community centers, urban garages, businesses, backyards, under trees, etc.) The beauty is in the process, not the finished product. Better the small that reveals a group’s effort toward responsible self-help than the big that reveals donations from outside. Our big and better methods in someone else’s country do not fool God according to Leonard Sweet:

The ancient Hebrews compared God’s workings to the monstrous cedars of Lebanon and wings of eagles. Jesus loves looking at mustard seeds, grains of wheat, leftover crumbs, and barnyard hens. He invites us to look around at our fields, our gardens, our orchards, our vineyards, our backyards. Jesus is not against large but invites us to start small and do little large. “Little is much if God is in it.”10

We need to cease making people of other nations believe that money and what money can accomplish are the key to making disciples. If we despise the small beginnings of other nations by shoving our supposedly efficient, bigger and better structures and methods down their throats, we are guilty of crushing the dignity and initiatives of men and women. We can learn from the interchange between the angel and the prophet Zechariah on behalf of Zerubbabel who was responsible for rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem:

I asked the angel who talked with me, “What are these, my lord?” He answered, “Do you not know what these are?” “No, my lord,” I replied.  So he said to me, “This is the word of the LORD to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the LORD Almighty. . . . Then the word of the LORD came to me:  “The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this temple; his hands will also complete it. Then you will know that the LORD Almighty has sent me to you.  Who despises the day of small things? Men will rejoice when they see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel.” (Zech 4:4–10a)

The interaction between the angel of God and Zechariah reveals to us the key ingredients to godly success, which are God’s Spirit and small beginnings. Let us Western missionaries not swallow up these key ingredients by imposing our resources onto others in cross-cultural contexts.

All of us are quick to say that the Bible is our principal and God-given manual for our mission practices. Dr. Christopher Little challenges the distortion of that claim:

Most if not all people involved in fulfilling the Great Commission today would affirm that the sole basis for Christian faith and practice is the Bible. Yet for whatever reason there has been a preoccupation with the former to the neglect of the latter. That is, the church has concentrated on “orthodoxy,” right or correct doctrine and thinking, to the exclusion of “orthopraxy,” right or correct practice and action. This predicament is most discernible in the area of finance since, according to Herbert Kane, “no other one thing has done so much harm to the Christian cause” (1976:91). As such, it is imperative that the Western church recovers biblical models regarding the proper use of money in mission.11

The apostle Paul was the most successful missionary of all time. We would be foolish to count his orthodoxy as passé. Paul purposely set aside regular support for himself, expected the churches he birthed to be self-supporting from the beginning, and encouraged poor churches to contribute to those who were facing famine, all for the greater purpose of planting healthy churches. Jesus and the disciples gave of themselves endlessly, yet that giving never included an unloading of material resources on a people. If we appreciate the success of Jesus, the disciples, and Paul, we may want to take their practices more seriously.

God asked Moses what was in his hand. Jesus asked the same question indirectly throughout his ministry on earth (John 21:6). Philip emphasized what the Ethiopian eunuch was holding in his hand—the Scriptures (Acts 8:30). Paul exhorted Timothy to fan into flame his resource—the gift of God that was given to him through the laying on of hands (2 Tim 1:6).

Instead of being providers of resources, let us affirm and facilitate local people’s identification and mobilization of their local resources to create what they need. May the question, “What is in your hand?” be forever on our lips as we participate in the Great Commission. In this way, God will receive the glory, not us.

Jean Johnson, a cross-cultural communicator, spent 23 years living and serving among Cambodians in the USA and in Cambodia specializing in worldview strategic church planting, orality, and reproducible training. Presently, Jean is a co-director of World Mission Associates and an international coach in parts of Asia, Africa, and North America. She coaches and teaches pastors, churches, missionaries, organizations, and teams on how to intentionally inspire indigenous people to mobilize their local capabilities, resources, and cultural creativity. Her publications include We Are Not the Hero: A Missionary’s Guide for Sharing Christ, Not a Culture of Dependency (Sisters, Oregon: Deep River Books, 2012), reviewed in the present issue.

Bibliography

Bonk, Jonathan J. Missions and Money: Affluence as a Western Missionary Problem. American Society of Missiology Series 15. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

Chikazaza, Ben. “Self-Reliance and the Church.” The Network for Strategic Missions (October 1997): http://www.strategicnetwork.org/index.php?loc=kb&view=v&id=9912&fto=1378&.

Dale, Tony, and Felicity Dale. Simply Church. Austin, TX: Karis Publishing, 2002.

Fitts, Robert. The Church in the House: A Return to Simplicity. Salem, OR: Preparing the Way Publishers, 2001.

Little, Christopher. “Partnerships in Pauline Perspective: The Economics of Partnership.” International Journal of Frontier Missiology 27, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 61–68.

Phillips, David J. Peoples on the Move: Introducing the Nomads of the World. Grand Rapids: IVP, 2001.

Schrag, Brian, and Paul Neeley. All the World Will Worship: Helps for Developing Indigenous Hymns. 3rd ed. Duncanville, TX: EthnoDoxology Publications, 2005.

Sweet, Leonard. Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who’s Already There. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010.

Van Rheenen, Gailyn. “MR #2: Money and Mi$$ion$.” Missiology.org. http://www.missiology.org/?p=278.

Wheatley, Margaret, and Deborah Frieze. Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey into Communities Daring to Live the Future Now. BK Currents. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2011.

This paper looks at problems that have occurred in Church of Christ missions by focusing on a case study in India called the Arise Shine Church of Christ Mission. The paper argues that paternalism in a cappella church missions has led to a “time capsule effect” wherein churches in India have become stultified. Indian Church of Christ members have developed a hybrid identity. They try to be faithful to the sending churches—in this case Canada’s valiant missionary J. C. Bailey—but they have to balance it with faithfulness to their own culture. Several issues are brought forth such as Bible translations (especially the use of the King James Version), contextualization and indigenization, and the unfortunate dependency that often arises in Church of Christ missions efforts.

To begin, I will share a quotation from the person described by Christianity Today as “the most important person you don’t know.”2 Andrew Walls is the dean of the relatively new discipline that I work in, known as world Christianity, or global Christianity. Walls is a Scottish, Oxbridge educated scholar who went to Sierra Leone in 1957 to serve as a church history professor in a colonial college. What he witnessed in Africa changed his understanding of Christianity and gave birth to a new academic discipline. While “happily pontificating” on early Christianity, Walls came to realize he “was actually living in a second-century church.”3 Africans were rapidly turning to Christ, and he was a front-row observer. He began to see that the Christianity his British compatriots had established was becoming translated and assimilated to the local context in creative, unpredictable ways. Africa was becoming the Christian heartland of the world, but it was complex, uncontrolled, vibrantly new, and unsettled.

Walls has made a career out of analyzing how Christianity gets translated and indigenized in new cultures. In his view, this is the genius of Christianity; its “translatability.” Walls’s ideas overhauled the field of church history to the point that most classic models are now obsolete. His work has impacted the discipline to the point that no longer can the history of Christians be told in an exclusively Western framework: Acts to Augustine to Aquinas to Luther to Wesley to Barth. Now, church history should be told in all its manifold greatness and extreme diversity. At Pepperdine I advertise my World Christianity course as a study of Christianity that moves from South Korea to South America, from South Africa to South Carolina.

Andrew Walls has globalized the discipline of church history by making us think globally, even when dealing with our own personal, local faith traditions. In his watershed essay, “Eusebius Tries Again: Reconceiving the Study of Christian History” he writes:

The church that is the subject of church history is implicitly defined as the church we ourselves know—our tradition as it has developed. In principle, there is no harm in this focus, provided we know what we are doing, and provided also we do more than this. It is natural and right to seek to understand one’s own tradition; it means to know who one’s ancestors are.

But there are lurking dangers, both historical and theological. One is that we think by the study of our own tradition we are doing church history. We are not—we are doing our church history. If this is the only lens through which we study Christian history, we have bypassed the story of the whole people of God in favor of clan history. Such an approach reduces the area in which we look for the works of God, whereas the promises of God are to all who trust them. The Lord of Hosts is not to be treated as a territorial Baal.4

Walls’s recommendation is a “Reconception of the Syllabus.” I am only one of many in a new generation who have taken Walls’s advice seriously, and most of the “history” that I write, I like to believe, respects the “whole history of the people of God.”

As a result, this article is a hybrid of local and global. It is “local” in the sense that it is indeed “clan history.” It is global in the sense that it is looking at how my form of Christianity managed to make its way to the other side of the planet. While not explicit, it has a practical dimension to it as well. It analyzes a small moment in time in the Churches of Christ missionary experience.

I am sensitive to the fact that these events took place within my clan, among my people. Telling stories such as these are important, but must be done carefully. I certainly hope that by looking at the mistakes and triumphs of our forebears, we learn to improve. It is my goal to be sensitive to whatever tradition I study, be it a different form of Christianity or a different religion altogether. We must treat other traditions with respect and dignity when telling their story. However, the same should apply when telling our own story. In this article, I try to handle my Restoration history with great care since it is the tradition that nourished me, and it is the tradition wherein I encounter the Risen Christ as Savior and Lord.

Introduction

Due partly to paternalism in the church, the non-instrumental—or a cappella— Churches of Christ in India have become a time capsule wherein members show great loyalty to the form of Christianity brought to them decades earlier by deeply convicted missionaries. A hybrid identity develops, and it is fraught with ambivalence, resulting in social dislocation. Members become increasingly isolated on two fronts: (1) their own culture views them as insular and sectarian, while (2) their supporting congregations in the Western world see them as out of touch with newer developments in the faith, sometimes legalistically holding on to teachings long considered obsolete in the home church, or, the sending church. This article examines issues in cross-cultural missions, focusing on paternalism and the continued use of the King James Version of the Bible in a Church of Christ network in South India. I use the KJV as a touchstone for investigating complex issues that arise when Christianity is planted from one culture into another, very different one.

In 2003 I traveled to India for the first time to do my doctoral research. I needed to access archives and conduct interviews in several places, but it was crucial that I travel to the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu. In preparation for my trip I did a Google search for “India Church of Christ” and the first hit was http://indiachurchofchrist.com.

I had a good feeling about the website, particularly since it had many hallmarks of the Church of Christ tradition, notably the ubiquitous use of the King James Version of the Bible. At the top of the homepage it read “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness (John 12:46).” When combining this website’s “C of C” jargon, its strong emphasis on immersion for the forgiveness of sins, and the use of the KJV, it was a dead giveaway: I was dealing with old school, died-in-the-wool, bona fide Church of Christ folk.

I immediately sent an email to that church, which happened to be based in Chennai. I had never been to India, I had no idea who these people were, and I knew not one person in the entire nation of India. The next day I had a reply in my inbox. They claimed to be faithful Church of Christ members, they were happy to pick me up at the airport, they offered to feed and house me during my stay, and they promised to provide any kind of support that I might need for as long as I needed it. Such is the nature of membership in the Church of Christ; there is immediate trust and rapport, even amongst strangers.

The Church of Christ

The Church of Christ is a loosely organized fellowship of over three million members worldwide.5 They refuse to call themselves a denomination since they have no hierarchy, creed, or central organization. Rooted in the Scottish independence church movements of the eighteenth century, they matured under the leadership of Thomas (1763–1854) and Alexander Campbell (1788–1866) and Barton W. Stone (1772–1844) in the nineteenth century. All three of these men began their careers as Presbyterian ministers. The Campbells were immigrants from Scotland while Stone was born near Port Tobacco, Maryland. Their early careers coincided with a very fractious time in the Presbyterian Church on both sides of the Atlantic. Discouraged, all three of them broke away from their Presbyterian affiliations in order to pursue a more ecumenical approach that emphasized the reasonableness of the Bible in determining right Christian doctrine and practice. With great confidence, they proclaimed their system and approach as a true “Restoration,” meaning they believed the ancient practices of the early church as portrayed in the New Testament were finally being restored.

The movement was attractive, and it mushroomed. It was a major player in the ecclesial context of early America, especially in the Second Great Awakening of the nineteenth century. This “Stone-Campbell” tradition grew and fragmented several times. It is estimated today that there are approximately 14 million people in 180 countries who associate themselves with the larger Restoration Movement.6 To be clear, the specific wing of the tradition that I am associated with—and the tradition dealt with in this article—is the non-instrumental Church of Christ. Without unpacking the nuances and distinctions between the various streams of the Restoration movement, it will suffice to point out that the most distinctive feature of the “Church of Christ” is the lack of instruments in worship. Thus this specific movement is generally referred to as the a cappella wing of the Stone-Campbell tradition, or the “non-instrumental Churches of Christ.” As the Restoration tradition splintered in the late-nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the a cappella group made its mark as the most theologically conservative strand of the movement, and it still carries that reputation.7

The Church of Christ in India and the KJV

The United States has the largest national Church of Christ population with around 1.6 million members. India also has a significant Church of Christ presence with estimates ranging from 600,000 to over a million.8 The story of how the Church of Christ tradition developed in India reflects fascinating cross-cultural dynamics and brings up numerous issues in missions and the indigenization of faith. The persistent use of the KJV in India is one of those issues, and is timely considering the 400-year anniversary of the translation. It is also an area rather unexplored.

It is important to point out that the Church of Christ was never beholden to the King James Version. Indeed Alexander Campbell edited a translation of the New Testament called The Living Oracles in 1826.9 While “extremely popular” in Restoration circles, it was “severely criticized by other church bodies” during its day.10 Nevertheless, due largely to Campbell’s influence, his movement had a very strong “back to the Bible” emphasis. Restoration scholars were at the vanguard of Bible translation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pressing for the most precise translations using the oldest and most respected manuscripts available.11 And the King James Version was insufficient on two fronts: (1) the Elizabethan dialect no longer reflected the spoken English of the day, and (2) the manuscripts used in 1611 had been surpassed by superior, more ancient ones.12

It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that until the mid-twentieth century, the KJV’s dominant status in the Church of Christ was never in question. The Scopes Trial in 1925 had the effect of drawing a line in the sand between liberals and conservatives in the United States, and certain individuals in the Church of Christ began “championing the sole use of the KJV.”13 With the publication of the Revised Standard Version in 1946, more conservative elements in the Church of Christ reacted.14 Led by Foy E. Wallace (1896–1979), a polarizing preacher and influential editor of Church of Christ journals, the KJV enjoyed renewed privilege. During the last decade of Wallace’s life, he “continued to speak about errors he saw in ‘the new versions’ in almost every sermon.”15 That was in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the very years that the Church of Christ presence was beginning to grow in India.

In general, the Church of Christ missionaries to India planted a faith strikingly similar to the one they knew back home. There was little regard for the unique cultural context of South Asia. Cultural intricacies were scarcely taken into account as the gospel was disseminated along the eastern coast from Shillong in the tribal northeast to Madras in the south. And the gospel as understood by those pioneering preachers was plain and simple. As Jesus announced in Matthew 7:14, “Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it” (kjv).

Indeed, North American a cappella Churches of Christ in the mid-twentieth century had an exclusivist soteriology that was transported overseas through mission work.16 This is clearly evinced in an annual Church of Christ missions report entitled The Harvest Field. In 1947, in the chapter on India, the author Bill Phillips deplored the status of religion in that country. He wrote, “The Hindu religion is one of the most iniquitous systems ever devised by man. Surely Satan must have had a direct hand in riveting the shackles of such bondage upon a helpless people.” For the year 1947, that perspective was not unique to Churches of Christ. What is surprising, however, is the blatant censure of other Christians conducting mission work there. Phillips continues:

And what shall we say of those who in their search for Christ have turned to the denominations? They have not the truth, for the denominations have not the truth, and only the truth can save them.17

Phillips laments that, to his knowledge, there is not a single Church of Christ missionary in all of India. He then provides very curious advice for the prospective Church of Christ missionary who might venture into the Indian mission field: “I am inclined to recommend ‘invading’ the territory of the Christian Church . . . but others might not consider this the best policy.”18

This was a very strange perspective because, theologically, the Christian Church is the closest relative to the Church of Christ. The major difference is that the Christian Church chose to use instruments in worship whereas the Church of Christ did not. Phillips reasoned that the most logical targets for evangelism were actually those closest to the Church of Christ because they could be won with the least resistance. Hindus could not be effectively evangelized unless one was to go through the rigors of learning local Indian dialects.19 “Mohammedans”—or, Muslims—were considered too tenacious in their beliefs and were therefore not a good place to start.20 Other Christians, however, were fair game, especially those who shared the Restoration heritage. I shall return to this point later.

Arise Shine Mission History

The case study for this article is a Church of Christ network based in Chennai, south India. They go by the name Arise Shine Church of Christ Mission, or, ASCOCM. They are a registered charity in India and do all kinds of relief and benevolent work ranging from orphan homes to disaster relief. They have around 60 village churches involved with “the mission” as they call it, and they employ preachers in most of these. Their work is concentrated in the states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and is overseen by a group of elders. The real authority, however, is the director of the charity, a young preacher named Jasuran Roy Knight.21 I know Roy Knight personally and have spent considerable time with him in India and in the US. He was born in 1979 to Indian Church of Christ parents. In 1995 he was baptized at the age of 16. After considering various occupations, he chose to become a preacher.

Roy’s personal faith testimony revolves around two important biblical passages: the Great Commission of Matthew 28, and Isaiah 60:1, “Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.” Disgusted by what he deems the “idol worship” of his birth country, he vowed to rise up and bring Christ to his countrymen. He claims to have experienced severe resistance in his ministry. People have spit at him, used witchcraft against him, thrown poisonous snakes at him, and even attacked him—in one case with a knife that left gruesome scars on his arms. He even claims that one of his coworkers was murdered in 2008 for preaching the gospel in a hostile village. Over the last decade, Roy has assembled a ragtag team of evangelists who preach the gospel against the odds. They are poorly paid and rely on Roy’s fundraising to make ends meet. These men take charge of one or two village churches and Roy makes his rounds to each of them, usually over the course of a month. One of the first preachers he recruited to the work was an untouchable Hindu man with leprosy who accepted the gospel in 1999 and began ministering almost immediately.22

While the Arise Shine Church of Christ Mission is only about a decade old, its antecedents go back to the 1920s when Roy’s great grandfather, a Hindu man, converted to Christianity after being persuaded by North American missionaries. These missionaries were not from the Church of Christ, however. While there were a few scattered Church of Christ elements in India by that time, this family was evangelized by J. C. Bailey, a Canadian missionary who, in their words, “trained many 1000s of preachers and workers and faithful Christians.”23 A humble training school was soon developed and Roy’s maternal grandfather, G. D. Yesudin, took a leading role in the indigenization of the faith, planting churches and conducting an impressive ministry in rural villages.

Yesudin died in 1977 and his daughter and son-in-law—Roy’s parents—began taking the reins of leadership in the church. Roy’s father, Dayalan, is a gentle and quiet man. He spent his working life employed by the Swiss elevator and escalator company KONE, earning a good salary. He started a house congregation in 1978 and remained committed to the Church of Christ even when they moved to new towns because of his employment. Roy’s parents were doggedly committed to raising their children in the Church of Christ, in spite of the cultural baggage it entailed. They conducted church services in their home and from time to time gathered with like-minded Church of Christ people from other towns. Occasionally, North American missionaries would come, although these visits became less frequent through the years. While Roy’s father Dayalan remained loyal to the Church of Christ tradition, his docile personality prevented him from being an effective evangelist. His role was to keep the Church of Christ beliefs and traditions alive, which he did.

Roy Knight is Dayalan’s oldest son. He has a personality completely different from his father. He is charismatic and outgoing. He has worked for over a decade to expand his family’s church and mission. A highly entrepreneurial minister, Roy organized their ministry into a government-registered charity. He has had great success raising funds in several countries including Singapore, Britain, Germany, Canada, and the US. The daily workload he carries is exhausting, consisting of regular travels to remote villages on dilapidated roads, preaching in several languages, arranging marriages for young couples, sorting out church conflicts, running an orphanage, and managing church finances.24 He claims to have baptized around two thousand people.

Arise Shine and the KJV

The vast majority of Arise Shine’s 60-odd churches function in the vernacular, which is usually Tamil or Telugu, the languages of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Most of the members are poor, uneducated village folk and do not speak English. However, a few of their city churches are English-speaking. In my interactions with Roy, I began noticing that when preaching in English or studying an English-language Bible, he and his cohorts use the KJV.25 I thought this was odd because the merits of using a more updated version of the Bible are obvious; the KJV’s English is difficult enough for Americans, hence its dwindling popularity.26 Furthermore, Indians who speak English normally do so as a second or third language after their vernacular and Hindi, and the antiquated KJV would seem even less comprehensible for them.27 However, when citing the KJV, I noticed Roy evincing a bizarre fluency.

After repeated conversations I came to realize that the language of the KJV was not the primary issue here; it was much more complex than that. Loyalty to the KJV is directly linked to loyalty to the tradition that had been taught to them in years past by highly committed missionaries. These American missionaries are heroic in the collective memory of this Church of Christ community. They propagated their faith with great confidence. Their version of Christian truth is still canonical in this network. And visiting Roy’s group of churches is like witnessing the opening of a time capsule, like stepping back in time to the Church of Christ of my grandparents. Their teachings and practices have not evolved or indigenized like I had expected. Within 24 hours of my first arrival to Chennai I found myself entangled in long discussions about why instruments in the worship setting could jeopardize a person’s soul, why non-Church of Christ Christians are theologically suspect, why drinking alcohol is a sin, and why women must take no leadership role whatsoever in public worship. Furthermore, I had heard the same arguments laid out in the same ways in the United States. I recognized these teachings as a part of the conservative strands of the Church of Christ heritage, but to witness them being propagated boldly in twenty-first century India hinted at two things: (1) this network probably received support from the most conservative Churches of Christ in North America; and (2) loyalty to the old ways of the missionaries took precedence over cultural relevance in this ministry.

When I arrived to India, I was given a hero’s welcome due to a strange twist of irony. While Indians are famously hospitable, and the Church of Christ connection certainly deepened the immediate level of trust between this community and me, there was something else going on. At the Chennai airport, an SUV full of Church of Christ preachers received me like a long-lost relative, with enthusiastic cheers. I found out later, after lengthy discussions, that they thought I was associated with the missionaries who had brought the gospel to them decades before. I, however, was clueless to all that.

Canadian Missionary J. C. Bailey

When I first traveled to India in 2003 I was actually working on my PhD at the University of Calgary, Canada. This was significant because upon arrival to India, I was surprised to find that this work was actually founded by a legendary Church of Christ missionary from Canada. His name was J. C. Bailey (1903–2001).28 In 1963, at the age of 59, Bailey moved to India as a missionary after many years working in ministry, education, and publishing.29 His towering stature in the Canadian Church of Christ scene is well known and is the subject of at least one master’s thesis.30 I never met J. C. Bailey but I did talk with his brother Cecil by phone once; he called me in 1999 to warmly welcome me to Calgary right before I moved there from Texas. Cecil explained that he would not greet me personally since he was soon to retire to Saskatchewan—at the age of 95. Like his brother J. C., Cecil was a missionary to India for many years.

When these Tamil Christians in Chennai found out I was coming from Canada, they figured I was associated with J. C. Bailey—a very logical assumption—and were very excited to receive me. I burst their bubble by telling them I did not know Bailey and knew almost nothing about his missionary work in India. In their minds, I had been sent to India to “check-up” on the status of the mission and rekindle the connection to the Canadian churches—a connection that had faded through the years. They were disappointed to learn that I merely wanted a place to stay while I did my research. And my dissertation had nothing to do with the Church of Christ movement. I was happy to meet their preachers, visit the orphanage, and even speak in some churches, but my focus was on research. I was clear: I intended to spend my time not out on the front lines of evangelism but in dusty archives at theologically questionable institutions. I was scarcely a shadow of my predecessor, the valorous J. C. Bailey.

In India as well as in Canada, J. C. Bailey is as much myth as man. In his obituary from 2001, one realizes the venerable status reserved only for the most elite “soldiers of the cross”:

Bailey’s influence on people was powerful. . . . He preached his first sermon when he was 17. . . . Bailey was always pushing into new frontiers in an unrelenting quest to seek and save the lost. Whether preaching in a schoolhouse in south Saskatchewan or in the scorching heat of an Indian marketplace, he was ever moving and ever pressing the battle for truth in the kingdom of God. . . . Nothing else seemed to be important except preaching the word and persuading men and women to obey the Lord. . . . As Gandhi stirred the heart of India’s people politically, so brother Bailey stirred their hearts in spiritual things. . . . His love for God encouraged people to change their lives. . . . If there ever was a man whose physical appearance, manner, and movement was that of a great Army General, it was J. C. Bailey. But this tall, straight man with long strides and brisk walk . . . was truly a STALWART SOLDIER OF JESUS CHRIST. Most of us who knew him thought he accomplished more in his fight for the right than any man we had ever known. . . . Like Stonewall Jackson, he had a tremendous ability to inspire his fellow soldiers to fight faithfully and stand valiantly!31

On April 25, 1963, J. C. Bailey and his crew arrived to northeast India to evangelize the people of what is now Meghalaya and Assam. However, within a few short months of arrival, in September, he moved south to Madras. Eventually he set up his mission base at Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, where he found “South India was a riper field than North India.”32 His co-missionaries in the north of India were devastated. David Hallett, one of the members of the team, recounted that moment in his memoirs:

Then in September of 1963, such a short time after arrival in Shillong, J. C. decided that he and his family would go to Southern India. Of course he offered such to us, but we all knew he was the one going. Ray and I had been promised support of two hundred dollars per month, each, by J. C. We came on one-way tickets. Then the bomb dropped: J. C. would go south and take all the money with him. His promises to the Perrys, Ray and me failed. We were without money support. Talk about being left “high and dry!” We were half way around the world and now what? J. C. had the money. . . . All other monies also went with him. J. C. took little interest in the Northeast and the three small congregations and us. He was what I call a trail blazer, always being lured on by a greener pasture in the venture for souls. During this time, if I had a return ticket I would have left.33

Although various Church of Christ missionaries preceded him, Bailey is described as “lighting a spark for the evangelization of India.”34 What was meant by this, however, was that Bailey lit the spark for a distinctly Church of Christ evangelization in India. When Bailey arrived in 1963, he actually found three a cappella congregations totaling approximately 80 members.35

Bailey worked as a missionary to India for twenty-five years, from 1963 to 1988. During the first nine years he took residence in India. In 1972 he moved back to Canada.36 Between 1972 and 1988 he made twenty more evangelistic trips. It is estimated that over 100,000 faithful Church of Christ members resulted from his ministry there.37 However, statistics in India are rarely taken at face value. For example, Bailey’s first convert in the state of Andhra Pradesh, Joshua Gootam, claims, “There are now estimated to be more than 2 million members of the church [meaning Church of Christ] in this state alone.”38 Nevertheless, the point should not be missed: prior to J. C. Bailey’s arrival in 1963, there were scant traces of the a cappella Church of Christ in India. By the end of his ministry in that nation, there were hundreds of thousands of members—and many of them could trace their origins to Bailey’s work.

Paternalism

Bailey’s great successes and conviction have not been forgotten. This was the great heyday of the non-instrumental Church of Christ in India, and Bailey’s impressive work fostered extreme loyalty to him. Faithfulness and loyalty to this strong leader has resulted in what I am calling a “time capsule effect.” The continued use of the KJV is one aspect of a much larger issue that has historically been identified as “paternalism” in the church. Paternalism is a concept that has been denounced by missionaries and church historians for decades, but Christian leaders even still continue to battle it.

Ideally, missionaries plant churches that evolve and indigenize, and one day become independent. However, the opposite often happens: churches become stunted in their development, becoming ever more dependent on the supporting churches in the West. This loyalty to the parent church is reinforced in various ways: (1) through the memory of the heroic missionaries and preservation of their theology, (2) through continued financial support, and (3) through an unspoken division of authority wherein the missionary remains a father figure, even long after his death.

The phenomenon of missionary paternalism has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years. Boston University historian Dana Robert writes of the many and serious problems it can cause.39 It prevents the sending and receiving churches from developing authentic friendships. It thwarts collegiality by perpetuating unbalanced relationships between foreigners and indigenous. The sending church holds the power. It is able to superimpose everything from the leadership of the church to the formulation of its doctrines, no matter how out of synch they may be with the local culture. Robert defines paternalism as a “father-like relationship between the missionary and the people.” This dependency is very difficult to overcome. She argues that “unreflective paternalism” can prove dangerous since it has often “lacked the equality assumed by modern ideals of friendship.”40

Another historian, University of Edinburgh’s Brian Stanley, writes that while, theoretically, Indian and Western Christians should work shoulder to shoulder as equals, there are often fault lines—racial and otherwise—that prevent “real, intimate, brotherly and sisterly fellowship.” This imbalance of power is “the most fundamental of all missionary failures,” which is why it touches a “raw nerve in the western Christian conscience.”41

Paternalism in the church is not at all unique to Restoration churches. It has long been an Achilles heel for Christian missionaries of other denominations as well, notably the Church of England, which firmly established itself on the Indian subcontinent during the age of empire. Anglican Michael Hollis, Bishop of Madras from 1942 to 1954, bemoaned this situation in his 1962 book entitled Paternalism and the Church.42 Hollis argued that a strong paternalism developed in the nineteenth century as the template for doing mission work in South India. Decrying the “general subordination of Indian Christians to the missionary,” he advocated strongly for indigenization, claiming, “It is not the business of the foreigner to tell Indians what God wants them to do.”43 In Hollis’s view, paternalism in the Indian context proved disastrous. Christianity’s natural development in the subcontinent was stunted because of this dependence on the West. He writes:

Broadly speaking, the mission pattern has been too much concerned to ensure that Indian Christians accepted the right formulations of belief, as developed in the West, and followed the right patterns of behavior, again largely in the Western expressions, of what was believed to be the law of God.44

Hollis urged Christians in both East and West to wake up to the vast cultural differences between them, and to allow a “more truly Indian and more truly Christian Church” to develop.45 There is blame on both sides for this continued “white man’s burden” mentality. Indian reliance on Western funds, for example, is unhealthy. It stifles indigenization and prevents the mission church from reaching out in local ways. There is a sense everything has to be approved by a governing body in the West. The Indian Church becomes a misshapen attempt to replicate the pristine gospel as first transplanted by admirable but imperfect missionaries. As the churches in the West evolve theologically and culturally, the missionary church stultifies, becoming less and less relevant to the culture in which it was planted.

The time capsule effect I witnessed in the Indian Church of Christ is not unusual in the larger history of Christian missions. The New Testament itself shows Paul holding sway over the churches he established and the ministers he shaped. On one level, paternalism in the church manifests just how deeply missionaries are loved by the people they convert. Quite understandably, that admiration can last for generations.

However, when I arrived to India and realized they were dealing with the hot-button issues of my grandparents’ generation, I became curious why they had not evolved along a similar trajectory as in the United States. In North America, Churches of Christ currently discuss matters such as whether to have women preachers, what to do about the instrumental music question, and how many millions of dollars can justifiably be spent on a church building. These issues are not even on the radar in India. They talk about why instruments are flatly wrong, why salvation belongs exclusively to the a cappella Church of Christ, and, crucially for this article, why the king’s English is best for the Tamil tongue.

In preparing this piece, I communicated with Roy Knight, the leader of the Arise Shine Church of Christ network, and inquired specifically about his use of the KJV. His reply came almost immediately, “Brother J. C. Bailey used the King James Version.”46 However, unbeknownst to Roy, J. C. Bailey actually preferred the American Standard Version (ASV), but he used the KJV interchangeably with it.47 This was not uncommon in North America. Many Church of Christ people actually preferred the literalness of the 1901 ASV because of their “back to the Bible” convictions. In the first half of the twentieth century there was no major controversy over whether the Church of Christ should use the KJV or the ASV. It was not until the second half of the twentieth century that this issue escalated. It was the fiery sermons of Foy E. Wallace that made this issue explosive in North America. These debates played out in the Indian Church of Christ context as well, just more subtly.

I contacted Ray McMillan—one of the missionaries who joined Bailey in 1963—to understand how the KJV came to be normative in many of the English-speaking Churches of Christ in India.48 Ray outlined a complex story that illustrates the fact that while the KJV and ASV were both accepted, it was the RSV, published around 1950, that was considered by some to be pernicious. Both J. C. Bailey and Ray McMillan arrived to India with the 1901 American Standard Version. However, the third missionary in their group, a former sailor and recent convert named David Hallett, was a KJV-only man.49

Ray McMillan was only 21 years old when he began working with J. C. Bailey in 1963. In his ministry, he soon began to realize that the 1901 ASV—like the KJV—was difficult for English-speaking Indians to understand. So shortly before leaving on his first furlough to America, Ray put the controversial—but far more readable—RSV (Revised Standard Version) into the church pews, unaware of the sensitivity of the matter. His colleague, David Hallett, found out about this and took action. When Ray returned to India, he discovered that the RSVs were gone and KJV Bibles had been installed in the pews. He did not cause a fuss about it since he was quite a bit younger than Hallett.50

The residual effect is that some English-speaking Church of Christ groups in India still insist on using the KJV. What translation is used generally has to do with the missionary held in the highest regard. For example, in northeast India, the churches under the influence of Ray McMillan are actually using the New International Version now, probably due to his theological influence. After all, he has been involved in their work continuously since 1963. They trust the translation he uses. Other Church of Christ networks, like Arise Shine, have tried to remain loyal to J. C. Bailey and the earlier, more conservative missionaries. The English-speaking churches associated with David Hallett’s ministry—both in India and America—still use the KJV.51

Hybridity

A final issue that comes to the fore has to do with hybridity, or, the blended identity that many Indian Christians deal with today.52 Tamil fealty to the king’s English is part of a much broader phenomenon of living in India with a faith that is perceived as being Western. There is a considerable body of scholarship dealing with religious and cultural hybridity in the context of Indian Christianity.53 Historian Robert Frykenberg’s work is perhaps the most important. With an unparalleled breadth of understanding, including his own missionary upbringing in India, he speaks of the suffering that many Indians have endured because of this “dual identity.”54 This hybridity plays out in various ways. For instance, in the nineteenth century there was a “Hindu Christian” movement that became a precursor to Indian independence movements.55 Describing themselves as “ ‘Hindu’ in culture, Christian in faith,” they upheld Hindu traditions that were objectionable to Europeans.56 For example, some Hindu Christians directly opposed missionary efforts to dispose of caste-ism in the church. He writes, “Among converts to Christianity . . . what was notable was the tenacity with which they preserved traditional culture and avoided, or even spurned, ways of the West.” Another example was the famous Indian Christian convert Sadhu Sundar Singh who declared “Indians need the Water of Life, but not the European cup.”57

In spite of indigenization movements, there were—and are—problems stemming from the hybrid identity of being an Indian and a Christian, especially when caste is involved.58 A change in religion does not translate to a change in caste. Buddhism, Janism, Sikhism, and Christianity have all—at one point or another—served as vehicles of hope for low-caste people trying to escape the albatross of social stigmatization. And in more cases than not, those attempts have failed. In most cases, caste is more fundamental to Indian identity than is religion. It is much easier for one to change his or her religion than it is to change caste.

In the Indian Churches of Christ, there is definitely a sense of having a foot in two worlds, of living a hybrid existence. Their religion came from North America. However, the majority of them know little of North America outside of media influences, stories, and the occasional missionary visit. For most of the Church of Christ members however, particularly in the village, North America is that Christian land from whence their heroes in the faith came.

Living as a Church of Christ Christian in a sea of non-Church of Christ people requires a certain duality that allows the Christian to function as a member of Indian society without compromising the Christian ideals that have become sacred to the community. There are many tensions in living this way, however. Church of Christ identity in modern India is a rather insular affiliation, perhaps best exemplified in an old, self-deprecating Church of Christ joke: A man dies and goes to heaven. The apostle Peter welcomes him and gives him a tour of heaven. As they walk they notice Christians of all stripes—Methodists, Baptists, and Catholics. But then the man asks Peter, “Who are those people in that room by themselves?” Peter responds, “Shhhh . . . those are members of the Church of Christ; they think they’re the only ones here.”59 Here again we encounter another one of those issues that was central a few generations ago in the Church of Christ, but today is considered rather backward and outdated. Today, very few American Church of Christ members under the age of 40 argue theirs is the only group with a heavenly passport. But in India, this teaching is still common, even assumed. I know from personal experience because I questioned it once . . . and should not have.

Conclusion

To return to Andrew Walls, and his experiences in Sierra Leone, he described the amazing situation he was observing as “a symbiosis, very carefully fused.” He recognized the indigenous forms of faith as being Christian, of course, but with a profoundly African bent. He discusses how when he first arrived to Africa, he was depressed by what he saw.60 Christianity there was uncontrolled, unrestrained, and in many ways foreign to his conservatively tamed Methodist background. However, after ruminating on the implications of a truly African revival taking place, Walls experienced a “very definite movement from depression to hope.”61 During Walls’s ministry in Sierra Leone, the days of European control over African politics were grinding to a halt—Sierra Leone itself gained independence from Britain in 1961. The Christian faith that the missionaries had brought, however, would remain. It was almost as if Britain handed the baton of faith to Africa. Britain is largely secular now while Africa is home to 500 million Christians and growing. Christianity is now the largest religion on the continent of Africa—a statistic unimaginable a century ago.

The Church of Christ in India, however, has not turned into the fused symbiosis that Walls witnessed in Africa. Rather, the time capsule would be a more fitting analogy. And major challenges loom because of this theological and cultural stagnation. Members remain deeply loyal to the form of Christianity brought to them decades earlier by stalwart missionaries. This hybrid identity is fraught with ambivalence, resulting in a form of social dislocation. Members become increasingly isolated—they appear insular and sectarian in their own culture, yet remain somehow different and distant from the Churches of Christ in the West. To borrow a concept from prominent sociologist Peter Berger, these Christians become “homeless minds”—unable to call either culture home, yet marginally affiliated with both.

It appears to me that the Indian Churches of Christ with which I am associated have made a decision. They have chosen the faith of the zealous evangelists who first came to them half a century ago. And it appears that faithfulness to the traditions of those missionaries has become necessary for ecclesial survival. Challenging the faith of the missionaries could prove disruptive on a number of levels. For instance, it could destabilize conviction in a setting where religious commitments must be sheltered from the religious cacophony in the surrounding culture. The case of the KJV illustrates why loyalty to the old paths must be maintained. If confidence in the Bible can be eroded, then the solid faith that was built on a “back to the Bible” worldview could become crippled. Moreover, if one aspect of the missionaries can be critiqued, then where does the scrutinizing end? Thus, it has become taboo to question the founding fathers.

So far, the Arise Shine Church of Christ members have made the collective decision to resist the larger culture and live a rather insular existence. Forsaking all others they hold on tightly to their image of J. C. Bailey. Conversion has always come with benefits as well as challenges. The risks of being persecuted, marginalized, or cast out must be weighed against spiritual liberation, social mobility, or other opportunities that might otherwise not exist. The benefits can be palpable, but there is a gamble. Indians are faced with a balancing act between how to be Church of Christ without abandoning their Indian identity. The stakes are high, the situation complex.

I conclude with a story relayed to me by Ray McMillan, one of the two missionaries who went to India with Bailey’s family. Ray told me that on his first Sunday in India, J. C. Bailey took him to a community near Shillong, Meghalaya, to preach publicly using a microphone and a portable amplifier. Bailey preached about the evils of instruments in the church. He scorned the concept of missionary societies, arguing they were unbiblical. He took issue with church names, arguing that “Church of Christ” was the only acceptable name for a church. He unpacked the subtleties of why the Church of Christ is distinct from the independent Christian Church.62 Ray thought the sermon to be awkward and irrelevant to these people who had no knowledge of these esoteric debates that went on in the North American context.

The two missionaries split shortly after that, due mainly to Bailey’s move to south India. Nevertheless, Bailey remained convinced that Ray was far too liberal to work as a missionary in the foreign field. In his memoirs, Bailey wrote that Ray McMillan had proven himself to be “unfaithful” to the gospel.63 Fifty years later, however, Ray continues his missionary work in India. When Ray told me that story, he tried to chuckle and gloss it over. I sensed, however, that those words still hurt him deep down.

Dyron Daughrity is Associate Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University. He is the author of numerous academic publications, including his most recent book Church History: Five Approaches to a Global Discipline (New York: Peter Lang, 2012). He can be reached at: dyron.daughrity@pepperdine.edu.

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Vulnerable Mission, as the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission articulates it, comprises important missiological concepts. These concepts are not new to missiology, though they have often been under-practiced. Vulnerable Mission is thus a welcome call to more conscientious and thorough application of sound missiological principles. Yet, at least in the Latin American context, some questions remain as to the universality and absoluteness with which missionaries should apply Vulnerable Mission methods.

Clarifying the Contrast Between Vulnerable Mission and Mainstream Missiology

The Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM) is promoting a conversation that Christian missionaries can ill afford to ignore. I am grateful that Abilene Christian University, through the initiative of Dr. Chris Flanders, has brought the conversation into the realm of missiological reflection among Churches of Christ. I wish to respond to the proposals of Vulnerable Mission (VM) from my particular location.1 The reader might triangulate my location with a few key coordinates: I write as an Anglo-American, trained missiologically in an a cappella Church of Christ university, serving as a missionary in urban Peru. From this vantage point, the basic impulse of VM looks beneficial. The AVM homepage states:

“Vulnerable mission” may be seen as part of the movement toward contextualization of the Gospel of Jesus, which we regard as the theory of many and the practice of few. We would like to see more people take the risks of contextualization and vulnerability in order to reap the rewards that only come to those who value local resources and invest in local languages.2

The notion that there is a disconnect between mission theory and practice is plainly true. The bifurcation exists on a variety of levels: academy versus ministry, missiology versus missions, ideals versus realities, goals versus potentialities, and the list goes on. The fundamental issue is how to overcome the divide, and VM is attempting to provide a solution: “VM does not propose different goals than mainstream mission and missiology. We are arguing that the mainstream methods of reaching those goals are not achieving them very well.”3 To be clear, though, the problem is not that mainstream missiology (just “missiology” hereafter) has failed to provide methodological direction.4 While there are still cross-cultural workers who are not cognizant of missiology, I believe this conversation, directed at an audience that attends missiological conferences and reads missiological journals, must really be about the best practices that many missionaries know about but find difficult to implement.

“Contextualization and sustainability are widely preached; imperialism and dependence are widely practiced,” states Stan Nussbaum with salutary directness.5 The criterion by which we can evaluate VM, then, is its effectiveness in bringing about contextualization and sustainability where missiology has failed. VM’s intention, in other words, is to provide a practical handle for actually propagating the “three selves” that have been missiology’s Sisyphean task for over a century. In Nussbaum’s taxonomy, that practical handle consists of three methods: local language, local resources, and local thinking style.6

Nussbaum grants that there are “major improvements to the ethnocentric model” found in “partnership methods.”7 He lumps “most advocates of partnership,” represented especially by Mary Lederleitner at the ACU conference, with “missiologists.” Lederleitner’s book Cross-Cultural Partnerships is a popular-level example of the way missiology brings anthropological study to bear on cross-cultural interactions.8 Thus, it is not fair to missiology that Nussbaum represents the alternatives to VM as either (1) the “ethnocentric model” or (2) a partnership model that would use English as much as local languages and would opt for a simplified message instead of considering local modes of thought:9

Goal	VM methods	Partnership methods
Contextualized	Local language	English or local
Sustainable	Local resources	Prime the pump, or top up local resources
Missional	Local thinking style	Simplify the message

If the contribution of VM hinges on its ability to achieve what missiology has not, it is absolutely necessary first to grant missiology its full qualifications, in order to see what VM’s practical difference really is. And historically, missiology has taken local languages, resources, and thinking styles as the key to the self-realization, if I may use that term, of the indigenous church.

To tease out what is really at stake, we must think about the nature of the goals that missiology and VM admittedly share. Self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation cannot mean partial self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation. “Self” does not mean some outside resources or some foreign modes of thought and speech. Rather, whereas VM is apparently advocating the method of permitting no foreign resources, languages, or thinking styles from the beginning of a missionary endeavor, missiology has historically made allowance for getting to the self-realization of the indigenous church by degrees. And it is only fair to note that by degrees is, from a missiological standpoint (rather than a blindly imperialist one), a deliberated compromise rather than a justification for easy, self-serving methods.

Furthermore, the introduction of no foreign resources, languages, and thinking styles, to the degree possible in a cross-cultural relationship, is a logical corollary of the goal. If the end is self-support, for example, the most direct means is quite obviously not to introduce foreign support. To take a well-known representative with a Latin American outlook, in 1953 Melvin Hodges was able to quote a missionary in Colombia as saying:

No money for [national] preachers and [national] churches is not a handicap nor hindrance; it is a challenge to missionary ability and a policy that, if adopted generally and more rigidly, would save many a heartache and produce a stronger, more humble church in the foreign field.10

Advocacy of “no money” as the means to self-support is not novel; VM is not proposing new methodology but rather agreeing with extant missiological wisdom by which Hodges felt sixty years ago missionaries should “generally and more rigidly” abide. While the difference between Hodges and VM on this point seems to be that Hodges was willing to say, “The right use of money has its place in missions,” we still have to acknowledge that Hodges was advocating throughout his book—as a methodological outworking of Roland Allen’s proposals—the introduction of no foreign funding.11

Moreover, the infamous “moratorium on missions” last century was “not because of liberal theology or anti-Western bias, and it was not intended to signal the end of missions” but was an attempt to foster “an alternative to remaining dependent on foreign funding and personnel.”12 We might understand so drastic an approach as the recognition that there is no way to use only local language, resources, and thinking styles as long as foreign missionaries are present. The only way to avoid compromise on some level is to dissolve the cross-cultural relationship altogether.

Because missiology assumes the necessity—and the benefit—of the cross-cultural relationship, it is dedicated to mitigating cross-cultural challenges and increasing the missionary’s capacity for contextual discernment. One can imagine easily that, given this purpose, missiology would advocate the use of local languages. If mission history is rife with examples of missionaries using colonial languages or depending upon translators, we need not confuse that fact with missiology’s own perspective. The goal is the self-realization of the indigenous church, and one method for everyone concerned is the use of local languages. David Hesselgrave states in his influential volume Communicating Christ Cross-Culturally:

Almost without exception, missionaries will be well advised to learn the language of their respondent culture. . . .

If one wants to communicate Christ to a people, he must know them. The key to that knowledge always has been, and always will be, language.13

Or consider the position of linguist and missiological luminary Eugene Nida:

As regards a very high percentage of the social and religious culture language is an indispensable instrument for transmitting not only the outward forms but the inner content and subjective evaluation. Perhaps the best evidence of the essential function of language as a transmitting mechanism is seen in the almost total failure of meaningful cultural contact when effective communication is lacking. . . . If a culture cannot and does not transmit its own concepts except by language, how can missionaries expect to inculcate wholly foreign concepts without using the only language which the people really understand?14

What is even more noteworthy, though, is the quantity of Nida’s work that simply takes for granted the missionary’s use of local languages.15 Local language is missiology’s presumed method for even the initial communication of the gospel. How much more so for the self-realization of the indigenous church? On this point too it seems as though VM is not proposing a new method but rather suggesting that missionaries actually employ the method missiology knows to be so indispensable.

That brings us to the final VM method, local thinking style. It is especially important for this paper because it is Nussbaum’s addition to the VM agenda.16 He states, “A paradigm is a tool that an analytical thinker uses to compare two or more systems. Non-analytical (oral) thinkers do not use that tool because they never undertake that task. They simply do not look at their worlds that way.”17 He explains further, quoting John Walsh:

“When people routinely assume that the opposite of orality is literacy, they are making only a superficial contrast. The real contrast is not oral vs. literate. It is oral vs. analytical.” In other words, an oral style is a story or narrative or holistic style of thinking as opposed to a conceptual style that breaks everything down into pieces and then connects the pieces. Oral thinkers apprehend whole ideas; analytical thinkers comprehend them one piece at a time.18

Orality is therefore a way of looking at the world that is non-analytical and holistic. As Nussbaum mentions in a footnote, accounting for this sort of local thinking style is not methodologically novel. First, authors such as Duane Elmer and Sherwood Lingenfelter have dealt with “holistic thinking” in popular missiological publications—and they have done so by placing holistic thinking in relation to a much larger complex of cultural variables that more amply characterize “local thinking” in its sundry configurations.19 Second, as Nussbaum hinted, the bigger issue is the way local people “look at their world”—their worldview. It is an immense understatement to say that missiology has been concerned with worldview. One prominent representative is sufficient for our purposes here. Paul Hiebert’s Transforming Worldviews is a thoroughgoing overview of worldview theory, including sections on various kinds of logic and narrative epistemology and a whole chapter on “Worldviews of Small-Scale Oral Societies.” He also presents a chapter on “Methods for Analyzing Worldviews”—which moves well beyond the suggestion that we should use local thinking to methods for doing so, including the analysis of wisdom literature (including proverbs) and aesthetic culture (including music and festivals).20 These are not best characterized as “quirky interests of a tiny minority.”21 There is undoubtedly only a small portion of the missionary force that undertakes rigorous worldview analysis, but in the context of a discussion about what methods missiology offers for achieving its goals, that is hardly the issue. These are mainstream methods. They are well-developed, widely published, and accessible.

If these methods have been at missionaries’ disposal for so long, why then have they continued to use foreign languages, resources, and thinking styles? The answer, I believe, is that the complexities and difficulties of cross-cultural cooperation require mutual discernment and, often, ad hoc decisions. This reality is hardly an excuse for the many poor decisions that have led to dependency and paternalism. At the same time, doubling down on the counsel to use exclusively local methods is not a practical solution to the complexity of cross-cultural relationships that has prevented missionaries from doing so long since. Thus, in my own historical and cultural location I am left with a number of questions that challenge VM.

Problematizing Vulnerable Mission

What About Urbanization?

VM gives the impression that it has rural contexts in view. The idea of local language quickly becomes problematic in areas where urban migration is a factor. The urbanization of Latin America is a well-known phenomenon. I live in Arequipa, Peru, a city of about a million inhabitants. In Arequipa, there is a confluence of Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara—the three official languages of Peru. Spanish, of course, is the dominant language; that of the conquerors and colonizers. But it is, as a matter of historical reality, the first language of most urban inhabitants. It is the language of the school system, business, government, and the transcontinental social construct called “Latin America.” In Arequipa, Spanish is colonial and local.

The indigenous persons who migrate to Arequipa do so for a variety of reasons. In general throughout Latin America, “industrialization and the introduction of capitalist modes of production in rural areas from the 1930s onwards triggered a process of concentrated urbanization that seventy years later had led to a majority of the societies in the region crossing the urban threshold.”22 Although rural to urban migration had tapered off in many countries by the 1990s,23 in Peru no few fled the countryside in the wake of Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path) during the 1980s and 90s. Droughts during the same time period also precipitated urban migrations. Currently, urban migration tends to be a matter no longer of industrialization per se but of its cousin modernization, driven primarily by the same economic impulses that marked earlier patterns of urbanization. Yet, it is not truly representative to characterize urban migrants’ motives as purely economic. In a study by the Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group, researchers developed a culturally specific model of wellbeing that identified the most important and most frustrated life aspirations of Peruvians. Regarding analyses specific to migrants, James Copestake summarizes the study’s findings:

Overall, what emerges from both the quantitative and qualitative evidence is the complexity of the personal wellbeing trade-offs entailed in migration. For many, the main cost of searching for a more secure livelihood was not delaying starting a family but being forced to live in a more insecure and uncertain environment. Migration behaviour is also revealed to be more than a movement of individual workers driven by real wage differentials or even the outcome of diversified household livelihood strategies: it is also part of a life-cycle process of seeking independence from and often then negotiating interdependence with relatives, particularly parents. An understanding of the relational dimensions of migration should not be regarded as a useful supplement to a separate understanding of more important material dimensions. Rather, material, relational and indeed emotional effects of migration are profoundly interrelated.24

One area of the wellbeing paradigm, called improvement from a secure base (ISB), was of special importance: “In-depth interviews revealed there to be a strong positive ISB motivation for migration to urban areas, particularly Lima: this being associated with terms like ‘betterment’, ‘superación’, ‘improving life conditions’, ‘securing the future’ and ‘upward social mobility.’ ”25 In fact, three ISB goals were statistically the standouts for disparity between aspiration and achievement: “Perhaps the most distinctively ‘Peruvian’ aspect of [the results] is the low satisfaction with achievement of highly ranked status goals for education, salaried employment and professional status.”26

Copestake notes, “The ISB goal can be viewed as corresponding closely with the Western idea of development, and suggests a desire to be part of a modernization process, subject to not taking excessive risks.”27 Certainly, there are among Arequipa’s urban migrants those less voluntary participants in the city’s modernized social arrangement—refugees from natural disaster or insurgent violence. But we can safely postulate that the vast majority of first generation rural to urban migrants, whose primary language is Quechua or Aymara, desire to be in the city precisely in order to participate in the opportunities modernization affords, to which the dominant Spanish-language criollo culture plays host.28 They endeavor, often at great risk, to enroll their children in a Spanish-only school system, to participate in the local urban economy, and to attain status as defined by urban Peruvian culture.

Especially regarding the Spanish-only school system we may recognize dynamics at work that are important to VM.

Whereas, in the past, formal education was exclusively Spanish in medium of instruction and urban and Western in content, the last quarter of the 20th century brought a shift in both policy and practice toward greater inclusion of indigenous language and content, usually under the label of bilingual intercultural education.29

Peru, in other words, made a legal requirement the use of both the local language and Spanish in the classrooms of indigenous communities. As the quotation intimates, the use of local language is necessarily a change not only of medium but also of content. And while the simultaneous use of Spanish might mean that “interculturality” is “simply a new guise for the ‘same old’ enlightened assimilationism that yet maintains the hegemony of Spanish as the language of writing, of formal communication, and of power,” it is also possible that the recourse to local language affords “a genuinely new intercultural ideology that seeks to incorporate indigenous languages, cultures, and ways of knowing into a new national identity.”30 Here we have, for the indigenous peoples themselves, the opportunity to choose, at least to some degree, their local language and local thinking style. In the urban context, we must therefore reckon with the decision of migrants to uproot their families partly in order to place their children in Spanish-only, urban, Western schooling. Second generation migrants usually speak their parents’ language poorly if at all and typically do not use it outside the family context. But why should they, when their parents have sacrificed so much to assimilate to the urban environment?

The question for the missionary in urban Peru, then, is what local language and thinking style to use. The difference between Spanish and Quechua, as well as the difference between indigenous and urban worldviews, is every bit as significant as VM asserts. Yet, is it the missionary’s place to overrule the indigenous migrant’s intention to live in the linguistic world of her second language? If she speaks Spanish but still “thinks” Quechua, need the missionary insist upon a Quechua approach—or is this even a realistic view of language? Nida notes the complexity of what he classifies as “a heterogeneous society with included face-to-face constituency”:

When a single over-all social structure involves not only a dominant group but an included face-to-face constituency, it is essential to recognize not only their differences of structure, but also their interrelations. One of the most serious mistakes in missionary work has been to imagine that Indians in the Americas, for example, should be reached as a separate constituency and developed as an isolated community, when all the time they are in highly dependent relation to the urban center.31

Nida points out that it is more common to err in the other direction, when the missionary “lumps them together without regard to their different structures.”32 So, even in this urban nexus VM provides a corrective when it provokes the sub-cultural sensitivity to which the melting pot can numb the missionary. But I emphasize Nida’s point about “interrelations” here because VM seems to disregard the complexity of the urban environment with its local-only formula:

In a heterogeneous society with an included folk culture there is always the acute problem of dealing with people in a state of transition. How are they to be ministered to—in terms of their rural circumstances, or in their city setting? In a sense, it all depends on where they are and how they view themselves.33

The point here is to juxtapose the urban Latin American scenario with Jim Harries’s rural African context, from which much of the VM perspective apparently arises:

Presumably the content of African languages arises from the content of African lives. Does learning of another language “magically” result in a change in way of life? Or is the widespread use of English making people dependent on what they do not understand because it is not a part of who they are? If we had examples of non-European languages ‘succeeding’ [as the medium of enlightened advanced education] then perhaps we could say that the choice of a European language for an African student is a free or arbitrary choice. As it is, if it is a choice at all, then it is a choice that largely precludes taking the African person’s own context seriously. This default option for African students handicaps them for the rest of their lives.

For example, consider the contrast between monism and dualism. English is “at home” in dualistic communities. When used by dualistic people, it can be extremely productive, because the way it is used fits the contours of life of the people concerned. But if used by a monistic people, it loses its moorings. Its implicit categories are no longer the right ones. It serves a monistic people very poorly. This is the case unless they adapt English so as to use it in their way. Such “adaptation” of English defeats the original intention—that English be a means of easing communication with the wealthy and powerful international community and a means of achieving development and prosperity on Western lines.34

The parallel is strong. Spanish is the colonial language and the “means of achieving development and prosperity on Western lines.” But the practical issue is Harries’s theory of language, which the Peruvian urban migrant’s intentions challenge. The logic of Harries’s argument is that the context (“the content of African lives”) is what determines their language. This is unidirectional, though, because in his view their context actually determines their worldview (monism) first, and their language is merely the manifestation of their worldview. Language is a surface element, which means that learning a new language cannot result in a new worldview (dualism). The context is still determinative, therefore the new language will be employed (adapted) only in terms of the existing worldview.

To this view, the urban migrant essentially poses the question: What if I change contexts? Is it possible for the Quechua speaker to see the world differently enough that her use of Spanish does indeed cohere with the native Spanish speaker’s use? The missionary’s expectation that every person’s worldview can be transformed into that of Jesus and VM’s expectation that the missionary can effectively adopt local language and thinking styles both require an affirmative answer. The oral thinker can learn to think analytically—they “simply do not look at their worlds” analytically, but they can do so every bit as much as the missionary can learn to think orally in order to “use local thinking styles.”

It is clearly paternalistic to require non-Westerners to conform to a Western worldview, but it is equally paternalistic to deny non-Westerners the agency to use non-local languages, non-local thinking styles, and non-local resources should they so choose. It is paternalistic to opt against partnership because potential partners may find it “very difficult, if not impossible” to “understand that the resources provided by the Western mission body to support the spreading of the gospel are not the gospel.”35 The methodology of using only local language, thinking styles, and resources, rigidly applied in urban Latin America, stands to become one more way that Western missionaries say, “We know what’s best for you, whether you realize it or not.”

Another way of putting this is that my context reveals the peculiarity of VM’s stated aim, to seek “more perspectives on VM from Majority World people whose contact with the West has not persuaded them to approach mission like Westerners.”36 I must ask, instead, why not equally seek the perspectives of Majority World people whose intentional contact with the West defines their reality in terms of interculturality and hybridity? The mestizo voice should not be marginalized here as well.37 It calls out a challenge to the notion of local culture as static and closed. It asks missiology to consider new, dynamic configurations that are oral and analytical, narrative and propositional. It seeks dialogue, discernment, compromise, and provisional decisions appropriate to contexts that are in flux.

What About Theological Education?

With the mestizo voice in my ears, then, I want to discuss the question of what language and thinking style to use from within the concrete (though diverse) situation of theological education. There are three principal issues that shape the conversation: (1) the nature of theology, (2) the extant voice of Latin American theological scholarship, and (3) the inevitability of cross-cultural interactions in the globalized world.

The Nature of Theology

There is no doubt that the dominant current of theological reflection in Christian history is part and parcel of the various Western church traditions. The recent overhaul of church history mentioned by Dyron Daughrity in the present issue implies a recovery of previously subdued non-Western theologies as well. Backing away from this development for a wider perspective, Western theology has already been in a long process of self-criticism, intensified by postmodernism, in which the idiosyncrasies, foibles, and blatant deficiencies of Enlightenment streams of Christianity have been laid bare. To some degree, Christianity finds itself in a theological malaise induced by an uncertainty about what to do after the assertion that theology is culturally conditioned. The instruments of communication that might potentially span the gap are themselves subject to the deconstruction of Western imperialism: rational discourse that assumes a particular rationality; communication media embedded in globalization; the practical need for linguae francae that finds a path of least resistance in formerly colonial languages; the written word, which excludes a variety of oral and grassroots theologies—not to mention academic standards such as peer review that further delimit publication. Paralysis results in theological ghettoization.

Personally, I hail from a theological tradition that drank deeply from the Enlightenment well and developed a hermeneutic that programmatically denied the possibility of theological pluralism, cultural or otherwise. Thus, along with the rest of Western Christianity, sectors of the Churches of Christ have been in a period of profound introspection, after which we see clearly that our culturally conditioned ways of talking about God are not universal and definitive. For all that, I maintain a commitment to the primacy of Scripture that must, for the Churches of Christ, be the point of departure for a discussion about the nature of theology.

There is vast diversity among literate cultures; conflating literacy with Western thought will never do.38 Yet, the VM advocacy of only local thinking styles among oral cultures runs up against theological education that makes Scripture central. Nussbaum contends that the contrast between orality and literacy is superficial, but superficial or not, illiteracy is a component of orality. To concretize the issue, what should theological education look like for my illiterate or functionally illiterate Arequipeño brothers and sisters?

Scripture stands as a testimony to the people of God’s enduring, trans-cultural impulse to center theology upon the written word. We may make historical caveats about the illiteracy of the majority, the priority of narrative, and the variety of cultural patterns that mark the reception of the text, but these do not obviate the nature of Scripture as scripture. Moreover, the rabbinic and Hellenistic modes of theology canonized in the New Testament demand to be met on their own terms by readers of every culture. At this point, it hardly needs saying, the cultures of the Bible stand at tremendous distance from US, Latin American, and African cultures alike. How could missionaries who focus upon Scripture not introduce foreign thinking styles? The use of local language in missiology intends to mitigate the distance, but as Nida said, the purpose is still in virtually every context “to inculcate wholly foreign concepts.”

The Western tradition’s historical-critical tools may be indelibly marked by the culture(s) in which they developed, but it is something else to say they are irredeemably compromised. Christopher Wright says:

There is no point, it seems to me, in swinging the pendulum from Western hermeneutical hegemony and ignorance of majority world biblical scholarship to the fashionable adulation of anything and everything that comes from the rest of the world and the rejection of established methods of grammatico-historical exegesis as somehow intrinsically Western, colonial, or imperialistic.39

At their best, historical-critical tools allow us to meet biblical cultures on their own terms. If the choice is between attempting that cross-cultural encounter with the text or subjugating it to the autonomy of a local thinking style, theological education should choose the former in every context. As a scholar who has spent much of his career giving the Latin American context a voice to critique and improve Western hermeneutics, René Padilla’s words on this point are weighty:

It has been argued, however, that . . . the grammatico-historical approach is itself typically western and consequently not binding upon non-western cultures. What are we to say to this? . . .

No interpreters, regardless of their culture, are free to make the text say whatever they want it to say. Their task is to let the text speak for itself, and to that end they inevitably have to engage with the horizons of the text via literary context, grammar, history and so on. . . .

The effort to let Scripture speak without imposing on it a ready-made interpretation is a hermeneutical task binding upon all interpreters, whatever their culture. Unless objectivity is set as a goal, the whole interpretive process is condemned to failure from the start.

Objectivity, however, must not be confused with neutrality.40

Similarly, as a twenty-first century American, my encounters with Irenaeus, the Cappadocian Fathers, Anselm, Calvin, or Karl Barth are all cross-cultural. Theological education actually seeks to challenge the student’s local thinking style, not to place it in a reservation.

Latin American Theological Scholarship

Vibrant theological scholarship already exists in Latin America, though its scale is modest relative to the number of churches it serves. Latin American theological scholarship bears certain prominent traits that present difficulties for VM methods. First, theological leaders think of themselves in terms of Latin America and therefore undertake their task internationally in Spanish or Portuguese. Entities such as the Latin American Theological Fellowship and the Evangelical Association of Theological Education in Latin America represent this characteristic most prominently.41 Second, they are participants in the theological discourse of the global church. Prominent leaders such as Samuel Escobar and René Padilla have played vital roles in the Lausanne Movement, for example. They participate in this global scene, as well as publish, in English.

The weight of these simple observations increases in proportion to the degree that theological leaders of the dominant criollo culture do indeed represent their diverse national contexts. This is not to say that local languages should be ignored—the principles of sound missiology stand. But even in indigenous communities in Latin America, “in the pedagogical process and in the development of an integral formation both languages are necessary and complementary”:42

The educational process, within the framework of the religious conscience is decisive in a socialization which will allow the aboriginal people and other participants to elaborate critical and constructive relations with the society in which we are living. The contrary, within current conditions, would inevitably lead to one form or another of the extermination of minority groups. In this sense, the proposal which certain anthropological currents uphold, to “maintain the indigenous cultures in a state of purity” simply brings on the same tragic consequences that the destruction/absorption plans have produced. . . .

The aim of a school in the aboriginal context is a double one: on one hand, to rescue and affirm the values of their own culture, language, identity, religious cosmovision; and also to offer adequate training so as to enable participation on a level of equality in a multi-cultural society, which at the same time is a dominating and vicious one towards certain sectors.43

If it is necessary to introduce Spanish-language theological education into the indigenous community rather than maintain a purely local-language theology, how much more must Spanish-language theological education be the right approach in the urban context, where indigenous migrants have made dominant-culture socialization their goal? It is invariably best to bring students’ culturally and linguistically determined thinking styles into dialogue with Spanish-language theology, first because balance is necessary in order not to perpetuate marginalization, and ultimately because the “promotion of inter-religious and intercultural dialogue for an improved mutual integration into a pluralistic society” is one of the goals.44

Considering Latin American theological leadership, it is important to note that Nussbaum sees the charismatic movement in Latin America as an example of Jim Harries’s “VM approach to theological training.”45 It may be that we see here the contrast between largely analytical mainstream theological scholarship in Latin America and that of supposedly oral charismatic Christianity. Yet, charismatic Christianity in Latin America is notoriously marked precisely by a lack of theological education, not an alternative “oral” model of it.46 And while many “grassroots” groups have certainly developed without foreign funding, it is not the case that they demonstrate a particular care for local languages—in fact, in Arequipa there are a significant number of native Quechua speakers participating in Spanish charismatic church services. Here as well, urbanization is determinative, and charismatic churches flourished first and foremost in Latin American urban environments.47

If it is right to describe the widely diverse charismatic movement in terms of Nussbaum’s conception of orality, then there is no doubt that the movement’s chief characteristic in regard to thinking style is not local indigeneity but socio-economic marginalization, along with which goes a lower level of education. José Míguez Bonino summarizes various sociological descriptions of Pentecostalism’s emergence:

A series of diverse hypotheses arose, but with a common denominator: They saw Pentecostalism as a movement which found its space in Latin America’s transition from a traditional society to a modern one, or more specifically, in the transition from a largely agrarian society to a partially industrialized one, from a rural to an urban society.48

The socio-economic implications of this transition are well known. The connection is clear between the indigenization of Pentecostal churches and the nationalist stirrings that accompanied the rural to urban transitions of poor, oral, uneducated populations.49 It is, however, difficult to demonstrate that a principle of orality was the cause of indigenization. It is perhaps a simpler explanation that lack of education, and therefore continued orality, became endemic in transitional groups precisely because marginalization prevented them from completing the transition they intended, which in turn led to a break with the wealthy, educated, analytical culture that marginalized them. They did not indigenize because they were oral but remained oral because they indigenized through conflict at a time when their identity was shaped by limited access to education.

To put it this way highlights the fact that one notion of education is regnant in Latin American urban society. There is no romantic notion of local indigenous education at work here. Rather, there are systems of urban poverty that perpetuate a divide between those with greater educational opportunity and those without. In this context, an “oral” rather than analytically trained mind is indeed the default mode of cognition, but it is hard to imagine idealizing such orality as an equally beneficial thinking style in a society that functions economically, legally, and politically in a more analytical mode. Indigenous migrants know as much and for that very reason seek every opportunity to integrate.

Furthermore, it is similarly difficult to think that such orality in the church context should not be challenged by the analytical theological mode that is itself indigenously Latin American and understands its context in the socio-economic terms pertinent to the urban reality of uneducated oral communities. There are strong links here to Paulo Freire’s conscientization—part of a pedagogy for marginalized groups that focuses on “critical literacy,” dialogue, and engagement.50 Freire’s influence on Latin American liberation theology, which much of Latin American evangelical theology has appropriated to varying degrees, finds expression in mainstream Latin American theological scholarship in the tendency toward discourse and interculturality. This disposition is especially concerned to empower the voice of the marginalized, yet it certainly expects theological education to be dialogical rather than monologically “local.”

Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Globalized World

Theological education cannot afford to treat local cultures as closed systems; especially in urbanized contexts, attempting to treat them so is futile. The world is plugged in, and there is no going back. Harries says, “The responsibility is on the West to communicate and interact inter-culturally.”51 That is a justifiable challenge to the ethnocentric Western missionary force; a historically reasonable corrective. Especially because the missionary enters the local culture to instigate the cross-cultural relationship, the burden to assume an incarnational posture is hers. Yet, when it is a matter of the local Christians’ theological education, to insist upon banning non-local thinking styles handicaps the resident of the globalized urban setting. What is more, to place the responsibility of the cross-cultural relationship solely upon the West is, inversely, to advocate the ethnocentricity of local Christians.

Were Western missions to achieve a moratorium on ethnocentric short-term missions and cut all “dead aid,” local Christians would nonetheless need the capacity to self-theologize (a self unmentioned in Nussbaum’s proposal) in dialogue with the global community.52 This precludes the local-only thinking style—or perhaps, more accurately, redefines the local in relation to the global. Of Harries’s context, Mercy Amba Oduyoye said twenty years ago—just before the hyper-acceleration of globalization through the Internet:

We short-circuit the cultural context of Black Africa if we forget that the contemporary culture, except maybe in the remotest of villages (and how many do we have left?), is fast becoming an amalgam of Arabic, European, technological, and African cultures. The context is today as it has been shaped by yesterday, and continues to interact spatially within a world of changing cultures.53

Missiologically, there is little to gain by ascribing moral value to globalization. It is not intrinsically good or evil; it affords opportunity for both. More importantly, it reshapes local realities regardless of our judgments. The missionary who judges it negatively may choose, to the extent possible, not to be an instrument of globalization. But globalization will change her context in any event. Therefore, the missionary task of contextualization must account for that change:

For some missiological reasons, traditional indigenization has been enthusiastic about preserving our Indian culture, especially in Indian dialects. This indigenization has been to a large extent romantic, in the sense of looking to the past and glorifying the noble savage without seriously taking into consideration the present, much less the future. Contextualization is asking for the incarnation of the gospel, not in a traditional and static culture, but in the struggle and agony of the people in search for a new culture, namely, a better way of life for them and their children.54

Beyond the inevitability of globalization, the bare fact that Majority World churches are engaged in cross-cultural mission throughout the world is enough to bring local-only thinking under scrutiny. Just as VM (and missiology) calls Western missionaries to respect local thinking styles, missionaries from oral cultures must learn to meet more analytical cultures on their own terms.55 This critique becomes all the more urgent given that theological leadership of the global church must begin to arise from the Majority World. On this point, no one speaks more eloquently than Andrew Walls:

It is inevitable that the religio-cultural transformation of the 20th century will place Africans and Asians more and more in positions of leadership in world Christianity; the more so since the Great Reverse Migration will ensure that the United States and Europe become more consciously multi-religious as well as more secular entities, and as the once axiomatic identification of the West with Christianity becomes more and more problematic. But any leadership needs to be an informed leadership; it is incongruous to have Western intellectual and theological leadership of a non-Western Church. That Africa will bring gifts to the church is widely recognized, and many see those gifts as including zeal for Christ, unembarrassed witness to him, energy and delight in worship, and fervency in prayer, all of which will bless the wider church. But Africa and Asia must bring other gifts too. Intellectual and theological leadership of the Church must increasingly come from Africa, Asia and Latin America. As a result, theological adequacy, rubbing along, is not going to be enough. There must be excellence, world-quality capacity for leadership. Africa, Asia and Latin America will increasingly have to be the powerhouses of Christian thought.

If we translate this into academic terms, it means that Africa, Asia and Latin America must first become centers of creative thinking, world leaders in biblical and theological studies. And theological and biblical studies may be one of the few disciplines, possibly even the only one, in which this will be true for much of the area. Economic and other factors will always give Europe, North America and East Asia the edge in scientific and technological disciplines, and in many branches of the humanities and social sciences. But for the sake of the Christian Church worldwide, Africa, all Asia and Latin America, home to so many Christians, must pull their true theological weight.56

This is not to reduce theological studies to Western modes of academia. There is much that other cultural modes of study and reflection can bring to balance and correct Western scholarship:

It may again be time for Christians to save the academy. And it may be that salvation will come from the non-Western world; that in Africa and Asia and Latin America the scholarly ideal will be re-ignited, and scholarship seen as a vocation. To follow a calling means putting other things aside as distractions, laying aside every weight; and the scholarly vocation may be best fostered by breaking with some of the Western models; developing new structures that encourage the community of scholars, rather than their competition. And in theological scholarship—the area in which Africa and Asia and Latin America have to excel for the sake of the worldwide Church—this will mean scholarly communities that maintain a life of worship and are in active relation to Christian mission.57

By itself, the Western church’s need for an intelligible, dialogical corrective from Majority World theological leadership is a powerful reason not to establish local Majority World churches with a purely self-oriented vision of ecclesial existence. The resistance to dependency and paternalism that powerfully compels the conscientious Western missionary should not engender a reactionary methodology that ultimately blinds the local church to God’s global mission. Theological education of local Majority World churches for global theological leadership cannot be reduced to Western academia, but it must certainly encompass Western modes of theological reflection.

What Is Vulnerability?

I affirm the need for vulnerability in mission. The narrative of Jesus’ incarnation, life, and death provides the theological imperatives for mission.58 Nonetheless, those imperatives need nuance. It rings true that Western missions has often compromised its own missiological principles because of the temptation to work from a place of strength and convenience. At the same time, it is not clear that mission in weakness and vulnerability can be flatly equated with exclusive localness.

On one hand, Jesus certainly did not leave humanity to its own resources. As Mary Lederleitner puts it, “Jesus is the ultimate high-powered and highly resourced partner in global mission. . . . I am glad Jesus didn’t say, ‘You know, there is such a big gap between what I can do and what you can do. Why don’t we just work separately?’ ”59 I get the sense that the VM response to this point is that it was the Holy Spirit rather than Jesus who brought these “outside resources” to bear, and that missionaries have relied on their own resources rather than the Holy Spirit. Yet, the analogical mode in which incarnational theology issues its imperatives for mission also permits us to compare Jesus’ power and authority with whatever resources the Creator has placed at our disposal. Taking for granted a biblical worldview, what resources would a missionary actually arrogate to herself, as her own strength?

On the other hand, there is nothing more vulnerable than the attempt to negotiate cross-cultural partnership in the most faithful and beneficial way in our postcolonial reality. The missionary who seeks to prevent dependency and facilitate sustainability is far more vulnerable to frustration and failure when she serves in a mode of genuine mutuality and intercultural dialogue rather than avoiding the complexity of the cross-cultural relationship and the reality of the globalized world. Absolute local-only methods may take missiology to its logical conclusion, but in abstraction from local realities, they may serve as oversimplified answers to questions whose difficulty makes us truly vulnerable.

An Appreciative Comparison

I conclude with a comparison between VM and the mission work I am a part of in Arequipa, Peru. There are two facets of the work in Arequipa: church ministry and development ministry. The missionaries conceive of both together in terms of kingdom sowing, but for practical and heuristic purposes they may be separated. I limit my comments to church ministry.60

Historically, Churches of Christ have tended toward a building-oriented strategy in Peruvian (and Latin American) urban church planting, whether renting or building facilities in order to establish a congregation or beginning in homes with a view to renting or building facilities. In either case, raising funds from US churches has been normal. Our intention to establish churches in poor urban communities caused us to doubt the appropriateness of such an approach. We concluded our study of the context:

Naturally, in the context of the poor, the rental or construction of a building is neither reproducible nor often sustainable. For churches intended to multiply themselves, it is not an acceptable model of church planting. Practically, churches that would choose to train leaders capable of growing congregations large enough to reproduce the building model will stifle the potential for church multiplication. This leads to a second point—that of leadership training. Building-centered strategies are virtually always locked into a pastor-laity dichotomy fostered by the institutional structure of the church. The assumed roles and tasks of church leadership professionalize ministry to the detriment of church-wide equipping. The assumed goal of growing large further removes the possibility of “ministry” from many would-be spiritual leaders and frustrates even natural leaders’ best efforts. Furthermore, the quality of the church communities that have had the most growth is contingent on the dynamics of small groups that have no need for a building. Lastly, the building of church buildings among Peru’s poor, as well as the leadership style it assumes, fails to contrast strongly enough with the religiosity that spiritually impoverishes nominal Catholic believers. Such an approach cannot adequately redefine and reconstitute “church” for new Christians. On each of these points, a building-centered strategy is at odds with the contextual factors uncovered by the best of Latin American missiologists and sociologists.61

Thus, we bring new Christians into a house church network. The use of local resources is not our only concern, but our critique of standard strategies does have some similarity with Nussbaum’s discussion of the financial implications of the “analytical church”:

Biases that go with assuming a mature church must be an analytical church

1. Professionalization—the leaders are the best analysts; laity tag along.
2. That kind of leader needs special schooling for analyzing the Bible.
3. A congregation must be big enough to support a professional pastor.
4. That size of congregation will need a building.
5. The building, the schooling, and the pastor all require major funding.62

These assumptions are generally typical in my context as well. Yet, the issue is really professionalization—a particular model of theological education—not a particular thinking style.63 Because theological education in the urban Peruvian church must take into account the nature of theology as dialogue with the historical church, dialogue with extant Latin American theological leadership, and dialogue with the global church within the globalized world, we are searching for an alternative model of theological education that does not professionalize students and conforms to the economic reality of Arequipa. Nussbaum’s proposal is suggestive:

Alternative model if a mature church can be an oral-thinking church

1. The laity can be involved in developing the theology of the group.
2. Special schooling not required for leaders; they can be apprenticed.
3. Congregations can thrive and sub-divide though too small to support a pastor.
4. Buildings are optional.
5. Little or no funding required.64

Practically, apprenticeship is the model of theological education for Nussbaum’s oral-thinking church. The rest are implications of refusing to professionalize ministry or otherwise grow congregations into large budget-maintenance mechanisms—implications that are also the goals of an alternative theological education model in Arequipa. The question, then, is whether apprenticeship will be sufficient to equip theological leaders to serve the urban Peruvian church. We affirm the essential commitment of VM: to foster an ecclesial existence among poor urban communities that is truly Peruvian (self-governing), economically sustainable (self-sustaining), and reproducible as the Peruvian church participates in God’s mission (self-propagating). Nonetheless, we must also promote the “fourth self”: self-theologizing.

Self-theologizing in the urban Peruvian context must not be a detriment to the economic sustainability of the church. In fact, because theology is done by the church, the nature of the church as contextual, sustainable, and missional should provide strictures for its self-theologizing, including the equipping of those gifted to be theological leaders. Therefore, it is unreasonable that theological education would entail costs incommensurate with the local economy or require foreign subsidy.

At the same time, theology is the point where historical, social, and global dialogue become indispensable. While the trappings of the Western academic edifice are both unsustainable and unnecessary for the education of poor Peruvian theologians, there may be some vital components that are more costly than the local church can afford. For example, one area where we have departed from a local-only resource methodology in Arequipa is the acquisition of Spanish theological texts. Books are more expensive in Peru than in the US, despite the relative weakness of the Peruvian economy. Therefore, US Christians have donated texts to the church in Arequipa. Is this the slippery slope of dependency, or is there a place for cautious, deliberate collaboration?

Discussing the “western captivity of theology,” Andrew Kirk, a theological educator in Latin America and other Majority World contexts, articulates the basic problem that theological education faces in contexts such as Arequipa’s:

Theological education is restricted in many instances to those who have reached a particular level of academic achievement, who can lay hands on sufficient financial resources for study and who share the cultural background of the educator. How is theological education to be made available to people who inhabit a “non-book” culture, i.e. for those who have not succeeded in meeting the expectations of the normal educational process? Present patterns of theological education will probably continue to reinforce the Western Church’s alienation in deprived, urban areas. How is it possible for existing Western theology, given its cultural assumptions, to equip a genuinely indigenous leadership in all strata of society?65

Both local resources and local thinking styles are at issue when we decide to make the theological library a component of education. It is not a decision to make lightly. Of course, the same can be said about the decision to translate, mass publish, and disseminate the Bible. Even if we hold firmly to VM convictions, when practical benefit outweighs idealism we must discern legitimate compromises. Undoubtedly, Christianity can thrive and expand without access to theological texts. But what is most beneficial for the urban Peruvian church: absolute economic independence or access to historical, social, and global dialogue? This is a situational dilemma that cannot be reduced to a choice between right and wrong but instead requires discernment of the contextually most beneficial option—which in turn makes us vulnerable to error. We must pose such questions prayerfully and humbly. And it is perhaps best to reiterate that our commitment to missiological principles already excludes Western academic institutionalism, ministerial professionalization, and economically unsustainable church forms.

I believe interculturality is the best mode for Latin American theological education—and probably for the global church of the twenty-first century. In Peru, at least, it is already an intelligible pedagogical framework. In this dialogical mode, which fosters theological interdependence, hybridity, and “a new level of partnership that is fully bi-directional,” it is a legitimate compromise for wealthy churches to put theological tools at the disposal of under-resourced churches.66 The use of those tools in a contextually appropriate educational framework will require creativity, experimentation, a permanently repentant heart, and attention to Latin American theologians who are already leading the way.67

VM seems to look at such a compromise with the expectation of impending dependency and paternalism because the history of Western missions justifies pessimism. Western missionaries have long felt empowered to compromise where it seemed expedient without regard for the imperative of vulnerability or the long-term cost of “strength.” Looking upon a global missionary movement prone to compromises that have undermined missiological principles, it seems reasonable to feel a more radical position is the only alternative for real change. My call for discernment and cautious compromise can appear to be just another path back to colonialist practices. I have great sympathy with the VM perspective and great appreciation for its intention to be consistent. In many cases, missiological principles need simply to be carried to their logical, hard conclusions. Yet, missiology also gifts us the fundamental insight of contextualization: there are no universal formulas. Urbanization and globalization are not excuses for missiological delinquency, but they are realities that complicate our notions of local, create new opportunities that are both risky and possibly constructive, and, ultimately, may require more than a local-only methodology.

Greg McKinzie (http://gregandmeg.net/category/greg) is a missionary in Arequipa, Peru, where he partners in holistic evangelism with Team Arequipa (http://teamarequipa.net) and The Christian Urban Development Association (http://cudaperu.org). He is a graduate (MDiv) of Harding Graduate School of Religion. He can be contacted at gemckinzie@gmail.com.

Bibliography

Alliance for Vulnerable Mission. http://vulnerablemission.org.

Almada, Samuel. “Intercultural Dialogue Perspectives in Theological Education with Originary People.” Journal of Latin American Hermeneutics 1 (Summer 2004): 1–11.

Asociación Evangélica de Educación Theológica en América Latina. http://www.aetal.com/esp/index.html.

Bonino, José Míguez. Faces of Latin American Protestantism: 1993 Carnahan Lectures. Translated by Eugene L. Stockwell. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.

Centro de Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios. “Diplomatura en Estudios Teológicos Interdisciplinarios.” 2010. http://www.kairos.org.ar/images/
pdfvarios/ceti/cetidiplomaturasprospecto.pdf.

Copestake, James. “Development and Wellbeing in Peru: Comparing Global and Local Views.” WeD Working Paper 09/48. Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group. June 2009. http://www.welldev.org.uk/wed-new/
workingpapers/workingpapers/WeDWP_09_48.pdf.

________, ed. Wellbeing and Development in Peru: Local and Universal Views Confronted. Studies of the Americas. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Diccionario de la Lengua Espanola de la Real Academia Espanola. 22nd ed. New York: French and European Publications, 2001. http://lema.rae.es/drae.

Elmer, Duane. Cross-Cultural Connections: Stepping Out and Fitting In around the World. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002.

Enns, Marlene. “Theological Education in Light of Cultural Variations of Reasoning: Some Educational Issues.” Common Ground Journal 3, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 76–87.

Fraternidad Teológica Latinoamericana. http://www.ftl-al.org.

Freire Institute. “Conscientization.” Concepts Used by Paulo Freire. Paulo Freire. http://www.freire.org/conscientization.

González, Ondina E., and Justo L. González. Christianity in Latin America: A History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Harries, Jim. “The Need for Indigenous Languages and Resources in Mission to Africa in the Light of the Presence of Monism/Witchcraft.” Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Praxis 4, no. 1 (February 2013): 51–67.

Hesselgrave, David J. Communicating Christ Cross-Culturally: An Introduction to Missionary Communication. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991.

Hiebert, Paul G. Anthropological Insights for Missionaries. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1985.

________. Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008.

Hodges, Melvin L. The Indigenous Church: Including The Indigenous Church and the Missionary. Kindle ed. Springfield, MO: Gospel Publishing House, 2009.

Hornberger, Nancy H. “Bilingual Education Policy and Practice in the Andes: Ideological Paradox and Intercultural Possibility.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 31, no. 2 (June 2000): 173–201.

Jeong, Paul Yonggap. “ ‘Mission in Weakness and Vulnerability’ in Selected Writings: From Lesslie Newbigin’s and David Bosch’s Missiological Books.” Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Praxis 4, no. 1 (February 2013): 10–20.

Kirk, J. Andrew. “Re-envisioning the Theological Curriculum as if the Missio Dei Mattered.” Common Ground Journal 3, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 23–40.

Langford, Ben. “The Art of the Weak: From a Theology of the Cross to Missional Praxis.” Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Praxis 3, no. 1 (February 2012): 14–25.

Lederleitner, Mary T. Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2010.

Lingenfelter, Sherwood, and Marvin K. Mayers. Ministering Cross-Culturally: An Incarnational Model for Personal Relationships. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

Nida, Eugene A. Customs and Cultures: Anthropology for Christian Missions. Pasadena: William Carey Library, 1982.

________. Message and Mission: The Communication of the Christian Faith. Rev. ed. Pasadena: William Carey Library, 1990.

Núñez C., Emilio Antonio, and William David Taylor. Crisis and Hope in Latin America: An Evangelical Perspective. Rev. ed. Pasadena: William Carey Library, 1996.

Nussbaum, Stan. “Vulnerable Mission Strategies.” Global Missiology 10, no. 2 (2013): http://ojs.globalmissiology.org/index.php/english/article/view/1135/2630.

________. “Vulnerable Mission Strategies vis-à-vis Mainstream Mission and Missiology.” Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Praxis 4, no. 1 (February 2013): 68–80.

Oduyoye, Mercy Amba. “Contextualization as a Dynamic in Theological Education.” Theological Education 30, Supplement 1 (Autumn 1993): 107–20.

Padilla, C. René. “The Interpreted Word: Reflections on Contextual Hermeneutics.” Themelios 7, no. 1 (September 1981): 18–23.

Reese, Robert. “Western Missions and Dependency.” Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Praxis 2, no. 2 (August 2011): 59–72.

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Education_in_the_Context_of_World_Christianity_-_Timothy_Tennent.pdf.

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The Vulnerable Mission movement grew first in the rich soil of rural Western Kenya, based in the deeply contextual insights of Jim Harries. Africa, however, is large, diverse, and changing. This article considers what Vulnerable Mission might look like in another corner of Africa: the cities of Angola. The contextual differences require that Harries’s proposals undergo considerable alteration. Vulnerable Mission strategies in Angola must recognize Portuguese as a truly local, African language and must take into consideration the globalizing changes that have redefined local identity and resources.

In its relatively brief existence, the concept of Vulnerable Mission has undergone a subtle but far-reaching seismic shift in its foundational assumptions—a shift which perhaps the seismographs of the movement have not adequately detected. This shift, in a word, is context. VM grew first from the fertile soil of the African continent, specifically in the life-experience and work of Jim Harries, long-term missionary to rural Zambia and rural Kenya. Harries’s writings draw deeply from local African culture and language, struggles in the African church, and pan-African philosophy. As a result, Harries’s strategic proposals are explicitly aimed at mission to Africa.1 However, his proposals struck a chord with mission practitioners from around the world, and in recent years his Alliance for Vulnerable Mission2 has attracted voices from Latin America and Asia and others who write on behalf of the “Majority World” at large.3

Without doubt, the VM discussion has much to offer non-African contexts. But I suggest that the shift in the discussion has happened so rapidly as to preclude careful reflection on the side effects of abandoning the contextual roots of the discussion.4 Therefore, in this reflection paper I intend to take the VM conversation back to its roots: I engage in an intra-African conversation with Jim Harries. Specifically, I will interact substantively only with Harries’s thought as canonized in his 2011 volume Vulnerable Mission, a collection of fourteen previously published articles written as early as 1997.5

Harries’s encapsulated strategic proposals—the use of local languages and local resources—are nothing novel to missiology.6 Rather, the strength of his contribution lies in his exposition and defense of those proposals grounded deeply in his personal and studied experience of Africa over the last two and a half decades. His writings are replete with references to Luo customs; linguistic comparisons of Dholuo, Kiswahili, and English; and ground-level assessments of “what is really going on” in African initiated churches. Thus he provides a refreshing and at times unsettling corrective to much current missiology that pays lip-service to contextualization but lacks the deep contextual grounding to substantiate its claims.

Unfortunately, Harries’s strength is also his weakness. From the vantage point of a Luo village in Western Kenya, he writes on behalf of plenary sub-Saharan Africa.7 In this tendency to gloss over significant contextual differences across the continent, Harries can claim a prestigious heritage of African scholarship. Classic studies of African culture such as John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy and Geoffrey Parrinder’s African Traditional Religion mix examples indiscriminately from West, East, and Southern Africa, yet still today are widely cited to substantiate missiological approaches in particular African contexts that may or may not fit the paradigms they espouse.8 Such generalization may have been justified in a fledgling field of study, but it is time for African missiology to come of age, resisting the temptation to paint with one brush a continent that incorporates 54 sovereign nations, over 1,000 languages, countless local histories, and a stunning diversity of current economic and social influences.

To highlight the need for contextual sensitivity, therefore, I bring to the conversation my local experience in another corner of Africa: the city of Huambo, central Angola. Through reflection on Angola’s context and an analysis of how Harries’s assumptions and proposals fit (or do not fit) this local setting, this essay will demonstrate the need for two key correctives to Harries’s proposals. First, the use of local languages in African missions may well need to include so-called “European” languages. Second, the identification of local languages and local resources may well be more globalized, even Westernized, than Harries is willing to admit. At stake in this discussion is our view of what Africa really is and our willingness to fearlessly contextualize the VM approach amidst the whirlwind of globalizing change on the African continent.

Introduction to Modern Angola9

To say that Angola is a former Portuguese colony is true but insufficient to convey the depth of impact the Portuguese had. A quick contrast with the British colonization of Kenya may at least provide some idea. The Portuguese arrived in Angola in 1483; within a decade they had built their first Catholic mission and begun their cultural expansion, and within three centuries they had militarily and economically subjugated the vast majority of what is today Angola.10 The British, on the other hand, arrived in Kenya with cultural impact only in the 1880s—a difference of 400 years. The Portuguese founded Luanda, Angola’s capital and largest city, in 1576; the British founded Nairobi, Kenya’s capital and largest city, in 1899. At the height of colonial occupation, more than 335,000 Portuguese called Angola home;11 fewer than 56,000 British lived in Kenya.12 From early days Portuguese colonists intermarried with black Angolans, creating a large and influential mestiço population;13 interracial marriage in British Kenya was rare. The Portuguese settled widely across Angola, founding cities as they went; in Kenya a large segment of the British population attempted to isolate themselves in the “White Highlands.” The British began pulling out of power in Kenya in 1959, granting full independence in 1963.14 At that time, Portugal was busy redoubling their presence in Angola; independence would come only in 1975 after an intense and prolonged military struggle. In short, compared to other colonial powers in Africa, the Portuguese arrived much earlier, dug in deeper, and stayed longer.

Even before the Portuguese left Angola, a civil war erupted that would dominate Angola’s existence for twenty-seven years, devastating the country until 2002. The war shaped modern Angola in many ways, but three are especially relevant to our study. In all three cases, the war continued and substantially accelerated trends that were already in progress from colonial times:

1. Intermixing of ethnolinguistic groups. After the abolishment of the slave trade, a widespread colonial system of forced labor caused large-scale internal displacement and thus intermixing of Angola’s tribal groups.15 But the civil war intensified this displacement many times over. People fled to other regions to escape the violence and destruction and then would flee again when war arrived at their new location. In addition, both government and rebel forces pressed any available men or children into military service, taking them to every corner of the country, many never to return home. This intermixing resulted in the breakdown of tribal barriers. In some cases whole tribal societies were broken down by the war, to be replaced with the national identity-shaping experience of civil war.16
2. Urbanization. In 1960, before the war for independence and the civil war, urbanization in Angola reached 11% as a result of normal push/pull forces.17 The wars, especially the civil war, created massive internal displacement as villagers fled the war, often being uprooted two or three times before finally “settling” in the relative safety of a provincial city such as Malange, Benguela, or Huambo.18 But they were not safe even there when the war reached the cities in 1993 and 1994—wave upon wave made their way to Luanda, bloating the capital’s population many times over.19 The result: by the end of the war well over half of the country’s population lived in urban areas.20 Contrary to Western assumptions, they would not return “home” to the rural areas. The only “home” they had was the city. Current estimates place Angola’s urban population at 59% of the total population.21
3. Use of the Portuguese language. The colonizers mandated education in Portuguese, and mission schools across Angola provided the means for the goal.22 But the war succeeded beyond the colonizers’ dreams. Precisely through the processes of urbanization and intertribal mixing, Portuguese became the only viable means of communicating on a daily basis. In addition, because the UNITA rebels championed the use of Bantu languages, the MPLA (government) forces that controlled the cities outlawed use of indigenous languages, allowing only Portuguese. As a result of this confluence of factors, an entire generation of Angolans that function primarily in Portuguese has reached adulthood. Tony Hodges relates the stunning statistics of a 1996 survey:

No less than 42 per cent of children under 9 years of age and 34 per cent of those between 10 and 19 speak Portuguese as their first language. . . . It is now common to find young Angolans, especially in Luanda, who do not speak any African languages at all—a situation which has no parallel elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. The implication is clear: almost half of today’s children are being brought up to speak Portuguese as their first language, and Portuguese seems set to outstrip all the African languages.23

That was 17 years ago. Those “children under 9 years of age” are now parents of a second generation of Angolans who speak Portuguese as their mother tongue—and often as their only tongue.

The war ended abruptly 11 years ago, but its impact remains. Angola today is an urbanized nation where tribal identities have been blurred and a national identity has grown strong, epitomized by the use of the Portuguese language as the language of Angola. Mission in Angola, even Vulnerable Mission, must take account of this reality. In the following section I will share our mission team’s attempt to engage with this bewildering context that is Angola. In the process, the reader will get a glimpse into what these national statistics look like from ground level.

Introduction to Our Ministry in Angola

In July 2011, our mission team of six adults and four children moved to Angola for the purpose of long-term church-planting ministry. Though we are the first long-term missionaries from the Stone-Campbell Movement to Angola, we did not come with a pioneering mentality. Rather, we took seriously the Christendom context: 95% of Angolans claim to be Christian,24 and churches are ubiquitous but proverbially shallow in biblical knowledge. Rather than create more division within this “Christian” context, we accepted the invitation to work with the Igreja de Cristo em Angola (ICA), an indigenous Angolan church movement. ICA began as an interdenominational association of Angolan Christians praying for peace in Angola, and in 1974 they adopted the name Igreja de Cristo, meaning “Church of Christ.” In the mid-1980s ICA first learned about “Churches of Christ” in other nations, specifically Brazil and Portugal, and over the next two decades had sporadic interactions with these churches. For the most part, however, ICA continued to make its own way forward, isolated from the world by the same factors that kept Angola as a whole isolated during many years. As a result, the dreaded dependency disease has not afflicted ICA—what they’ve accomplished, they’ve accomplished without outside assistance—and their theology and church practice are characteristically Angolan. When we arrived, ICA comprised about 36 congregations, mostly in Luanda and the northern regions of the country. They asked us to help in Bible teaching, church planting, evangelism, and social outreach ministries.

Our team was determined not to make a mess of the promising situation into which we stepped. So as not to introduce dependency, we have very carefully avoided the use of Western resources in ministry.25 Also, we have been careful to avoid stepping into positions of power—but that has been easy. In the existing ICA systems of power and influence, we young missionaries are welcome participants but decidedly low on the totem pole!

After surveying many possible locations, we settled in Huambo, an urban center of perhaps 350,000 in one of the hardest-hit regions during the civil war.26 Huambo’s geographic centrality makes it an ideal strategic base for ministry with a nationwide focus; indeed, our team has already visited churches in 16 of Angola’s 18 provinces. We are currently gaining experience in church planting in the Huambo area in a variety of settings: urban, peri-urban, and rural.27 We pray that in the future this experience will be useful as we mentor Angolans in planting and maturing healthy churches with a nationwide scope. In all we do we try to partner with Angolans rather than working alone. This is not the financial “partnership” oft glorified and much maligned in missiological literature, but the daily camaraderie of getting our hands dirty together in the labor of church planting and maturation. God heard our strategic plans as prayers, and he has graciously allowed our team to participate in the planting of four new churches in the past year, all initiated by our Angolan coworkers.

I live with my family in an Angolan-style house in the bairro (low-class high-density peri-urban neighborhood) of São Luís on the outskirts of Huambo city.28 Day after day I walk fifteen minutes through the labyrinth of narrow dirt alleyways to the area of the São Luís ICA church plant, where I devote the bulk of my ministry efforts. In the bairro my interaction with Angolans is ground-level, devoid of grandeur. I drink kissangwa in their homes; I overhear drunken brawls in nearby courtyards; I sit in solidarity with family members at their funeral wakes; I join in arguments about the local football scene; I stumble over my phrases of Umbundu, the predominant Bantu language of this area, which I am in the throes of learning. And in all of this, I try to bring God’s word to interact with their lives at their level.

The point of this somewhat extended introduction to our ministry in Angola is simple: that the reader may understand that our mission team shares the values of Vulnerable Mission, and that we are struggling to apply these values and principles to the particular Angolan context in which God has placed us. In the process, we have learned that several key assumptions of VM as espoused by Harries simply do not fit the Angolan context. If we cannot say “Amen!” to Harries’s proposals for mission in Africa, it is not because we differ in strategic goals; rather, it is because the “Africa” of urban Angola is a world away from the “Africa” of rural Kenya.29

VM Assumptions that Do Not Fit Angola

If I were to list the VM assumptions that do apply well to the Angolan context, the list would run to pages and pages. Harries is correct in saying that there is much in the African mentality that is common across Africa.30 However, the following assumptions that do not hold true in Angola are foundational enough to Harries’s proposals that they must be addressed:

European languages are not local, and thus should be avoided in mission.

Harries argues strongly that European languages, though widely used in Africa, are so disconnected from the daily life and thought processes of Africans as to preclude helpful communication, especially as regards a topic so intimate and far-reaching as the gospel. European languages are foreign, based on vastly different cultural foundations, and instruments of dangerous cultural imperialism.31

In response, allow me to introduce some of the members of the São Luís ICA church, still less than one year old, planted in the bairro by an Angolan.32

• Jeremias was one of the first baptized and is growing by leaps and bounds in his Christian life. His father is Chokwe by tribe, from Lunda Norte province, more than 700 km away from Huambo. His mother is Ovimbundu33 by descent, but spent most of her life in Luanda and some in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where she learned Lingala. Jeremias only speaks Portuguese; he cannot even greet in Umbundu.
• Gideão’s parents were both Ovimbundu. They died when he was eight. For the last eight years he has been raised by extended family, also Ovimbundu. His life is only in the bairro; rarely does he venture more than one kilometer from his house. Yet Gideão neither speaks nor understands Umbundu. Portuguese is his first and only language.
• Nanda is a grandmother and a faithful Christian. She is fluent in Portuguese and Umbundu and truly enjoys worshiping in Umbundu. She is semi-literate in Portuguese, but cannot read a word of Umbundu.
• Mama Chinha is a young mother who sells tomatoes in the local market. Her parents from Kwanza Sul Province speak Kimbundu, which she partially understands. She speaks only Portuguese. I often forget and greet her in Umbundu—I always receive a Portuguese response.
• Avelino is a father who struggles with alcoholism. Umbundu is his first language, but he is also completely comfortable in Portuguese. He can read relatively well in Portuguese, but not at all in Umbundu.
• Moisés lives in Luanda but works in Huambo. Portuguese is his first language, and he also learned Kikongo at an early age, since he is Bakongo by tribe.
• Pedro, fourteen, speaks Portuguese as his first language. He also speaks Umbundu, but often struggles over vocabulary since he uses it much more rarely than Portuguese.
• Paulo, eighteen, is one of Pedro’s close friends. He is Muila by tribe, but speaks Portuguese as his first language. He has learned enough Umbundu to communicate when needed.

About half of the church members speak Umbundu. Half don’t. Not a single member is capable of reading Umbundu. Every single member is comfortable speaking Portuguese, and the vast majority can read (to some extent) in Portuguese. None speak English or other European languages, though the youth would like to learn English.

To put this in context, Umbundu is the most widely spoken Bantu language in Angola, and Huambo province is one of the most ethnolinguistically homogeneous regions of the country. Here, in the heart of Ovimbunduland, I listen to children playing on the streets in Portuguese, drunks cursing the world in Portuguese, churches worshiping in Portuguese, people in the market buying vegetables in Portuguese, and family members engaging in chores at home in Portuguese. Huambo, like Angola in general, functions in Portuguese.34

European languages remain rooted in foreign cultures; they do not become Africanized.

Harries admits that some of his linguistic argument would not apply “if European languages were allowed to become African”:

Should communication with European originators of the foreign languages used in Africa suddenly cease, then the very languages will become Africanised. This is not currently happening, because (at least in East Africa) Northern languages are valued exactly because of the links that they enable with the North, and are assessed using foreign standards.35

Angolan Portuguese stands as a counter-example to Harries’s assumptions. Since a majority of people in Angolan cities function primarily in Portuguese (in all contexts of life, even home life), and since a sizeable minority speak no other language besides Portuguese, it is clear that they have found a way to Africanize the Portuguese language—to root it in the Angolan context and adapt it to fit Angolan life. A hypothetical glimpse at the vocabulary of an Angolan morning may illustrate the case:

Paizinho wakes up before the sunrise and immediately goes outside for his matatino (morning run), a typical Mwangolé (Angolan) morning routine. Back at home he draws water from the cacimba (well) to take a bath, conserving the water bué (very) carefully since it is August, near the end of cacimbo (the dry season). Clean and refreshed, he takes a few moments to matabichar (eat breakfast) before heading out for the day. Normally Paizinho works doing candongueiro (informal business that involves buying, transporting, and selling), but today he must visit the soba (local authority figure) to discuss some makas (problems) regarding his family in the kimbo (rural area). Before going to the jango (meeting hut), he winds his way through the beko (alleyway) to the market to buy a gift to present to the soba. He knows which sellers will give him eskebra (a little extra for free); perhaps today someone might even give him kilapi (informal credit), since he is short on cash.

The italicized words above are purely Angolan. Native speakers in Portugal may not have a clue what they mean, except the few words that have come to Portugal as slang. Moreover, these words are not Bantu. They are Portuguese. Though some have etymological roots in Kimbundu, Umbundu, or other Bantu languages, they made their way into Angolan Portuguese generations ago and are now used widely across the nation of Angola, from Cunene in the south to Cabinda in the north. They are used daily by Angolans who speak only Portuguese. And many Angolans would be quite surprised to hear that citizens of Portugal don’t even know how to communicate with these basic Portuguese words. “Do people in Portugal not eat breakfast?” they might ask.36

Adaptation of the language has enabled Angolans to use Portuguese effectively in even the most traditional African settings. Last year I had the opportunity to be a bystander in a sensitive situation where a church leader was accused of using witchcraft to possess a teenage boy with his spirit, resulting in debilitating madness. The case was handled by the soba (traditional communal leader) and included input from the traditional herbal healer who was watching over the boy in the far-flung rural area of his home. The process lasted parts of three days—and all of it was conducted in Portuguese. The only times someone broke into Umbundu were when they wanted the opinion of the boy’s grandmother, who was not comfortable in Portuguese. Immediately after hearing her opinion, the participants would switch back to Portuguese.37 Portuguese is Angola’s medium of choice to handle the intricacies of African life.

Portuguese today belongs to Angola as much as it belongs to Brazil or Portugal. Each country has its version of Portuguese; the differences reflect the variations in culture, and the similarities foster fraternal connections between the three continents.

Ethnolinguistic ancestry is the key identity for Africans.

Harries relates the unwillingness of the Luo people to accept him, a white man, as part of their tribe. The reason is simple: “in much of Africa, unlike in the West, someone’s key identity is rooted in their ancestry.”38 I suggest that this observation forms a defining assumption that undergirds the whole of Harries’s thinking. For example, he makes much of the cultural roots of language, and his (usually unspoken) assumption is that in Africa, cultural means tribal.39 I concur. In my experience in many parts of Africa, tribal (ancestral) identity is key.

Angola is not, in this sense, like “much of Africa.” The two-sided sword of ethnolinguistic mixing and urbanization has pierced deep. In our local church this intermixing has already been noted. The church, which averages fewer than 20 adults on a typical Sunday, includes not only Ovimbundu but also Kimbundu, Bakongo, Chokwe, and Ovamuila persons—here in the most ethnically homogeneous region of the country. In the cities of Lubango and Luanda the situation is even more pronounced. Paul Robson and Sandra Roque conducted an excellent ethnographic study among migrants to the cities and found that the exigencies of internal displacement have created a pervasive heterogeneity:

People end up renting or building a house wherever they can. This is one of the main reasons why the peri-urban bairros are so heterogeneous. People go to live where it is cheapest or where there is space, and this is not necessarily in the bairro where they first went to or where live their relatives, friends and other people originally from their area. [This has] important consequences . . . for the social dynamics of the peri-urban areas.40

Among the important consequences is the disappearance of ancestral traditions. “Nowadays few traces of rural traditions remain in the social life of Luanda’s peri-urban areas.”41 Even in Huambo, “traditional festivals like ovinganji, olundongo, and evamba are almost non-existent.”42

The question remains: despite changes in language, customs, and urban heterogeneity, do Angolans still hold ancestry as their key identity? For many, the answer is no. One may catch a glimpse of this in their conversations with each other. When making a new acquaintance, Angolans do not typically ask, “What tribe are you?” as might be common in other nations. Rather, they ask, “What area are your parents from?” The answer often shows that the choice of phrasing is not superfluous. “I was born in Moxico while my mother was fleeing the war, but she is originally from this area (Huambo). Her father was from Malange. My father grew up in Luanda, but his family is originally from Uíge. . . .” Moreover, the rhetoric of ethnic rivalry was used by government and rebel forces to perpetuate the civil war. Angolans of today explicitly shun such rhetoric; they want no part in undoing the peace they have gained at such great cost.

Angolans have had to forge new identities and new sources of identity. The central worldview question “Who are we?” is always rooted in a story, and when the story changes, so does one’s key identity. Traditional Bantu myths emphasize the cyclical nature of life: we are a community composed of members from the past, present, and future. Ancestors play a vital role in the continuity of life, and numerous community rituals (birth rites, circumcision, funerals, libations and sacrifices, etc.) function to reinforce the communal and cyclical coherence of life together with the ancestors.43 This story defines each tribal social grouping in contradistinction to others.

The continuing importance of ancestors has waned significantly in peri-urban Angola,44 and many other elements of the traditional story, including rituals, have been removed or replaced, as noted above. Perhaps it is not too bold to say that peri-urban Angolans explain their place in the world not primarily in terms of the traditional story, but in terms of the story of how they have survived the war and rebuilt since the war. It is this story that has redefined the social groupings. For some, such as the returned refugees from Kinshasa, their new community is not their tribe but the people who accompanied them in their journey of survival. Thus this group does not speak Kikongo (their tribal language) but Lingala (the language of their refugee story). They feel a unique solidarity with each other, but not with other Bakongo.45 For other residents, their social group is their immediate family. They are the only ones who have stuck together through thick and thin—there is no story which binds them to their neighbor, regardless of ethnicity. One of the most important social groupings, by the assessment of several independent observers, is the church community. Fellow church members are the people who have endured the struggles of the story together and hence share a solidarity that is not found in the larger peri-urban population.46 But for many, key identity has shifted to the national level: an individual is, first and foremost, an Angolan, regardless of region, social class, language, religion, or race. A national identity has been forged in the furnace of the nation’s story of struggle, a story that binds Angolans together and distances them from surrounding peoples, many of whom used to be family. For many Angolans, a redefined story has redefined communal identity.47

Perhaps the illustration of this reformation of communal identity that would most surprise Harries is Angola’s breakdown in racial division. As he notes, where tribal identity is key, whites must necessarily remain foreigners in black Africa. So great is the racial divide of his Kenyan context48 that Harries naturally adopts the racial divide into his own terminology:

Use of the term “black” . . . is applied to people of African origin wherever they are now living. The term “African” is reserved for those black people who are living in (and are assumed to have been born and raised in) Africa.49

Thus Harries concurs with the assumption of his Luo neighbors that a white person cannot be African.50

My thoughts turn to Alexandre, Huambo’s local veterinarian. He was born, raised, and educated in Huambo. His parents, too, are from Huambo. But he is white. Alexandre says he is Angolan, and his passport agrees. Through his paternal grandfather he can trace ancestry back to Portugal; but his identity is formed by his story, not by his ancestry. At the end of the work day, Alexandre walks home with his black receptionist who shares his story, for she is also his wife. It would never occur to their two mestiça daughters that a white man cannot be Angolan.

The racial divide runs so deep, writes Harries, that “for a white man to become a leader in black Africa in other than an ‘oppressive’ way, is almost impossible.”51 But no one informed José Luís de Melo Marcelino, Huambo’s municipal administrator, that such was the case. Marcelino is white, Huambo born and bred, and in a government position of great responsibility. He is also respected by the people of Huambo: black, white, and mestiço. From an elevated vantage point, he shares the people’s identity because he shares their story.

Examples could be multiplied. The point is simple. Through ethnolinguistic and even racial integration, Angolan identity has shifted from its roots in tribal ancestry toward new roots in the shared national story of struggle, survival, and rebuilding.

Westerners maintain economic and cultural hegemony over Africa.

The last of Harries’s assumptions with which I will contend is that, because of the great economic gulf between rich Western nations and poor African nations, Africans are forced to follow Western leading, hoping for a handout. This particular strand of the dependency virus, he maintains, has infected Africa at the national level, the institutional level, the communal level, and the personal level.52 His analysis is perceptive and convincing; it rings true with much of what I have seen in other parts of Africa.

What makes Angola different? In a word, petroleum. Crude oil. As Africa’s second largest producer of oil, Angola has no shortage of cash.53 On the contrary, the nation has emerged from its war years to find itself in a position of considerable economic clout in the global arena. It did not take long for Angolan politicians to discover the ease with which petroleum dollars can overturn American idealism, French justice, and international armament embargoes.54 With its pockets lined, Angola wasted no time becoming bedfellows with the superpower that is China.55 But perhaps the most poetic twist in the international plot was when Portugal, the former colonial power, came on its knees begging for a financial bailout from Angola, its former colony.56 Of course Angola condescended to open its purse! Who could pass up the chance to reverse history, to rise from slave to master with all the world watching?

What does this look like at street level in Angola? There is lots of money floating around in this country. As “wealthy Westerners” in Angola, we find ourselves consistently unable to afford the exorbitant prices that wealthy Angolans throw money at. We stay as guests in homes in Luanda that would rent for $20,000 a month. There are also many poor Angolans who live on just a few dollars a day; the lifestyle gap between rich and poor is astounding!

So what does this mean for dependency issues in Angola? Angolans, like other Africans, will take a handout no matter who it comes from, but most of the time in Angola it comes from wealthier Angolans. International aid dependency, whether from the IMF, NGOs, or churches, is still a problem in Angola. But it is dwarfed by the issues of internal dependency. A church here might ask us missionaries for funds to build a new building, but when we don’t prove golden, they waste no time in turning to their list of Angolan donors, who consistently prove much more generous than the stingy foreigners who keep mumbling on about missiological ideals. In this context, the all-important purse strings are held not by Westerners, but by wealthy Angolans who walk in the age-old African paths of patronage.57 This pattern holds true at levels from the individual to the national. The result is that in Angola, Westerners are seen as potential donors, but their influence is not dominant because they do not carry the biggest wallets.58

One final note regarding the dynamics of wealth in Angola is important. Wealthy Angolans serve as a wide-open door between Angola and the globalized world. Many Angolan businessmen make their millions internationally; not through aid, but through trade. As such, they swim in the urban currents of New York, São Paulo, and Beijing, drinking from the global fountains of politics, materialism, and religious pluralism. These ideas (and things!) flow steadily into Angola down the patron-client canals, eventually inundating even the lowest socio-economic rungs of Angolan society. Whether we missionaries want to participate in this globalizing current is a moot point. Angola is already there, with or without us.

Implications for Vulnerable Mission in Angola

If these assumptions that are at the heart of Harries’s contextual concept of Vulnerable Mission do not hold true in Angola, how are we to move forward? VM’s key principles, the use of local languages and local resources, remain missiologically sound, but they must be radically adapted for use in the Angolan context. I suggest that the following five alterations to Harries’s recommendations do not require a lengthy defense, but rather emerge naturally from the above analysis of Angolan culture.

1. Mission in Angola should be primarily in the Portuguese language, with secondary usage of Bantu languages to the extent they are used among the target population. Missionaries’ fluency in Portuguese should be honed in the Angolan context, so as to reach Angolans in the local flavor of their heart language. Angolan Bantu languages should not be neglected, since they provide an important window into Angolan culture and thought, but should not be imposed as the primary means of communication.
2. Mission in Angola should strongly consider a nationwide strategic focus, since Angolans increasingly define their own storied identity at a national level.59 To missiologically target an ethnolinguistic group is to recreate historical divisions that Angolans do not embrace. More importantly, it is to misjudge the identity-shaping story of the Angolan people. There are contextual exceptions to this rule: small homogeneous ethnic groups that survive on the peripheries of Angolan culture.60 Mission to these particular groups should closely follow Harries’s original proposals.
3. Mission in Angola should train some Angolan Christians to function missionally as a cultural bridge from the urban and peri-urban to rural environments. The urban-rural divide plagues many aspects of Angolan life, and the church should be at the fore in bridging the divide: helping urbanites relate to their uneducated rural neighbors and helping rural Angolans know how to cope in the whirlwind of globalizing change. Rural areas should not be approached in isolation, since they yearn to share in the national Angolan identity; neither should they be neglected in favor of greener urban pastures, as many Angolan churches already tend to do.
4. Theological education in Angola should include training in how to translate theological concepts between Portuguese and Bantu languages. Portuguese should be the primary vehicle for theological education, but teachers should ideally be conversant enough in Bantu languages to model healthy translation processes. This dual-language approach will (1) mimic the translation processes already in use in daily Angolan life, (2) open Angolan church leaders to the published resources of the Lusophone world, especially Brazil and Portugal, (3) enable nation-wide networks in which Angolans can mature theologically together, and (4) facilitate the urban-rural bridge mentioned above.
5. Mission in Angola should use the resources that Angolans typically have at their disposal, whether local or global, giving preference to the local. In an urban environment, local must be understood as an ill-defined range in the graduated spectrum from individual to global. To the extent that Angolans customarily call on resources from other neighborhoods, cities, or countries, missionaries should be willing to follow suit, while always being vigilant to watch for signs of dependency that may catch Angolans unaware, and while consistently reminding Angolans not to undervalue local small-scale resources. Moreover, foreign missionaries should avoid introducing external resources that are not already a well-integrated part of Angolan culture.

Conclusion: What Does Angola Have to Do with Africa?

If the contextual situation of urbanized Angola contrasts so dramatically with that of rural Kenya as to necessitate such significant revisions to the core strategies of VM, then perhaps Angola should simply be treated as an outlier—noted and ignored—in matters related to African missions. Perhaps missiologists in sub-Saharan Africa should embrace and advocate Harries’s approach while including a footnote that says, “except in Angola.”

Angola is indeed exceptional in some aspects. I know of no other sub-Saharan nation, for example, where the colonial language has become the first and only tongue of so great a segment of the population. The historic moment when the former colonizer, Portugal, entreats the former colony, Angola, for financial assistance is perhaps unprecedented. But it would be a mistake to equate “unprecedented” with “won’t happen again.”

Africa is changing. In some aspects, Angola is not exceptional but rather simply ahead of the curve. Urbanization is the obvious example. The pull of the city is relentless across Africa: urbanization is expected to march forward at about 1% per annum,61 which is among the highest rates on the globe. Thus Africa as a whole will pass the 50% urban mark by 2035,62 and will triple its urban population by 2050.63 Already thirteen sub-Saharan countries are at least 50% urban.64 Even among those nations with lower urban percentages, Christian mission cannot afford to overlook the cities.

Urbanization will continue, across Africa, to increase the percentage of Africans who speak trade languages, including former colonial languages, as their first language. Urbanization will continue, across Africa, to bring people of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds shoulder to shoulder as neighbors. And above all, urbanization will continue to open doors to the already pervasive influence of globalization. Whether we like it or not, global languages, global resources, and global thinking styles are irreversibly becoming a part of the local African scene. In these aspects, Angola is not exceptional but rather ahead of the curve. Perhaps we should see it as a preview of coming attractions.

Moreover, Angola is not the only African nation whose national story has been so intense, so epic, as to forge within its flames a new national sense of identity. In this globalizing world, Africans across the continent are being challenged to rethink tribalism’s place as key identity. If missiologists are to exercise diligently our anthropological duties, we must be ever bold enough to probe the worldview questions of Africans as they are becoming, not simply as they were.

The vital lesson in all this is beautifully simple: each local context demands that we approach it with fresh eyes, ready to see it for what it is, not what we remember from another context. Local stories are unique; local mission strategies, too, must be unique—even in Africa.

I close with a few words from a project manager, a foreigner, living in another city in Angola. He was asked to do a radio interview about Africa “in general,” but when time and again his down-to-earth Angola-specific responses did not live up to the preconceived notions of the interviewers, “they cut me short and decided instead to interview someone in Cameroon, where they must have a much better idea of what Africa really is.”65

May God grant us the ever-renewed vision to see what Africa really is and the ever-increasing wisdom to reach Africa with the word of his saving grace!

Danny Reese delights in the maturation of God’s church on the continent of Africa, the continent that witnessed both his physical birth and his spiritual birth. He lives with his wife and daughters in Huambo, Angola, serving as part of the Angola Mission Team (http://angolateam.org). Danny holds an MDiv from Harding School of Theology. You may contact him at danny@angolateam.org.

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________. “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision: Highlights.” New York: United Nations, 2012. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/pdf/WUP2011_Highlights.pdf.

Van der Winden, Bob, ed. A Family of the Musseque. Oxford: WorldView, 1996.

Vines, Alex. Angola Unravels: The Rise and Fall of the Lusaka Peace Process. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999.

Viv Grigg.
The Spirit of Christ and The Postmodern City.
Asbury Theological Seminary Series in World Christian Revitalization Movements 2. Lexington, KY: Emeth Press, 2009. 256 pp. $34.00.

As a theologian, church planter, and urban missionary, Viv Grigg explores the question, “What is the relationship of the Spirit of Christ to the transformation of a postmodern city?” (10). The resulting work is of more than theoretical value: it ultimately introduces us to new and challenging conversations that will activate “transformational revival” in individuals and ultimately in groups great and small, public and private.

The book is divided into three parts: Framing the Conversation; Goals of Postmodern City Transformation; and Processes of Citywide Transforming Revival. The overall organization of the book is good. Each chapter builds easily upon the one prior and gives a sense of closure while also inviting the reader to further reflection.

The first section develops a theological framework for the study and introduces the “transformational conversation hermeneutic.” Several questions are posed, including:

• Is God a rationalist philosopher or creative storyteller?
• Is God or was God? . . .
• Is God incarnate or cosmic? Immanent or transcendent? Local or global?
• Is God or does God? . . . (21)

Books could be filled with analysis and dissection of these questions (and many have been), but this book does not indulge the intrigued. The author’s hermeneutics regarding the nature of God, per these guiding questions, set the course for this study, though mostly as guides, not as the destination. This section closes by providing additional framework, which is spent defining terminology and outlining the cultural and structural setting of the study’s case city—Auckland, New Zealand.

The middle section outlines the results that one can expect of a postmodern city touched with transformational revival. A second, “ideal,” city is introduced in this section. If transformational revival is the goal, then the socio-economic structure of a city that drinks of the river of life flowing through it will resemble another city of Scripture—the City of God. With “universal affirmation of the metanarratives portrayed” (62) in Genesis 1-11 the author explores several characteristics that any city transformed by the Spirit will possess. Drawing upon the nature of God, any city of God will then reflect these divine qualities: urban development marked by linear process and new growth; creativity produced by innovation and design; media and learning as cities liberated with communication; good[ness] as cities filled with value and aesthetics; community reflecting both authority and equality; structure as cities founded with purpose and justice. Posing the question of “transformation into what?” it is with these preceding characteristics that conversational engagement can take place within the postmodern city.

The third and final section of the book deals with the process through which transformational revival can be realized. Grigg first explores characteristics of past revivals in Auckland and then extrapolates them for the postmodern city. He gives nineteen transforming revival principles, beginning with the precondition of transforming revival, all the way to cultural revitalization. In between lies a progressive course of transforming revival that must move from individual to small group, from small group to wider structure, and from wider structure to whole culture. This final section is the heart of the study, as Grigg provides not just action steps but actual illustrations of these transformational revival principles in practice.

What I thoroughly enjoyed about this work is how the author donates a fresh perspective of missional thought and praxis to the growing number of homogeneous contributions on the subject. As our cities, cultures, and languages evolve, it is essential that our conversation does as well. While the church has a unique responsibility in the process of urban revival and transformation, I find it rejuvenating that the author emphasizes a highly pro-outward response. Incarnate and missional principles apply at every level of transformative revival; the church is to bring the conversation to the source of stagnated life. This book not only presumes an incarnational (“living theology”) approach to missions, it leaves little room for an alternative way forward in a postmodern society.

As a mission leader in Auckland, I feel particularly kindred to the direction and scope of this book. Where I cannot speak with certainty that the principles in this book will translate fully in every postmodern city, I do sense they are well measured and finely tuned to Auckland.

Though relevant, this scholarly book could be shorter, as some of the points could have been made just as effectively with more conciseness. I did not find the graphs and figures very helpful, nor the author’s numerous (54) injections of cameos into the body of text. Regarding the former, I felt they aided my understanding of the subject matter very little, and a few of the figures did not seem to correspond to the outline of text very precisely. Concerning the latter, they were disruptive to the flow.

I wanted to dance after finally finishing the book (and I did brag of this accomplishment to my colleagues), but over time I found myself more challenged and introspective, and perhaps a little fatigued. Even still, this book is a worthy addition to the conversation about world missions in postmodern cities, and though it may represent just a sliver of the pie, it has whetted my appetite and has me craving more of this beautiful and challenging dialogue.

Elijah Peters

Missionary

Auckland, New Zealand

Stanley H. Skreslet.
Comprehending Mission: The Questions, Methods, Themes, Problems, and Prospects of Missiology.
Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2012. 240 pp. $30.00.

The American Society of Missiology has just completed the second year of a three-year evaluation of the future of missiology as a discipline. The publication of Stanley Skreslet’s Comprehending Mission could not come at a more opportune time. His book is published as part of the prestigious American Society of Missiology Series.

Skreslet, Dean of the Faculty of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, was asked in 2001 by editor Jonathan Bonk to survey a decade’s worth of dissertation research in English for the International Bulletin of Missionary Research. The result is this volume, which one reviewer predicted would be “the standard introduction to the field of missiology for the next decade, and every student ought to begin right here” (back cover).

Chapter one poses the question, “Who studies Christian mission, and why?” Missiology is defined by the author as “the systematic study of all aspects of mission” (12), and he notes that those who study mission include those who do mission (practitioners) and the university academics. He posits the following constants that distinguish missiological study from other academic activities: (1) the processes of religious change; (2) the reality of the faith; and (3) an integrative, multidisciplinary approach (13–14).

The bulk of the book is a survey of the literature through history in which the author notes various trends and directions. Skreslet identifies six themes and devotes a chapter to each: Bible and Mission; History of Mission; Theology, Mission, and Culture; Christian Mission in a World of Religions; The Means of Mission; and Missionary Vocation.

Through the past century, mission theology stopped at numerous way stations: missio Dei, shalom, liberation, reconciliation, and universalism. Mission in the postmodern era needs to be multidimensional and has to embrace “witness, service, justice, healing, reconciliation, liberation, peace, evangelism, fellowship, church planting, contextualization, and much more” (36, quoting David Bosch).

The History of Mission chapter is not intended to provide a summary of mission history, but a discussion of the subject from the point of view of historiography—“how history has been and could be studied or portrayed” (43). The section on Critical Ethnography is illuminating. These mission historians use “the techniques of microhistory, interpretative anthropology, historical anthropology, and sociology of religion. Ideas and influences from semiotics, feminist studies, and postcolonial literary criticism permeate these approaches to mission history” (59). Past mission history has to be deconstructed and then rewritten since much of mission history was written from the point of view of the male missionary, as if the local believers—and his wife—made little contribution.

The use of the social sciences in mission history is the subject of chapter four. Some of the headings include linguistics, cultural analysis, and religious and cultural change. How the social sciences are used in mission studies is informing and being informed by theology: “missiology poses to theology an implicit cross-cultural challenge that is getting harder and harder to ignore” (95).

One of the key themes in missiology over the past thirty years has been the reality of pluralism. How does Christianity interface with other religions? Is dialogue a valid approach? Does it lead to syncretism? Is prophetic dialogue possible? Some have suggested that the interreligious issues bearing on mission indicate that the theology of religions has become the “essential integrating principle” or “hub” of missiology (123).

If the “why” of missions must be discerned, then the “how” of missions is also deserving of study. Skreslet treats The Means of Mission under the headings of Tactics and Strategies, Methods and Modes of Mission, Organizational Structures for Mission, and Financing Mission Endeavors. He concludes that “today, it appears that the means of mission is no longer the dominating subject that it once was within missiology” (166).

Regarding the missionary vocation, the author highlights several themes: (1) professional missionaries and the work they do; (2) missionary spirituality and the call to mission; and (3) probing how the missionary has been, and is, depicted. Within this third approach the missionary is seen in history writing, in biography, in fiction, and in film.

Skreslet brings his research together in his final pages, entitled “Missiology Reconfigured.” We are reminded that it was his intention “to present a representative sample of such research, in order to indicate the broad scholarly landscape [he believes] the field of missiology now encompasses” (195). He claims that missiology does not have a central concern comparable to that of theology of mission. His final conclusion is that the field is distinctive in its foci of “study on religious change, respect for the vocation of mission, and a desire to integrate knowledge about mission gathered from many sources and viewpoints” (197).

Comprehending Mission is much more than a survey or review of the literature. Yes, many authors and their contributions are noted (itself worth the price of the book). But where Skreslet shines is in the way he elicits themes before providing the outlines for the vast body of material he has studied. Any serious student of mission should have this book.

Doug Priest

Executive Director

CMF International

Dr. Flanders is the Director of the Halbert Institute for Missions and an Assistant Professor in Missions in the Graduate School of Theology at Abilene Christian University. He spent eleven years doing mission work in Thailand, seven of those working as a church planter in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. He is a consulting editor for Missio Dei as well as a member of the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission executive board.

A non-Western church leader recently remarked, “When I hear the word partnership, I run the other way!” Why? Because despite their rhetoric and intent, Western missionaries often end up creating the very thing they seek to avoid, viz., dependent churches.

Though we must be thankful that most missionaries today do hold (in theory!) incarnational, contextual, and empowering as appropriate modes of mission, we all know that quite often our practice falls short. The indigenous, empowering, partnering type of mission that is the “canonical” version of modern missions theory is frequently unrealized in our mission efforts. In the end, dependent churches are often the result.

This is not true in every case. Some examples exist of Western missionaries establishing local churches that thrive, become able to carry out the work of God utilizing local capacities and resources, and exhibit full ownership of their lives under God. As a whole, however, such is less frequently realized than we all desire. What noted mission historian Wilbert Shenk has claimed remains the case, that since 1850 the “indigenous church” has been central to Protestant mission theory but infrequently practiced.

This is a problem. It is a dependency problem. And dependency is about resources—control of, use of, and access to resources.

While we often focus on the use of money (and money does represent a huge challenge), think of the multiple resources missionaries often represent or control directly. These include language (non-local languages, often English, either to evangelize or for use in training and worship), leadership (non-locals making significant or primary decisions for local believers), theology (note the dominance of translated Western works but the paucity of local writing and the imposition of Western theological conclusions), competence (many local believers look to missionaries as more authentically “Christian” or equipped to do ministry and make the important church decisions), worship style (Vineyard, Hillsong, and contemporary English praise and worship songs dominate across the globe as do modern Western liturgical patterns), and access (Western missionaries can provide networking to potential donors and funding sources). Additionally, recent scholarly studies demonstrate that thinking styles (not just communication styles), identity construction, and the configuration of the human self are significantly different across cultures.1 Many missionary-planted churches default into Western preferences in these areas, thus creating all sorts of subtle but ultimately destructive dependencies.

Dependency, whether financial, theological, cultural, linguistic, psychological, technological, or personal, remains among the greatest challenges for mission in the twenty-first century.

A recent incarnation of the age-old dependency/resources conversation is that of “Vulnerable Mission” (VM). Taking its cue from biblical (e.g., Luke 10) and contemporary (modern studies on western aid and development activities) resources, the VM conversation takes as central the call to address these important issues with vigor. VM advocates that some missionaries take seriously a model of mission that steers away from using the power of non-local resources for mission. Instead, VM advocates capacity-building missionaries that rely upon local resources.

As Stan Nussbaum reminds us in his article, VM as an approach is something with which most of us are already quite familiar. Three modern mission stories of note (the independent and African-initiated churches in Africa, the modern Chinese house-church movement, and certain Pentecostal movements in Latin America) all rely upon what VM advocates suggest as the best ways to achieve the goals of mission.

The papers in this issue of Missio Dei represent some of the current and best thinking on VM. On the Campus of Abilene Christian University in March of 2012, the Halbert Institute for Mission (ACU), the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission, and TransWorld Radio jointly hosted the first global conference on VM. It was simultaneously livecast on the internet with participants from every continent.

Whether one adheres fully to the principles advocated by Vulnerable Mission proponents, the questions they raise demand serious consideration from a church that often takes easy, conventional wisdom. In particular, VM forces us to grapple with both priority in mission and our mode. What is the goal of mission? What is of most importance? What way(s) are most consistent for participating in God’s reconciling reach toward the world? VM advocates contend that often our goals and our mode do not properly match.

Is VM something new? In one sense, it is not. VM represents the age-old questions of missions, use of resources, and dependency. Yet, the new context in which we find ourselves presents different challenges and calls us to evaluate our mission practice anew. This new context involves the massive surge in short-term mission, the growing vibrancy of the non-Western church, the continued financial dominance of the Western world, and the ambivalence created by post-colonial global commitments.

This is what constitutes the conversation we call Vulnerable Mission. It is a renewed probing of the hard questions that we must ask in order to see our ultimate goal fulfilled—churches fully reflecting the glory of God in their local contexts.

What does this conversation mean, then, for missions in Churches of Christ and Christian Churches? Particularly in these two branches of Stone-Campbell churches, mission has operated primarily without the denominational structures of a mission agency. One consequence of this is that anyone, anywhere, can send or do missions, regardless of their qualifications, preparation, or approach. With the current swell of short-term mission efforts, the number of “missionaries” has vastly increased. Yet, many of these “missionaries” unwittingly create and perpetuate structures of dependency.

Additionally, our commitment to Scripture as the foundation of mission practice requires us to be deeply concerned about the examples of Jesus and the earliest Christians. Vulnerable Mission advocates suggest that Jesus, the disciples, and the early church all operated with a very vulnerable approach to mission.

These papers represent not a final destination or some fully articulated theory of mission, but a conversation. In my opinion, it is worth pursuing precisely because of the high stakes. After reading and considering them carefully, we hope you will join us in this important conversation!

Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch were two of the last century’s outstanding missiologists. This essay demonstrates how both of them consistently and convincingly rooted their theology of mission in the weakness and vulnerability of the cross. Their faithful voices are an important reminder that the call is to mission in Jesus’ way.

Not long ago, I was in a Bible study group. The group was studying the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Mark:

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed. “Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him, that he even does miracles! Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. Jesus said to them, “Only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith. (Mark 6:1–6a)2

As the people who were present wrestled to understand whether there was a deeper meaning in the reason why the people in Jesus’ hometown were so hostile to him, it dawned on me that an incarnational approach would require vulnerability from the messenger of God. When we are vulnerable enough to approach people face to face, the message that the messenger carries then becomes genuine. The message and the messenger are not separable; rather, the messenger’s heart and attitude are already melted together in his communication so that the messenger becomes intrinsic to the message. Therefore, without true vulnerability from the messenger, the love of God cannot flow with his or her spoken words into the hearts of the recipients of the message. Therefore, when Jesus himself came as a person into the world and tried to give life to the townspeople, he had to risk hostility and rejection.

Needless to say, we must go back to the Bible if we want to be grounded on solid rock before we articulate any form of mission from the perspective of mission theology. In this article, however, I want to deal with the theme of “mission in weakness and vulnerability” that appears in missiological writings, specifically from the writings of Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch. In my opinion, how missiologists see the theme of mission in weakness and vulnerability is crucial in understanding and formulating mission theology for missionary movements. The writings on the theme of mission from a position of weakness and vulnerability from missiologists such as Newbigin and Bosch will illuminate us as to how missionaries and mission theologians have tried to understand mission in Christ’s way.

Lesslie Newbigin

Lesslie Newbigin acutely indicated that modern missiology remarkably lacks the understanding of weakness and vulnerability that should essentially accompany the messenger if the message that the messenger carries is to be authenticated.3 In his book, Mission in Christ’s Way, Newbigin unfolds what it means to do mission in the way of Christ.

First of all, in order to do mission as Christ did, according to Newbigin, we need to realize that gospel is revealed, yet hidden, in Jesus Christ; people are naturally asking how a man crucified as a sinner can be the embodiment of the wisdom and power of God. It is like a parable. It is hidden, yet revealed in the eyes of believers. It is there on Calvary that the kingly rule, the kingdom of God, won the victory over all the powers of darkness. The cross is not a defeat overturned by the resurrection, but the cross is itself the victory proved by the resurrection. The disciples who saw the resurrected Jesus began to understand that it was when the Lord of Life was crucified that he exposed and disarmed the power of the darkness and overcame death itself.4

Therefore, the kingdom of God, Newbigin went on to say, now has a human face and a human name. Without Jesus, we cannot comprehend the kingdom of God, and without the kingdom of God, we cannot think of Jesus. Jesus Christ himself is the very embodiment of the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God has been given to us (not that we establish, expand, or extend it by ourselves) in the form of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh. In this milieu, the cross embodies the weakness and vulnerability of God that turned out to be the power of God. It is in this vulnerable love out of which overflowed the saving and healing power of God for humanity.5

Thus, to Newbigin, mission is not a success story. The world yearns for success, but the gospel is, by no means, a success story. Mission does not have to do with a pragmatic or effective effort, or an accomplishment that can be much more easily achieved with ready-made tools or highly developed scientific statistics. In both Newbigin’s time and ours, the most vital mission has not taken place in more developed countries but rather in areas where Christianity is persecuted, believers suffer, and where Jesus’ followers do not have much means to offer—a position many would define as vulnerable or weak. However, the effectiveness of our mission is not in our own hands. It is the work of the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who himself arises, is with and comforts the weak and vulnerable community of the believers, and manifests the power of God through this earthen vessel.6

John 20:19–21 clearly shows how mission is to be carried out in Christ’s way, says Newbigin:

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” (John 20:19–21)

The words written in John show that Jesus had sent the disciples (and us) exactly as the Father has sent the Son into the world. In the same manner that the Father sent his Son, the Son now also sends us. For the disciples to understand more fully the manner in which they were to be sent, Jesus showed them his hands and side. Here lies the ultimate foundation for vulnerable mission. The church, which is the body of Christ, as the bearer of mission, will have the same scars as she goes out to the world and preaches the gospel of the kingdom. These scars will authenticate the mission that is undertaken and the very gospel that they preach.

The cross—the scars—that the disciples bear is not a suffering that the church has to passively endure. Nor is it a defeat that the church should receive. It is not an act of oppression that the church should tolerate submissively. The scars are “the marks of Jesus” that the Apostle Paul talks about (Gal 6:17). It is the weakness, vulnerability, and suffering that accompanied Paul when he preached the gospel. We see these characteristics constantly demonstrated in the life and ministry of Paul (e.g., 1 Cor 4:8–13; 2 Cor 4–5; 12:1–10).7 To heal the sick and cast out demons is “an active and uncompromising challenge to all the powers of evil, yet . . . a totally vulnerable challenge so that (and here is the profound mystery) the final victory is God’s and not ours.”8 In weakness and vulnerability, seemingly a defeat, the victory of God is assured.

The concept of mission from a position of weakness and vulnerability is also addressed in another of Newbigin’s books, The Open Secret. Although The Open Secret deals primarily with the broad area of theology of mission within the framework of trinitarian view, Newbigin always focuses the reader’s attention to the fact that the cross is the way of Christ for mission and that we are to follow him in his example. As a missionary from the West, Newbigin was very sensitive to how people in other parts of the world might feel about Western colonialism, and he recognized the incongruity of the tie that Christian mission had with expanding Western power.9 Newbigin insisted that those involved in present-day mission should learn from New Testament examples “what it means to bear witness to the gospel from a position not of strength but of weakness.”10 Newbigin went on, saying that “this picture of the mission is as remote as possible from the picture of the Church as a powerful body putting forth its strength and wisdom to master the strength and wisdom of the world.”11 The opposite is true in this case. The church is weak and vulnerable. However, it is in the church’s state of weakness and vulnerability that the Spirit of God himself manifests his power through her. A true mission cannot be done by using military strategy, mastering the strength and wisdom of the world, and neither can it be done by a successful sales campaign. The victory is not ours. The victory is and always has been won by the One who is greater than we are. Newbigin’s description of mission in weakness and vulnerability is well presented in this way:

The real triumphs of the gospel have not been won when the church is strong in a worldly sense; they have been won when the church is faithful in the midst of weakness, contempt, and rejection. And I would simply add my testimony, which could be illustrated by many examples, that it has been in situations where faithfulness to the gospel placed the church in a position of total weakness and rejection that the advocate has himself risen up and, often through the words and deeds of very “insignificant” people, spoken the word that confronted and shamed the wisdom and power of the world.12

What constantly appears in Newbigin’s theology of mission is that significant advances of the church do not happen when we depend on human power, decision, or the ability of “mobilizing and allocating of ‘resources.’ ”13 Rather, significant advances of the church happen without advance knowledge and without human power.

Earlier, I mentioned that The Open Secret was written within the framework of the trinitarian view. What is intriguing in Newbigin’s emphasis on the trinitarian approach is that the element of weakness and vulnerability found within christology is always combined with the fresh, surprising action and empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Influenced by Roland Allen,14 Newbigin dared not omit the essential place of the Holy Spirit in mission. The evidence of Newbigin’s emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit is clear in his ecclesiology as well.15

Newbigin’s emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit is also apparent in his understanding of the Gospel of John. With the dominant theme of “sending” apparent throughout the Fourth Gospel, Newbigin confirms that the writer of the Gospel is truly concerned with mission.16 The earlier quotation, having established mission in Jesus’ way, continues: “And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven’ ” (John 20:22–23).

Various roles of the Holy Spirit are previously mentioned in the Gospel of John, especially in chapters 14–16. This emphasis on the role of the Spirit in the Fourth Gospel is culminated in verse 22, preceded by Jesus’s remark as to the way in which the disciples will themselves be sent—with scars (v. 20). What I am trying to point out is that the great commission in the Gospel of John (20:19–23) combines an emphasis on the power of the Holy Spirit (pneumatology) with the weakness and vulnerability (christology) of the messenger—so much so, that there is no room for any kind of triumphalism even as we are used mightily by God Almighty in the communication of the message. As much as “the Church on earth is by its nature missionary,”17 mission as having been sent is by its nature vulnerable.

In another of his books, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, Newbigin deals with the meaning of the cross.18 In an attempt to shed light on the relationship between the meaning of history and Christ, Newbigin recognizes the centrality of the cross in the kingdom of God. What is the meaning of history and what does history move toward? Referring to Hendrikus Berkhof,19 Newbigin elaborates the prominent placement of the weakness and vulnerability of the cross, both in the kingdom of God and throughout history.

To Newbigin, history has to do with the gap “between the coming of the kingdom veiled in the vulnerable and powerless Jesus and the coming of the kingdom in manifest power.”20 Thus, patience and watchfulness are greatly required because we live between the times. What is critical here is that the character of this time in which we are waiting is determined by the character of the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. The church, while journeying through history, is destined to participate in the suffering of Christ.21

In our present period, the meaning of the cross has both been revealed and yet still remains hidden. Though the event of the crucifixion of Jesus was seen as a real historical moment by believers and unbelievers alike, the resurrection of the Lord, on the other hand, was seen only by those who had faith in him. This hiddenness of the kingdom of God has been throughout history. However, to Newbigin, it is this hiddenness that “makes possible the conversion of the nations.” Because of this hiddenness of the kingdom, nations may continue to freely turn to the Lord. Without the hiddenness of the kingdom of God, nations would be forced to turn to the Lord because of the terrible majesty of Jesus revealed in glory with no room for a free will of their own. Here is the significance of the weakness and vulnerability of the cross, both in the kingdom of God and as evidenced in history:

When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom. But when it goes the way the Master went, unmasking and challenging the powers of darkness and bearing in its own life the cost of their onslaught, then there are given to the Church signs of the kingdom, powers of healing and blessing which, to eyes of faith, are recognizable as true signs that Jesus reigns.22

Acceptance of vulnerability and weakness in mission is, to Newbigin, not only appropriate but also indispensable for the authentication of the gospel of the kingdom that the messenger preaches.

David J. Bosch

Though David Bosch, a South African missiologist, wrote several important books such as Witness to the World, Transforming Mission, and Believing in the Future,23 I will primarily address only two books in this article: A Spirituality of the Road and The Vulnerability of Mission.24 A Spirituality of the Road was written earliest among his books, and The Vulnerability of Mission was written just before he died in a car accident, and yet both of them are very relevant to the theme of “mission in weakness and vulnerability.” It shows that the theme of mission in weakness and vulnerability had been on his mind constantly throughout his lifetime. It should also be added that his book, Transforming Mission, which many missiologists regard as a magnum opus, also deals with this issue in much broader context, which is beyond the scope of this article.25

As a white man who had stood against apartheid in South Africa and had kept his integrity about racial issues until death, Bosch knew better than most that missionaries and missiologists should live and carry out their ministries with vulnerability. Bosch solidly developed the theological foundation for the primary thesis of A Spirituality of the Road from 2 Corinthians. In the last chapter, Bosch commends that we as believers above all need to have the courage to be weak.26

What Bosch noted in the Apostle Paul’s life is that “true mission is the weakest and least impressive human activity imaginable, the very antithesis of a theology of glory.” This Apostle followed his Master. To Paul, weakness and vulnerability was “a necessary precondition for any authentic mission,” said Bosch.27

The same precondition of weakness and vulnerability is true within authentic community. The community of Christ is not the assembly of spiritual giants. It is the gathering of the broken people and led by people like Peter who experienced brokenness. Mission involves not just the vulnerability of the people whom we want to convert, but also requires the vulnerability of the missionaries themselves; because Jesus himself revealed our own sins by his vulnerability. Our sin would have remained hidden if Jesus had not been willing to be vulnerable.28

Even my own experiences are evidence that our failures and mistakes can become assets. When we become vulnerable, yet courageous enough to share our failures and mistakes with others, these failures become rich assets, and transform the hearers. As we begin to take the road to weakness and vulnerability, we see people changed.

Bosch seemed to understand how powerful it is to be in a position of vulnerability. He stated that Jesus had never been so close to the world as when he was on the cross. In vulnerability, Jesus was able to embrace the world so closely and in this same vulnerability he was able to relate himself to the world. Though Bosch also believed that it was on the cross that Jesus stood against the world more than any other occasion, it was Jesus’s involvement with the world that Bosch wanted to highlight.29

Bosch’s perception of the relationship between the vulnerable mission and the world was broad. To Bosch, mission in vulnerability and weakness does not only pertain to so-called “spiritual matters,” but that mission in vulnerability and weakness also applies to ministry that has social dimensions. To Bosch, the distinction between “spiritual and social” ministries was caused by dichotomistic thought that originated from Greek spiritual ancestors. Vulnerable mission legitimately encompasses social issues as well as personal and spiritual ones in a traditional sense.30

As a final comment on A Spirituality of the Road, I also want to note that Bosch views missiology as “the study of the Church as surprise.”31 Reciting Ivan Illich,32 Bosch asserts that theology, especially missiology, is always in process. Because missionaries constantly bring their own experiences into their own areas of reflection as they continue to engage in mission, their way of thinking or frame of reference also constantly changes.33

This discerning attentiveness with the thorough grasp of the meaning of mission in weakness and vulnerability should assure that militant vocabularies like “soldiers, forces, advance, army, crusade, marching orders, strategy, planning, and many more” should be used discreetly in describing mission.34 For after all, it is the Spirit of God who works through the messenger who is obedient in a position of vulnerability and weakness. Through this position, we might come to realize that we are not there as messengers to give correct answers or to resolve problems with superior technology or tools, but that we were sent by God to show scars in vulnerability, and relate ourselves with the people to which the message is being given, because we too are weak and vulnerable. By doing mission in our Master’s way, taking the road to weakness, instead of strength and power, we will move “from surprise to surprise.”35

As I address another of Bosch’s books, The Vulnerability of Mission, I will not discuss issues related to the book, Silence, written by Japanese author Shūsaku Endō, which Bosch referred to in the beginning of his own book. I want to specifically avoid talking about apostasy in Silence, since Bosch also describes Endō’s book as a disturbing novel. However, the main point Bosch tried to draw from Endō’s book was that the cross is not about the power of God, but the weakness of God.36

In The Vulnerability of Mission, Bosch states that the cross is not a beauty or a power contest,37 nor is mission to be carried out by crusading minds but by crucified minds.38 What Bosch eventually tried to discuss was the problem of the colonialism that Westerners have imposed on the rest of the world. For it was natural in the Christendom model that where the power of Western countries went, their religion (Christianity) was expected to go as well.

Although Bosch addresses the flaws of colonialism and Western mission, Bosch’s statement also sounds a note of warning against the missionary forces from the Majority World, since we tend to think that generally speaking, we (the missionary forces from the Majority World) are currently replacing Western missionary forces. We may not be performing our ministry under the banner of colonialism; however it is often done with substitute colonialism such as the power of money, technology, popular business brand, and the like.

Whether it is from Western countries or the rest of the world, if mission is to be authenticated according to the way of our Master, mission should have the marks of Christ. Here, I would like to make sure, along with Newbigin, that Jesus is not portrayed as a victim, nor do we accept our suffering passively, but that Christ and we are submitting to God actively.39 Nevertheless, mission is not a success story either.40 Desmond Tutu once declared that the church of Christ should be a “failing community rather than a success-driven one” in the face of a South African government that was outlawing nineteen ministry organizations, arresting many of the church leaders, and operating banning orders.41 We have no choice but to follow the footsteps of our Master. In the words of Jonathan Bonk, there is nothing “strategically efficient . . . about taking up a cross.”42

The analysis of Bosch and his understanding of mission in weakness and vulnerability may be stated here in a rather brief manner. However, his mission praxis, personal life, and his difficult journey in the context of South Africa continue to serve as the clearest example of a position of mission from weakness and vulnerability. From the beginning of his ministry period (1957–1967) as a missionary among the Xhosa in Transkei until the time of his death in April 1992 he was constantly in a situation in which he had to be vulnerable; in the context of apartheid, as a white man, Bosch found himself caught between the blacks and Afrikaners (whites). The situation of apartheid continued to become more pressingly difficult for him as he continued to stand for and with those who were black.43 Bosch understood that to be an instrument of reconciliation, he could not avoid being “crushed in between.”44 As Bosch began to identify himself more with the suffering blacks, his family, including his young children, had to go through the same difficulties.45 Here, I do not feel that I am dealing with this issue of mission in vulnerability and weakness somberly enough to accurately convey to the reader how crucial it was to Bosch. For Bosch, his writings were reflections of his lifetime struggles for mission in vulnerability, weakness, and integrity. With utmost integrity and seriousness, he embraced this vulnerability into his life, into his heart and mind, and in his flesh and blood, and sacrificed greatly for it. He understood that it was an essential part of his mission.

In this short article, I have examined the writings of Lesslie Newbigin and David Bosch. However, throughout history this theme of mission from a position of vulnerability and weakness was not ignored by conscientious men and women of God. The reason we must now re-emphasize it is because somewhere along the way we lost touch. As Protestants, we tend to launch our missionary movement with triumphalism and ambition, and choose to settle for mere effectiveness in activities. We have forgotten how our Master did his mission. We have not paused to think about the true meaning of the cross and its implications for our mission. We have tended to go ahead of the Lord carelessly whistling, as Kōsuke Koyama has described.46 We have hastily embraced the theology of glory before we have tasted the suffering. We must want to know Jesus more with the willingness to have the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings (Phil 3:10).

Mission in weakness and vulnerability does matter. As we comprehend the true meaning of the gospel of the kingdom of God, we must put the cross, the scar, and the weakness and vulnerability at the center of the kingdom of God. And we shall humbly follow our Master. That is authentic mission.

A graduate of the Korea Military Academy, Paul Yonggap Jeong was voluntarily discharged from the army to pursue his calling as a minister. After graduating with an MDiv from the Korean Baptist Theological Seminary, Jeong became the senior pastor of Hanter Baptist Church in Seoul, which he also jointly established. He earned his ThM at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina and his PhD in intercultural studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. He was the interim pastor of Winston-Salem Korean Baptist Church and the senior pastor of Carrboro Korean Baptist Church. Currently, he teaches at the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary and serves as the International Director of Vision for the Kingdom, which is a cooperative mission for world evangelization.

Bibliography

Allen, Roland. The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder It. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962.

Berkhof, Hendrikus. Christ the Meaning of History. Richmond: John Knox, 1966.

Bonk, Jonathan J. Missions and Money: Affluence as a Western Missionary Problem. American Society of Missiology Series 15. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

Bosch, David Jacobus. Believing in the Future: Toward a Missiology of Western Culture. Christian Mission and Modern Culture. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1995.

________. A Spirituality of the Road. Missionary Studies 6. Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1979.

________. Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. American Society of Missiology Series 16. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991.

________. The Vulnerability of Mission. Occasional Paper (Selly Oak Colleges) 10. Birmingham, England: Selly Oak Colleges, 1991.

________. Witness to the World: The Christian Mission in Theological Perspective. New Foundations Theological Library. Atlanta: John Knox, 1980.

Flannery, Austin. Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1975.

Illich, Ivan. Mission and Midwifery: Essays on Missionary Formation. Mambo Occasional Papers: Missio-Pastoral Series 4. Gweru, Zimbabwe: Mambo Press, 1974.

Jeong, Paul Yonggap. Mission from a Position of Weakness. American University Studies 269. New York: Peter Lang, 2007.

Koyama, Kōsuke. No Handle on the Cross: An Asian Meditation on the Crucified Mind. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1977.

Kritzinger, J. N. J., and W. A. Saayman. David J. Bosch: Prophetic Integrity, Cruciform Praxis. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: Cluster Publications, 2011.

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989.

________. The Household of God: Lectures on the Nature of the Church. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2008.

________. Mission in Christ’s Way: Bible Studies. WCC Mission Series. Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1987.

________. One Body, One Gospel, One World: The Christian Mission Today. London: International Missionary Council, 1958.

________. The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995.

________. Unfinished Agenda: An Autobiography. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985.

Contextualizing principles like those identified by Vulnerable Mission may be used to avoid creating unhealthy dependency. They may also be used to other ends, such as persuading a donor or gaining information to subdue an enemy. This highlights the importance of underlying narrative, the frame of meaning at work that largely determines the impact such principles have in a given situation. Beginning with Jesus, the early Christian movement penetrated the vast cultural mosaic of the Roman empire over several centuries without, on the whole, creating unhealthy dependencies. This essay explores a narrative at work that may help to explain this remarkable achievement and suggests an understanding of the role vulnerable principles played in that achievement.

Introduction

Vulnerable Mission offers two specific proposals to avoid creating unhealthy dependencies and ultimately harming those who receive the attention of Christian workers:

1. Working in indigenous languages—or more broadly, a firm commitment to understand people deeply, on their own terms, in their own context.
2. A commitment to depend on local resources, avoiding outside resourcing in the conduct of local work.2

Cultural competence as demonstrated by language mastery and dependence on local resources can be potent tools in the service of God’s mission. At the same time, it cannot be the case that these qualities by themselves constitute the essence of Vulnerable Mission. It is possible, for example, that one could learn a language and culture in order to be more effective in exploiting that culture.3 Alternatively, people might enter a culture bearing no outside resources simply because they are poor or escaping oppressive circumstances.

In this essay I want to follow one stream of early Christian thought to describe how the commitments identified by Vulnerable Mission found expression among the early followers of Jesus. To be more specific, I will trace a certain continuity between the notion of an “economy of grace” as developed in the letter to the Ephesians and the actual missionary practice of the early Christian movement, beginning with Jesus and continuing through the early Christian centuries.

To begin I will examine several key but sometimes neglected themes in Ephesians. We will need to consider some familiar terms in somewhat unfamiliar ways as we enter the thought world of Ephesians.4 In the following section I will survey some implications of these themes as they played out in the mission of Jesus and in the early missionary movement, and conclude by suggesting how these insights might inform our understanding of Vulnerable Mission. As the study proceeds a useful question to explore will be, “If linguistic/cultural competence and dependence on local resources are important for the transmission of the gospel into new settings, then how do we find these principles embodied in the earliest Christian mission?

An Ancient Ecclesiology: Church as Economy of Grace

To begin I will explore two key themes and their relationship as developed in Ephesians: grace and economy.

Grace

The idea of grace in the Western, Protestant churches has been dominated by the Reformation emphasis on the unmerited gift we have received in Christ—the grace by which we are saved. A classic text underlying this focus states: “For it is by grace (charis) that you are saved through trust, and this not from yourselves, it is a gift of God—not by works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8–9).5

While this take on grace was an important corrective and pillar of the Reformation, it represents only one dimension of the meaning Paul and the early church invested in the word charis.6 Most notably for our study, it is only a subset of how charis is used in Ephesians.7 In the widest sense a grace (charis) is a gift, “that which pleases or brings delight (chara).”8 However, in the New Testament and Paul’s work in particular, more specialized understandings of the term come to bear in significant ways.

Charis is broadly understood in Paul’s writing to embrace all of God’s gracious, self-disclosing work in Christ. This widely encompassing notion of grace, especially emphasized in the Eastern church tradition, can be summarized, “Grace is God dispensed into us.”9 God’s greatest gift is the gift of God’s own self. Important in this broader understanding is that, while it includes God’s incarnational “dispensing” in Jesus Christ, this view of grace also helps us make sense of a major, often overlooked, dimension of that work, namely God’s self-investment into each of his people as individuals and in the community called the “body of Christ.”

Simply put, this is the grace for which we are saved—to become the embodiment and revelation of God. A classic description of this dimension of grace follows closely on the text quoted above: “For we are God’s masterpiece, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared in advance for us to walk in” (Eph 2:10).10

This statement beginning with “for” seems jarring in light of what follows until we see the broader sense of grace in view. Works per se are not the antithesis of grace. Rather, it is human works—works of human initiative and strength in which we could boast—that have no place in the salvation of God. The works God has predesigned for us to do are precisely an expression of that grace—a theme that will continue to be developed through Ephesians.

This dimension of grace, the grace for which we are saved, is given specific shape in the next chapter where the unique calling of Paul is described as his grace: “Though I am less than the least of all the Lord’s people, this grace was given to me: to proclaim to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ, and to make plain to everyone the economy of this mystery” (Eph 3:8–9).

This is Paul’s standard way of describing the work to which he has been uniquely called by God: “to me this grace has been given.”11 Paul routinely uses “grace” as a synonym for God’s calling on his life, his divinely appointed vocation. But in Paul’s thought such a grace belongs to every believer. As Ephesians continues, this dimension of grace as vocation moves to the center of the argument. “And yet, to each one of us a grace has been given according to the distributed gifting of Christ” (4:7).

The “and yet” that begins this statement marks the shift in chapter four between the unity that characterizes our calling—“one Lord, one Faith, one baptism”—and the diversity of that calling—“to each one a grace.” To “walk worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (4:1) entails an embrace of both the unity we share in Christ (the grace by which we have been saved) and the diversity of our respective gifting and assignments in the household of God (the grace for which we are saved).12

In this sense of vocation, then, grace is the measured dispensing of God’s purpose and power into every unique person of God’s family household. Although this understanding of grace has been somewhat muted in the Western church, it is clearly seen elsewhere in Paul, in Peter’s writing, and in the commentary of the church since the first century.13 And as we will see, it is developed more fully in the verses that follow.

Economy

Our second theme, economy, is based on the term oikonomia, which occurs three times in Ephesians.14 The term conveys a range of meanings: household rule, stewardship, order, plan.15 It is often used regarding the management of large estates in the ancient world. At times it conveys the notion of underlying structure. In more contemporary thought a useful translation might often be, “operating system.”

Especially prominent in Ephesians is the theme of the economy of God, his pre-ordained system for the summing up of all things into himself by way of Christ through the church. This theme is introduced in Eph 1:9–10: “making known to us the mystery of his will, in accordance with his good pleasure that he purposed in himself, leading to the economy of the fullness of times, to head up all things in Christ—the things in heaven and the things on the earth—in him.”

This economy is the object of God’s self-purposed pleasure, something revealed in the fullness of times, which has been a mystery but has now been made known. These ideas are taken up and developed more in 3:8–11:

To me, less than the least of all saints, was this grace given: to announce to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ and to enlighten all that they may see what the economy of the mystery is, which throughout the ages has been hidden in God, who created all things, so that now, to the rulers and authorities in the heavenlies the multifaceted wisdom of God might be made known through the church, according to the eternal purpose which God made in Christ Jesus our Lord.16

Here this finally-disclosed economy is revealed as no less than the church, God’s means of displaying his multifaceted wisdom to the heavenly powers.17 In chapter four, what this means for the church is stated even more explicitly in an extended description of the church as the body of Christ. The case is summarized thus: “From Christ the whole body is joined and held together . . . by means of the distributed divine energy of every single growing part of the body working to build up his body in love” (4:16).

God’s divine energy is distributed to each growing part of his body according to the distinct grace each one bears. As each one exercises that grace under the headship of Christ, the body of Christ, the church, is built up, and God’s multifaceted wisdom is fully revealed in that completed person, the bride of Christ.18

Economy of Grace in Ephesians

Having discussed grace and economy we can summarize the Ephesians presentation of church as an economy of grace. Six observations provide an overview:

1. Ephesians claims to disclose a great mystery. This mystery has been hidden in God in the past but now, in the fullness of time, has been made known to us (1:9; 3:9–10).
2. Furthermore, this mystery is revealed in an economy (oikonomia), that is to say, a household rule, or operating system that has its origin and its ultimate fulfillment in God through Jesus Christ by way of the church (1:23; 3:9).
3. This economy, or household rule, is a divinely designed system for the dispensing of God’s multifaceted wisdom and for the display of that wisdom to powers and principalities in the heavenly realms (3:10). Simply put, this self-disclosure of God is the church.
4. God’s multifaceted wisdom is revealed, in fact, as an economy of grace (3:2).19 What makes this economy a display of the many, many forms of God’s wisdom is that God’s power (energeia) is distributed (metron) uniquely as a grace (charis) to each part of the household body (4:7, 16).20
5. The body is built up (oikodomeo) to its mature, healthy expression when every single part is doing its particular, divinely graced and empowered work (4:14–16).
6. The church, as the operating system for the grace of God, therefore, functions to fulfill God’s delight in reconciling all things to himself through Christ (1:9–11).

Economy of Grace in the Mission of Jesus and the Early Church

The letter to the Ephesians, by identifying the church as God’s economy of grace affirms and clarifies core themes of the Hebrew/Christian narrative that underpinned the early Christian movement. In broad strokes, those themes included:

1. From the beginning men and women were designed to display—in their collective diversity—the image of God.21
2. Although people have been broken and estranged from God by sin, God nevertheless has chosen through Abraham to bless all the families of the earth.
3. Through Jesus Christ, Abraham’s descendant, the power of sin has been broken and by the Spirit of Christ, God’s design in people is again being revealed.
4. People from all the families of earth are now being gathered in a divine family that displays God’s multifaceted wisdom—an economy of grace.

This framing narrative came to deeply shape the thought and action of the early followers of Jesus.

In view of this vision of church as God’s economy of grace, I want to reflect briefly on three themes illustrated by the earliest Christian mission that I believe bear directly on the nature and practice of vulnerable mission. These include the locus of initiative, the nature of leadership, and the context of mission.

The Locus of Initiative in the Economy of Grace

The initiator in the economy of grace can be none other than the economy designer and grace-dispenser, God. If God has chosen to display God’s multifaceted wisdom in this economy, then those who would follow the Master’s lead must learn to pay attention to God’s gracious initiatives in general, and to those initiatives in people.

Just this kind of deep attentiveness to God’s initiative characterizes the life and mission of Jesus.22 And as Jesus trains his disciples this theme features prominently. Jesus sends his disciples off in pairs to the surrounding villages with these instructions:23

Go! I am sending you out like lambs surrounded by wolves. Do not carry a money bag, a traveler’s bag, or sandals, and greet no one on the road. Whenever you enter a house, first say, “May peace be on this house!” And if a person of peace is there, your peace will remain on him, but if not, it will return to you. Stay in that same house, eating and drinking what they give you, for the worker deserves his pay. Do not move around from house to house. Whenever you enter a town and the people welcome you, eat what is set before you. Heal the sick in that town and say to them, “The kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Luke 10:4–7)24

This instruction by Jesus is grounded in the conviction that those with whom God intends the disciples to work—the household of peace—will be ready to receive these vulnerable disciples, so the disciples are not to waste their time casting about for other options. Attentiveness to the Master’s prevenient work in people, here invoked by the image, “the Lord of the harvest,” becomes the means by which the disciples appropriately concentrate their work out of one household that will become a beachhead for the coming kingdom in that place.

This instruction to his disciples simply mirrors the approach they repeatedly witnessed Jesus himself taking. He is steadily on the watch for those ready to receive him and, on discovering such people, goes into their homes. This careful attention to God’s initiative does not end with the life and missionary training of Jesus. It continued naturally in the early apostolic teams and among those who formed the household-based churches of the first centuries, as we will see in what follows.25

The Nature of Leadership in the Economy of Grace

What does it mean to be a leader in a household economy—if you are not the owner/master? Throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, to have such a role meant to be a steward, a household manager, an oikonomos. Those given responsibility within an oikonomia, the household economy, were servants of the household under the master/father’s leadership.

The dominance of the household theme in the New Testament, and God’s role within that household as Master/Father helps to explain, not only Jesus’ prohibition of calling people “father,” but also explains the curious shortage of the word “leader” as applied to believers in the New Testament. Where the notion of leadership is in view, it is usually Jewish leaders opposing the coming kingdom, or Gentile leaders whose “lording” approach is explicitly prohibited.26 By contrast, positions of influence and responsibility in the church are routinely described in the language of servanthood and stewardship.27 The focus of that stewardship within an economy of grace can be given sharper definition by reclaiming the old English word, eduction, which means “the drawing forth of what is latent or potential in another.”

In Ephesians 4, this idea offers a most helpful and comprehensive way to understand the function of Christian stewardship. In God’s economy of grace, certain gifts are given to call forth the gifting of the whole: “It was [Christ] who gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers to equip the saints for works of service to build up (oikodomēn) the body of Christ” (4:11–12).

“To equip” in this context conveys more than simply teaching, modeling, directing, or exhorting. God’s intended purpose for the equipping/leadership gifts is to call forth the full expression of all the body parts according to God’s design. In a word, this is the work of eduction. If divine self-dispensing is grace, then eduction, the calling forth of the divine in others through self-dispensing attention is a means for grace multiplied.

To thus prioritize eduction entails a profound shift from common assumptions about the nature of Christian leadership: from leader as the source and sustainer of God’s work to leader as the attentive supporter and co-learner of God’s work as it is being revealed in the world, in people, and in the myriad ways God has of disclosing his purposes. Leaders function as stewards, not simply in name, but in practice under the conviction that the household wherein they work is not theirs, and the vision they are to enact is most reliably discovered together under the Master. To say it differently, the work of these leaders is a stewarding of stewards, each of whom may hear from the Master to the benefit of the family and its mission.28

So in an economy of grace, while various kinds of oversight are affirmed, it must be emphasized that eductive stewardship is not limited to any sub-group. Rather it is a core value that permeates the lifestyle and belongs to every member. As John Howard Yoder puts it:

Paul] . . . proclaims that in the midst of a fallen world the grace of God has apportioned to every one, without merit, a renewed potential for dignity in complementarity. This is not an anti-structural stance; it is the affirmation of a structure analogous to the human organism. God has done this not by making everyone the same, but by empowering each member differently although equally.29

The work of building up the body is owned by every family member on behalf of every other family member—in keeping with the development, capacity, and calling of each. Peter makes this explicit: “Each one should use whatever gift (charisma) he or she has received to serve others, as good stewards (oikonomoi) of the multiform grace (charis) of God” (1 Pet 4:10).

A steward, by definition, operates in the context of an economy. This thought is a natural extension of the household/kingdom teaching of Jesus and his call to faithful stewardship for each of his followers.

What, then is the primary function of good stewardship? To cultivate a household that in every respect is aligning with the Master’s intention. Paradoxically, the household itself, comprised as it is of the multifaceted graces of God, is both a primary means of discovery and the key to embody the Master’s intention in each case.30 The wisdom and dispensed power to do God’s will are already present in the church, however latent.

Economy of Grace as the Context of Mission

The earliest Christian mission deeply embraced a vision for life in God’s household economy of grace. This is well confirmed by the shape that the mission’s communities took over the following centuries. Joseph Hellerman concludes his substantial study of The Ancient Church as Family with this observation:

From first century Palestine to third century Carthage, the social matrix most central to early Christian conceptions of community was the surrogate kinship group of siblings who understood themselves to be the sons and daughters of God. For the early Christians, the church was family.31

The family Hellerman is describing, the “surrogate kinship group,” was an extended family typically based in the home of a nuclear family, but developing a more diverse membership over time.32 As Jesus anticipated, these groups were not merely a metaphorical family of brothers and sisters. Rather, they became the functional family replacement for those who had “lost father and mother, homes and lands” for the sake of Christ. That is to say, they saw themselves as a real family with God as their common Father, and they treated each other as real siblings.33 Unlike natural families, however, these groups were often remarkably non-homogeneous—a living demonstration of the multifaceted wisdom of God.34

Karl Sandnes, in A New Family, writes extensively of the vital role these families played in making it possible for people in the ancient world to consider a new life as Christians and, having become converts to Christian faith, to survive and thrive in that new life. He concludes: “The family vocabulary was not only a matter of language; it was put into practice. The Christians considered themselves brothers and sisters, and lived accordingly.”35

The degree to which these surrogate families functioned as powerful witnesses to the “multifaceted wisdom of God” and the in-breaking of God’s kingdom is often attested to in antiquity by the off-handed observations of their detractors. For example, in AD 360 the last pagan Roman emperor, Julian, laments to a pagan high-priest:

Why do we not observe that it is their [the Christians] benevolence to strangers, their care for the graves of the dead and the pretended holiness of their lives that have done the most to increase atheism? . . . When . . . the impious Galileans support not only their own poor, but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us.36

Perhaps the most compelling evidence for the witnessing power of these household communities is the relentless pace at which Christianity permeated the Roman empire, despite an array of opposition.37 As Sandnes noted: “An individual who sought for and really needed a family-like fellowship had good reason to expect that he/she would find a sheltering home here. . . . This might furnish a partial explanation for why Christianity grew so rapidly in its earliest history.”38

The concrete expression of the household economy of grace was a day-by-day family experience of sharing in every significant dimension of life. Such tangible philadelphia, “brotherly love,” in the early church produced a durable and inviting affirmation of its divine source. As J. H. Elliott observes, “Households thus constituted the focus, locus and nucleus of the ministry and mission of the Christian movement.”39

Conclusion

In this study we have explored the idea developed in Ephesians of the church as God’s economy of grace, designed, in the fullness of time, to disclose God’s multifaceted wisdom. By thus establishing God’s household rule among people, the divine desire is being fulfilled to bring all things together in Jesus Christ.

This idea, taken seriously, has profound worldview implications that frame our understanding of the missionary enterprise. In concluding I want to reflect briefly on those implications as they intersect with Vulnerable Mission.

First, if we take seriously that God is the one forming the family of God, at both the universal and local level, then we would expect to find certain capacities in people who have the specific stewardship of bringing the news of the kingdom to new pockets of people. These stewards are the “sent ones,” designated in English as apostles and missionaries, depending on our preference for the Greek or Latin root.

At this point especially the commitments of Vulnerable Mission play a vital role. These cross-cultural workers must have the capacity to discern those “people of peace” in the local culture who are ready to receive their message. Having discovered such people, the missionaries must be prepared to receive the hospitality of those people, entering their context with the vulnerable gifts of dependency and some degree of linguistic/cultural competence.

Secondly, as the persons of peace understand and receive the gospel, they have, as a matter of course, the stewardship of sharing the good news and calling forth the graces of those within their own extended circle of influence. A new family of Jesus forms. In this phase, concerns for linguistic and cultural competence are diminished, since this competence within the household may normally be safely assumed. Similarly, questions of economic disparity are mitigated by first-hand knowledge of the parties involved and the growing philadelphia of the forming family.

Thirdly, as this nascent economy of grace begins to demonstrate the fruit of divine life within their household, the news naturally spreads among their extended relational networks. Here again, because the economy of grace has formed within the local culture with local servant leadership, the message is inherently well contextualized.

While this outline is clearly an idealized description, it nevertheless recapitulates a message and process that can be traced from the mission of Jesus through the pre-Easter mission of the apostles and on through the expanding mission of the church in its early centuries.

Against this backdrop, Vulnerable Mission clearly has an important, even vital role in the ongoing task of bringing the gospel to unreached peoples. At the same time that role must be seen as one dimension of the broader mission enterprise, which for the earliest Christians was the outworking of the multifaceted wisdom of God in and through the church. Apart from a clear self-understanding by the missionaries of their role as stewards in the story of divine initiative, the graces of Vulnerable Mission may well lose their value in service of the kingdom. Missionaries come in vulnerability and in strength; in human weakness and divine power. In other words, the practices of Vulnerable Mission find their great usefulness in the service of God’s in-breaking economy of grace, in the formation of vibrant families of Jesus that display the multifaceted wisdom of God.

When that economy of grace is released in a new pocket of people through the faithful stewardship of missionaries, we draw closer to God’s ultimate purpose in Jesus Christ. That process, the early Christians believed, will see the consummation of God’s delight when those of “every kinship, tongue, tribe, and people” gather for celebration with the eternal family.

Dr. Kent Smith has taught in the Graduate School of Theology at Abilene Christian University since 1991. His teaching and research focus has been in the area of spiritual nurture systems, especially as they relate to new expressions of church. He directs ACU’s graduate internship in missional leadership and the Missionary Residency for North America (MRNA) and has been a trainer for international mission teams over 20 years with ACU’s Halbert Institute for Missons. Kent can be contacted at smithpk@acu.edu.

Bibliography

Bauer, Walter, Frederick W. Danker, William F. Arndt, and F. Wilbur Gingrich, eds. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

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