Category: md-16

What lies beyond the fragile walls of the casita—the “little house” of institutional faith? This paper argues that Ivan Illich’s “It/She” framework of bipartite ecclesiology, which distinguishes the institutional “It” from the mystical “She,” offers Stone-Campbell communities a path forward amid crisis. Drawing on Colombian ethnographic testimony, it shows how casita theology fosters spiritual confusion and loyalty to broken systems. Through poetic inquiry and decolonial critique, the paper proposes conspiratio—a relational praxis that enables movement from casita logic to casona abundance, critiquing corrupt institutions while cultivating life-giving community.

A Missiological Emergency

Christian Smith, in Why Religion Went Obsolete,1 along with others, documents the sharp decline in religious affiliation across the United States (USA). This shift is not merely data—it is a lived reality. People around me now ask, as Brian McLaren does, Do I Stay Christian?2 Such a decline is not merely a sociological phenomenon, but a missiological emergency that demands a theological response.

David Bosch reminds us that “mission is the mother of theology.” He observed that the New Testament writers did not theologize from a place of academic detachment but from within an “emergency situation,” compelled to think theologically as followers of Jesus confronting the realities of their contexts.3

A Third Way Beyond Casita Theology

In response to this crisis, when casita theology, short for teología de la casita (“theology of the little house”. The figures below illustrate the “little house” approach that locates salvation within tightly bounded institutional structures—equates salvation with institutional membership —and forces members who face institutional corruption to confront an impossible choice: defend the indefensible or abandon their faith. Ivan Illich’s “It/She” framework, based on bipartite ecclesiology—the understanding of the church as both institutional and mystical—provides theological grounding for a third way.4 The following analysis demonstrates how conspiratio, a relational practice of shared life and mutual discernment, allows communities to critique corrupt institutions while nurturing authentic faith that transcends institutional boundaries.

Through ethnographic evidence and poetic inquiry (reshaping interview data into poetic form), the present paper argues that Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology provides the theological framework necessary for the Stone-Campbell Movement communities to move beyond casita theology toward conspiratio, a relational practice of shared life and discernment that recognizes kingdom abundance both within and beyond institutional boundaries.

In Dussel’s terms, decoloniality is not merely critique but an ethical reorientation—a turning toward the voices and experiences of the marginalized as a primary locus for theological reflection. Inspired by a missiology of listening, I extend this framework through the concept of decolonial listening. In this study, I intentionally attend to the voices of grassroots members of the congregation, enacting a decolonial turn.5

Three movements guide the argument. First, it examines the crisis in Stone-Campbell Movement missiology through the lens of casita theology, which prioritizes institutional control over relational presence. Second, it engages Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology. Finally, it proposes a decolonial reorientation: a return to the Stone-Campbell Movement’s frontier radicalism through the mystical conspiratio—a practice of shared life and open tables. By inhabiting Illich’s ecclesial ambiguity, we may move beyond the restrictive walls of the “little house” and toward a faith that nourishes, resists, and surprises. What follows is not only a theoretical proposal but a reflection shaped by lived tension and sustained engagement with communities navigating institutional crisis.

Personal Stakes: Faith, Motherhood, and Missiological Tension

Raised in the Stone-Campbell Movement, I have long grappled with the tension between the institutional forms of faith and its lived reality. My critiques—developed over the course of a 300-page dissertation—emerge from this struggle. Yet, I continue to cherish the legacy of faith and love for God passed down through generations linked by the Church. Just as the Stone-Campbell theologians and Illich looked to early Christian communities as their reference point—groups formed not by birthright, but by shared belief and lived experience, marked by face-to-face relationships and practices such as conspiratio that embodied a collective spirit of the “She”—I likewise find that attending to the “She” fosters a resilient spirituality that transcends denominational boundaries. In the Colombian context, shaped by maternal thinking and table fellowship, I understand bienvenidos, siempre se puede echar más agua a la sopa (welcome—there is always room for more around the table) as an image that resonates with the Gospel narratives of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, in which shared hospitality becomes a site of unexpected abundance (found in all of the Gospels: Matthew 14:19-20; Mark 6:41-42; Luke 9: 16-17; John 6:11-13).

I have lived that truth—as both a scholar and a mother. My theology, like my parenting, has been forged in the crucible of love: love for my three adult children, each navigating their own journeys of faith, and love for the community in Colombia, my home church since 1992. Like the New Testament writers facing their own “emergency situation,” I, too, have been compelled to theologize—driven by maternal instinct to nurture faith beyond inherited dogmas and rigid walls. As I account in my dissertation, that experience became a near-conversion moment, leading to a deep reckoning with forgiveness and a reimagining of my missiological journey.

This maternal pull extends beyond biology. It first drew me to Mexico and then to Colombia as a young missionary, sustained me through the congregation’s collapse and rebirth in Colombia, and motivated my return from Argentina amid the chaos of 2004. It also carried me through an insider/outsider doctoral case study on Iglesia ICI-Colombia (also known as Iglesia de Cristo International-Colombia), as I explored in a missiological evaluation after a crisis in 2004-2021.6 This insider–outsider research connects to Bosch’s “a view from the inside,” as he and Illich researched also from within their Christian tradition in a liminal, in-between space.7

I listened through hours of semi-structured interviews as participants shared their experiences of the congregation’s collapse. Poetic inquiry, as excerpts from their transcripts reshaped into poetry, offers a glimpse into the raw emotion of that study.8 The method of poetic inquiry—a practice that reshapes interview data into poetic form to surface affective and embodied insight. This method is central to the study, for, as Illich reminds us, “Preparation for the study of missiology therefore implies an increased receptivity for the poetic, the historical, and the social aspects of reality.”9

Maternal thinking has become the lens through which this understanding takes shape.10 The experience of motherhood—whether literal or metaphorical—reveals something essential about authentic faith: its capacity to be both nurturing and defiant, protective yet resistant.11 When rooted in the missio Dei—God’s sending and reconciling work in the world—”She” becomes both sanctuary for the vulnerable and resistance against oppressive forces, creating spaces where mystery and survival coexist even amid institutional collapse.12 This vision draws on the transforming mutuality of the Incarnation—the profound interrelationship between the Godhead, Mary, and Jesus.13 What emerges is not merely a personal theology, but a response to a broader missiological crisis: how can faith communities hold space for both transcendent mystery and embodied authenticity when institutional structures increasingly fail them?

Decolonial Framing and Theological Method

Mark Love calls for a postcolonial reimagining of mission.14 I push further—toward a decolonial shift, one that challenges inherited structures of power and centers marginalized ways of knowing. Decoloniality here refers to a critique of colonial epistemologies that shape how reality is interpreted, drawing on the work of Latin American thinkers such as Enrique Dussel. As Richard T. Hughes and Christina Littlefield argue through their notion of an “empire state of mind,” empire criticism must extend beyond theology and history into missiology.15 We must confront how Christian mission has too often reproduced systems of power, racialization, and control. It is a call to practice decolonial listening.16

Illich’s theology of bipartite ecclesiology is vital here. His “It/She” framework defines the church as both “It” (the institutional machinery of Christianity—its hierarchies, structures, and boundaries) and “She” (the mystical body of Christ: a living communion grounded in love and conspiratio).17

This paradox fascinated Illich, who saw the church as a site of creative tension between the “mystery of mutuality” and the “mystery of evil.” For him, the church embodied corruptio optimi pessima (“the corruption of the best is the worst”). He even described the church as a “nesting place for evil.”18 This paradox does not resolve; instead, it holds space—restless yet rooted—for faith to flourish in ambiguity. It is a posture that resists purity politics and welcomes human imperfection as sacred ground.

Bosch’s missio Dei—the idea that mission flows from God’s sending love—calls us to embrace this ambiguity.19 Yet, as Bosch warned, there is little hope for the quick “re-evangelization” of Western Christianity unless we confront the colonial logics embedded in our practices (neoliberalism, in my context). For Bosch, re-evangelization is not about recruitment but about humanization: a “new mutuality” in which, in his context, Black and White “discover one another and rediscover themselves.”20

Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology makes this possible. It resists the idolatry of institutional control of casita theology and creates space for the unpredictable, Spirit-led presence of “She.” This presence is found not in programs or ecclesial “purity,” but in shared meals, maternal defiance, and hospitality at the margins, and border-crossing. At its core, missiology is fundamentally about boundary-crossing, inspired by the example of Jesus and, especially, the Parable of the Samaritan. In the Lukan account (Luke 10:25–37), the Samaritan is portrayed, when read in the Greek, as being moved by an embodied force—splagchnon—”in his guts.” This understanding of the gospel as a gut-level movement that motivates boundary-crossing lies at the heart of Illich’s thought and practice.21

Re-Evangelizing Ourselves

My return to Colombia in 2004 marked the beginning of decolonial listening as I confronted my complicity in “whiteness” and USA-centric, neoliberal “managerial missiology”—an approach that prioritizes efficiency, metrics, and control over relational presence.22 Illich described such an approach as the attempt to make a mercy-producing machine. Draper’s framework—repentance, contextual learning, guesthood, submission to non-white leadership, and listening to unfamiliar cadences—provided a roadmap for this transformation.23 This process resonates with what Richard Hughes describes as “escaping the web of white supremacy,” which he identifies as the most urgent task in the work of character formation.24

The Stone-Campbell Movement, once a radical frontier powerhouse, now faces institutional decline and growing disillusionment with boundary-keeping. Re-evangelization requires dismantling casita control through Ivan Illich’s ecclesial ambiguity: theologizing at the margins, in conspiratio, and turning scarcity into feast.

Movement One: Diagnosing Casita Theology

Bosch rightly observes that one’s theology of salvation always shapes a theology of mission; how salvation is defined determines the scope of the missionary task.25 Illich draws on early Christian communities—formed through face-to-face relationships and shared life—as an embodiment of conspiratio. Within this framework, I argue that casita theology names a form of ecclesial imagination that prioritizes institutional boundaries over relational mutuality, often mirroring colonial logics.

The Stone-Campbell Movement, particularly within the a cappella Church of Christ and its offshoot, the International Church of Christ (ICOC), has embodied what I am calling casita theology. The metaphor names an ecclesiology in which salvation and spiritual legitimacy are located within a tightly bounded, often insular community.26 Those within the “walls” or “high boundaries” are considered saved, while those outside become the objects of mission. Leaders function as gatekeepers, regulating access and enforcing boundaries. This logic echoes the Roman Catholic doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the church, no salvation”) and, in practice, can reduce mission to a form of recruitment, a reduction sharply critiqued by Illich.27

The data visualizations below, adapted from my dissertation, are diagnostic. They are developed from a Bible study series used in Iglesia ICI-Colombia beginning in the 1992 church planting.28 Figure 1 depicts the tension between the hospitality of God’s kingdom—Jesus’ movement, the spiritual family, and God’s church—and its confinement within a “little house.” Entry into this house is mediated through a defined “door”, which represents the five steps to salvation: hear, believe, repent, confess, and be baptized. While each of these elements reflects biblical themes, the problem emerges when they are reduced to a fixed formula that functions as a boundary marker for belonging. As Bosch cautions, evangelism cannot be defined “too sharply, too precisely, and too confidently.” We cannot package the gospel into a set of principles or a definitive list of truths that people must master to be saved. Such reduction risks equating entry into a particular ecclesial structure with participation in the kingdom of God.”29

Figure 1. Visualization of the internal logic of casita theology, including how authority, belonging, and boundary enforcement function within it.30

Below, Figure 2 highlights the theological implications of casita logic: life is located exclusively within the structure, while those outside are positioned as lost. The result is a binary imagination that collapses mission into recruitment and constrains God’s activity to institutional boundaries.

Figure 2. Visualization of the binary imagination of casita theology.31

In daily practice, this internal logic takes concrete form in how belonging is named and recognized. Within the International Church of Christ, a member is identified as a “disciple.” At the same time, in the a cappella Church of Christ, similar belonging is expressed through the designation “member of the church.” Though linguistically distinct, both function as markers of inclusion—signaling who is considered “inside” the community. As reflected in the figures, supported by participant accounts, and reinforced in a cappella Church of Christ literature, these designations carry implicit theological weight: to belong to the community is to be understood as within God’s kingdom and family, while those outside are often perceived as beyond its bounds.

To understand how this binary logic took shape and gained such enduring authority, it is necessary to examine its historical and philosophical roots.

Historical Roots of Casita Theology

To understand the persistence of casita theology, it is necessary to trace its historical formation within the Stone-Campbell Movement’s intellectual inheritance. Emerging from an empirical philosophical tradition shaped by Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Reid, the movement developed a form of theological rationalism that privileged clarity, systematization, and procedural certainty. Within this framework, faith was increasingly organized around observable steps and definable outcomes, producing a missional imagination that mirrored the mechanistic logics of the modern Enlightenment. Casita theology, in this sense, is not an accidental development but a historically situated outcome—shaped both by Enlightenment ways of thinking and by a reaction against perceived theological ambiguity. It represents a desire for doctrinal precision that gradually solidified into bounded ecclesial form.32

Walter Scott’s “Five-Finger Exercise” epitomizes this rationalist missiology: a clear and concise conversion tool outlining the steps to salvation. The model was taught to children, who then shared it with their parents, contributing to the movement’s rapid expansion. As the Stone-Campbell Movement grew to be the third-largest Christian group in the USA, this method enabled the movement to gain traction on the American frontier.33

By the post-World War II era, these patterns became institutionalized through Stone-Campbell Movement missions at Harding University under George Benson, whose alignment with emerging neoliberal frameworks shaped a movement that became one of the USA’s most prolific missionary-sending bodies.34

Contemporary Consequences

Defined broadly, missiology for Illich entails the study of mission through theology, ecclesiology, social imagination, and poetry. In modern contexts, this necessarily includes attention to power relations, colonial legacies, and global economic structures. My research indicates that engagement with perspectives from the Global South—particularly grassroots communities not financially dependent on the USA—remains limited within the Stone-Campbell Movement. This disconnection raises critical questions about the theological and economic assumptions shaping contemporary mission. As Illich argues, modern missionary work operates within a global system of development that often reproduces colonial patterns.35

Illich traces Christianity’s institutional shift as face-to-face conspiratio gave way to bureaucratic structures. This shift sharpens his critique of what I term Religious Branded Organizations (RBOs)—modern ecclesial forms shaped by free-market, seeker-oriented logics that mirror neoliberal structures. In this light, casita theology is not only a theological construct but also a system reinforced by global and economic forces that privilege control, scalability, and institutional expansion.36

Illich’s critique also resonates with the early Stone-Campbell Movement’s resistance to ecclesial hierarchy. As Leão et al. observe, the movement affirmed the conviction that being “Christians only, not the only Christian” resisted reducing mission to institutional self-preservation. In its formative period, laypeople—often unordained—moved beyond established boundaries into frontier contexts. Yet this same rationalist, nondenominational impulse, which Noll critiques for leaving little room for divine mystery, also created conditions for highly systematized and, at times, restrictive ecclesial forms.37

Religious Branded Organizations, rather than embodying gospel-rooted responses to lived realities, often function as growth strategies shaped by managerial missiology. As Flanders, drawing on Illich, reminds us, “The mission of the Church is the social continuation of the Incarnation,” and that “Church innovations must never be merely a growth strategy or reaction to ‘consumer demands’.”38 Wuthnow similarly traces the shift in global mission from Spirit-led communities to Western-managed strategies, often framed as benevolent development. Despite the rhetoric of “from everyone to everywhere,” mission funding remains heavily concentrated in the USA.39 As my case study concluded, “funds [from the USA] ran the system.”40

Colombian Evidence of Casita Effects

The theoretical consequences of casita theology become starkly evident when examined through the lived experiences of the Colombian participants during the 2003 institutional collapse of the International Church of Christ. Through poetic inquiry, their voices reveal how institutional boundary-keeping fosters systemic control, spiritual confusion, and misplaced loyalties, reducing the church to what all participants called “The System.”

Juan, Manuel, Sara, and Esteban, participants in the study, provide poetic testimonies of an institutional crisis that, as analyzed in Hughes’ work, reveal the lived tension between institutional loyalty and authentic discipleship while illustrating how claims of exclusive ecclesial legitimacy can confine perceptions of God’s activity within human institutional structures. Their words, transformed into poetry, convey what statistical analysis cannot: the gut-level experience of this tension.

Juan eloquently expressed the lived tension, and Appendix A provides the full transcript section, offering readers direct access to the underlying data and enabling engagement with the depth and complexity of the participant’s voice. I summarise his thoughts in a prayer format:

God,

People are in a system.

In church it is difficult to change one’s way of thinking.

Dangers and Danger…

Jesus… it is hard to learn to be a Christian.

The relationship with God they know

is born in this church,

the system.

And there are lots of dangers

that we can find in the church.

Amen.41

(Juan)

At another point in the interview process, Juan described his “sin”, as he had felt he had betrayed God by “misplaced loyalty” to what all identify as “The System”:

Poem: Misplaced Loyalty

Misplaced Loyalty

Absorbing, controlling.

Wasn’t loyal to Jesus.

I was loyal to. . .

(I can’t believe it)

A System.42

(Juan)

Juan’s testimony illustrates how casita theology conflates divine sovereignty with institutional systems. When the “It” mediates faith, questioning the system risks questioning God himself. Such entrapment creates a false choice between defending the institution and abandoning faith.

Across interviews, participants repeatedly described what they called “The System”, best illustrated by the following poem from an interview with Sara and Manuel.

Poem: What can I tell you about The System?

It is results-oriented.

“Baptize a lot so that it looks good.”

That is The System.

It has high boundaries.

Unspoken texts.

“Whether it was verbalized or not, it was the case.”

That is The System.

It creates favoritism.

It has its own leadership.

It has rules for dating.

That is The System.

It is control.

It is dependence.

Its strategy? Campus ministry.

That is The System.

A specific issue?

Cultish practices?

Yes. That, too, is The System.

(Sara and Manuel)

Sara and Manuel’s strong and specific critique reveals the mechanisms of control embedded in “The System.” Their emphasis on “dependence” shows how institutional machinery can supplant Christ-centered faith.

Through decolonial listening, I concluded that “The System” was beyond repair. I identified it as a failed religious innovation and described it with maternal metaphors, “But the 2003 collapse showed it for what it was, a faceless, bodiless, wombless, and motherless system.”43 Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology, however, provides a third way.

Movement Two: Illich’s Bipartite Ecclesiology

Illich: A Missiological Outsider

If casita theology reveals an ecclesial imagination structured by enclosure, boundary, and control, then Ivan Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology offers a necessary disruption. Where the casita confines, Illich reintroduces tension—refusing to collapse the church into a single, unified form. This “It/She” distinction does not resolve the problem of institutional failure; rather, it reframes it. By holding together what casita theology separates or conflates, Illich makes space for discerning God’s presence beyond the limits of institutional belonging without abandoning the church altogether. In this way, his thought does not reject the institution but destabilizes its claim to exclusivity, opening a path toward a more relational, dynamic, and participatory vision of faith grounded in conspiratio.

Although Illich’s work appears only sporadically in missiological literature, his early engagement in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Mexico—including the founding of the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), where he helped train over 2,000 missionaries—was deeply concerned with forming missionaries through cultural respect and genuine face-to-face friendship. This decolonial praxis, or should I say, decolonial listening, is most clearly articulated in his 1968 lecture “To Hell with Good Intentions,” where he challenges American volunteers to renounce their benevolent power and to come instead as learners rather than helpers:

I am here to challenge you

to recognize your inability,

your powerlessness

and your incapacity

to do the ‘good’

which you intended to do. …

Come to look,

come to climb our mountains,

to enjoy our flowers.

Come to study.

But do not come to help.44

For Illich, friendship was not an addition to theology—it was theology embodied. He spoke of “kindling friendship in the course of intellectual work,” redefining mission as philia: a mutual, relational presence rather than participation in an institutional system. Reflecting on the parable of the Samaritan in Luke’s account, Cayley suggests, “‘Who is my neighbor?’ [Illich] answers, ‘He to whom you as a free human being establish your personal proportionality by turning to him in love and inviting him to the mutuality of love which is usually called friendship”.45 In this way, Illich begins to gesture toward a distinction that will become central to his ecclesiology.

Theological Foundations: It and She

At the heart of Illich’s ecclesiology lies his “It/She” distinction, or ecclesia bipertita. This framework enables critique of corrupt institutions without abandoning faith itself, offering a way beyond casita theology’s paralyzing binary of in or out. This tension between institutional machinery and Spirit-led community resonates with contemporary voices from the Global South, who have faced comparable ecclesial struggles. Brazilian sociologist Neto Leão, whose work bridges Illich’s thought with Stone-Campbell Movement theology, captured this paradox during our recorded conversation (Dec. 15, 2021). Leão’s recognition of the same ecclesial tension emerged:

Poem: Paradox

A Spirit in a paradox

within the Church.

The Power of the Spirit.

Power.

The Spirit should be Guide.

To give more space

to the Spirit

to guide the Church.

Trust in the Power

instead of the bureaucratic apparatus.

It can be a mechanism

for evil.

We are the new Pharisees.

To give more space.

Open space.

An outside solution.

For he who continues to believe.

For she who continues to believe.

This theological vision bridges Illich and the Stone-Campbell Movement in practical terms. Leão’s insight that “we are the new Pharisees” when we trust “bureaucratic apparatus” instead of the “Power of the Spirit” directly echoes Illich’s warning about the institutional “It” eclipsing “She.” What follows traces how this tension between “It” and “She” is expressed across contemporary, historical, and lived contexts.

Historical Precedent: Tyconius and the Bipartite Church

Leão recommended I read Agamben, who links Illich with Tyconius (c. 330–390 CE), the North African theologian who coined the term ecclesia bipertita. This notion is not dualistic thinking but rather a theological complementarity. Tyconius saw the church as both sanctified and corrupt, as two sides of the same coin. In contrast to his Donatist peers, who pursued institutional purity through rigid boundaries, he understood the presence of evil within the church as inherent rather than aberrant.46

The Wheat and the Tares: Ecclesial Ambiguity

The parable of the tares (the wheat and the weeds) in Matthew 13:24–43 crystallizes this tension for both Illich and Tyconius. The church is a “bipartite body” in which holiness and corruption coexist. Rather than pursuing premature purification, the parable calls for patience within the ambiguity—to wait, to witness, and to nurture relational integrity amid tension. For Illich, the church’s bipartite nature calls for nonviolent resistance: cultivating spaces of mutuality where face-to-face friendships embody grace in the very midst of evil. Such ambiguity is not failure but mystery, echoing Tyconius’s ecclesia bipertita. The following section examines how a bipartite vision of the church illuminates historical tensions within the Stone-Campbell Movement.

Stone-Campbell Tensions Through Illich’s Lens

Illich’s “It/She” distinction provides a valuable lens for interpreting historical tensions within the Stone-Campbell Movement. Hughes identifies a fundamental conflict in the early nineteenth-century merger of Stone’s apocalyptic vision with Campbell’s rationalist, confrontational stance. Although their union was shaped by shared marginalization, the deeper tension between mysticism and systematization continued to persist.47 Seen through Illich’s framework, this conflict reflects an ongoing negotiation between institutional form and Spirit-led life.

Colombian Case Study Evidence

This theological tension—between corruption and grace, structure and mystery—was strongly echoed in a single participant’s testimony. Esteban, reflecting on the congregational collapse, moved between lament and trust in divine providence within the same conversational flow. His words thus embody Illich’s vision of a church that is both broken and beautiful, revealing ecclesial ambiguity from within lived experience.

In one moment, he names the intensity of spiritual conflict he experienced within the congregation before and during the crisis:

Poem: “The Enemy, SATAN”

SATAN dominated.

Prey of SATAN.

Let SATAN accuse him…

SATAN seeks in every way

to dominate us…

SATAN makes us think

there is no solution…

(Esteban)

This litany of despair names evil directly. The church, in this poem, is not merely a safe haven but a contested battlefield. Yet this is not where the story ends.

In the same conversation, Esteban shifts to a second reflection:

Poem: “Just a Little Piece of Nothing”

He was passing by Jupiter,

getting him turned around.

So, they turned it around and took a picture of the land.

And by turning it over and taking the picture of the earth inside one of the rings,

You came to see a seal of Jupiter.

You see a tiny blue dot.

And that’s the Earth.

The link, yes on YouTube, you can find it

and you can watch it.

I was impressed by that because

it says that

Everything that has happened on Earth—

all our mistakes,

all our weaknesses,

everything is there.

Everything happened on that place,

all the wars,

all the loves,

all the poetry,

Seen from that planet,

we are just a little piece of nothing,

and God loves us

and kept that gigantic gas for comets from crashing into it and has protected the earth.

Oh! That’s it, that’s it.

It is something that surpasses me,

my ability to understand how much he has loved us.

God loves us and how little we are!

And yet—He has control

over it.

So, it seems to me

what we need to do

is love God,

love our families,

and live.

And trust Him.48

(Esteban)

Read together, these two poems arise from the same speaker and the same moment of reflection, revealing a striking movement between spiritual warfare and cosmic humility. Esteban’s testimony thus holds together what might otherwise appear to be a contradiction: an intense awareness of evil within the church alongside profound trust in divine sovereignty.

In this sense, his words vividly enact Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology, portraying the church as both spiritual battlefield and space of grace. His simultaneous recognition of suffering and divine providence models the ambiguity of the “It” and the “She,” where corruption and grace coexist without resolution. The financial dependency that “ran the system” shaped the very structures he attributes to a “nesting place for evil”. This tension sets the stage for Movement Three, where conspiratio will be explored as a constructive response.

Third Movement: Conspiratio as Decolonial Reorientation

If Movement One names the problem and Movement Two reframes it theologically, Movement Three turns to practice—what it might look like to inhabit conspiratio within real communities, through shared practices of trust, listening, and mutuality.

Illich disrupts the casita logic. Rather than relying on ecclesial power or institutional salvation, he commends mission as mutuality, friendship, and presence. As Cayley observes, Illich imagined a church without walls—one where believers gather face-to-face around dining room tables rather than formal altars: “Celebration will sanctify the dining room,” a vision that reflects his understanding of mission as rooted in shared life among families and friends rather than institutional ritual.49

This image resonates with Bosch’s theology of table fellowship and Love’s theology of hospitality. This insight also connects to my own metaphor, échale agua a la sopa—an invitation to widen the table rather than reinforce the walls, to move from casita to casona (a large house with room for everyone).50

The Stone-Campbell Movement’s frontier origins and non-creedal practices—such as weekly communion and adult baptism, which require neither clergy nor consecrated space—are examples of how conspiratio might already be latent within the tradition. These may be precisely the gifts needed in this season of institutional uncertainty. Our ancestors’ capacity to meet their cultural moment with radical faith suggests that we, too, might sustain faith beyond current institutional forms. A practical aid to study this in groups is Together Towards Life.51

Illich’s framework provides theological grounding; conspiratio provides the practice. It takes shape in the creation of spaces of trust beyond institutional walls. My own journey, marked by ecclesial disillusionment, revealed the darkness of the “It.” Yet Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology led me toward a lived experience of re-evangelization, where I learned to live within that tension—to critique the “It” while nurturing the “She.” What emerged were not endless meetings and conferences on discussing how to “fix the system”, but gathering together for decolonial listening.

The following poem, drawn from participants’ reflections, captures this collective movement toward trust:

Poem: Creating Spaces of Trust

Connect.

To explain.

A place

for forgiveness.

And to discuss.

Discussing

contributes

to connecting.

Discussion

is trying

to understand.

Explanation,

in a space,

allowed to flourish.

An open space

must be evaluated.

We are

creating spaces.

Spaces for…

To give more space.

To create,

finally,

spaces of trust.

What do these “spaces of trust” look like in practice? In one gathering following the financial collapse, a small group met around a kitchen table in a modest Colombian home. Coffee was poured. Someone began—not with doctrine, but with a story of hurt. No one interrupted. There was no immediate correction, no appeal to authority. Instead, there was listening—slow, attentive, embodied. Another responded, not with answers, but with recognition: “yo también.” A simple meal was shared. In that space, confession did not lead to exclusion but to connection. Authority shifted from hierarchy to presence. Trust was not assumed; it was built through mutual vulnerability as participants agreed that friendship was their reason for staying.

This vision of “spaces of trust” embodies what Illich meant by conspiratio—breathing together in mutual vulnerability rather than defending institutional boundaries. In these spaces, participants listen without immediate correction, share meals and stories, and practice forms of presence that resist the urgency to fix or control, echoing the maternal table embodied in the metaphor of échale agua a la sopa.

My research sought to understand where spaces were created after the financial collapse. Although a rented facility remained in use for public services for several years, interviewees consistently pointed to other, more relational spaces that emerged in its wake. These spaces arose precisely because institutional structures no longer held trust, requiring new forms of gathering and conversation. Future research could further examine how mothers and grandmothers created such spaces in their homes—a vital yet underexplored dimension of the community’s resilience and growth in Iglesia ICI-Colombia.

But both the congregation and the Colombian mothers revealed another way—echarle más agua a la sopa—stretching scarcity into abundance through mutuality. In practice, this meant one more chair pulled up, one more plate extended, one more voice welcomed without interrogation. Their wisdom echoes Illich’s vision: creating space for the “She” to flourish even as the “It” falters.

The Stone-Campbell Movement now faces two urgent missiological fronts in which these insights must be applied. First, many congregations are shrinking as younger generations increasingly disengage from institutional religion, including within the Stone-Campbell tradition. Second, Global South congregations remain structurally linked through financial dependency, which often translates into external ecclesial authority. These fronts are not separate but interconnected: as membership declines in the United States, so too does the flow of resources that sustains these global relationships, further entrenching asymmetries of power.

In this context, decolonial listening is not optional; it is essential. But what does this mean in practice? It requires sustained, attentive engagement with those whose voices are often marginalized: younger generations disillusioned with institutional forms of faith, and grassroots members in the Global South whose lived realities are frequently mediated through external structures of control. As my research demonstrates, these voices do not merely offer critique—they carry vital theological insight.

To take decolonial listening seriously is to risk reordering our priorities. It may require radical shifts in how authority, resources, and space are held—reconsidering ownership of church buildings, educational institutions, and established programs. Such a reorientation calls the movement back to its origins. The question is whether we are willing to do so again, reclaiming the radical legacy of the Stone-Campbell Movement, which once prioritized the “She” over the “It” at great cost.

My research shows that the way forward is not easy. But both the congregation and the Colombian mothers revealed another way—echarle más agua a la sopa—stretching scarcity into abundance through mutuality. In practice, this meant one more chair pulled up, one more plate extended, one more voice welcomed without interrogation. Their wisdom echoes Illich’s vision: creating space for the “She” to flourish even as the “It” falters. This practice is not abstract; it is embodied in shared meals, extended hospitality, and a willingness to make room for one more voice at the table. This is the re-evangelization we need—not a fix, but a feast…a feast made possible through shared life, mutual trust, and the slow work of conspiratio.

Conclusion: Breaking the Casita Logic

The path beyond the walls of the “little house” lies not in abandoning institutional structures but in learning to discern within them. Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology offers Stone-Campbell Movement communities a way to break free from the casita logic that traps us in false choices—between defending institutional failures and abandoning faith altogether. By distinguishing the institutional “It” from the mystical “She,” we gain the freedom to critique systemic corruption while nurturing conspiratio, confirming that there is a spiritual life beyond the high boundaries or walls of the “little house.”

Through poetic inquiry, participants demonstrate that even when institutions fail, the possibility of mutuality endures beyond institutional forms. Juan’s awareness of the “lots of dangers… in the church” need not lead to despair when we recognize that these dangers arise primarily from the “It” rather than the “She.” José’s journey—from naming “The Enemy, SATAN” to choosing radical trust—embodies this tension, holding corruption and grace together without collapsing into either cynicism or denial. These dynamics recur throughout the poetic data set.

The future of Stone-Campbell faith in this age of religious obsolescence may depend less on institutional survival and more on our willingness to cultivate spaces of trust where genuine relationships can flourish. Practicing decolonial listening is essential—not as method alone, but as posture and practice.

Illich’s bipartite ecclesiology reminds us that the “She” can flourish even when the “It” falters. The mystical body of Christ persists through conspiratio: breathing together in vulnerable community that transcends denominational boundaries. This movement toward conspiratio is expressed in a final poetic synthesis emerging from participant data:

Mutuality is…

Mutuality

is

creating spaces

while

walking together

through

a system broken beyond repair.52

This is the conspiratio Illich envisioned—not a solution to institutional crisis, but a way of being together that transcends it. Whether the Stone-Campbell Movement endures institutionally matters less than whether its people learn to live this mutuality—breathing together, sharing tables, crossing boundaries, and trusting God’s love even as our casitas crumble.

This reorientation returns the movement to its origins. The question is whether we are willing to do so again, reclaiming the radical legacy of the Stone-Campbell Movement, which once prioritized the “She” over the “It” at great cost. In the end, faith is not a house but a journey, not a system but a relationship—not a casita but a casona, where scarcity is transformed into feast.

---

1. 1 Christian Smith, Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America (Oxford University Press, 2025).

2. 2 Brian D. McLaren, Do I Stay Christian? A Guide for the Doubters, the Disappointed, and the Disillusioned (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2022).

3. 3 David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Orbis Books, 1991), 15–16.

4. 4 Illich is rarely cited in mainstream missiological discourses, although he was a missiologist in his early career. Bosch cites him in Transforming Mission, 436, 493; Samuel E. Ewell, Faith Seeking Conviviality: Reflections on Ivan Illich, Christian Mission, and the Promise of Life Together (Wipf and Stock, 2019).

5. 5 Enrique Dussel, “Epistemological Decolonization of Theology,” in R. Barreto and R. Sirvent (eds.), Decolonial Christianities, pp. 25–42 (Springer International, 2019); Mogens Mogensen, “A Missiology of Listening for a Folk Church in a Postmodern Context.” In Foundations for Mission, eds. E. Wild-Wood and P. Rajkumar (Regnum Books International, 2012), 190–204; Francis Sosta, “Decolonizing Listening to Decolonize Memory,” From the European South 11 (2022): 10–23.

6. 6 Renee Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality in a Theology of Mission” (PhD diss., Stellenbosch University, 2023), which provides the primary ethnographic and theological framework for this study.

7. 7 Bosch, Transforming Mission, 26; I describe this experience in Renee Rheinbolt-Uribe, “‘Let Us Return’: Enacting Transforming Mutuality Through Duoethnography,” Journal of Religion and Public Life, (Forthcoming, Spring 2026).

8. 8 A recognized method within Poetic Inquiry involves transforming interview transcripts into poetic form to enhance interpretive depth and emotional nuance. Sandra L. Faulkner, Poetic Inquiry: Craft, Method, and Practice (Routledge, 2019).

9. 9 Ivan Illich, The Church, Change and Development (Chicago: Urban Training Center Press, 1970), 87.

10. 10 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace, 2nd ed. (Beacon Press, 1995).

11. 11 Renee Uribe, “Beyond the ‘It’: Mutuality, Maternal-Thinking, and the ‘She’ in Illich’s Thought,” Conspiratio 6 (2024): 46.

12. 12 Renee Rheinbolt-Uribe, “I Was Trained to Be a Man: Reclaiming the Motherline, the Maternal Gift Economy, and the Missio Dei.” Missio Dei Journal, no. MD 15 (2025).

13. 13 Renee Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality, The Jesus-Mary Relationship as a Model for Theology and Public Life,” Journal of Religion and Public Life 1, no. 2 (2024): 5-20.

14. 14 Mark Love, “Missio Dei, Trinitarian Theology, and the Quest for a Post-Colonial Missiology,” Missio Dei Journal 1, no. 2 (2010).

15. 15 Richard T. Hughes and Christina Littlefield, Christian America and the Kingdom of God: White Christian Nationalism from the Puritans Through January 6, 2021 (Eerdmans, 2025).

16. 16 Francis Sosta, “Decolonizing Listening to Decolonize Memory,” From the European South 11 (2022): 10–23.

17. 17 Ivan Illich, The Powerless Church and Other Selected Writings, 1955-1985 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).

18. 18 Illich, Rivers North, 61.

19. 19 Bosch, Transforming Mission, 390.

20. 20 David J. Bosch, “Re-evangelisation: Reflecting on the Contributions of J N J Kritzinger and S Mkhatshwa,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 76 (1991): 122–31.

21. 21 Cayley, An Intellectual Journey, 351–59; Neto Leão, “Vernacular Forms-of-living: Thinking After Ivan Illich” (PhD diss., Universidad Estatal De Campinas, 2022), 33.

22. 22 Samuel Escobar, “A Movement Divided: Three Approaches to World Evangelization Stand in Tension with One Another.” Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 8, no. 4 (1991): 11, provides a definition, “As a typical school of thought coming from the modern [USA], the quantitative approach is predominant and the pragmatic orientation well defined. . . the evangelistic task is reduced to a process that can be carried out in accordance with standard marketing principles.”

23. 23 Andrew T. Draper, “The End of ‘Mission’: Christian Witness and the Decentering of White Identity.” In Can ‘White’ People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission, eds. L. L. Sechrest, J. Ramirez-Johnson, and A. Yong (InterVarsity Press, 2018), 177-205, 181.

24. 24 Richard T. Hughes, “Escaping the Web of White Supremacy: Our Most Urgent Task in the Work of Character Formation,” The Cresset 83, no. 2 (2019): 4–8; Richard T. Hughes. Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories That Give Us Meaning (University of Illinois Press, 2018).

25. 25 Bosch, Transforming Mission, 393.

26. 26 Kathleen E. Jenkins, “Intimate Diversity: The Presentation of Multiculturalism and Multiracialism in High-Boundary Religious Movements,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42, no. 3 (2003): 393–409.

27. 27 Cayley, Intellectual Journey, 223-234.

28. 28 Felipe Lamb and Donna Lamb, El Movimiento de Jesus: El Mensaje Vivo para un Mundo Moderno (Jose Manuel Garza Mier y Teran, 1991).

29. 29 Bosch, Transforming Mission, 420.

30. 30 Adapted from Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality,” 372.

31. 31 Adapted from Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality,” 372.

32. 32 J. Caleb Clanton, Restoration and Philosophy: New Philosophical Engagements with the Stone-Campbell Tradition (University of Tennessee Press, 2019); Jeanie Shaw, Re-Examining Our Lenses: The Relationship Between Restoration Movement Hermeneutics and Spiritual Formation (Illumination Publishers International, 2024).

33. 33 Thomas H. Olbricht, “Walter Scott as Biblical Interpreter.” In Walter Scott: A Nineteenth Century Evangelical, ed. M. G. Toulouse (Chalice Press, 1999), 79–107.

34. 34 Edward Hicks, “Sometimes in the Wrong, But Never in Doubt”: George S. Benson and the Education of the New Religious Right (University of Tennessee Press, 1994); Bob Waldron, “A Portrait of US Church of Christ Missionaries,” Missio Dei 8, no. 1 (2017).

35. 35 Beyond my own PhD dissertation, I located only one book focused on the International Church of Christ: Neto Leão et al., Jornada de Fé: Uma Breve História da Igreja de Cristo Internacional do Brasil – 30 Anos de História (1987–2017) (Self-published, 2017). In contrast, there is a growing body of research on the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe. One example is Gift Masengwe, “The Church of Christ in Zimbabwe: Identity and Mission Continuity (in Diversity)” (PhD diss., University of South Africa, 2020). Also see Stone-Campbell African scholar, Paul S. Chimhungwe, “The Conversion Process in Southern Africa (1914-1927): An Historical Analysis,” in Missional Life in Practice and Theory: Essays in Honor of Gailyn Van Rheenen, ed. Christopher L. Flanders and Greg McKinzie (Pickwick Publications, 2024).

36. 36 For neoliberalism as one of the relational causal influences described by Smith in explaining the obsolescence of religion in the USA, see Smith, Religion Went Obsolete.

37. 37 Leão et al., Jornada de Fé, 93; Mark A. Noll, Christianity in America: A Handbook (Lion Publishing, 1983), 184.

38. 38 Chris Flanders, “Kainos Koinonias: How Innovative Faith Communities Embody the Missio Dei,” Mission Alive, January 17, 2024, https://missionalive.substack.com/p/kainos-koinonias.

39. 39 Robert Wuthnow, Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (University of California Press, 2010).

40. 40 Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality,” 195.

41. 41 Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality,” 213-14.

42. 42 Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality,” 205.

43. 43 Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality,” 214. Still, it destabilizes.

44. 44 Illich, The Powerless Church, 139.

45. 45 Cayley, Intellectual Journey, 383.

46. 46 Giorgio Agamben, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, trans. Adam Kotsko (Polity Press, 2017).

47. 47 Richard T. Hughes, “The Apocalyptic Origins of Churches of Christ and the Triumph of Modernism,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 2, no. 2 (1992): 181–214.

48. 48 Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality”, 31-32.

49. 49 Cayley, Intellectual Journey, 66.

50. 50 Love, “Missio Dei.”; Bosch, Transforming Mission, 41–46, 107, 167, 199; Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality,” 234.

51. 51 Jooseop Keum, Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes: with a Practical Guide, ed. (World Council of Churches, 2013).

52. 52 Rheinbolt-Uribe, “Transforming Mutuality,” 250; Uribe, “Beyond the ‘It’,” 52.

Introduction

The Churches of Christ are the most well-established strand of the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement (SCRM) in Ghana. Two American missionaries, Wendell Broom and Sewell Hall are credited with initiating this work around 1958. Since then, the community has flourished. The Ghanaian congregations are generally self-governing, self-propagating, and somewhat self-supporting. There is still a significant financial connection between Ghanaian congregations and American support sources. Additionally, there seems to be an inordinate attachment to the theological vision bequeathed by missionaries in Ghana. In this paper, I submit that the narrow nature of this theological vision has resulted in poor spiritual formation among the SCRM in Ghana and that this situation can improve if the community responds wisely to the spiritual development needs of its emerging generation of leaders.

Douglas Foster is a respected church historian affiliated with the SCRM. He has had an illustrious academic career. He rose through the ranks to become a professor emeritus in church history at Abilene Christian University (ACU), in Abilene, Texas. For many years Foster directed the Center for Restoration Studies also at ACU. He served as the General Editor for the Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement published in 2004 as well as The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History published in 2013. After more than four decades of excellence as a SCRM historian, Foster has a forthcoming article inquiring into the theological vision of the SCRM particularly, spirituality of the Churches of Christ.1 This article is his first exploration into the subject of spirituality. Foster’s burgeoning interest in the subject of spirituality in itself, is instructive.

In this article, Foster recounts two anecdotes; one in his ministry career in the 1970s and 1980s in Nashville, Tennessee and the second, a more recent one during his academic career at ACU. In the first one, he tells the story of the reaction of one of his favourite elders at a recurring elders’ meeting he described as “mind-numbing.” He noted that the winding nature of the meeting and the bickering which characterized the meeting led his “favourite” elder to shout in exasperation: “What we need in this church is more spiritualism.” In the second anecdote, Foster was sharing his current research interest in spirituality of Churches of Christ with a female colleague. This female colleague, with her eyebrow raised, asked, “Do we have any?”

According to Foster, the reactions in both anecdotes are true reflections of the general assumptions about the Churches of Christ in America. This faith tradition has historically emphasized rationality to the neglect of spirituality. Indeed, many in the Churches of Christ are likely to construe or confuse spirituality with reading the Bible, prayer, evangelism, caring for the poor, ethical behaviour, and financially supporting missionary work around the world.2

Theologically, the Churches of Christ in Ghana are not significantly different from their mission source, but Ghana is generally more conservative than their mainline American counterparts. After almost seven decades of existence, the Ghanaian brotherhood appropriates the theological legacy bequeathed by missionaries. This includes a theological vision of “spirituality” such as was concisely articulated by Alexander Campbell in November 1843 in his debate with N. L. Rice when he defended the proposition that “in conversion and sanctification the Spirit works only through the word of truth.”3 This theological vision is predominantly cerebral.

Robert Richardson, a close associate of Alexander Campbell and at one time, an associate editor of Millennial Harbinger, remarked concerning this theological vision, that “it exaggerates the power of facts, endows the words of the Bible with ‘unwonted efficacy,’ and improperly ties faith to material things…it cannot get beyond facts and arguments to an intimate and personal communion with God.”4 In other words, in this theological vision, the “letter” is given pre-eminence over the “Spirit.”

The church in Ghana stresses a “strong view of Scripture’s authority, the centrality of Christ’s death for our sins, and a strong impulse for evangelism and service.”5 Consequently, in relation to the process of spiritual growth, “there is an assumption that the appropriation of biblical knowledge will by itself lead to spiritual maturity.”6 More than a century prior, Richardson anticipated the inherent deficiency in these writings. He indicated that such a theological vision eventuated in “chilled Spiritual vitality, doctrinal formalism, and an arresting of the full restoration of pure Christian faith.”7 Richardson’s thesis seems to have been vindicated within the Churches of Christ in Ghana.

In 1997, at the “Africans Claiming Africa” conference in Zimbabwe, John Franklin Tamakloe, one of the pioneering preachers of the SCRM in Ghana raised an alarm about the spiritual implications of the theological orientation utilized within our movement in Ghana. Speaking on the topic: “The Gospel, Not Issues,” Tamakloe observed among others that:

…Everything has been mechanized; patterns and form have taken the place of spirituality. Greed, envy, pettiness, and lack of Christian courtesy and charity, etc., are things we are now contending with, because our brethren have misplaced their trust and loyalty. Our faith is more in the ‘Institution’ than in the ‘Institutor.’ Those things that may be aptly described as the ‘fruits of the Spirit’ are non-existent in the lives of our members.8

Therefore, as far back as 1997, the effect of the anemic theology of spiritual growth of the community was discernible. Mastery of biblical information was confused for spiritual transformation. Character formation and spiritual transformation were not given their pride of place in the life of the community in Ghana. Doctrinal exactitude has been elevated over a transformed and sanctified Christian life. As expected, this dearth of spirituality has affected the holistic growth of the community in Ghana.

Although the community has recorded significant numerical growth over the years, the same cannot be said for qualitative growth. Even though the movement is called the “Churches of Christ,” the character of Christ is visibly absent in the church’s orientation and habits. Conflict, division, rancour, and even ethnocentrism have characterized the life of the community. As a consequence, the community has not lived up to her potential.

The Birth of a New Generation

Beginning in 1980s, the development of higher education in Ghana led to the challenging of this theological vision. As young persons from the church pursued higher education, they carried their faith along with them to the various public universities. On account of this, campus churches affiliated with the Churches of Christ in Ghana emerged. This new ministry context comprised mostly emerging adults; ages ranging between 20 and 30 years old,9 interspersed by a few older ones. This development has led to a new generation of church members who have realized certain difficulties with the prevailing theological vision. More specifically, this group has noted flaws in the theological vision that often manifest behaviourally within the community in the form of hypocrisy – a palpable discrepancy between identity and character; from top to bottom.

A characteristic of this new generation was and still is a lesser tolerance for spiritual hypocrisy and a yearning openness to more genuine and deeper levels of spirituality. Beyond the general notion that Africans innately possess an enchanted worldview and are incurably religious,10 deepening levels of spirituality for many emerging adults in Ghana has become an existential necessity. Like many African nations, Ghana can be considered a failed state.11 Due to pervasive corruption, economic mismanagement, wanton dissipation of state resources, the state is unable to meet the legitimate needs and aspirations of her citizenry. Consequently, many emerging adults in Ghana look to God through their faith; and not to the state, to succeed in life. Thus, to many emerging adults in Ghana, including those within the Churches of Christ, a robust spirituality offers a better future.

Retreat as a Means of Spiritual Formation

To mitigate against the adverse effects of the SCRM inherited theology of ministry, these emerging adults began seeking avenues and opportunities to drink from the deep spiritual wells in Scripture and Christian history. Beginning in 2011, the Church of Christ campus ministry at the University of Cape Coast where I minister initiated a retreat for leaders. The leadership retreat emerged as a response to the deterioration in spiritual progress among members of the church in Ghana. Through word of mouth, seven other campus churches joined the retreat.

I designed and led the initial retreat, which has become a bi-annual gathering. In the retreats, we focus on the spiritual disciplines of engagement and abstinence. Participants recognize a disparity between belief and practice, often seeing their own lives as prima facie evidence. We started the retreat in recognition of the fact that we could not expect different outcomes from our inherited approach to ministry. We needed to explore other ways of doing ministry which prioritized formation and transformation over biblicism, crucicentrism, conversion, and activism,12 as important they are. As things were, we were not being prepared to participate in God’s life and mission. We were miles away from being like Christ and sharing in the character of God. The content, activities, and processes at the retreat are all based on the belief that the ultimate telos of ministry is human transformation and communal participation in the divine life.

An Evaluative Assessment of the Retreat

After more than a decade of the leadership retreat, an evaluative assessment of the program was carried out between January and February, 2024. The evaluation sought to gather, analyse, and interpret data about the bi-annual program in a systematized manner so that conclusions could be drawn in respect of its spiritual formative function. A qualitative research design was adopted relying on semi-structured interviews for data collection. Interviews were utilized because of its suitability for individualized stories, views, and inclusivity. Additionally, interviews allow for covert constructs like attitudes, personal feelings, and interpretations to be accessed.13

Individuals who had participated in the retreat from 2016 formed the population for the study. Purposive sampling technique was used to select participants because certain peculiar qualities and characteristics were essential to the study. For instance, expressive individuals; those with the ability to articulate their experience was critical. Regarding sample size, given the potential of interviews to generate overwhelming data, a total of 15 retreat participants were selected for the study. They comprised eight females constituting 53%, and seven males who made up the remaining 47%. Participants were drawn from six campus churches. Their ages ranged between 24 to 32 years. The number of years participants had spent in Christ after baptism ranged between 8 to 17 years. Participants had attended the retreat as few as twice and as many as eleven times. One participant had attended all retreats since 2016.

In terms of instrumentation, a semi-structured interview questions were utilized. Retreat participants have created a social media platform on which they frequently interact. Therefore, recruiting participants was easy. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and subsequently analysed using the NVivo 14 software. To increase the richness and robustness of the data, a focus group discussion was conducted via Zoom in addition. The resultant data was analysed using Reflexive thematic analysis (RTA). Reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) is considered “easily accessible and theoretically flexible interpretative approach to qualitative data analysis.”14 RTA allows for the identification, categorization, and analysis of patterns or themes in a given qualitative data set. It is considered flexible because it is amenable to varying approaches. Specifically, RTA is capable of utilizing three main continua within qualitative research approaches: inductive versus deductive or theory-driven data coding and analysis, experiential versus critical orientation, and an essentialist versus constructionist.

When a researcher chooses the inductive or data-driven approach to data coding and analysis, codes produced reflect directly from the content of the data set and are devoid of a preconceived theory or conceptual frame-work. The deductive approach or ‘theory-driven’, on the other hand, produces codes in relation to a pre-advertised conceptual framework. In such a case, both coding and analysis are analyst-driven rather than content-driven. Codes generated and analysis performed reflect more on an undergirding theoretical framework and not necessarily on the data set under consideration.15

In experiential orientation to data analysis, priority is given to the unique ways participants experienced the phenomenon being investigated, including the meanings they assign to these experiences. Even though thoughts, feelings, and experiences are subjectively recounted, the researcher employing this approach would be expected to defer to the meaning and meaningfulness attributed to the experience by the participant. Conversely, in the critical orientation, a researcher approaches and analyzes data “as if it were constitutive, rather than reflective of participants’ personal state.”16 The intent of the critical approach is to question patterns and themes of meaning from a theoretical understanding that language creates and not merely reflect a given social reality.17 In the critical approach, a researcher may attempt to investigate the mechanisms underlying participants’ construction or development of systems of meaning and in so doing interpret or second-guess the meanings engendered by participants.

In essentialism, a researcher uses a unidirectional appreciation of the correlation between language and communicated experience, such that it is assumed language is a natural reflection of expressed meanings and experiences. Consequently, meanings that are attached to systems in developing these meanings are largely uninterrogated. Those of the constructionist perspective prefer a bidirectional appreciation of the language/experience dichotomy, insisting that language is implied in the social construction and reconstruction of both meaning and experience.

This study proceeded on the basis of an inductive, experiential, and essentialist continua. This means that analysis was data-driven and that codes generated and analyses performed were based directly on a reflection on the content of the data. Furthermore, priority was placed on the unique experiences of participants at the leadership retreat and the subjective meanings, feelings, thoughts they attributed to these experiences. Additionally, this study took for granted the relationship between language and communicated experience and that language is a natural expression of unique meanings and experiences. Thus, no attempts were made to second-guess the participants in the study or superimpose any external interpretation on their thoughts, feelings, and experiences expressed in this study.

Coding was done semantically. This means that codes were identified through explicit or plain, unambiguous meanings of the data. The researcher did not have to engage in mirror-reading or reading-in-between the lines. The researcher did not go or look beyond the participants’ statements. The use of semantic codes is defined as descriptive analysis of the data, and the intent is to present the content of the data as expressed by participants.18

The NVivo 14 software was used to process and gather emerging themes, patterns, and commonalities based on the interview questions. A six-phase process was employed to facilitate the analysis, identification, and categorization of codes, themes, patterns, and attending to essential aspects of thematic analysis.19 While the six phases proceed in a logical sequence, the analysis is not a linear process of moving through the phases. “Rather, the analysis is recursive and iterative, requiring the researcher to move back and forth through the phases as necessary.”20 Below is a summary of the six phases of RTA.

Phase One: Familiarization with the Data

This first phase involves the reading and rereading the transcribed data set in its entirety for the express purpose of becoming intimately conversant and familiar with the data. This phase is critical for identifying relevant and appropriate information that correlates with the research questions or whatever the case might be. In the case of audio recordings, familiarization can be done by actively listening to each interview recording. A researcher may take notes as part of the familiarization phase.

Phase Two: Generating Initial Codes

Codes are pithy, shorthand descriptive and sometimes interpretative labels which encapsulate information relevant to the research or interview questions. Codes form the basis of generating themes and are developed when the researcher attends equitably to the entire data set, identifying aspects of data that is germane to the generation of themes. Codes are technically brief, yet sufficient enough to independently inform underlying similarities among constituent data sets in relation to research questions.

Phase Three: Generating Themes

This phase begins after initial codes have been generated, when attention shifts from interpreting individual data items (codes) within the dataset, to interpreting aggregated meaning and meaningfulness across the dataset. Themes and sub-themes are formed when coded data is reviewed and analysed to show how varying codes may be combined based on shared meanings. Themes may be distinctive and even contradictory; however, they should cohere to offer a clear idea and picture of data set.

Phase Four: Reviewing Potential Themes

At this phase, the researcher assesses and evaluates potential themes in relation to coded items and entire dataset. Themes which are deemed irrelevant or redundant in terms of their contribution to meaningful interpretation of data or possession of information which addresses research questions are culled. Two levels of review are carried out at this phase. Level one reviews the relationships within data items and codes that inform each theme and sub-theme. Level two review themes in relation to data set. Themes are assessed for their aptness regarding interpretation of data in relation to research questions.

Phase Five: Defining and Naming Themes

The task in phase five offers an in-depth analysis of the thematic framework. Each of the themes and sub-themes are developed in relation to the dataset and the research question(s). Each theme functions to provide a coherent and internally consistent account of the data. Together, all themes function to paint a lucid picture that is congruent with the content of the dataset and informative in relation to the research question(s). This phase requires deep analysis of underlying data items.

Phase Six: Producing the Report

The final phase of reflexive thematic analysis is the production of the report. Like the other phases, producing the report can be a fluid recursive process. As and/or when codes and themes change and evolve over the course of analysis, so too can the report. Changes along the way are recorded in informal notes and memos. A research journal is kept for this purpose. Thus, phase six is perceived as the completion and final inspection of the report the researcher began at the inception of the research.

Findings and Discussions

The results of the data demonstrate that all participants’ assessment and evaluation of the leadership retreats were positive. Participants described the retreats as educative, transformative, impactful, and a means by which emerging adults learn about Christ and leadership roles in the church. Others described the retreat as a “life changing event because it offered them spiritual perspectives to life and living it.” Beyond the spiritual benefits, participants indicated that the retreats also helped them develop relevant psychosocial skills through their engagement and interaction with peers from other campuses.

They indicated further that the structure, the activities, and the content of the retreats, and, of course, the power of the Holy Spirit interact to instigate and orchestrate the participants’ spiritual growth and maturity. The open, honest, and transparent discussion of relevant issues that thwart the spiritual growth of emerging adults and the insightful responses offered by resource persons play a critical role in the growth and maturation process. Spiritual exercises like fasting and prayers, and the communal spirit engendered at the retreat all contribute to the growth and maturation participants experience. The vulnerability exemplified by the convener of the retreat and promoted at the retreat are essential ingredients in the growth process.

To a question about whether the transformation they were describing could be possible in their local congregations, the overwhelming majority of participants answered in the negative. This suggests that given the ministry orientation of their local congregations, the majority of participants did not believe that the formation and transformation they received through the leadership retreat would be possible in their various local congregations. The reasons they noted in their responses were mainly concerned with the telos or theology of ministry pursued in the various local congregations.

Implications of Findings for Ministry Among Churches of Christ in Ghana

First, the findings from this study indicate that emerging adults, who form a significant majority in many congregations of the Churches of Christ in Ghana, possess a deep yearning for spiritual formation and transformation. Despite the moral lapses and the ravaging effects of the culture in which they are immersed, emerging adults affiliated with the Churches of Christ in Ghana demonstrate a palpable, burning desire for God.

They desperately seek spirituality. Many of their addictions may be desperate attempts at compensating for the void created by the distance which exists between them and God. Consequently, the church in Ghana must begin to revise their notes about emerging adults, begin to see beyond the false appearances that emerging adults often display, and discover their deep yearning and groaning for God in their lives.

Second, findings from this study demand the Churches of Christ in Ghana to interrogate and audit our vision or theology of ministry. It has become abundantly clear that even though the prevailing theology of ministry which resolves around evangelism, edification, and benevolence is valuable, it appears inadequate to meet the spiritual needs of emerging adults. Many of them expressed a sense of bewilderment, disillusionment, and abandonment as a result of the unquestioned dependence and utilization of those mantras even when they do not meet their peculiar spiritual needs.

Third, the Churches of Christ in Ghana must come to terms with the reality that spiritual formation and transformation are legitimate telos of ministry which is consistent with the teachings of Scripture. When all an emerging adult receives from Bible studies is information but not transformation, the Bible becomes nothing more than a newspaper because that is all that a newspaper has to offer–information. The Churches of Christ in Ghana must desist henceforth from measuring ministry success by the number of converts. We must begin to commit ourselves to the higher standard of forming and transforming coverts into the nature of Christ.

Finally, a critical assignment derived from this study for the Churches of Christ in Ghana is to revise the curriculum of the preaching schools affiliated with the community in Ghana. Part of the reason Churches of Christ in Ghana relegate spiritual formation and transformation to the background or discount and discredit its relevance is that the subject of spiritual formation and transformation does not feature in the curriculum of many of the training institutions which train ministers and leaders for the Churches of Christ in Ghana. Consequently, many preachers who serve the various congregations have neither the necessary training nor the tools necessary to equip them for spiritual formation and transformation.

Therefore, one way of reversing or addressing the situation is for the training institutions to begin incorporating the theological discipline of spiritual formation and include more developed theologies of Christian transformation into their curriculum. This assures that from the onset those clothed with the responsibility of ensuring the spiritual growth of the church are neither ignorant nor oblivious of the need for spiritual formation and transformation.

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1. 1 Douglas A. Foster, “The Spirituality of Churches of Christ: A Preliminary Inquiry, Teleios Journal 6 No. 2. Winter 2026.

2. 2 Ibid, 1.

3. 3 C. Leonard Allen and Danny G. Swick, Participating in God’s Life: Two Crossroads for Churches of Christ (Orange: New Leaf, 2001), 40.

4. 4 Ibid, 46.

5. 5 Leonard Allen, In the Great Stream: Imagining Churches of Christ in the Christian Tradition (Abilene: ACU Press, 2021), 46.

6. 6 Barna Group, The State of Discipleship: Research Conducted among Christian Adults, Church Leaders, Exemplar Discipleship Ministries and Christian Educators (Ventura: Barna, 2015), 60.

7. 7 These expressions are attributed to Robert Richardson when he published a series of articles entitled “Misrepresentation of Scripture” in 1857 protesting the overreliance of human philosophy instead of the Spirit of God in the interpretation. It was cited by: C. Leonard Allen and Danny G. Swick, Participating in God’s Life, 38.

8. 8 Sam Shewmaker, Africans Claiming Africa: Living the Vision (Fullerton: DRUMBAT Publications, 1999), 112.

9. 9 The ages of college students in Ghana tend to be higher than their counterparts in the West because of issues of affordability and accessibility. Hitherto, the cost of higher education was such that only the rich in the society could afford. Such that, after high school, economically challenged individuals needed to stay at home, so that they and their families could work and accrue enough money to be able to pay their way through tertiary education. In the 1970s and 1980s, the average of college students in Ghana were higher than what pertains today. However, with enhanced investment in Ghana from the late 1980s until now, many more people are able to afford higher education now and so the average has also dropped.

10. 10 In African Religious and Philosophy (Nairobi: EAEP, 1969), 1; John Mbiti, the famous expert on African religion and philosophy, discusses into detail this phenomenon. A more recent reflections on this subject in relation to the dynamic effects of secularization can be found in a collection of essays edited by: Benno van den Toren, Joseph Bosco Bangura, and Richard E. Seed, Is Africa Incurably Religious? Secularization and Discipleship in Africa (Oxford: Regnum Books, 2020).

11. 11 In his book, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (Cambridge: World Peace Foundation, 2003), 3; Robert I. Rotberg provides a framework and rubric for determining a failed state. He indicates that, “Nation-states exist to provide a decentralized method of delivering political (public) goods to persons living in designated parameters (borders)…[they] focus and answer the concerns and demands of citizenries. They organize and channel the interests of their people, often but not exclusively in furtherance of national goals and values. He indicates that it is the responsibility of states to cocoon their citizenry from exogenous forces and factors that impinge on the economic, political, and social wellbeing of their people while promoting the interests of the citizenry. The success or failure of states are determined on this rubric.

12. 12 These terms were used by David Bebbington to characterize the central theological attitude and convictions of Evangelicals. It can be found in: Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hymn, 1989), pp. 2–17. This was cited by Jeffrey P. Greenman, “Spiritual formation in theological perspective.” Life in the Spirit: Spiritual formation in theological perspective (2010): 23-35.

13. 13 Tim Sensing, Qualitative Research: A Multi-Methods Approach to Projects for Doctor of Ministry Theses. Kindle ed. (Eugene: WIPF&STOCK, 2011), 70.

14. 14 Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, “Thematic Analysis.” in APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology, eds. Harris Cooper, et al. (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2012), 57-71.

15. 15 David Byrne, “A Worked Example of Braun and Clarke’s Approach to Reflexive Thematic Analysis,” Quality and Quantity 56, no. 3 (2021): 1391–1412, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-021-01182-y, 1396.

16. 16 Ibid, 1396.

17. 17 Gareth Terry, et al., “Thematic Analysis.” In: Carla Willig and Wendy Stainton Rogers, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology (London: Sage, 2017), 17-37.

18. 18 David Byrne, “A Worked Example of Braun and Clarke’s Approach to Reflexive Thematic Analysis,” 1397.

19. 19 Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, “Thematic Analysis,” 60.

20. 20 David Byrne, “A Worked Example of Braun and Clarke’s Approach to Reflexive Thematic Analysis,” 1397.

In this article, Mark Love critiques the influential missiological paradigm that equates Christian mission with the translation of a universal “gospel message,” a view Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls articulate. He argues that this approach wrongly assumes interpreters can abstract the gospel from its cultural and narrative particularities. Drawing on the theological insights of Willie James Jennings and David Bentley Hart, alongside philosophical hermeneutics from Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, the essay reconceives the gospel not as a static message but as an ongoing apocalyptic event—a “sustained apocalypse”—that continues to unfold within history. Through biblical analysis and theoretical reflection, Love advances a shift from translation and contextualization toward understanding as the telos of mission and emphasizes how meaning emerges within an “in-between” space where diverse cultural horizons meet. In this framework, mission becomes a shared process of discerning the gospel as living “news” embedded in cultural particularities, offering a more theologically robust and postcolonially sensitive account of Christian witness.

It should never be forgotten that Christianity entered human history not as a new creed or sapiential path or system, but as apocalypse: the sudden unveiling of a mystery hidden in God before the foundation of the world in a historical event without any possible precedent or conceivable sequel.

This is the only true faithfulness to the memory of an absolute beginning, a sudden unveiling without precise precedent: an empty tomb, say, or the voice of God heard in rolling thunder, or the descent of the Spirit like a storm of wind or tongues of fire. In a very real sense, the tradition exists only as a sustained apocalypse…1

In his groundbreaking work in missiology, Translating the Message, Lamin Sanneh extols the virtues of the principle of translatability that he sees at the heart of Christian mission.2 The virtues are numerous. It is undeniable that the missionary practice of translating the Bible and other documents of the faith in many cases preserved languages and cultures that might otherwise have vanished under the waves of Western imperialism. It is also clearly the case that translation empowered indigenous expressions of Christianity, even in those cases where the missionary intent was less open to local expression of the faith. Contextualization became the ultimate achievement of those committed to the translatability impulse, the mark of sensitivity to the reception of Christianity over the cultural expressions of a sending culture.3 Sanneh’s work is impressive in what it accomplishes.

Still, the book’s title reveals much about Sanneh’s commitments, which are open to critique. Chief among these assumptions is that the gospel is a message to be translated.4 This sounds innocuous enough, but determining what constitutes “the gospel” is fraught with difficulties. One might ask, for instance, if the faith is primarily a message or a way of life? What is it, in other words, that is being translated? A larger issue, however, concerns the translation process outlined by Sanneh and his teacher, Andrew Walls. For them, vernacular translation is not merely an activity of mission, but the defining characteristic of mission as a whole. Walls, for instance, uses the incarnation as a warrant for understanding mission in these terms.

Incarnation is translation. When God in Christ became man, Divinity was translated into humanity, as though humanity was a receptor language…Bible translation as a process is both a reflection of the central act on which faith depends and a concretization of the commission Christ gave his disciples. Perhaps no other specific activity more clearly represents the mission of the church.5

These sweeping statements equating translation with mission deserve examination.

In Translating the Message, Sanneh considers the gospel as something extractable from the particularities of a culture, making a “culture (sg)” expressible in terms of “essences” and “non-essentials,” the gospel being transcendent of those realities. He writes, “Translation forces a distinction between the essence of a message and its cultural presuppositions, with the assumption that such a separation enables us to affirm the primacy of the message over its cultural underpinnings.”6 What is required, then, in translation is the identification of an essential message transcendent of cultural particularities. This type of identification is problematic both on the origin side (how is any message above the cultural?) and the receptor side (once translated into the vernacular, how does it retain its cultural transcendence?)

Walls explains this process in greater detail than Sanneh. Translation of a message proceeds on the “principle of revision,” that is, some aspect of the message needs to be exempt from revision to transcend local realities. This exemption for Walls is Christ. Walls understands, however, that there is no Christ apart from the particularity of time and space, “crucified under Pontius Pilate,” hence the dilemma in translation. It is not clear how the particularity of Christ can be separated cleanly from other elements of the narrative. How would Jesus be separated, for instance, from the particular story of Israel without turning a person into a theory or an abstraction? Are elements of Jesus’ life exempted, or are there aspects of his life subject to the principle of revision (that is culturally bound, like his maleness)? And if one could isolate Jesus from the rest of the story in that way, how would Jesus be extracted from the particularity of the missionary, or from the particularity of a gospel account, for that matter, in a mission engagement? And what are we to make of the resurrection claim that Jesus continues to be living among his people, making the rest of the New Testament a witness to Christ? Is Christ extractable from these testimonies? Walls seems most comfortable in this vein when referring to Jesus as the logos, perhaps a way of turning Jesus into a message or concept safe from the reaches of revision and reducing Jesus to a Word, albeit a word made flesh.7 Even here, the difficulties in identifying an element safe from revision remain.

Sanneh seems to understand the gospel as a “message of repentance, faith, and forgiveness” that allows Christianity to appeal directly to individuals. The gospel is a message concerning the salvation of the individual. For Sanneh, this individualized account of “the gospel” allows for a more seamless assimilation to the local culture, the individual’s salvation being separable from larger material and social realities.8 How would Sanneh square this gospel, separable from the material and social, from the preaching of Jesus concerning the gospel of the kingdom of God?

Willie James Jennings presses this very issue with Sanneh and Walls’ notions of mission as translation. According to Jennings, vernacular translation is simply not broad enough to account for the entirety of mission. To speak of mission as translation would encompass worlds, not just languages or messages, which would both be simultaneous across cultural situations and would include social and material realities. From Jennings’ perspective, Sanneh’s failure to account for worlds with all their complexity leaves him precisely in the place he is hoping to leave, an ethnocentric account of the gospel. By failing to account for the translation of worlds, both Sanneh and Walls describe the results of translation still inscribed within the world of modernity, the world they occupy. And for both, the story of colonialism is replaced with the modern story of nationalism. As Jennings notes, “Sanneh believes that the practice of translation engaged in by missionaries opened them to the possibility of repudiating cultural imperialism. If the practice of translation disrupted colonialist hegemony, it did so by making room for something else, cultural nationalism.”9

This is not simply Jennings’ interpretation of Sanneh. These are Sanneh’s own words quoted by Jennings: “Mission furnished nationalism with the resources for its rise and success, whereas colonialism came at it as a conspiracy. At the heart of the nationalist awakening was a cultural pride that missionary translations and the attendant linguistic research stimulated. We might say with justice that mission begot cultural nationalism.”10 For Jennings, this updated form of ethnocentrism is barely an improvement. The act of vernacular translation, as told by Sanneh and Walls, results in an endless series of cultural relativizations in which the ethnocentric skin of the originating culture is shed for appropriation in the process of receiving one. For Jennings, this endless relativizing allows ethnocentrism in through the back door of nationalism. Jennings attributes all of this to a thin view of translation he detects in Sanneh and Walls.

The first relativization in the story of mission by translation involves the Hellenization of Christianity, effectively severing it from its roots in the story of Israel. Walls and Sanneh both view this “move out of Israel” as paradigmatic for all subsequent translations of the faith. This move universalizes the faith, trading the story of Israel’s Christ for the universal story of Jesus as Lord, relativizing Israel’s story and every subsequent cultural account of the faith.11 Jennings sees this not only as a supersessionist account that sponsors a docetic Christology, but also as a failure to account for the translation of worlds. The task of Christian mission, for Jennings, is to translate worlds simultaneously within the Christian world of “Israel’s house.” A definitive move away from colonialism comes not through a universalizing of the faith, but by claiming the story’s particularity—the story of Israel’s Messiah.12

A universalizing move too easily makes the story I occupy as normative. The faith becomes “my faith,” a personal account of “repentance, faith, and forgiveness” and the practices that attend to that understanding. A thin view of vernacular translation related to a message with an accompanying, weak (modern) concept of culture is simply not ample enough to parse the complexities of cultural exchange.13 I would term Sanneh’s approach as modern, a two-footed duality, the weight of cultural transaction as translation shifting from one foot to the other, from a subject to an object or from a sender to a receiver. What is lacking is space, a staging for the missionary encounter that belongs neither to the sender nor the receiver—a space, even, for God’s own agency.

While I applaud many of the points made by Sanneh and Walls related to the necessity and power of vernacular translation, I want to push the imagination beyond their conception, steeped as it is in modern conceptions, and offer instead a more hermeneutical account of mission that takes the story of Israel’s Messiah as necessary rather than as a cultural husk to be left behind. And I want to suggest that this fits better with biblical accounts of the term “gospel” than what is often meant when it is reduced and generalized as a message. The gospel itself bears phenomenal characteristics related to the particularities of the world that allows it to function hermeneutically. It is the announcement of an ongoing event. To this last point, I now turn my attention.

The Gospel as News: A Persistent Apocalypse

Hart’s provocative statements cited at the beginning of this essay highlight not only the apocalyptic nature of the original announcement of the coming of God but stress its continuing persistence in defining the living tradition of the Christian faith, what Hart calls a “sustained apocalypse,” an event without precedent or sequel.14 It is the future coming of God that constitutes the tradition rather than an unbroken continuity with the dogmatic deposits of Christianity through time. Tradition’s coherence, in other words, is provided by the future and not the past.15

Hart devotes the first half of Tradition and Apocalypse to critiques of the work of John Henry Newman and Maurice Blondel, both of whom try to establish criteria whereby “the tradition” might be seen in an unbroken line from the beginning (even if only implicitly) to the present. “Both men were trying to navigate the middle passage between two perils. Both were seeking to open Catholic dogmatic tradition to the discoveries of modern historical scholarship while also blunting the sharper edges of scholarship by arguing for the tradition’s intrinsic rationality. And both wished to do this without denying either church dogma or academic history its autonomy and its own sphere of competence.”16 While Hart lauds the attempts, especially in the case of Blondell, he ultimately finds them both to be failures. The historical record simply depicts too much diversity and disjointedness to locate a fixed dogmatic certainty that could be termed “the tradition.”

With no recourse to the past to provide “the tradition,” Hart turns to the future. With reference to Blondell, Hart concludes

To make a case for the kind of living tradition, however, he should not have looked backwardly so avidly into the realm of history, or upward so obediently to an exalted realm of ideas grounded in an authority that is its own justification, but should have looked forward with sustained attention to that sole mysterious horizon where the historical and ideal—the truth of time and timeless truth—naturally and necessarily coincide. And that is, and can only be, the eschatological horizon.17

For Hart, the eschatological horizon ties the Christian faith in each subsequent generation to its inception, not dogmatically or doctrinally, but in mood and posture. The apocalyptic origins of Christianity carried forward the whiff of a radical inbreaking, “an indomitable and subversive ferment, an inner force of dissolution that refuses to crystallize into something inert or stable, but that instead insists upon dispersing itself into the future ever again.”18 I would add, and this is the point of sojourning through Hart’s argument, that this existence between its apocalyptic ferment and eschatological telos is characterized by news, by good news.

By this I mean that the present moment, an expression of the already and not yet, is always given to discernment, is forever in search of understanding, and is always discovering more fully the newsworthiness of God’s decisive action toward the world in Christ through the power of the Spirit. The gospel, then, remains the gospel to the extent that it continues in the modality of news, which is always expressible, but is not reducible to an essence or discrete message to be translated.

Gospel Texts

The apocalyptic scaffolding Hart recommends for understanding tradition aligns well with biblical uses of the word “gospel,” which I would distinguish from current popular understandings of the term. The sense of apocalyptic as a revealing, or even as an interruption of the experience of life given to us by the principalities and powers of this age, conforms well with the modality of news. And the fact that this unveiling comes to us not as inscribed dogma or detailed instruction but through the events of history makes discernment the missional activity of God’s people. Neighbors, strangers, localities, and cultural particularities are not simply recipients of God’s movement toward creation in Jesus but carry the generative potential of news. Here, the binary relationship of subject/object and sender/receiver breaks down. Translation gives way to something more robust—something thicker—the hermeneutical telos of understanding. Before making the case for understanding as the telos of mission, let me first explore the biblical testimonies to the term “gospel” to see whether this perspective holds.

Biblical texts understand the term “gospel” in relation to apocalyptic realities. Isaiah 52, for instance, speaks of the gospel in relation to the future return of God to Zion, an event that would bring the exile to an end in favor of God’s anticipated saving rule on behalf of Israel. This announcement of God’s dramatic advent on Zion’s behalf bears a striking resemblance to the Synoptic Gospels’ report of Jesus’ preaching, namely the announcement of the in-breaking kingdom of God. “The time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news” (Mark 1:15).

These apocalyptic texts are not typically cited in current, popular definitions of “gospel.” Instead, many turn to Paul, whose multiplicity of metaphors provides the opportunity to cherry-pick language that fits preferred atonement theories. This reading of Paul, however, overlooks the larger apocalyptic framework that characterizes his writings.19 For Paul, the death and resurrection of Jesus mark a dramatic turning point in the ages. Paul is a two-age thinker, which includes both the present age that is perishing, or passing away, and the coming and enduring age, which Christians can belong to and serve in the present. Christians live in the overlap of these two ages, groaning along with creation and the Holy Spirit in anticipation of the glory eventually to be revealed when God is all in all (Rom 8:18ff, 1 Cor 15:42-56). Living in the realities of the already but not yet, Christians find in the apocalyptic “word of the cross” a way to distinguish between the powers of this age and the power of the age to come (1 Cor 1:28-2:6).20 Anticipating the day of the Lord, Christians are those who are “being saved,” an already/but not yet sign of the apocalypse of God in Christ (1 Cor 1:18).

Paul’s use of “gospel” and his understandings of the salvation offered by God are no less apocalyptic than those of Isaiah or the Synoptics. For Paul, “the grace of God has appeared (apocalypse),” saving us from this present evil age and liberating us from the powers of this age that rule through the dominion of sin and death. In all three textual traditions, whether it’s God’s return to Zion, or the coming of the kingdom of God, or the revealing of a new creation eventuated by Christ’s death and resurrection, gospel is the announcement of an apocalyptic event. And because this announcement anticipates a later fulfillment, it continues to produce news in what Hart refers to as a “sustained apocalypse.”21

A word of clarification is in order for the word “event.” I’m not using “event” to evoke Barth’s notion of revelatory eruptions from eternity into ordinary time. Rather, by “event” I mean something more than a mere verbal proclamation, a happening,, or an advent with phenomenal characteristics. In the case of the biblical use of the word “gospel,” the event announced relates to the coming of God for the deliverance of his people and the salvation of the world. Deliverance and salvation go well beyond Sanneh’s “repentance, faith, and forgiveness,” and include the social and material circumstances of those being delivered into the eschatological realities of the kingdom of God.

The Hermeneutical Shape of News

James Brownson suggests that the term “gospel” served as a hermeneutical framework for the earliest Christians as they navigated the relationship between tradition and context. In making the case for the hermeneutical function of gospel, Brownson points to other religious terms available to Christians that were not chosen to stand in for what they offered the world: e.g., truth, law, instruction, mystery, or word (logos). It’s not that Christians did not use these terms, but they did not carry the same normative status as gospel. This choice for gospel over other terms might be related to the first Christians’ cultural aggressiveness, or their openness to allowing context to shape their understandings. Terms like truth, law, and instruction are more conceptually closed, placing what is to be delivered above and/or prior to local conditions.22 News is more conceptually open and, therefore, more sensitive to what is encountered on the ground.

Tying these observations concerning the hermeneutical structure of news to the exploration of apocalyptic in the previous section, the gospel is to be discerned in the overlap of the ages. Gospel, then, exists not above or prior to the local realities, but occurs precisely within them. The coming of Jesus as the conveyor of the good news of the kingdom of God suggests as much. The incarnation ties gospel to the particularities of time and space. Jesus is not a principle to be translated from one locality to another, but rather a thickly articulated life to be encountered and embodied in every circumstance.23 As Mark Heim states, this incarnational impulse, “We won’t know the full meaning of the gospel until it has gone every place in every time.”24 This shift from the gospel as a message to be translated to gospel as a sustained apocalyptic event presents a bag full of distinctions, a fundamental one being a shift from contextualization to understanding.

One final point needs to be made related to the previous discussion on the eventfulness of what is being announced. Part of the phenomenon of the gospel texts explored above (Isaiah 52, Mark 1, I Cor 15) is the social location of the announcement. The announcement of the coming of God’s reign is not made by occupying forces—Babylon, Persia, Rome—but by captive Israel, not by any stretch of the imagination a world power. The story elements found in the gospels match this located-ness: born in a manger, coronated in the muddy Jordan river in a wilderness region, ministry primarily among Galileans, crucified by civil and religious authorities outside the city gates. This important detail of social location related to the eventfulness of the gospel announced is lost, glossed over in an account of the gospel as a message of “repentance, forgiveness, and faith,” an account annexed from the details of the story of Israel’s Messiah.

Context or Understanding

Bosch suggests that the term “contextualization” is of fairly recent vintage, a term that served the interests of a postcolonial missiology.25 A theology professor of mine twitched with uneasiness, however, whenever we used the term or concept in class or in a paper. Turns out contextualization shares some of the same limitations as translation as a telos for mission. To con-text something assumes a prior “text.” What is this text? Who determines what comprises this “text”? By what measure and by whom is it deemed contextualized? At its bottom, the problem with both translation and contextualization is a failure to fully escape a subject-object conceptuality, a concept hoped to be avoided in a postcolonial missiology. As mentioned above, both are two-footed approaches, shifting the subjective weight back and forth from sender to receiver. What gets overlooked is the in-between, to use the language of hermeneutical philosophy—e.g., Heidegger’s Dasein—an eventfulness or appearing that escapes the subjectivities of both sender and/or receiver. In fact, Heidegger critiques the subject-object orientation as an abstraction, even a false consciousness, that emerges only after a more fundamental way of being in the world has been forgotten.

Gadamer, following Heidegger, sees understanding as the result of “fruitful prejudices,” our understanding being dependent on prior, communally determined understanding. Gadamer uses the image of horizons to depict what he means by understanding. A horizon refers to the background of meanings and assumptions by which persons experience the world. Understanding occurs in a fusion of horizons, when another horizon interrupts our meanings or assumptions and creates something new. The significance of Gadamer’s depiction of understanding for our use is that a fusion of horizons is always something new.26

Hermeneutics, steeped within an ontology of understanding, makes room for Hart’s “sustained apocalypse” and the biblical definitions of gospel traced above. Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” names the meaning that emerges in the endless encounters with other horizons as “news.” Moreover, this “news” is, by its very nature, surprising or unanticipated. It is a revelation—a possible event carrying meaning in a sustained apocalypse (my words, not Gadamer’s).

Gadamer’s account of how meaning emerges, however, still feels primarily linguistic or even textual. This is where more robust accounts of the “in-between” are needed, e.g., Heidegger’s Dasein, or Taylor and Ricoeur’s “social imaginaries,” which provide more embodied notions of understanding and meaning.27 The significance of embodied accounts for mission runs in two directions. First, embodied accounts depict mission as a “thick” encounter with multiple and simultaneous agencies. Translation, in contrast, presents a “thin” approach within a double reduction—gospel reduced to message, and the message reduced to an essence. Translation views gospel as settled in its essence and transcendent of the cultural (Sanneh and Walls’ “principle of revision”). In contrast, a hermeneutical account seeks gospel meaning within the cultural, the particularities of all cultural settings being potentially generative of understanding gospel as “sustained” apocalypse.

Let me be clear about the distinction I am making at this point. Walls and Sanneh certainly would understand the task of the missionary as providing a thick description of the receiving context, or better, as one provided by the context. It would be required for vernacular translation. They would even claim that the missionary is emancipated from the sending culture in the effort of vernacular translation. And through translation, there is even a sense of the ongoing. The distinction, though, is to be made precisely here. Walls and Sanneh view the gospel as rising above the cultural, universalizing it through abstraction, even through individuation, a relativizing of nonessential cultural husks. In contrast, a hermeneutical understanding would view the gospel as emerging precisely within the cultural. As we have already seen in Jennings’ critique, this universalizing tendency in Walls and Sannneh brings through the back door what they have endeavored to keep out of the house altogether—ethnocentrism, this time tied to nationalism rather than colonialism.28

This brings me to the second way an embodied account is significant: the in-between. Again, the translation impulse is a two-footed approach (subject-object, sender-receiver), a direct and reciprocal encounter between two distinct parties. Nothing is before the subjectivities of either party. A hermeneutical account assumes a mediation of understanding and meaning that occurs in the in-between, the understanding into which we are thrown. There is more at play in the encounter or event than just the respective subjectivities or worldviews, but also the possibility of an alternative “staging” or “hosting” that transcends what we bring or receive. Before I provide a theological account for this staging or hosting, I want to be clear that we bring not an essentialist account of who we are or what we represent, but inescapably, we bring everything. In reference to the Christian story, we do not bring only an abstracted account of Jesus’ life, say his death and resurrection, but the entire canonical witness to Jesus as Israel’s messiah and our own experience and interpretation of that witness.

Which brings me to the mediating space of the in-between. In an in-between, we might say that all encounters are mediated by the Spirit of God, a life force independent of distinct parties. It is striking that Sanneh is largely mute about God’s agency. In a binary (sender/receiver), there is little need to appeal to God’s involvement. An “in-between,” however, leaves space for the appearance of something not totally accounted for by the direct encounter of sender and receiver.

The issue of staging also brings us back to Jennings’ critique that Israel is jettisoned in Sanneh and Walls’ account of translation. By universalizing the story above the particularities of the story of Israel, we are left with only the realities of sender and receiver and the subsequent need to find a message beyond the reach of revision. By insisting on the mediating presence of the story of Israel’s messiah, a staging is imagined in which neither sender nor receiver can claim ownership. This is what Jennings seems to mean by “the translation of multiple worlds simultaneously.” Translation takes place within “Israel’s house,” the location within which Christian worlds are created. The particularity of “Israel’s house” covers the entire world. “Through Christian faith, new languages and the people who speak them are drawn into that house.”29 So, when a European encounters an African, they place between them a story that neither of them owns. They work together, in the staging provided by a story that does not belong to them, to come to understanding.

Here, I want to return to Sanneh’s emphasis on the importance of texts, but through the lens of Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur speaks of the autonomy of texts. The shift from face-to-face to writing creates a “threefold autonomy:” from the intention of the author, from the cultural conditions that produced the text, and from those who first received the text. This autonomy, what Ricoeur calls “distanciation,” means that no one owns the text—not the author, the missionary, or the recipients. This distance, or autonomy, is exactly what is needed for meaning to emerge in front of the text.30 It is not simply the fact of a text translated into the vernacular that accounts for local meanings apart from the intentions of a missionary, but the very fact of a text itself. The encounter of text and reader will inevitably produce new meanings in the world created in front of the text. These meanings evade the intentions of the community that produced the text and expand the possible habitable worlds for those encountering it anew. Though Ricoeur does not speak directly to this situation, we might see the otherness of the text as a mediating factor between persons in a mission encounter. This third element, an in-between, in mission encounter allows for space not available in a one-on-one, intersubjective encounter. This space, or distance, keeps open the possibility of transcendence, or even the movement of the Holy Spirit in human encounter that goes beyond the intentions of sender or receiver.

In this case, Christian Scripture contains diverse accounts of Israel and its messiah, Jesus Christ, who, by virtue of the resurrection, is Lord of all. The text does not belong to the missionary, culturally speaking. In mission, this autonomous set of texts is placed in-between to see what news might be discovered together in a fusion of horizons, in the furtherance of a sustained apocalypse.

Conclusion

While Sanneh’s insistence on the vernacular translation of Scripture is an indisputable good in the practice of mission, his insistence that translation represents the entirety of the mission enterprise is misguided. It misses at both levels: defining what is meant by “gospel” and relating to modern philosophical assumptions wed to notions of translation and contextualization. I am proposing shifts in the understanding of mission that ultimately better serve Sanneh’s concerns for a postcolonial missiology. These shifts include understanding the gospel in the way the term is used biblically, as the announcement of an apocalyptic event rather than as an essential message transcendent of cultural particulars—what Hart terms a “sustained apocalypse.” Gospel does not occur outside or above the cultural, but precisely within it. This distinction is accompanied by a philosophical shift away from the modern “turn to the subject,” with its attendant splits (sender/receiver), and toward philosophical hermeneutics,, which provides for what I am designating as as “the in-between” as a mediating space (a staging for the appearing) for shared understanding. The telos of mission would shift accordingly from contextualization to understanding as a fusion of horizons, keeping the gospel in the mode of news.

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1. 1 David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023) 135, 143.

2. 2 Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture, 2nd edition (New York: Orbis, 2009).

3. 3 David Bosch claims that the telos of mission as contextualization is a fairly recent development, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (New York:Orbis, 2011), 412.

4. 4 I am all in favor of translation as an indispensable activity in mission. Sanneh’s claims press further than this, putting all of mission under the rubric of “translation.”

5. 5 Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996), 27-28.

6. 6 Sanneh, Translating the Message, 156.

7. 7 Walls, 26, 46.

8. 8 Sanneh, 65.

9. 9 Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, (New Haven: Yale, 2011), 156.

10. 10 Sanneh, 106.

11. 11 Walls makes this point with clarity. He reads the experience of the early Christians in Antioch, where Jew and Gentile worshipped together for the first time, as a calculated risk to “drop the time-honored word Messiah” for the word “Lord,” a risk Walls claims “saved the Christian faith for the world.” The Missionary Movement, 17-18.

12. 12 Jennings, 158-159.

13. 13 For a historical account of the development of “culture” from the perspective of a theologian, see Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997).

14. 14 Hart, 143.

15. 15 These conclusions are stated most clearly in the final two chapters of Tradition and Apocalypse. Early in the final chapter he prefaces his argument this way: “I do not assume before beginning my reflections that there exists any account of Christian tradition that can plausibly demonstrate either the historical or logical coherence of its doctrinal developments and institutional expressions. . . Any real, living, and organic unity is shaped, governed, and sustained by a teleology, which is to say at once the intrinsic limit to and perfect realization of all its potentialities.” Hart,154.

16. 16 Hart, 88.

17. 17 Hart, 94.

18. 18 Hart, 137.

19. 19 The recovery of Paul’s “Jewishness” in recent scholarship highlights the apocalyptic framework that pervades his writings. Unlike the typical Reformation reading of Paul which focuses on the salvation of the individual sinner by faith through grace, Paul’s focus is seen to be eschatological and cosmic. Cf. James Dunn, The New Perspective on Paul, (Eerdmans, 2008) as a primer for the broad movement in Pauline scholarship that encompasses the work of prominent scholars: e.g. Wright, Hays, Beker, Martyn, Gorman, Sampley, Achtemeier, and many others.

20. 20 I like Arland Hultgren’s distinction between “forensic” understandings of salvation and Paul’s “apocalyptic” gospel. “The forensic (anthropological/anthropocentric) imagery is all but completely overshadowed by apocalyptic (theological/theocentric) imagery. While a forensic residue remains, Paul’s gospel essentially sets forth a message of the revelation of God’s righteousness. The forensic model is anthropological and anthropocentric: how can the sinner be justified before God? The apocalyptic imagery employed by Paul is theological and theocentric: what does the gospel of the atoning death of Christ say about God and God’s action toward the world?” Hultgren, Paul’s Gospel and Mission, (Fortress, 1985) 37.

21. 21 This recurring nature of good news might be seen most clearly in 1 Cor 15:2 where Paul refers to the gospel as that which was “received (past tense), in which you stand (present tense), through which you are being saved (ongoing future tense).”

22. 22 James Brownson, Speaking the Truth in Love: New Testament Resources for a Missional Hermeneutic (TPI, 1998).

23. 23 An objection might be raised that Paul speaks of the gospel as a message, and even narrows the message proclaimed to a brief summary of the death, burial, resurrection, and appearances in 1 Cor 15. This is true on the surface of things, but the message proclaimed by Paul encompasses past, present, and future which speaks to its ongoing eventfulness. Also, Paul often depicts the result of his preaching as something that happened in a demonstrable way (e.g. 1 Thess 1:6; Gal 3:1-2). His views of preaching conform to Hebrew understandings of the word that accomplishes what it proclaims. “The gospel happened among you, not in word only, but also in power and the Holy Spirit with full conviction” (1 Thess 1:6, translation mine).

24. 24 This is a quote from a presentation Heim made at Rochester University, October 2018. These sentiments can be found in S. Mark Heim, The Depths of the Riches, A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends (Eerdmans, 2001) 136-139.

25. 25 David Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in the Theology of Mission, 20th anniversary edition, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2011), 430.

26. 26 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Continuum, 1985).

27. 27 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, (Durham: Duke, 2003). Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 3rd edition, John Thompson, translator (New York:Routledge, 2003).Taylor defines a social imaginary as being reflected in norms, habits, and rituals in addition to theories.

28. 28 This is stated plainly in Sanneh, 81, and critiqued by Jennings, 160-161.

29. 29 Jennings, 158-159. There is much at stake here for Jennings. The move away from the particularity of Israel’s Christ and toward an unmoored universalism, an abstraction in which faith too easily becomes “my faith,” results in the loss of place, and with it the loss of bodies, leaving Black bodies susceptible to a racial imagination resulting in subjugation.

30. 30 Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, John Thompson, translator (Cambridge, 2016), 91-94.

This paper argues that the exclusivist and rigid patterns of worship, coupled with persistent neglect to engage and interpret the distinctive worldview of the indigenous Shona people, amongst other factors, significantly contribute to the numerical and possibly spiritual challenges—though the latter remains difficult to quantify—confronting 21st-century Church of Christ A Cappella congregations in the eight Shona-speaking administrative provinces of Zimbabwe. Although sub-Saharan Africa has become the epicenter of Christianity, the worship practices of this North American-founded fellowship require contextualization to resonate with Shona religiosity; otherwise, it will continue to struggle with congregational retention.

Introduction

The Church of Christ, a branch of the Stone-Campbell Movement, has existed in the Shona-speaking regions of Zimbabwe since 1914.1 However, despite its long presence, it faces growth challenges. The church was “transplanted” in toto from the Western world without adequate contextualization to align with the indigenous Shona worldview, moral framework, and cultural expressions. As the Church of Christ experiences decline in the West—the birthplace of its doctrinal and structural foundation, “the source of the river is drying”—the Shona-speaking church in Zimbabwe must critically examine its origins and disentangle itself from supposedly scriptural Western practices that may have been hindering its growth and sustainability.2 Therefore, this study offers a historical analysis of the origins and development of the Church of Christ, examining its current context while advocating for greater flexibility in worship practices. It proposes the incorporation of indigenous Shona-speaking communities’ emotional and cultural expressions alongside, or in dialogue with, Western liturgical models.3 Furthermore, the study argues for a critical unpacking and theological engagement with the worldview of the Shona people, recognizing its significance in shaping authentic Christian experience and worship within their cultural context. But how did the Church of Christ arrive in Zimbabwe?

Brief History of the Church of Christ A Cappella in the Shona-Speaking Parts of Zimbabwe

The Church of Christ work in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia, was founded in 1897 by John Sherriff, the self-supporting New Zealander stonemason-cum-missionary. While practicing his trade in Bulawayo, Sherriff establishes Forest Vale Mission (FVM) as a training institution for the indigenous Africans. He deploys some of his graduates to establish churches in different parts of southern Africa. George Khoza, originally from Eswatini (formerly Swaziland), was posted to Roodepoort, South Africa, to work amongst the indigenous people.4 Peter Masiya (d. 1924) championed the work in Livingstone, Zambia, in 1912. Masiya was joined by Jack Mukaro Mzirwa, from Zimbabwe, in planting the Senkobo Mission near Livingstone around 1914. The little mission closed its doors in 1915 due to inadequate funding at the height of the First World War.5

Mzirwa left Zambia for Guyu (Maryland), Macheke, Zimbabwe, where he established the Macheke Mission. The mission shifted in 1919 to Wuyuwuyu when the colonial government forcefully moved the indigenous people from their land, paving the way for the establishment of white-owned commercial farms. The relocation led Mzirwa and his colleagues—Mirimi Makunde, Penny Mupondi, and Jack Choto—to establish the Wuyuwuyu Mission in 1919 under Sherriff’s financial and moral support.

Sherriff, his mentor, made three visits to Wuyuwuyu before finally relocating from FVM in 1927, marking the “beginning” of Wuyuwuyu Mission. In 1930, the mission welcomed the Dewitt Garrett family, the first North American missionary to work with Sherriff. The latter left Wuyuwuyu in 1931 for Cape Town on health grounds, leaving the mission under the guidance of William and A’Delia Short, the first missionaries from the Churches of Christ to be commissioned to sub-Saharan Africa in 1923. Short had worked for several years in Zambia before coming to Zimbabwe in 1931, and subsequently lost his financial support due to the Great Depression (1929-33) while working at Wuyuwuyu. This loss led to the destruction and closure of Wuyuwuyu Mission in 1934; however, the church building remained intact under the use of the local congregation.6

As expected, Sherriff was not happy with the closure of Wuyuwuyu Mission. He wrote, “So far as I know, he [Short] will now be pulling to pieces the buildings I and my family struggled to erect and over which I ruined my health. What I thought was the crowning and closing work of my life would now appear to be the biggest blunder and mistake I have made during my thirty-seven years’ experience in Rhodesia.”7 Sherriff passed on in 1935 after the closure of WM in 1934; his remains are at FVM. The work resumed under the leadership of William Leslie Brown, who pioneered the establishment of the Nhowe Mission, which opened its doors in 1940.

However, the numerical growth of the Churches of Christ in Zimbabwe increased significantly following the arrival of young, dynamic North American missionaries after World War II. Before their arrival, the two major branches of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Churches of Christ A Cappella and the Church of Christ instrumental) in the Shona-speaking regions had maintained a form of unity despite theological and practical differences, particularly concerning the use of instrumental music in worship and the wearing of uniforms—issues that revealed more profound church divergences. The newly arrived missionaries from the Churches of Christ strongly advocated that the New Testament presents only one true church (cf. Matt. 16:16: Church of Christ) and that all other expressions of Christianity were considered erroneous.8 They asserted that their specific worship structure—consisting of five elements: prayer, singing, preaching, the Lord’s Supper, and giving— is quintessentially the only biblically authorized true form of worship, grounding their position in selective scriptural interpretation.9

Although North American Christians derived the five purported elements of worship through proof-texting from the Bible, they embedded them within North American cultural frameworks. Michael W. Casey and Douglas A. Foster have argued that “the Stone-Campbell Movement [is] American. American culture and values are at the center stage in the life of the tradition [and] the movement has not and will not escape the American soil in which it [is] planted.”10 North American instructors rigorously transmitted the format, style, and worship practices at Nhowe Bible School, the country’s sole Bible training institution. Upon graduation, these preachers went on to establish congregations that reflected the teachings they had received. A significant number of the preachers were financially supported by sponsoring congregations based in North America, whose leadership periodically visited the designated “mission points.”

Consequently, many Shona-speaking congregations came to closely mirror their North American Church of Christ counterparts in both ecclesiastical structure and modes of worship. This replication, however, has often resulted in the marginalization of Shona cultural authenticity that does not contradict biblical teachings. We cannot expect an indigenous African Shona Christian to worship in identical ways as a Caucasian North American Christian. Just as a maple syrup tree, which thrives in the sub-zero climates of North America, would struggle to survive in the savannah temperatures of Zimbabwe, so too do uncontextualized worship patterns risk “withering” when removed from their cultural and environmental roots; an argument cogently presented by Kosuke Koyama in his trailblazing book Water Buffalo Theology.11 As “colonized communities [Zimbabweans] were mere consumers or recipients of a faith and theology of the colonizers.”12 The critical missing link is contextualization—taking the “concrete local context seriously. It is rooted in a concrete particular situation”—taking the unique situation of the indigenous Shona seriously: their culture, religiosity, and worldview.13 To understand their religiosity, let me briefly explain the Shona-speaking people of Zimbabwe.

The Shona People: A Brief Analytical Overview of Their Origins and Worldview

While space does not permit an in-depth exploration of this indigenous group, this section aims to define and correct common misconceptions, if not myths, often perpetuated by those with a limited understanding of the Shona, an industrious and deeply religious Bantu-speaking people. We must understand the Shona people’s past to appreciate their present state. Like most indigenous sub-Saharan Africans, the Shona are monotheists who believe in one God/Mwari, often called Musikavanhu—the one who created human beings.14 Anthropologists have established that the Shona ancestors are related to people south of the Limpopo River. The Chope, Nguni, Sotho, Tsonga, and Venda are among them.15 These Bantus settled in southern Zimbabwe and traded in gold. They were known as Karanga before they were known as Shona; the word’s origin is uncertain.16 However, the term was applied to all Shona-speaking peoples after Britain had colonized the country in 1891. The Shona people’s most outstanding achievement was the construction of the Great Zimbabwe ruins (built between the 11th and 13th centuries), while Mutapa was their enduring chief who traded with the Portuguese in the Zambezi Valley. Mutapa’s chieftainship collapsed with the defeat of Chioko by the Portuguese in 1917.17

Meanwhile, before the eventual collapse of the Mutapa dynasty, some Bantus traveled southwest, gradually establishing the Changamire Mambo dynasty. Bourdillon argues that under the Changamires, “the cult of the high god Mwari, which later survived the collapse of the state and the Ndebele invasion, was established in the Matopo Hills.”18 For the Shona, Mwari possesses two distinct attributes that are significantly equivalent to those ascribed to the triune God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. First, Mwari, a personal name, is known by various names, including Nyadenga or Dedza (Lord of the sky), Musikavanhu (Maker/Creator of the people), Chikara (One inspiring awe), Dzivaguru (The great pool), Chirazamauva (The one who provides for good and bad), and Mutangakugara (One who existed at the beginning).19 Although Mwari has different names, he is the God of all human beings and created everything, including natural fruits and game that can be given to anybody, including strangers. Second, Mwari provides rain for everyone, whether good or evil.20

However, there is a major difference between Mwari and the triune God of the Judeo-Christian religion. Mwari is too remote and not very interested in the affairs of individuals, let alone their problems. Accordingly, these issues are handled by family representatives—the living dead, intricately connected with Shona’s religiosity and worldview.21

The Shona worldview, deeply rooted in the belief in Mwari, centers on the sanctity of life and thereby shapes its epistemological, ethical, and anthropological frameworks. Consequently, the Shona people regard both human and animal life as sacred gifts from the universal and life-sustaining God, Mwari.22 At this point, let me point out that although the Shona believe in one God/Mwari, they understand that this God works through ancestral spirits. Let me categorically point out, in agreement with Chimhanda, that “ancestors are not God/Mwari. [They] are understood to have supernatural powers (conferred by God through the ancestors they represent).”23 The belief in ancestors is not unique to the Shona, though I must be careful not to generalize. Nevertheless, Charles Nyamiti’s summary of the general elements of ancestral belief resonates with the Shona’s understanding of them. Hence, it is pertinent to quote in full. Ancestors:

1. Share a natural relationship with their earthly relatives, usually based on blood ties of parenthood or brotherhood;
2. Acquire supernatural or sacred status through death due to their nearness to God;
3. Function as mediators between God and humanity;
4. They are entitled to maintain regular sacred communication with earthly relatives, which explains their ambivalent character.
5. Are exemplars or models of good behavior.24

Hence, ancestors are pivotal to the Shona, who regard human life as “participated life, that is, it is social, sacred, and sacrosanct.”25 Consequently, the giving and taking of life is understood to be the sole prerogative of Mwari. The Shona deeply abhor murder since they believe the spirit of the victim—avenging spirit— will torment the murderer’s family until they pay the appropriate material compensation.26 In concluding this section about the Shona, let me quote Bourdillon’s description of the Shona society.27 “Shona society contains people of all types: dreamers and pragmatics, superstitious, traditionalists and cynics, conservatives and progressives, socially oriented people and individualists, good people and bad. There is a Shona proverb, ‘Murungu munhuwo’ – A white is also a person.”28 In light of the Shona’s understanding of Mwari, how do the worship practices of the Churches of Christ, imbued with North American cultural values, compare with traditional Shona religious expressions?

Worship in the Churches of Christ A Cappella in Mashonaland: A Contrast with Shona Worship

The Churches of Christ worship practice has its historical and theological roots in the Reformed tradition of worship, but later diverged, grounding its practices primarily in a restorationist interpretation of Scripture.29 Alexander Campbell laid down the enduring order of “simple worship” in his quest to restore the pure gospel and the true church.30 This order, with minor adaptations, was shipped in toto to the Shona-speaking people of Zimbabwe. Sunday church service commences with one or two congregational songs, followed by an opening prayer and an additional hymn that introduces the preacher. The sermon customarily concludes with an “altar call,” inviting responses such as baptism, repentance, restoration, or other forms of spiritual commitment. Thereafter, the Lord’s Supper is observed in a closed manner (only members of the Churches of Christ are allowed to feed from the table), followed by the collection of the day’s giving, and a final song marks the end of the main service. Bible classes are held either before or after the primary worship assembly. Churches follow this order of service with near-ritualistic consistency, typically involving the active participation of no more than seven men. At the same time, the rest of the congregation remains passive, mainly observers.31

The limited participation of men and the complete absence of women in worship services starkly contrast with the traditional Shona conception of religiosity, which emphasizes holistic and communal engagement in religious life. In indigenous Shona religious practice, all members of the community—men, women, boys, girls, and children—actively participate in religious rites and expressions, affirming a shared spiritual responsibility.32 Hence, Edwin Zulu’s argument, “There is no single participant while all others just watch.”33 Zulu’s observation resonates with the traditional worship of indigenous Shona, which, I argue, was a preparatory experience for the coming of the gospel. “African religious background is not a rotten heap of superstitions, taboos and magic: it has a great deal of value in it,” according to Mbiti.34

For example, the repertoire of Shona religiosity includes practices such as clapping, dancing, ululating, whistling, and kneeling, all of which involve communal participation in worshipping the Creator/Mwari. Regrettably, both Western missionaries and their proteges—the indigenous Shona church leaders—condemn these tenets fiercely in the Churches of Christ because of their absence in the New Testament.

Recently, an indigenous South African preacher argued, to the disdain of some, at the 2026 South African International Lectureship in Thohoyandou, Limpopo Province, South Africa, that the Churches of Christ do not permit dancing in worship. Ironically, on the same day, he joined the Malawian delegation in dancing, ululating, and hand-clapping at the podium while receiving the trophy for hosting the 2027 lectureship. This contradiction exposes a deeper tension between inherited missionary traditions and indigenous expressions of worship. Just as a fish depends on water for survival, indigenous Christians—in this case, the Shona people—express authentic worship through indigenous tenets: dancing, handclapping, and ululation. Churches of Christ should encourage these cultural expressions, thereby strengthening congregational participation and improving spiritual vitality. For that reason, I am arguing for what Henning Wrogemann calls the ennoblement model, whose proponents “trenchantly argue that mission and the cultural ennoblement of the recipient culture go hand in hand.”35 Failure to implement the ennoblement model leads to the withering of the transplanted church because it remains disconnected from the cultural soil that sustains living faith.

Let me emphasize that before the arrival of Western missionaries, God had already been actively preparing the indigenous Shona people of Zimbabwe through their worship of Mwari. The missionaries did not introduce or bring God to the Shona; instead, God—Mwari—was already present and at work among them. The missionaries brought the gospel message but struggled to meaningfully engage with or appropriate the valuable beliefs and ritual practices inherent in the Shona people’s traditional worship of Mwari. Therefore, I am suggesting the local contextualization of these practices and their appropriation in the Church, since scripture does not expressly condemn them. A critical analysis of the contemporary Church of Christ in the Shona-speaking provinces of Zimbabwe shows that it is a North American church transplanted into Shona soil. As such, it remains a foreign institution, struggling to take root and resonate with the local cultural and religious landscape.

Contemporary Situation of the Church of Christ in Shona-speaking Provinces of Zimbabwe

Although this study focuses primarily on the Churches of Christ in the seven Shona-speaking provinces of Zimbabwe, I will, at this point, incorporate and analyze relevant statistical data from all ten provinces as of January 2022. Notably, this period coincides with the national census conducted by the Government of Zimbabwe, providing a valuable point of reference. Therefore, the Churches of Christ’s statistical report will be compared with national demographic figures to provide a more comprehensive contextual analysis.

Church of Christ A Cappella Statistics in Zimbabwe as of January 202236

Province	Number of Congregations	Number of Full-Time Preachers	Membership (Congregants)	Province Population 2022	Percentage of the National Population affiliated with the Churches of Christ
Bulawayo	18	8	525	665,952	0.079%
Harare	25	15	1,425	2,427,231	0.059%
Manica Land	71	55	4,351	2,037,703	0.21%
Mashonaland central	12	1	436	1,384,891	0.031%
Mashonaland east	65	28	2,252	1,731,173	0.13%
Mashonaland west	22	15	1,373	1,893,584	0.073%
Masvingo	18	7	836	1,638,528	0.05%
Matabeleland north	34	21	866	827,645	0.10%
Matabeleland south	27	9	720	760,345	0.095%
Midlands	17	11	748	1,811,905	0.041%
Total	309	170	13,532	15,178,95737	0.089%

These statistics show that, as of January 2022, the Churches of Christ in Zimbabwe comprised 309 congregations with a combined membership of approximately 13,532 Christians. About 170 full-time preachers served the congregations. The fellowship’s membership constituted an estimated 0.09% of Zimbabwe’s population, as per the 2022 national statistics, reflecting the “true church’s” marginal demographic footprint, which raises pertinent questions. To what extent has the Churches of Christ, rooted in the Stone-Campbell (Restoration) Movement, advanced in its mission since its initial establishment in Bulawayo in 1897 and its subsequent outreach to the Shona-speaking regions in 1914? Again, I would argue the available data points to a critical need for the contextualization of worship, amongst other factors, because the “transplanted tree from North America” is struggling to survive in Zimbabwe—it is “withering.” Moreover, the Churches of Christ in North America are declining at an alarming state.38 Hence, sound hermeneutical principles teach us that our “God is a contextual God who delights in variety” and not uniformity.39

Suggestions Towards a Contextualized Theology

Therefore, the Churches of Christ can meaningfully appropriate certain emotionally enriching religious practices embedded in the pristine Mwari cult to deepen and vitalize their worship. First, the dedication of young boys and girls as future religious functionaries. In the Mwari cult, some families would commit their children to grow up within the sacred environment of the shrine, preparing them for religious service.40 This indigenous tradition echoes the words of Jesus: “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest” (Luke 10:2, NRSVA). It also finds a biblical parallel in Hannah’s dedication to Samuel: “For this child, I prayed; and the LORD has granted me the petition that I made to him. Therefore, I have lent him to the LORD; as long as he lives, he is given to the LORD” (1 Sam 1:27–28, NRSV). Eli, despite his challenges, mentored Samuel. Considering these resonances, indigenous Shona leaders within the Churches of Christ should intentionally cultivate and mentor the next generation of church leaders, drawing on both biblical and cultural resources to sustain the church’s future.41

Second, the intentional training and development of talent within the church—regardless of gender—merit serious attention. The Churches of Christ, in this regard, can draw valuable insights from the Shona traditional religion, where youth dedicated to the Mwari cult by their parents for specific ritual functions underwent rigorous preparation. These young individuals were systematically trained in music and dance, serving as the primary role in honoring Mwari during sacred ceremonies.

Third, posture during worship constitutes a significant aspect of Shona religious expression, particularly in their reverence for Mwari. Kneeling and handclapping are ontologically embedded visible Shona cultural gestures that express respect, authority, and power. These postures are not exclusive to religious contexts; they are also customary in familial and social relationships, for instance, when children engage with their parents or when a son- or daughter-in-law interacts with in-laws. In Shona culture, the failure to demonstrate appropriate physical gestures, however seemingly minor from an external culture’s perspective, can seriously compromise the perceived integrity of the relationship between authority figures and their subjects.

A practical illustration underscores this cultural dynamic. Following a visit to a Church of Christ worship service, an elderly Shona couple inquired of the preacher, “Do you never kneel or clap your hands before your God?” The preacher responded, “No, because posture is not central to worship; what matters is the state of one’s heart.” The couple, visibly disapproving, replied, “Your casual approach to God shows that your white missionary’s God lacks power and authority. Our Mwari is powerful—one does not approach him like a child. Your worship feels like a child’s play.”

This encounter highlights a profound theological and cultural disconnect. I assert that incorporating traditional Shona postures—many of which align with biblical practices such as kneeling and prostration—into Church of Christ worship could foster greater engagement among the Shona people and serve as a culturally meaningful bridge to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Fourth, greater participation of all. Proverbs convey the inexpressible, deep, authentic attributes and traits of the Shona. For example, when listening to music without dancing, the Shona would say, “Ngoma yaperera pasi!” It means “you are wasting the drum.” Drums, rattles (hosho)—percussion instruments using the acceptable term in ethnomusicology—mbira, drums, handclapping, feet stomping, and ululating accompany Shona music. When our dear missionaries arrived with the gospel, music played a central part in both social circles and religious activities. Unfortunately, utilizing the grounded research of their day, missionaries did not accept some of these tenets during public worship.42 Most Christian denominations prohibited drumming and dancing, regarding them as heathen practices. However, these artistic expressions constitute a vital part of Indigenous African cultural and spiritual heritage.43 Adrian Hastings, a European missionary, writing in 1966, challenges this exclusion by arguing that dancing and drumming are “simply the way the African crowd expresses its common sentiments, and the total barring of it from the Church’s worship may merely prevent the new Christian from expressing himself in the only visible, sacramental way he can appreciate.”44

Fifth, the Shona people express their devotion through exuberant singing, embodying the biblical exhortation to “make a joyful noise to the Lord” (Psalm 98:4). However, such emotionally expressive worship is not always readily embraced by some of our brothers and sisters from North America. I recall an incident in which a North American brother attended an all-night service with earplugs. He said, “Sorry, my brother, I cannot withstand the noise.” What was “noise” to him was the finest expression of my devotion to the triune God. Interestingly, a similar atmosphere of intense spiritual fervour characterized the Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky in 1801.45 These differences underscore the rich diversity in Christian worship. I argue this variety reflects the multifaceted beauty of God’s creation, and the Creator loves this diversity by encouraging symbiotic relationships between those abundantly blessed with earthly resources and those struggling.

Although Christianity continues to grow significantly in the Global South, the Global North still controls the majority of financial resources and, as a result, exerts considerable influence—often indirectly—over churches in the Global South. This dynamic is particularly evident within the Churches of Christ in the Shona-speaking regions of Zimbabwe. Key ministry initiatives—including the operation of the four Bible schools, a hospital, World Bible School programs, Gospel Chariot campaigns, the feeding and schooling of orphans (Zimbabwe Orphan Programme), and the drilling of water boreholes—are sustained mainly through the generous support of congregations and individuals in the United States. Moreover, in many cases, the financial livelihoods of most local preachers are also dependent on this external assistance. For that, the Shonas are grateful. However, paternalism—sometimes associated with material and institutional power—should not regulate the passionate worship expressions of the indigenous Shona people, since doing so represents an unacceptable and regressive phenomenon within Christian partnership.

Conclusion

In this paper, I argue that although sub-Saharan Africa is now the epicenter of Christianity, with 650 million followers, the Churches of Christ, in the eight administrative provinces of Zimbabwe, are struggling numerically, because, amongst other factors, they worship like their North American counterparts.46 Hence, there is a need for contextualization, which has its own challenges. If a transplanted tree struggles to survive, the farmer should adopt alternative nurturing methods; otherwise, there will be no harvest. The Church of Christ, as a transplanted North American Christian fellowship in Zimbabwe, appears to generate an abundance of ostensibly “beautiful and promising blossoms,” reflected in the numerous reported baptisms across Zimbabwe and the wider African continent. However, these blossoms rarely mature into “edible fruits,” suggesting a superficial growth that lacks sustained spiritual formation and contextual depth. The flowers wither without producing any fruit; many baptisms, but few remain in the church. Why? Among other reasons, I argue that the North American transplanted worship content, expression, style, and format, as experienced, does not adequately address the Shona’s religiosity. Therefore, the Shonas people must contextualize worship, since the current form is not the “gold standard of Christianity.”47 The phenomenon demands a comprehensive study because, since 1914, the Shonas are still eating “fruits” from their North American counterparts, although, of late, the quantity is lower because the original tree is also struggling to survive in the 21st-century’s rapidly changing cultural, religious, and social climate.48 But let me close with a caveat: we do not build congregations! It is Christ Jesus who is “building his church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it” (Matt 16:18b NRSV).

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1. 1 Church of Christ A Cappella is hereafter referred to as Church of Christ, while the indigenous Shona-speaking people of Zimbabwe are hereby referred to as the Shona.

2. 2 The Churches of Christ are in the decline see Stanley E Granberg, Empty Church: Why People Don’t Come & What to Do About It? (Stanley E. Granberg, 2022); Andrew Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (Baker Academic, 2022); Jack R. Reese, At the Blue Hole: Elegy for a Church on the Edge (Eerdmans, 2021).

3. 3 Although my papers constructively criticize the North American mode of worship that was graciously handed down to the Shona by our dear missionaries, I highly respect these men and women who sacrificed their lives to bring the gospel to us, the Shona of Zimbabwe. Let me quote John Sentamu’s words, “My late parents always said to me whenever you meet a group of people who may be interested in hearing what you have to say, always tell them how grateful we are for the missionaries who risked their lives to bring the good news of God’s salvation to Uganda. It is because of that missionary endeavour that I am standing in front of you. A fruit of their risk-taking and love.” Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Third (Oxford University Press, 2011), 75.

4. 4 Sam Shewmaker, A Great Light Dawning, Profiles of Christian Faith in Africa (Drumbeat, 2002), 114.

5. 5 Sherriff, “South Africa, Seventh Annual Report,” Christian Leader, 5 January 1915, 12–13.

6. 6 W. N. Short, ‘Brother Short Moves’, Gospel Advocate, 23 February 1934, 1131.

7. 7 He continues: “Huyuyu Mission had just reached the stage when it was bearing spiritual fruit, and the bulk of building and temporal work was completed, and the workers could give more time and attention to spiritual work, in comfortable surroundings, which the writer was unable to do. The first half of year of 1934 fifty converts had been baptized. Brethren, when I think of those buildings being pulled to pieces and one of the denominations taking over, it hurts. My pioneering is now finished. I cannot open up any more missions on the veldt of Africa. I sincerely regret my last effort has been such a failure and financial loss to the brotherhood and myself. I have written all our coworkers on the fields here concerning the loss of Huyuyu Mission and received kind and sympathetic replies; but their hands are all so full of their own troubles they could render no assistance. John Sherriff, ‘A Foreign Mission Closed’, Gospel Advocate, 6 December 1934, 117.

8. 8 Leroy Brownlow, Why I Am a Member of the Church of Christ (Brownlow Corporation, 1945).

9. 9 Paul M. Blowers and Bruce E Shields, ‘Worship: Nineteenth Century’, in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster et al. (Eerdmans, 2004), 787. Alexander Campbell, ‘A Restoration of the Ancient Order of Things No. V. Order of Worship’, in The Christian Baptist, ed. Alexander Campbell (American Christian Publication Society, 1854), 165.

10. 10 Casey and Foster, ‘The Renaissance of Stone-Campbell Studies’, 1–65. It is appropriate to mention that the Campbells also brought much from the Reformed Presbyterian church in Scotland and Ireland, including acapella music. James L Gorman, Among the Early Evangelicals: Transatlantic Origins of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Abilene:ACU Press, 2017).

11. 11 Kosuke Koyama, Water Buffalo Theology 1999, 25th Anniversary (Orbis, 1999). Contextualization was championed and advanced by Shoki Coe (also known as C. H. Hwang) Shoki Coe, ‘Contextualization as the Way Towards Reform,’ in Asian Christian Theology: Emerging Themes, ed. D. J. Ellwood (Westminster, 1980).

12. 12 M. P. Joseph, ‘Introduction: Context, Discernment, and Contextualization: Theology of Shoki Coe, the Prophet from the Fourth World,’ in Wrestling with God in Context: Revisiting the Theology and Social Vision of Shoki Coe, ed. Po Ho Huang and Victor Hsu (Fortress, 2018), 3.

13. 13 Po Ho Huang et al., ‘Revisiting the Methodology of Contextual Theology in the Era of Globalization’, in Wrestling with God in Context: Revisiting the Theology and Social Vision of Shoki Coe (Fortress, 2018), 22.

14. 14 See Francisca Chimhanda, ‘The Liberation Potential of the Shona Culture and the Gospel: A Post-Feminist Perspective’, Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae 40 (September 2014): 305–28. This article gives an informed position of the Shona’s understanding of God/Mwari.

15. 15 M. F. C. Bourdillon, The Shona Peoples: An Ethnography of the Contemporary Shona, with Special Reference to Their Religion, 3rd Revised Edition (Mambo, 1987), 7.

16. 16 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, 7.

17. 17 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, 11.

18. 18 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, 12. Marthinus L. Daneel, The God of the Matopo Hills: An Essay on the Mwari Cult in Rhodesia (Mouton & Co., the Netherlands, 1970), https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/8949.

19. 19 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, 277.

20. 20 Marthinus L. Daneel, Old and New in the Southern Shona Independent Churches: Leadership and Fission Dynamics (Mambo, 1988), 3:211; 322.

21. 21 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, 225–27.

22. 22 Chimhanda, ‘The Liberation Potential of the Shona Culture and the Gospel’, 313.

23. 23 Chimhanda, 317.

24. 24 Charles Nyamiti, Christ as Our Ancestor: Christology from an African Perspective (Mambo, 1984), 15–16.

25. 25 Chimhanda, 317.

26. 26 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, 233–34.

27. 27 Although I am Shona, but my understanding of the Shona people is influenced by the works of Michael Gelfand, The Genuine Shona: Survival Values of an African Culture (Mambo, 1987); Marthinus L. Daneel, The God of the Matopo Hills: An Essay on the Mwari Cult in Rhodesia (Mouton, 1970), https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/8949; Bourdillon, Shona Peoples. In this section I am relaying on Bourdillon’s work.

28. 28 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, xviii.

29. 29 Blowers and Shields, ‘Worship: Nineteenth Century’, 786.

30. 30 Douglas A. Foster, A Life of Alexander Campbell, Library of Religious Biography (Eerdmans, 2020), 35.

31. 31 Everett Ferguson presents a comprehensive ecclesiology for the Church of Christ, advocating for the limited participation of women in public worship. He bases his argument on the traditional interpretation of 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:11–12. Everett Ferguson, The Church of Christ: A Biblical Ecclesiology for Today. (Eerdmans, 1996). In contrast, Carroll D. Osburn critiques the exclusion of women from public worship, challenging the traditional interpretation of these passages. Carroll D. Osburn, Women in the Church: Reclaiming the Ideal (A. C. U. Press, 2001).

32. 32 See Chimhanda, ‘The Liberation Potential of the Shona Culture and the Gospel’, 315. She advocates for the full participation of women in church services, drawing on the precedent of their active involvement in the worship of Mwari within traditional religious practices.

33. 33 Edwin Zulu, “Government Proposals on Regulations of Religious Institutions: Which Way to God for the African Churches?” In Addressing Contextual Misleading Theologies in Africa Today: What Do You Mean?, ed. Bosela E. Eale and Njoroge J. Ngige (Regnum Books International, 2020), 134.

34. 34 John Mbiti, ‘Christianity and Traditional Religions in Africa’, International Review of Mission 59, no. 236 (1970): 432.

35. 35 Henning Wrogemann, Intercultural Hermeneutics: Intercultural Theology, vol. 1, trans. Karle E. Böhmer (InterVarsity, 2016), 265.

36. 36 The following Churches of Christ preachers (listed alphabetically) compiled provincial statistics in 2021: Brighton Mucherera, Charles Jokonya, Damson Siwedi, George Muhura, Ishmael Mutichu, Lovemore Manyanhaire, Nkosilathi Mpofu, Tendai Jana, and Tawanda Mukondwa. Although the data was collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was accepted as accurate by the broader body of preachers in Zimbabwe.

37. 37 https://zimstat.co.zw/ accessed May 10, 2025, at 11:15.

38. 38 Tim Woodroof and Stanley E. Granberg, ‘Tim Woodroof & Stan Granberg Churches of Christ in 2050’, July 2019, https://interimministrypartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Churches-of-Christ-in-2050-rev-10.pdf.; The following articles by distinguished journalists and scholars from the Churches Christ paint a gloomy picture of the past and even the future is bleak. Consequently, Stanley E. Granberg argues, “Over the last twenty-five years, the Churches of Christ [in the USA] shifted from a growing to a declining fellowship.” Stanley E. Granberg, ‘A Case Study of Growth and Decline: The Churcrateratehesraterate of Christ, 2006-2016’, Great Commission Research Journal 10, no. 1 (2018): 111, AtlaSerials PLUS, Religion Collection; Bobby Ross, Jr., ‘Churches of Christ in Decline: U.S. Culture to Blame? Changing Society Poses a Challenge for Christians’, Christian Chronicle, April 2015, https://christianchronicle.org/church-in-decline-u-s-culture-to-blame/; Tim Woodroof, ‘A Demographic Study of Fifty Congregations of the Churches of Christ’, July 2019, https://interimministrypartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/A-Demographic-Study-of-Fifty-Congregations-of-the-Churches-of-Christ.pdf; Tim Woodroof and Stanley E. Granberg, ‘Churches of Christ: Losing Our Hope Seeking a Future—New Study Reveals Drastic Decline’, April 2019, https://interimministrypartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Losing-our-Hope-Finding-Our-future.pdf.

39. 39 Augustine Chingwala Musopole, ‘Shoki Coe and Contextualization in African Christian Theology’, in Wrestling with God in Context: Revisiting the Theology and Social Vision of Shoki Coe, ed. M. P. Joseph and Victor Hsu (Fortress, 2018), 254.

40. 40 Bourdillon, Shona Peoples, 281.

41. 41 Ayandokun has argued for the deliberate grooming of leaders aiming at raising men and women of integrity. Esther O. Ayandokun, ‘Theological Education and Leadership: A Response to Leadership Challenges in Africa’, In Sights 6, no. 2 (2021): 61–71.

42. 42 But Adrian Hastings argued that it is “a first missionary principle to begin with beliefs of the people you approach as Paul did at Athens.” Adrian Hastings, ‘Christianity and African Cultures’, New Blackfriars 48, no. 559 (1966): 134–35, JSTOR. See also Sepota’s argumentfervorfervor in M. M. Sepota, ‘The Destruction of African Culture by Christianity’, South African Journal of Folklore Studies 9, no. 2 (1998): 23–27.

43. 43 See Jacob K. Olupona, African Religions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014) especially pages 89–104.

44. 44 Hastings, ‘Christianity and African Cultures’, 134. Let me be clear I am not arguing for the type of dancing described by Katrien Payne where Christians end up in a trance. Katrien Pype, ‘Dancing for God or the Devil: Pentecostal Discourse on Popular Dance in Kinshasa’, Journal of Religion in Africa 36, nos. 3–4 (2006): 296–318, AtlaSerials PLUS, Religion Collection (ATLA0001613673).

45. 45 D. Newell Williams, ‘Cane Ridge Revival’, in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas A. Foster et al. (Eerdmans, 2004), 164–66.

46. 46 Todd M. Johnson et al., ‘Christianity 2018: More African Christians and Counting Martyrs’, International Bulletin of Mission Research 42 (2017): 1–12.

47. 47 Granberg, Empty Church: Why People Don’t Come & What to Do About It?, 69.

48. 48 Reese, At the Blue Hole: Elegy for a Church on the Edge; Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age; Granberg, Empty Church: Why People Don’t Come & What to Do About It? These three books further develop Philip Jenkins’s thesis on the decline of Christianity in the Global North. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Third (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Christian missions are dependent on healthy partnerships, but unfortunately, that reality is complicated by history, assumptions, and even theology. After briefly summarizing the challenges to meaningful missional relationships, this paper explores a vision for a practical theology of partnerships. Drawing on the concepts of kenosis and theosis to coin a new term, koinonosis, for the process of cultivating covenantally grounded relational partnerships, this study roots a vision for partnership and fellowship in 2 Peter 1:4. Becoming partners or participants in the divine nature can frame the rest of our relationships as well. To reinforce this concept, we examine how the Transfiguration, along with the trellis metaphor, can be useful for a koinonotic approach, helping us update even outdated yet treasured theoretical missiological concepts such as the Three-Selves (or Four-Selves). The exploration of koinonosis concludes with brief case studies to explore how this practical theology of partnerships might function in real-life scenarios.

Introduction

What does it even mean to “partner” in missions? Our relationships with mission and ministry partners are very frustrating, and it is hard to understand what is going wrong. It feels almost impossible to get a handle on all the cultural, colonial, and church factors that make things so complicated. What could it look like to develop a common approach to practicing real, healthy, God-honoring partnerships?

Questions like these regularly appear in my conversations with American church leaders, cross-cultural missionaries, and indigenous kingdom workers. Partnerships can be a source of joy, but they are often filled with frustration and fallout. The term ‘partner’ in English is a useful and often appropriate one; unfortunately, partnership language has been used to describe relationships that seem one-sided and unconcerned with mutual benefit. How can we redeem that word from its misuse and reinforce the concept to make it sturdy enough to bear the weight of kingdom concepts and expectations effectively? The Greek word κοινωνόν (koinōnόn), translated as ‘partner,’ ‘sharer,’ ‘companion,’ and ‘participant,’ is a good candidate. This word links with the more broadly familiar term, koinonia, which also reinforces that idea of partnership with the relational depth of communion and fellowship.

A practical theology for the process of missional partnerships is needed, and 2 Peter 1 is a powerful place to ground it. To develop this well, we will mix the crucial ingredients of theosis and kenosis to coin the term koinonosis.1 Kenosis is the process of self-emptying or “pouring out” as demonstrated by Christ. Theosis is the transformative process into the likeness of or union with God. And our new term, koinonosis, refers to the process of cultivating covenantally grounded relational partnerships.2 Koinonotic partnerships flow from God’s initiative in partnering with human beings from the very beginning of the biblical story. By following God’s partnership and partner-seeking example, we can practice true collaboration in our missional participation. This shift to koinonosis offers a needed corrective, especially for those steeped in Western individualism, particularly as this individualism relates to participation in global missions.

In this paper, we explore how Christian missions can benefit from trading up to a more valuable and viable approach to theologically-robust global partnerships. In conversations about this topic with people from around the globe, I hear the refrain that “partners participate, but not all participants are partners.” At some level, that is to be expected, but there is significant room for improvement for everyone involved. The approach to partnership explored in this paper can deepen our engagement, enrich our relationships, and improve our overall effectiveness for collective kingdom expansion. We start by looking briefly at the way partnership is used in mission discourse. Second, we dig into a rich theological grounding for our key term from 2 Peter 1:4 to see how being partners or participants in the divine nature can frame the rest of our relationships. Third, we look at how the Transfiguration story (2 Peter 1:16-18) and a trellis as a metaphor can be useful, as well as how a koinonosis approach can help us update even outdated but treasured theoretical missiological concepts like the Three-Selves (or Four-Selves). Finally, brief case studies to explore how koinonosis can shape real-life scenarios conclude this paper.

For missional partnerships to function well, we need to find deeper resources for grounding them theologically and practically. 2 Peter is a useful, albeit a potentially surprising place to find common, fertile soil for moving beyond surface-deep, ministry relationships. Embracing a koinonosis approach to partnerships can encourage all parties to flourish in faithful relationships with one another.

The Purpose, Peril, and Power of Partnerships in Mission Discourse

A complete history of partnership language in mission discourse is outside the scope of this article. However, Evertt W. Huffard, in a recent paper, “Partners in the Mission of God,” effectively surveys the terrain and offers useful perspectives on how such partnership language includes dangerous pitfalls.3 Throughout the history of Christian missions, practitioners tell stories of effective partnerships as well as arrangements that failed to live up to that label. That is tragic because, as Huffard notes, “the mission of God depends on real and meaningful partnerships with God, with sister churches, with (and within) mission teams, with local church leaders, and between those who give support and those who receive support.”4 Interestingly, while churches in the U.S. often reference their partnerships, Huffard notes, in comparison, the global church rarely uses that label to describe the experience of working together.5

So, although partnership has become a widely popular term in Western spheres, expectations can vary widely regarding what that concept means.

The term ‘partners’ may include a range of assumptions from co-workers with a shared task to shared relationships, as in a marriage. If the partnership is predominantly task-oriented, then power, finances, control, and outcomes assessment will prevail. If partnership assumes more of a relationship, then listening, sharing values, and respect will influence the dynamics of the mission.6

That potential confusion should lead us to question whether a given partnership is actually more like a purchase (a one-way flow of money) or something truly shared by all parties involved.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mission Resource Network took advantage of the global “pause” from much of the mission-related activity and hosted virtual listening groups. We wanted to learn from African and Asian church leaders who had experience with short-term mission groups and Western missionaries.7 Huffard summarizes five major findings from those listening groups that can help leverage the hopes and expectations for partnerships in missions, learning from the global church about how to practice them well:

1. Healthy partnerships balance tasks and relationships.
2. Joy in partnerships will be found in everyone making meaningful contributions to shared goals.
3. In global missions, lasting partnerships will be developed between groups (churches) and not one or two individuals from each group.
4. Financial support always changes the equation, and
5. Healthy, cross-cultural partnerships need mediators to develop the relationships, define the expectations, and manage conflicts.8

Recognizing these touchpoints helps us navigate real differences in partnership expectations. For example, Westerners often define partners based on tasks and results, while Africans tend to frame partners more relationally. Those differences in usage will shape the character and flow of information and resources between either side.9

Differing cultural expectations should be acknowledged and addressed, and in Scripture we find instances where kingdom workers crossed those kinds of differences. For example, we see how the Apostle Paul navigated different cultures through co-laboring with multiple people and how he worked at cultivating God-honoring partnerships:

From Acts and Paul’s letters, we can identify thirty-eight co-workers involved in his ministry and mission. He used nine different terms… for his fellow workers with God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Working together with others became a fundamental value for the mission ministry of Paul. He also sought the collaboration of churches in the mission of God.10

Paul balances both relationships and results with Timothy, Titus, and others. One potentially surprising example, though, is how Paul frames and forges his relationship with Philemon, using the term partner (1:17–koinōnόn) to leverage deep values of fellowship (1:6–koinónia) toward restoring Onesimus.11

Given the feedback from the listening groups, the insights from Paul’s letters, the popularity of partnership as a concept, and the difficulty in finding a better term, Huffard concedes “that we just need to find a better way to define, develop, and execute partnerships in mission, acknowledging that our relationships find purpose and definition in our mutual partnership with the God of mission and fellowship (koinonia) in Christ.”12 This is the objective for the rest of this paper. To redefine and reshape this conversation, we explore this topic from three different angles to find handholds for missional partnerships: theological reinforcements, theoretical reconsiderations, and teleological redirections.13 And while Huffard’s exploration focused on the Apostle Paul, this paper draws on 2 Peter to examine how partnership and fellowship are crucial ingredients in a koinonotic process for developing and maintaining robust kingdom partnerships.

Theological Reinforcements for Partnership: 2 Peter and Partners in the Divine Nature

I am proposing koinonosis, defined as the process of cultivating covenantally grounded relational partnerships, as an antidote to the all–too-common practice of ill-defined and perilous partnerships. In practice, this will look like God’s people collaborating in fellowship and faithful work to produce holy, kingdom fruit that feeds holistic transformation. Koinonosis builds on theological foundations found in 2 Peter. To unpack that, though, we first need to appreciate the historical context and the dynamics of the biblical text.

Broadly speaking, 2 Peter is a type of farewell speech that calls the church to remember who they are and not to follow influencers who deny the second coming of Christ by living blatantly in sin.14 This letter contains elements that cause it to stand out to modern-day readers of the New Testament. These include similarities to Jude, comments on false teachers, a reference to First Enoch, and some fiery comments on the final reckoning. 2 Peter is complex with “some twenty-six metaphors in play” and “a barrage of tropes: hyperbole, metonymy, synecdoche, onomatopoeia, and others.”15

In 2 Peter 1:4, the author refers to followers of Jesus as those who become partners in the divine nature (θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως, theias koinōnoi physeōs). In this section, we briefly unpack this concept in context to see how it might serve as a theological center of gravity (when aligned with both kenosis and theosis) to shape our perspective on what partnership with God and God’s people should resemble.

After 2 Peter’s introductory comments and a prayer of blessing for the recipients (1:1-2), Peter then grounds those greetings in some powerful convictions (vv. 3-4).

Accordingly, his divine power provides it all for us, everything given for (our) life and godliness, by means of the knowledge of the One who called each one of us by means of his honor and virtue, through which he has granted to us his precious and magnificent promises, so that through all of these you all may become partners of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption of worldly desire and decay.16

Following this thesis, the author unpacks the necessary qualities for this type of life in the present (vv. 5–9) and what that means in light of our future, hearty welcome into the eternal kingdom (vv. 10–11).17 Recipients are encouraged to look to the past for confirmation, as they are exhorted to remember the truths that they were taught (1:12–15). Next, Peter moves from reminders to radiance. He references two bright, beautiful visions: the Transfiguration (1:16–18) and the day dawning with the morning star rising inside of us (1:19). Christ’s majestic glory and God’s word as revealed through the prophets serve as the confirmation for God’s covenant people to continue in the truth together even when we are pulled in other directions.18

Given that overview, we now focus on our key terms. The issue that has garnered the bulk of the attention in 1:4 is determining what is meant by “divine nature.”19 Commentators and theologians have rightfully turned to this text to explore the concepts of theosis and divinization: the transformative process into union or likeness with God.20 For our purposes, we will concentrate on an underexamined part of the phrase. While the word koinōnoi in 1:4 can be translated as ‘partner,’ ‘sharer,’ ‘partaker,’ or ‘companion,’ the constellation of meanings points us to a theologically-robust vision of unity and community with the divine, whichever translation we choose.21 Viewing the whole section (1:3–11) through the lens of participation in the divine nature grounds the themes of God’s great promises and endurance in the midst of suffering. And this reference to partnering links to the previous letter (1 Peter 4:13), where there is an exhortation to rejoice, because the recipients “shared” (κοινωνεῖτε) or participated in Christ’s own suffering and therefore their joy will overflow in the glorious revealing of Jesus.

What does this mean for missional partnerships and the koinonosis proposal? To address that question, we point towards a few related elements. The first one concerns just how crucial partnership is and how being “partners in the divine nature” fits with the whole narrative of Scripture and serves as our common starting point. This concept is a key through-line in the overarching biblical story. From the very beginning, we find God partnering with humanity. As we move from Adam and Eve in the Garden, to calling Abraham to form a new family to bless the nations, to working with Moses to deliver the people, we recognize that God has always been looking for and working with human partners.22 Continuing through the biblical narrative, the incarnation (and kenosis) of the Son and the indwelling of the Spirit move this partnership to even deeper levels of intimacy with humanity as God seeks to fulfill the divine vision and mission.

2 Peter 1:4 helps us frame partnerships as part of that overall trajectory of Scripture. We find ourselves not in a story of striving but of something we are supplied with, as “sharing in divine nature is not something 2 Peter’s readers achieve but something they receive” through connection to Christ.23 When we follow God’s partnership and partner-seeking example in the biblical text, we work towards flourishing and collaboration among all parties for robust missional participation in different contexts. God’s koinonosis with us moves us toward each other in fellowship and partnership. This comprehensive vision for grounding our own actions and attitudes towards partnership in an expansive understanding of how God acts as a partner can serve us all well. We can now see long-term missional partnerships as a sign of coherence with God’s commitment to partner with us even beyond the grave.

A second important element for a koinonosis vision of partnership has to do with the interplay of relationships and results, including our affections, our actions, and mutual accountability. Witherington notes that the primary thrust in 2 Peter is ethics, not ideas or doctrine,24 so we should see 1:3-4 as foundational for the ethical summary that follows in v. 5-11. Sharing in the divine nature leads to the practice of virtues in our lives and in the world around us. This ethical commitment bears fruit relationally (1:7, brotherly affection), and it also means that we pay attention to results (1:8, not being ineffective or unproductive). To rephrase this concept, our divine partnership with God shapes how we interact in partnership with others in ways that are faithful to both tasks and relationships. Applying this concept to missional partnerships emphasizes the moral imperative to care for one another while holding one another accountable for God-honoring action.25 We could say then that a koinonosis partnership is concerned with a dual focus: producing fruit and reflecting the fruit of the Spirit together.26

A third element of koinonosis has to do with how our common starting point and synthesizing connections between kenosis and theosis reframes power dynamics in partnerships.27 This element is crucial and must be reckoned with. One African church leader, for example, told the Western mission agency he was working with, “You are too powerful to be good partners.”28

Here we need to see what light koinonosis shines on power dynamics as it draws energy from the two key and sometimes controversial concepts of theosis and kenosis.29 To frame power in kingdom partnerships well, we recognize that all parties involved, a kenotic God and theotic humans, are meeting one another in koinonosis: covenantally grounded relational partnerships.30 Kenosis claims that Christ reveals a God who pours out power and authority on behalf of others even to the point of death on a cross (Phil. 2).31 Theosis is an organizing principle in Orthodox theology and experience.32 Louth notes that, “for the Orthodox tradition… the aim of the Christian is to become once again truly human, to become the human partners of God as we were originally created, and as human partners to share in the divine life.”33 Theosis is not about removing our humanity, but about finding our true humanity in partnership with the God who uses power in kenotic ways. I propose that koinonosis offers a mode of leveraging power in fellowship and partnership for impactful kingdom collaboration that potentially energizes missiology.34

Theosis must go alongside kenosis, otherwise we would fall prey to power’s “diabolical temptation (Genesis 3:5).”35 While Panikkar links kenosis to humanity, the notion is better linked to divinity (Philippians 2).36 That move (seeing kenosis as a sign of the divine nature) allows us to see theosis as a sign of our true humanity. To be clear, God’s partnering people are to imitate both of these movements in covenantal connection with one another (koinonosis), that is, mutually pouring ourselves out like Christ (kenosis) while growing up into the image of God God gave us (theosis).37 Panikkar notes that 2 Peter 1:4 shows that, “we become participants in the divine nature by entering into communion with it… It is more than a participation. It is a koinonia (‘communion’).”38 Koinonosis holds both of those together as we exist in divine and human partnership with one another. In fellowship with God, we learn the right ways to ‘play God’ and how to use our power in partnerships well.39

Readers of 2 Peter may focus on the reference to the “divine nature,” but what if Peter’s main point was ultimately about the “sharing” or “partnership”? In 1:3–11, he talks about covenantally shaped ethics as well as the ends or eschatological vision. In chapter 2, he deals with the dangers of partnering with preachers, prophets, or people who have bad orthodoxy or orthopraxy, and in chapter 3, he unpacks the call to live in light of an appropriate eschatology. Peter is certainly concerned with whom the readers will partner and how that will shape their shared future trajectory. Reading this letter with an awareness of how power is at play in kenosis and theosis explains why 2 Peter may be more about koinonosis and how a framework for partnership that includes fellowship (koinonia) and working together (koinon) serves us well.

To summarize, in this section, we reflected on 2 Peter and the theological reinforcements we find for a koinonosis process for cultivating partnerships. Partnering with God is a major theme that fits well within the whole narrative of scripture. 2 Peter helps us see partnership in ways that focus our attention on ethical relationships and end results. Finally, theologically robust partnerships reframe power dynamics when they are infused with both kenosis and theosis. By rooting koinonosis partner-ships in this rich soil, we avoid turning them into a ‘partner-shop’ (focused on money) or a ‘partner-shape’ (focused on control) and can truly work together powerfully as companions and co-laborers.

Theoretical Reconsiderations: Transfiguration and Trellis as Partnership Metaphors and the Selves

Biblical stories provide rich, imaginative space and common language for framing theological and missiological engagement. The Transfiguration of Jesus, for example, has been an important orienting story for theosis.40 That story also serves as a great intersection for kenosis, theosis, and koinonosis. 2 Peter demonstrates the connection between these ideas as the text takes readers from “partnering in the divine nature” (1:4) to the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration as Christ interacts with his disciples in that transformational space (1:16-18).41 Here are nine potential touch points for koinonosis, a theology of partnership, found in the Transfiguration story:

1. No matter who is present in a partnership, Christ is the one who is honored and glorified (Mark 9:2-4).
2. Doing the first thing that comes to mind, like a building project (shelter, tabernacle, or otherwise), may not be the right response (Mark 9:5–6).
3. Both our relationships and tasks should be in accordance with Christ’s teachings. The voice from the cloud tells us clearly: “This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!” (Mark 9:7).
4. We should expect both conversation and correction in the koinonia we experience on the mountain and in missional partnerships (Mark 9:5–7, 9–13).
5. The bookends of the Transfiguration (what happened before and after their mountain encounter) teach us to expect suffering and service. We will also certainly need correction (for our misunderstandings) and we will need Christ to be present (Mark 8:31–9:1; 9:14–32).
6. Individual experience is not the focus. We are on the mountain with other disciples and the Christ, not alone (Mark 9:2, 9).
7. Experiences of the covenant people of God from the past, both ancient (like Moses and Elijah) and contemporary (other disciples), may be important in interpreting our journey (Mark 9:4, 10).
8. Conversations about exit strategy and long-term legacy are welcome here (Luke 9:31 tells us that what Jesus talked about with Moses and Elijah was his upcoming departure or exodus).42
9. A koinonosis mountain partnership should then reframe how we think about multiple relevant topics: who is the greatest, sectarianism, caring for little ones, and being at peace with one another (Mark 9:33–50).

Inspired by 2 Peter’s linkage of “partnering with the divine nature” (1:4) and the Transfiguration story (1: 16-18), the above touchpoints for koinonosis help us encounter and engage with one another well. Since “the Transfiguration operates as a kind of matrix for theology” as we experience communion with God,43 this story helpfully serves as a powerful and productive framework for engaging in missional partnerships, as well.

Another image Mission Resource Network has used to discuss healthy, creative partnerships is the trellis and vine. This fruitful fellowship framework has been particularly useful for collaboration involving foreign nationals in global partnerships, so they can be sent to a new location for kingdom impact. Inspired by John 15, we imagine a vine spreading across a trellis, providing a pathway for fruitfulness by allowing them to reach out and generate seeds and bear fruit in a new area. A fruitful, proven worker who developed as part of the vine in his or her home country (Vine Church in country A) is branching out and being supported by a trellis (Trellis Church partnering with them from country B) who is sent out to country C to “bear much fruit,” spreading the Gospel and making disciples in a new context. In this framework, Mission Resource Network functions like a ‘watering can’ providing worker care and strategic coaching.44 We have found this image to be useful for painting pictures of the roles that the vine church, the trellis church, the field worker, and our organization have to play in order to have a fruitful missional partnership.45

The analogy of the Transfiguration, paired with the metaphor of the trellis, points us towards flourishing koinonosis partnerships and beyond, missional frameworks from a previous age. The Three-Selves paradigm of establishing indigenous churches that are Self-Propagating, Self-Supporting, and Self-Governing (later including Self-Theologizing as a Fourth “Self”) has been influential in shaping the “end goal” of Protestant missions. While this paradigm-oriented missions towards independence, the stated objective was still shaped by Colonial ideals and had significant pitfalls.46 Shifting from the goal of independent “Selves” to an interdependent posture of “One-Another-ing” (or “Belonging”) is an important corrective. The phrase “one another” (ἀλλήλων, allēlōn), occurs one hundred times in the New Testament and has the potential to resonate even better with the global Church today. In a separate paper, I propose a “One Another” framework that moves beyond the language of mere autonomy (Selves) to that of relationship and mutuality. This transition would certainly be a paradigm shift. The four-part vision of Interdependence or hospitable accompaniment as a goal for mission that I propose is:

1. Respecting one another’s agency
2. Honoring one another’s authority
3. Mutual sharing with one another by means of all forms of assistance
4. Long-term commitment to one another’s advancement (i.e., flourishing)47

Following this “one another” vision for reframing outputs, goals, and objectives fits well with how koinonosis reframes the starting point.48 So, grounding stories like the Transfiguration and the orienting image of the trellis can buttress a koinonosis pathway for missional partnerships. These ideas replace outdated frameworks that continue to pull mission agencies, churches, and kingdom workers into anemic partnerships with insufficient goals and outcome expectations.

Teleological Redirections: Case Studies and Conclusions

In this section, we will explore some of the practical ends that need to be addressed to handle the differences between the ideal and the real of partnerships. As we conclude, I want to revisit Huffard’s summary of the current state of missional partnerships and engagement:

The gap between the ideal and the real in the life of most churches seems the greatest when it comes to fulfilling the mission of God. Churches I have been blessed to consult with usually show more vitality in spirituality and relationships, while their inadequacy will likely be in organization and mission/vision. I would venture to guess that 10–20 percent of congregations effectively execute their mission within their community and the world. The majority seem to survive, accept mediocrity, and focus on keeping everyone happy.49

That is an important reminder. A high level of buy-in for churches to change their approach to partnerships will be required, and this change can certainly be intimidating if we go it alone. But as Borthwick notes, “In a relational view of partnerships, I don’t need to have all the answers, all the money, or all the ideas. We come together as a family to chart the way forward. We need each other.”50 The multi-ethnic, covenantal family of God leans on the shared partnership with the Holy Spirit indwelling us and empowering us to represent God’s Kingdom well.51

To explore how koinonosis (the process of forming covenantally grounded fellowship partnerships) can work in practice, we briefly look at three case studies and questions that can spark conversations from reflecting on those scenarios:

1. An American church has been supporting proven disciple-makers from Cuba to work among people from a Muslim background in North Africa. Members from this US congregation consistently talk about what they are learning from their Latin American partners. They do not see themselves as leading from above; instead, they see themselves as learners. They celebrate stories of how the Cubans are using their Spanish to cross-cultural divides in their new, yet complicated context. The deepening relational connection and fellowship with these kingdom workers has caused one American to develop his Spanish language skills to both improve the communication and fellowship with the Cubans, as well as increase his ability to connect missionally and follow their example in connecting with those in his own community. Partnerships like this one certainly involve risk, as we try to figure out who should be involved in building the trellis and how to do that work in a way that allows everyone to flourish. This approach can open partners’ eyes to options and opportunities around them. What are some other ways that this trellis church can deepen its fellowship and celebrate fruitfulness both among the nations and their neighbors?
2. The translation of partnership language among the Makua-Metto people opens up additional avenues of discovery and layers of meaning.52 For example, in 2 Peter 1:4, the key phrase is translated as “nipanke mphantte o makhalelo oottakattifu awe.” This translation encourages a contextualized reading and helps hearers perceive the connections to the ethical dimensions referenced in the next few verses. We are sharing in God’s sanctified character. That ethical commitment will both bear fruit relationally (1:7, “brotherly affection”) and make us pay attention to results (1:8, “not being ineffective or unproductive”). What are some additional ways that the language of partnership can help us be faithful to both tasks and relationships?
3. In the United States, a church plant and a campus ministry partner together to reach those in their community. After some initial successes, the relationship begins to strain as the theologically-trained leaders pursue different opportunities and juggle different priorities. Neither group wants to exist on its own, but they are looking for ways to frame their collaboration more effectively. How could kenosis, theosis, and koinonosis help these two ministries establish common ground? What would it look like to meet each other in the Transfiguration story?

This paper has explored how a theologically robust and practical vision of koinonotic partnerships can move us together and move us forward. A koinonosis approach shaped by 2 Peter teaches us to lean into the process of developing and maintaining covenantally-grounded fellowships and partnerships. That approach will challenge us (as we will be called to see ourselves as part of the global body of Christ and move to a focus on one another), but it also has the potential to lead to greater joy and fulfillment. Leveraging imagery like the transfiguration and the trellis can reinforce that vision for all parties involved. In doing so, we will be drawn into deeper partnership with a covenant-making God who fellowships and partners with us and shows us the path for doing this well.

Alan Howell is the Director of Equipping and Training for Mission Resource Network, equipping congregations and kingdom workers for service (mrnet.org). He and his family resided in Mozambique from 2003 to 2018 as part of a team working among the Makua-Metto people. From 2019 to 2023, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Bible and Missions for Harding University.

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1. 1 For more on theosis or deification as a metaphor and its development through historical reflection on biblical texts, see Paul M. Collins, Partaking in the Divine Nature: Deification and Communion (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2010), 9–10, 31, 38.

2. 2 The words “covenant” and “relational” may seem redundant in this working definition. But, since many partnerships lack a deep commitment to one another that flows from God’s covenant love that binds us all to God and to each other, those words are included for emphasis.

3. 3 Evertt W. Huffard, “Partners in the Mission of God,” Journal of Christian Studies 4.1 (2024): 7-22.

4. 4 Huffard (2024), 7.

5. 5 Huffard (2024), 8.

6. 6 Huffard (2024), 12. For an interesting visualization of the complexities of partnership, see https://missionexus.org/degrees-of-partnership/

7. 7 Those results are available in a downloadable handbook entitled, “Partnering with Indigenous Leaders” at https://www.mrnet.org/partnerships.

8. 8 Huffard (2024), 13–21.

9. 9 Huffard (2024), 14. For more on the survey from fourteen different countries, see Sherwood G. Lingenfelter, Leading Cross–Culturally: Covenant Relationships for Effective Christian Leadership (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 45.

10. 10 Huffard (2024), 21.

11. 11 Huffard (2024), 22. For more on this, see Alan B. Howell, “‘Old Man’ as Cipher: Humor and Honor-Shame Rhetoric for Reading Philemon in Mozambique,” Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Practice 11 (2020).

12. 12 Huffard (2024), 22.

13. 13 Works that have shaped my thinking on missions and partnership over the last few years include, Mary T. Lederleitner, Cross-Cultural Partnerships: Navigating the Complexities of Money and Mission (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2010); Al Tizon, Whole & Reconciled: Gospel, Church, and Mission in a Fractured World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018); Bennett Hunter Farrell with S. Balajiedlang Khyllep, Freeing Congregational Mission: A Practical Vision for Companionship, Cultural Humility, and Co–development (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022); and especially, Deborah Ajulu, Holism in Development: An African Perspective on Empowering Communities (Monrovia: MARC, 2001). Ajulu shares helpful analogies for partnerships: a horse and rider, cow and milker, and two oxen (171– 72). In some scenarios, Western partners are like the rider, in others the cow, but being yoked together for the same goal is the ideal.

14. 14 Witherington states, “Without question, 2 Peter is the most difficult New Testament book to deal with in terms of the basic authorship, date and composition issues.” Ben Witherington III, Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, Vol. 2: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1-2 Peter (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2007), 260. While New Testament scholarship generally takes the position that it is improbable that Peter wrote this letter, many Christians around the globe (including the Makua-Metto churches in Mozambique) assume authorial authenticity. In light of that assumption and since the letter’s authorship and pseudonymity would have little impact on the purposes of this paper, we retain Petrine authorship as an open question and for simplicity’s sake refer to Peter as the implied author. For more on this topic see Witherington (2007), 269–71 and Richard Bauckham, Jude-2 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary, 50 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), 158–163.

15. 15 Witherington (2007), 273, summarizing Duane F. Watson, Invention, Arrangement, and Style: Rhetorical Criticism of Jude and 2 Peter. SBLDS 104 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 123-25.

16. 16 2 Pet 1:3–4; my own translation.

17. 17 Bauckham breaks down this section into 3 parts: “(a) a historical (or theological) section, recalling the acts of God in salvation-history: vv. 3–4. (b) ethical exhortations, based on (a) and with (c) in view: vv. 5-10. (c) an eschatological section, in which salvation is promised or judgment threatened: v.11.” Bauckham (1983), 173.

18. 18 While covenant may not be an explicit theme in the letter, covenant certainly frames the counsel and reflection given to God’s people in 2 Peter.

19. 19 Starr comments on whether 2 Peter means deification: “The answer to that question is that it depends on what is meant by deification. If the term means equality with God or elevation to divine status or absorption into God’s essence the answer is no. If it means the participation and enjoyment of specific divine attributes and qualities, in part now and fully at Christ’s return, then the answer is–most certainly–yes.” See James Starr “Does 2 Peter 1:4 speak of Deification?” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, eds. Micheal Christensen and Jeffery Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 90.

20. 20 The terms theosis, deification, divinization, and Christification, are often used interchangeably as well as distinguished from one another in different ways depending on the author; to find consensus on the use of terms is challenging. So, for our purposes here, I will use those terms as cognates while making primary use of theosis in this paper. For distinguishing the theosis word cloud from the real critiques, criticisms, concerns, and dangers often commented on, I will contrast the word theosis with apotheosis. For example, Lenz notes that Peter (and Plato) would certainly disagree with a “previous Greek notion of an apotheosis” which “entailed the promotion of a mortal being to divine status through a special and rare heroic dispensation.” See John R. Lenz, “Deification of the Philosopher in Classical Greece” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Micheal Christensen and Jeffery Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 52. For our purposes, apotheosis is the heterodox version of the concept of theosis. Theosis warps into apotheosis because of the addition of one or more of the following ideas: 1. Lacking a covenantal or ecclesial connection with God as revealed in Christ; 2. Achieving a level of divinity through personal heroic deeds; 3. Assuming absorption into the divine reality that obliterates one’s human identity; 4. Overemphasizing special knowledge and information as the main element in the process of divinization; 5. Framing this in a way that compromises the ultimate transcendence of God and assumes that humans will completely overcome all divine unknowability. For summaries of the history of theosis and how different authors see its alignment or misalignment with the idea of divinization or deification, see Myk Habets, “Theosis, Yes; Deification, No.” In The Spirit of Truth: Reading Scripture and Constructing Theology with the Holy Spirit, ed. Myk Habets (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010), 124–149. And Robert V. Rakestraw, “Becoming Like God: An Evangelical Doctrine of Theosis.” JETS 40.2 (June 1997): 257–269 and Paul M. Collins, Partaking in the Divine Nature: Deification and Communion (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2010).

21. 21 For a resource that lists translation options in this order: “Partner, Sharer, Partaker,” see Cleon L. Rogers, Jr. and Cleon L. Rogers III, The New Linguistic and Exegetical Key to the Greek New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), 581. For more on κοινων– terminology, see Walter Bauer, 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, 2000), 551–554. Also, see J. Y. Campbell, “ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΑ and Its Cognates in the New Testament.” JBL 51, no. 4 (1932): 352–80.

22. 22 Starr notes that, “beginning in the creation account, humanity is called to multiply (i.e., procreate), have dominion, tend the garden (Gen. 2:15) and rest on the Sabbath with God, so that humankind is a partner with God already in creation.” James M. Starr, Sharers in Divine Nature: 2 Peter 1:4 in Its Hellenistic Context. Coniectanea Biblica New Testament Series, 33 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2000), 79. It is instructive to see examples of how ancient authors, like Philo, use partnership language to describe Moses’ relationship to God. “Moses constitutes for Philo the archetypal human being whose knowledge of God and assimilation to God are unsurpassed. As such, Moses enjoys an unparalleled communion with God, often described with κοινων– terminology.” See James M. Starr (2000), 113.

23. 23 James Starr “Does 2 Peter 1:4 speak of Deification?” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Micheal Christensen and Jeffery Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 88.

24. 24 Witherington (2007), 276, 278, 297–98. Bauckham notes that the letter’s author in considering sharing in the divine nature “uses ideas and language which had a long history in Greek philosophical and religious thought” (Baukham, 179–80). He sees the reference to the divine nature in 2 Peter less through something like theosis and more as being tied to our immortality: “Although v. 4b has been a classic prooftext for the Greek patristic and Eastern Orthodox doctrine of deification, in its own historical context it does not refer to a participating in the life or essence of God himself, but to the gift of ‘godlike’ immortality” (Baukham, 193). While there certainly is some truth to that, we do not have to choose one or the other. We have already noted how Peter is speaking poetically, layering multiple metaphors, and given the context, the author seems to care deeply in this section about how sharing in the divine nature shapes their actions in the here and now. This is not about something merely eternal or ethereal, it is about transformed living in the current age. Bauckham believes that given the context, there are two essential questions: in what sense do we become divine? And when does that happen? “In view of the background… it is not very likely that participation in God’s own essence is intended. Not participation in God, but in the nature of heavenly, immortal beings is meant… To share in divine nature is to become immortal and incorruptible.” (Bauckham, 181). That debate is outside the scope of this article, but one thing Bauckham seems to neglect is the practical ethical concerns that immediately follow 1:4. In the very next section, Peter writes about virtues, ethics, and being honorable to one another. Peter was not merely interested in sharing in the divine nature in the age to come, but also very much in this age as well. And that certainly has implications for partnerships.

25. 25 It certainly includes a future dimension as well as a present one. As Starr notes, “Building our case solely from 2 Peter’s own statements, we find that participation in the divine nature follows from knowing Christ as salvific sovereign, that participation has a present component in the readers’ progressive assimilation to Christ’s virtue or moral excellence or righteousness. And participation has a future component in the readers’ entry into the incorruption of Christ’s eternity.” See Starr (2007), 84.

26. 26 Instead of an “either-or” approach to navigating relationships and results, what is needed is a “both-and” outlook. One way to imagine this is to contrast the single focal point of a circle with the two focal points that form an ellipse. Healthy partnerships will be more like an ellipse (with a focus on both tasks and relationships) than a circle (giving attention to one instead of the other). That way of picturing the potential tension of the “being and doing” elements in partnerships frames it in ways that allow us to cover more surface area for a broader scope of participation in mission together.

27. 27 Christensen helpfully summarizes “the problem, promise, and process of theosis” in 2 Peter 1:4, but I believe giving more weight to what is indicated by the idea of partnership would give greater clarity to the process and minimize problematic aspects. Michael Christensen, “The Problem, Promise, and Process of Theosis” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Micheal Christensen and Jeffery Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 23-31. For an exploration of how theosis links to the recapitulation model of the atonement and its application in missional contexts, see Alan Howell and Logan Thompson, “From Mozambique to Millennials: Shame, Frontier Peoples, and the Search for Open Atonement Paths,” International Journal of Frontier Missiology, vol. 33, no. 4 (Oct–Dec 2016): 157–165.

28. 28 Lederleitner (2010), 122.

29. 29 For important resources on the intersection of kenosis, theosis, and Christian missions that have shaped my thinking, see Michael J. Gorman, Abide and Go: Missional Theosis in the Gospel of John. The Didsbury Lecture Series (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018) and Michael J. Gorman, Participating in Christ: Explorations in Paul’s Theology and Spirituality (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019).

30. 30 For more on covenant as a key element in deification and how corporate and collective dimensions for the metaphor come into play, see M. Collins, Partaking addresses the dangers of partnering with preachers, prophets, or those with in the Divine Nature: Deification and Communion (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2010), 29, 48.

31. 31 For a strong theological vision of missional partnership centered on Philippians 2, see Lederleitner (2010), 181-88.

32. 32 Andrew Louth, “The Place of Theosis in Orthodox Theology” in Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions, ed. Micheal Christensen and Jeffery Wittung (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 32–44.

33. 33 Louth, (2007), 39. For an exploration of mission as participation in the Triune God from the Orthodox tradition, see Stephan B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 286–304.

34. 34 Another example that is potentially useful here is Philippians 1:5, 4:15–20 where koinonia is used to describe how a church partners financially and fellowships with a kingdom worker.

35. 35 Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), 120.

36. 36 Panikkar (2004), 137–8.

37. 37 I am grateful for Dr. Laura Callarman for framing this succinctly.

38. 38 Panikkar (2004), 95.

39. 39 The phrase ‘playing God’ is often used to refer to the ways that dictators, kings, leaders (and even missionaries) pridefully act in ways that are destructive and disastrous. They fail because they play the roles that gods like Mars, Venus, and Mammon model for them. Christians, however, are to embody Jesus’ practice of power, since he “is the God we are meant to play.” See Andy Crouch, Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power. (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 281.

40. 40 The Emmaus Road, for example, is a useful theological shorthand for narrative theological grounding and an inspiring setting for embarking on constructive interreligious dialogue. John Dudley Woodberry, ed. Muslims and Christians on the Emmaus Road (Monrovia, CA: MARC Publications, 1989).

41. 41 Given that early Christian tradition suggests that Mark wrote his Gospel based on the testimony of the Apostle Peter [See Irenaeus, Haer. 3.1.1 (ca. 180) and Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.13–15 (quoting Papias, ca. 110–140), 6.14.5–7 (referencing Clement of Alexandria, ca. 180], specific references to the Transfiguration story will mostly follow Mark’s Gospel.

42. 42 This is an important reminder that even good things can come to an end but they can still have a long-lasting impact. Wrapping up a partnership does not necessarily mean failure, it may mean finishing well.

43. 43 Collins (2010), 107.

44. 44 The trellis metaphor could certainly be applied to domestic ministry partnerships as well.

45. 45 While the vine as a root metaphor for partnership is certainly appropriate, in talking through this concept with people from the USA another story about a different plant has been particularly illustrative. Many are familiar with The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein (New York: Harper Collins, 1964). In that book, the boy takes more and more from his friend, the tree, until it seems like there is nothing left for the plant to give except a place for him to sit. This one-sided arrangement, where only one of the parties will benefit is certainly not a viable long-term vision of partnership. We could even argue that it is a toxic vision of partnership. Far from a generative vision of collaboration, in this story, one partner receives all the benefits while the other is reduced to a stump. Topher Payne offers an alternate ending to this tale. In his updated version, the tree and the boy form a fruitful, sustainable partnership where both share their abilities and expertise in ways that allow flourishing that lasts for generations. When we are able to practice koinonotic relationships, we follow the pattern of a giving and partnering God. Koinonosis offers a productive pathway that honors Christ and his worldwide body, the church. For Payne’s “The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries,” see https://www.topherpayne.com/_files/ugd/91bb14_622b75781da64356bcb9112b3ce069f0.pdf

46. 46 Alan Howell, “From ‘Selves’ to ‘One Another’: A Hospitable Proposal for a Post-Colonial Missions Paradigm of Interdependence,” Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies 39, no. 3 (July 2022): 181–192.

47. 47 Howell (2022), 187.

48. 48 The “one another” vision also helps resist the dangerous individualistic distortions of theosis named earlier in the paper.

49. 49 Huffard (2024), 8–9.

50. 50 Paul Borthwick, Western Christians in Global Mission: What’s the Role of the North American Church? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 154. For a recent exploration of stories of the challenges involved in real-life partnership, see Shawn Tyler, A Cultural Mosaic: Thriving in Our East African Partnerships (Amazon Book Publications, 2024).

51. 51 An area for future exploration outside the scope of this paper would be to consider more carefully the role of the Holy Spirit in koinonotic partnerships. Another topic would involve helping churches develop a deeper understanding of the term covenant, since it is a crucial ingredient in the definition we are using for koinonosis. And a third fruitful area of research, could be to see how this approach could lay the groundwork for healthy conflict resolution between partners.

52. 52 Or in the alternative spelling, Makhuwa-Meetto.

In the heart of the Canadian prairies lies an acapella Church of Christ. This conservative Canadian congregation has a traditional view of mission similar to that of many congregations in North America. To them, missions is the sending of a person (or a group of people) to preach the Gospel to others, while engaging in some charity work; thus, missions is monocentric (sending of one party) and monodirectional (the relationship going one way – thus the receivers being impacted by the sender), usually with a focus on evangelism and charity. However, over the past decade, scholars such as Allen Yeh, Everett W. Huffard, Hunter B. Farrell, S. Balajiedlang Khyllep, Christopher J.H. Wright, and Mark Love have observed a shift in the perception and function of missions. These scholars have begun to understand emerging missiology to be broader than the traditional view – instead of done by one group (monocentric) to one people (monodirectional) it is done by multiple parties simultaneously (polycentric) and is about the sending and receiving of people (polydirectional), making missions about focusing on a partnership with others and God for God’s mission: the redemption and reconciliation of all creation. This case study uses the Saskatoon Church of Christ to compare traditional and emerging missiology, exploring what a transition from the conventional to the contemporary view of missiology entails.

Saskatoon Church of Christ, where I am one of two full-time ministers, is considered a small-to-medium-sized congregation in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (population estimated at 352,000), a city with 103 Christian congregations in the prairies of Canada. When I look around the sanctuary on a given Sunday, I may observe up to 80 or 90 individuals, though I know about 60 of them are core members who have signed our constitution and participate in various events throughout the year.

While the congregation’s members live scattered throughout Saskatoon and nearby towns, the church building is located in the warehouse district, close to the airport and on the north end of the city. The area has two convention centers, a furniture warehouse, and other businesses with whom there is little to no engagement; the one exception is a business arrangement that exchanges weekday use of the congregation’s parking lot for winter snowplow removal. The congregation’s roots date back to 1947, but it has been in its current location since 1996. Someone once said that part of its draw was that it was convenient to no one, so no favoritism in location was shown.

The congregation is predominantly composed of two mostly white, intermarried Canadian families and a mix of people from other countries, many of whom came to Saskatoon to study or work, primarily from Africa or Asia. On a Sunday morning, the related Canadian families tend to sit on the right side of the sanctuary, with long-standing or distantly related members in the middle, and newer families or those from other countries on the left or at the back. The current minister would fit with the middle group, as he is the son of the previous minister; his father, the last minister, was a white Canadian missionary who spent many years in India before serving with the congregation.

Members and visitors gather every Sunday at 10:00 a.m. for worship. During the service, there are classes for children from birth to grade 12. While the male minister primarily preaches, occasionally other males from the congregation (mostly white Canadians, but one black Nigerian) will preach. Women and men rotate for the communion meditation and leading worship. Members often stay between fifteen and thirty minutes after the service to talk with each other and catch up on their week.

During the week, various groups meet at the building and in other locations. The congregation has an active youth group that meets every week for Bible study and every two weeks for either a volunteering or a fun fellowship event. The young adult ministry (18-25 years old) attempts to meet twice a month, once for Bible study and once for a fellowship or volunteer event; the second gathering tends to be canceled or never materializes. Additionally, there is a seniors’ ministry that gathers approximately once a month or every two months for a meal in the community. Seniors make up over half of the church population; youth are the next-largest group, followed by a mix of young adults and adults, and, lastly, children.

Besides Sunday morning, intergenerational gatherings occur through small groups and various activities. Starting in 2024, small groups of mixed demographics will meet once a week in members’ homes, usually on Sunday evening, with snacks involved. The entire congregation is invited to stay after church on Sundays, approximately four times a year, for a potluck. The Christmas potluck, along with the Easter service, is specifically noted as a time when members are encouraged to invite guests. Invitation cards are printed and passed out to everyone in the service. A large stack of them remains at a table in the foyer for members to take more of if needed. There are also two to five fellowship opportunities throughout the year for the congregation, created by a fellowship team. Lastly, during the summer, the congregation gathers in various parks for games organized by different individuals (average attendance is 6 to 10 people).

The Mission Committee directs missions at the Saskatoon Church of Christ, to which approximately 10% of the overall congregational budget is allocated. In addition to the regular budget allotment, there is a single day of special collection for missions – called the Day of Prayer and Purpose – which raises between $12,000 – $14,000 for three different mission funds (one in India and two domestic agencies); these special agencies are invited to share on the given Sunday about their work and then join the church in a potluck afterwards. Under the committee’s oversight are three international missionary partnerships, two domestic missionary partners, funding for staff and congregation members to participate in missions, and the MAPP program (a gap year for student missions). In addition to these activities, the congregation is engaged locally in canned-food drives twice a year for two soup kitchens in town, as well as a few other events that raise funds for various organizations.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, which was before my time, the congregation had a pattern of taking a short-term mission trip every other year to missional partners in India, where the previous pastor had been a missionary. Between 1995 and 2020, thirteen teams from SCoC participated in mission trips, with 21 different congregation members involved. Although trips to India did not continue, a few of the teenagers took a two-week mission trip to Eastern Europe with Let’s Start Talking (a nonprofit that uses the Bible in ESL discussions) in 2023 and 2024. Additionally, under the previous minister, there was local missional engagement that included prison ministry and visiting nursing homes. When the young adults who served in these ministries transitioned to their next life stage, including marriage and starting their own families with children, and the previous minister partially retired, these outreach ministries ceased. Furthermore, before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a robust ESL ministry (FriendSpeak) that was suspended during the pandemic and resumed in the 2024-2025 school year but has been paused due to a lack of participation.

Also worth noting is that one couple in the congregation, related to the two major families, has a history and pattern of welcoming new immigrants to Canada and supporting them as they settle in. As a result of this effort, a new Ukrainian family has joined the church. Furthermore, several members have extensive gardens, and during the harvest season, they bring their produce to the church to share. Occasionally, there is so much that leftovers are donated to the local food banks. Neither one of these activities, however, is officially a part of the congregation, although we all enjoy them.

If asked, members of the Saskatoon Church of Christ are likely to describe their congregation as missional or invested in missions. Each week, members are visually reminded of these efforts, as an auditorium wall map is filled with pushpins indicating where members are from or have traveled for missions. In addition, each year, missionaries supported by the community present their mission reports on Mission Sundays.1 Therefore, the congregation aligns with and functions within classical understandings of missions as monodirectional and monocentric, with a focus on preaching and charity.2 However, the question becomes how the Saskatoon Church of Christ fits within modern missiology, which is polydirectional and polycentric, focusing on the larger mission of God, the redemption and reconciliation of all of creation, and if it does not fit, what can the congregation do to align with modern missiology?

1. If missions, according to modern missiology, is anything that joins in with God’s mission – the redemption and reconciliation of all of creation – what things are the Saskatoon Church of Christ doing that would not traditionally be understood as missions, but are under this new understanding?
2. How might the Saskatoon Church of Christ transition from a traditional part of missions to a modern one?
   • What should change?
   • What should stay the same?
   • What further information would you need to determine more?
   • What things should be considered before implementing change?

Ariel Bloomer has been the associate minister at the Saskatoon Church of Christ since January 2024. Originally from the United States, she has studied and lived in six different countries and five states. After working as a social worker for several years, she obtained a TEFL certificate online and relocated to Hanoi, Vietnam, for two years. It was there that she was called into ministry and became a bi-vocational missionary. She earned a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts in Modern and American Christianity from Abilene Christian University in 2023.

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1. 1 Mission Sundays are named such because the missionaries share their reports. The sermons themselves do not necessarily focus on missions, and the only distinctive element of the service is the reporting, often done via a short, recorded video.

2. 2 A two-week survey, created for this paper and engaged by 42% of core members, revealed that the majority viewed missions as having something to do with the Gospel, Good News, the Bible, or Jesus (64%). The second-largest viewpoint of missions was that it involves traveling somewhere, to a foreign place, and/or a different culture (44%). Many also viewed missions as helping those in need (36%). All respondents reported involvement in missions, citing both local and foreign participation and donations. When asked about the future of missions, 36% requested more opportunities for engagement, while 20% wanted missions to remain the same.