Category: md-4-1

The Chattahoochee Valley Church in Columbus, Georgia commissioned the “Missional Church” series after Mark Woodward presented a series of lessons. I had done a few smaller projects for earlier themes the ministry staff had presented to me.

Each of the posters is purposefully simplistic and relies on symbols to portray the statements in a way that expands upon each of the ideas. It’s great to have the opportunity to use artwork to inspire, encourage, and develop the church in a way that will hopefully get them thinking more missionally. I hope that these images will serve to communicate to everyone from longtime Christians to newly reborns. It’s my hope that these images are able to constantly preach, every time someone views them. For example, if they remember the image of the church building with its walls felled and pointing outward, then imagine how they are to bring Christ to the world outside those four walls, I would deem the purpose of the images a success.

I hope the message received is that the whole church body, not just its leaders, is tasked with sharing the gospel to its neighbors, coworkers, and friends. I’m struck by how quickly the early church was able to spread the gospel, even through persecution, because all had taken on the duty of spreading the good news. They were excited about it. I’m not sure what steps need to be taken to stop the pervasive cultural misconception that mission work is “not my job” among the church members. We’ve assumed the roles of spectators and performers rather than a unified cause for Christ.

Aaron Sparks is a former youth minister who moved to the UK in 2010 to attempt vocational mission work and is now starting a career in social care work for young people. He has a beautiful wife, a five-year-old Star Wars fanboy, and a three-month-old Princess Leia in training. He is most likely found in a coffee shop reading a good book.

Jean Johnson. We Are Not the Hero: A Missionary’s Guide for Sharing Christ, Not a Culture of Dependency. Sisters, OR: Deep River Books, 2012. 335pp. $15.99.

Missionaries strive to leave healthy, indigenous churches that are relevant to their host cultures and lead by local leaders. These dreams fall short, however, as they settle for planting unhealthy churches that are too dependent upon the missionary’s skills, resources, and Western ways of “doing church.” Missionaries unintentionally leave behind unsustainable models of church growth, leadership, and development that the local church cannot hope to emulate. What is needed is guidance and coaching to ruminate on the challenges associated with indigenous church planting.

In her first book, Jean Johnson provides a catalyst for rethinking missionary methods. Johnson previously spent sixteen years as a missionary in Cambodia, and she currently works as a leadership coach and consultant for both missionaries and indigenous church leaders with World Missions Associates. As she reflected on the history of Christianity in Cambodia, as well as her own challenges and failures on the mission field, Johnson came to a realization: although the mission churches she had helped plant were “healthy” and had good attendance, they were not able to multiply and grow effectively. These churches were, in essence, too Western in their worship, preaching, evangelism, and leadership development. They depended upon Western funds to sustain their outreach and church programs. With this realization, Johnson began to adjust her efforts in order to plant effective indigenous churches run by Cambodian leaders. Johnson challenges the reader to a “premeditated” missiology that focuses on “multiplication, indigeneity, and sustainability among the respective people groups” with whom they work (13). Using stories, parables, and case studies from her own time on the field, as well as those of other missionaries, Johnson seeks to share her new missiological understanding with her readers.

Johnson’s mantra throughout the book is, “Day 1 affects Day 100” (64). Missionaries often focus much of their time, effort, and energy on how to enter the culture. Even more important, however, is for the missionaries to focus on how to phase themselves out of the work. Sustainability must be worked into the DNA of the church from the first day, in the way that we reach out to the community and conduct evangelism. Indigenous evangelism focuses on relevant cultural forms: stories and songs, parables and poetry, etc. When the gospel is shared in culturally relevant ways, Christianity is no longer seen as a “foreign religion” and the new converts can easily share what they have learned.

Shockingly, Johnson calls missionaries not to plant churches. When missionaries begin planting churches, they unknowingly import Western forms of church: singing translated Western songs instead of using indigenous melodies; preaching expository sermons instead of telling stories; training through seminary classes rather than coaching and modeling. Instead of planting churches, Johnson calls the reader to plant the gospel:

Allowing the gospel (God’s presence and transformational work) to take root within a community in such a way that the community expresses and spreads its faith in an organic manner. . . . This organic expression may look very different from the cross-cultural communicator’s church experience. (241)

In order to build a sustainable evangelistic movement, missionaries must be intentional in every action they undertake. From the very beginning, missionaries should do evangelism with reproduction in mind. If the local leader cannot reproduce the missionary’s efforts and materials, and in turn teach others to do the same, then these methods must be rethought.

According to Johnson, every aspect of the missionary’s method and lifestyle must be rethought in light of the receptor culture.

Johnson’s book is broken into three parts and an introduction. In the introduction, Johnson calls missionaries not to think of themselves as heroes, which comes with an air of superiority and colonialism. Instead, she challenges missionaries to enter the culture humbly as learners and servants, walking alongside the contacts or Christians as a guide. Part 1 reveals the need for indigenous, self-reliant church movements that create disciples. Johnson uses the history of Christianity in Cambodia to highlight the need for multiplication, sustainability, and self-reliance. Part 2 helps the reader reflect on how to plant healthy, indigenous churches in which local leaders take the lead in all aspects of worship, evangelism, teaching, and expansion. Part 3 is more practical, helping the missionary conceive how these ideas can be put into practice. My only complaint with the material is in its organization. Parts 2 and 3 should have been integrated into one another in order to provide a cohesive flow. Also, at times the ideas of multiplication and sustainability overlap, and these areas could have been addressed together. Overall, however, the book was incredibly insightful and convicting.

Two sections were very thought-provoking. First, Johnson focuses on the differences between oral and literate societies in chapters ten and seventeen. Western communicators learn through bullet points, outlines, diagrams, and abstract concepts. Seventy percent of the world’s population consists of primary or secondary oral learners, however, which necessitates a different approach to communication, teaching, and evangelism. Johnson calls this type of communication orality. “Orality is a method of communicating truth by dressing it up in parables, poetry, riddles, stories, drama, dance, and song” (158). Johnson calls us to focus on the values and worldview characteristics of oral cultures by emphasizing community, working with heads-of-households, and using examples from everyday life in order to best communicate the gospel. She also reflects on ethnomusicology (“heart music”) as the best manner to convey biblical truths. Johnson’s insights into oral cultures are important areas of growth for most missionaries.

Second, Johnson calls the missionary to take the lesser role in ministry and instead work as a “shadow pastor.” Mission works often start with the missionaries as the leaders and then go through a process of nationalizing, in which local leaders are raised up and trained to take over these roles. Instead, Johnson calls us to practice indigenizing, coaching local leaders from the beginning and allowing them to succeed (and sometimes fail) in leadership as they learn to grow and thrive (247–48). The missionary keeps the focus off of himself/herself and instead mentors these new leaders behind the scenes, which allows local leadership to thrive faster than in traditional models.

Johnson’s book challenges the readers to rethink their missiological practices in light of what is best for the culture of their receivers. It would serve as a great textbook for an upper-level missions class or for missionaries who are strategically planning their work on the field.

Daniel McGraw

Community Life Minister

Houston, Texas, USA

W. Ross Blackburn. The God Who Makes Himself Known: The Missionary Heart of the Book of Exodus. New Studies in Biblical Theology 28. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012. 238pp. $17.00.

Ross Blackburn’s study contributes to the recent rise of attention given to the theme of mission in the interpretation of Scripture. His purpose in this monograph, an iteration of his doctoral thesis written under Christopher Seitz at St. Andrews, is to argue that mission is the governing theme of the book of Exodus. At first glance this aim may strike the reader as peculiar, if not backward: how is mission the driving theme of Israel’s story of liberation and constitution? Anticipating such a question in the introduction, Blackburn defines his use of the word mission as God’s desire to right what is wrong, principally through God’s commitment to be known among his people and, through them, among the nations. Blackburn proposes that, when read as a coherent narrative within a canonical framework, Yhwh’s missionary impulse explains his motivation in each major development in the story and resolves some thorny hermeneutical issues therein.

After an introduction (ch. 1), Blackburn divides his treatment into six chapters. In chapter 2 he builds the case that the primary theme in Exod 1–15:21 is the revelation of Yhwh’s name/identity as redeemer. Through the burning bush, the plague cycle, and deliverance of the people from slavery, Israel and Egypt (to a lesser extent) come to know Yhwh’s redemptive character, Yhwh’s supremacy, and that Yhwh’s identity and mission is tied up with Yhwh’s goodness toward Israel.

Both chapter 3 (15:22–18:27) and chapter 4 (19–24) explore how the provision of torah/teaching carries forward God’s missional intention to make his name known. Blackburn argues that the sequence of wilderness trials serves the purpose of training (better than the commonly translated “testing”) Israel in the knowledge of her new sovereign. The giving of water, food, and security seeks to instill trust in Israel as preparation for Sinai. Chapter 4 casts Israel in a priestly role for the sake of reflecting the character of God before the watching nations. The law’s essence is a revelation of the character of God; thus, Israel’s holy imitation of Yhwh (by keeping the covenantal demands) aims toward the larger goal of mediating knowledge of God among the families of the earth. Israel’s witness pulsates out from her distinctive conduct.

Blackburn next turns to the dense tabernacle legislation in chapter 5 (25–31). The instruction detailing the materials to be used in the tabernacle’s construction and its accoutrements communicates the sanctity and kingship of Yhwh, dwelling in Israel’s midst. Moreover, within Israel, the tabernacle was a palpable, microcosmic symbol of Yhwh’s orderly, macrocosmic reign over the universe. The presence of Yhwh among his people in the tabernacle is an end in itself, but the purpose of the tabernacle was not limited to this end. Rather, the tabernacle pointed in nuce to God’s missionary desire to reign in similar fashion among all the nations.

Chapter 6 wrestles with how Moses’ petitions persuade God to forgive Israel’s transgression committed in the golden calf debacle (32–34). Blackburn persuasively argues that Moses succeeds in his remonstrations by appealing to Yhwh’s honor among the nations. In short, Moses defends God’s reputation before God. Thus, Yhwh restores Israel because Yhwh’s name among the nations is at stake. Yhwh’s judgment and mercy emerge from the same motivation—to be known among the nations. Yhwh’s forgiveness restores the plans for building the tabernacle (35–40), which Blackburn treats briefly in chapter 7. The construction of the tabernacle signals that forgiven Israel can now fulfill her commission to be a priestly kingdom and holy nation. God dwells in her midst—this is both the object and method of Israel’s missionary vocation.

The main body of the work is well written, well researched, and for the most part well reasoned. Blackburn’s commitment to reading the text in its canonical presentation as a coherent narrative pays rich exegetical dividends, especially in tracing underappreciated connections to the larger Exodus story in the wilderness narratives and Moses’s appeals to God in Exod 32–34. So too, Blackburn’s insistence that the minutiae of the tabernacle legislation carry theological, even missiological weight brings a welcomed corrective to traditions that devalue priestly texts. Because his work is in an evangelical series on biblical theology, Blackburn rounds out each chapter (and sometimes begins them) with reflections on texts outside of Exodus, mostly connecting his emphases to New Testament motifs. While this move helps further elucidate themes under discussion in some chapters (e.g., his parsing of the relationship of gospel and law in ch. 4), in others it feels more like an appendage that provides too terse a treatment. Blackburn concludes his work with four brief observations concerning how mission in Exodus informs the mission of the church. Because this is precisely the kind of theological payoff needed by churches (and so often lacking in rigorous works of biblical theology), the book could have been enhanced significantly if this chapter were longer than a thin five pages.

Blackburn’s book is a solid attempt to show how a missiological hermeneutic opens up the interpretation of a central Old Testament book. Yet, the book suffers on two accounts. First, Blackburn is in danger of instrumentalizing Israel’s election. His appreciation of God’s larger purposes undersells the promises to the patriarchs as a reason for the Exodus and creates some unnecessary tension with the subsequent history of God with Israel. For example, how does Israel’s future interaction with the nations (e.g., Canaanites) make sense of the missionary bent of Exodus, if this is indeed the governing theme of her root narrative? The conquest, which itself draws on themes from Exodus, fits this trajectory with difficulty. Israel as a “missionary people” may fit some of Isaiah’s prophecy—a prophet who draws liberally on Exodus themes—but is this the most apt theological backdrop for, say, the oracles against the nations? Moreover, what does it mean for the nations to know Yhwh? Is the acknowledgement expected of the nations on par with Israel’s acknowledgement? As a work of biblical theology, I would have liked these questions addressed with more rigor. Second, and related, Blackburn’s definition of mission will strike many as too narrow for biblical theology. He rightly stresses that in Exodus Yhwh’s presence is what makes Israel holy—attending to Yhwh’s presence is to make Israel distinctive, thus mediating knowledge of God. But does this fulfill the book’s subtitle: The Missionary Heart of the Book of Exodus ? The missional theology of Exodus is chiefly centripetal, and I am not certain it is the heart of the book, that is, the central theme giving life to all else. Nevertheless, I recommend the book for students and scholars alike, and I look forward to future works from Blackburn.

Nathan Bills

Assistant Professor of Old Testament

Lipscomb University

Nashville, Tennessee, USA

A. Scott Moreau. Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2012. 432pp. $22.03.

Certain subjects linger in a state of cumulative chaos, waiting for the right scholar to create a sense of order. The discussion of contextualization among evangelical Christians is such a subject, and Scott Moreau has proven equal to the task of systematizing its diverse parts into a balanced presentation. The undertaking requires both a comprehensive understanding of a multifaceted debate and the methodological rigor necessary to avoid reductionism. In Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models, Moreau combines these qualities in an orderly, economical rendition of the issues.

A. Scott Moreau has taught missions at Wheaton College for more than two decades. In addition to authoring or editing a variety of missiological works, he has been the editor of Evangelical Missions Quarterly since 2001. A prominent evangelical missiologist, Moreau aims to “map” evangelical models of contextualization. Some prominent treatments of contextualization have lumped evangelical contextualization into a single category among a more theologically liberal array of options. Thus, the impetus behind his endeavor is the need for a truly representative analysis of evangelical perspectives. Moreau hopes his cartography will help readers explore the diverse regions of the evangelical “continent” of contextualization in order to make informed judgments about particular proposals.

The book bears a popular academic style that does not shy from technical content but consciously avoids scholarly wordiness. The real key to the book’s success, though, is its systematic and restrained exposition. The body comprises two sections of nearly equal length. The first section illuminates Moreau’s methodological concerns, and the second section is the substance of the proposal itself. Though Moreau’s descriptive endeavor is potentially fraught with subjectivity, in the first section he so thoroughly explicates the assumptions and criteria at work in his map that there is hardly any cause for uncertainty. Moreover, he manages to introduce working assumptions, such as the meaning of “evangelical” or the place of holism in contextualization, convincingly, without bogging down in topics that could be books unto themselves.

The proposal trades on Moreau’s credibility rather directly. He classified 249 examples of evangelical contextualization from published sources, according to seventy-nine criteria. In this process, he “discovered” six initiator roles (195). Moreau utilizes these six roles as his models of contextualization, cross-referencing them with other criteria to define exemplars of each model and their respective tendencies. The selection of these models, as well as the definition of the various criteria, is completely Moreau’s prerogative despite the clinical feel of his data analysis. By section two, though, the reader is convinced that Moreau is anything but arbitrary in his procedure, and his credentials certainly merit the benefit of the doubt. The skeptical reader may wonder, nonetheless, whether the source material could be organized into different categories, as Moreau cannot defend his choices in a work this size.

Moreau’s map seems to represent the major regions of evangelical contextualization. His models are Facilitator, Guide, Herald, Pathfinder, Prophet, and Restorer. One problem with these categories is that some examples fit equally into multiple models. Anticipating such objections, Moreau clarifies that his intention is not to communicate “that the individual never takes on other roles or that the method is constrained by that role” (175). Taken as typical rather than definitive, and in relation to the many other variables in Moreau’s dataset, the models are a powerful tool for “locating” contextualization efforts on the evangelical map.

One question lingers, primarily regarding the Restorer model. Although “the restorer comes to heal or deliver from bondage of any type,” most of Moreau’s examples have to do with spiritual warfare. Curiously, the evidence suggests that “evangelicals consider demons qua demons somehow immune to contextual or worldview considerations” (299). “A criticism of initiators as restorers,” states Moreau, “is that practitioners rarely discuss their methods as explicitly contextual” (307). The question, then, is why Moreau considers this a model of contextualization, when its presuppositions are acontextual on average and nearly anti-contextual at worst. It seems that the Restorer is a model of mission work rather than a model of contextualization. And this observation highlights a concern for the other models to a lesser extent. Approaches to mission that deal with issues in their contexts (such as spiritual bondage) are not thereby necessarily contextualized, as per Moreau’s own definition of contextualization (36). One danger of being as impressively thorough as Moreau has done is to be overly inclusive to the detriment of a limited notion of contextualization.

Because Moreau intends to systematize existing proposals rather than rehash them, the specific processes of contextualization in his models are never in view. He stays at a bird’s eye view of each exemplar, leaving the reader wishing for a more concrete understanding of each one, which would help clarify why each one is in fact an example of contextualization rather than just missions methodology. The book would be far more lengthy with that provision, though, and the bibliography is available.

A couple of other peculiarities are noteworthy. One, Moreau’s definition of evangelical appears to exclude Majority World evangelicals. There are a few exceptions, and he is aware of the issue (320–21), but it is clear that American evangelicalism is in view. This is due primarily to the use of published exemplars, of which there are far fewer from the Majority World. The point here is not that Moreau would chose to exclude Majority World exemplars given an alternative (although his definition of evangelicalism does have roots in American culture wars), but the fact that he cannot represent them severely limits the representativeness of his map. As with Europeans’ “discovery” of the Americas, once readers venture off the map, they may find the second half of the world—or more, in this case. Two, large portions of the book read as an extended exchange with Charles Kraft. Kraft is an influential and controversial missiologist whom Moreau could not wisely marginalize in these discussions, but at times it seems as though evangelical contextualization comes down to Kraft’s proposals and their dissenters.

One of the key successes of the book is that it makes evident the occasion of the contextualization discussion. The urgency of talking about particularly evangelical contextualization, and to a large extent the urgency of the dialogue with Charles Kraft, is a symptom of the ongoing shift within conservative Christianity toward critical realism. The mapping of contextualization models among evangelicals is fundamentally about establishing an epistemological continuum on which to locate contextualization efforts. Though evangelicals will need to move beyond Moreau’s descriptive contribution into critical and prescriptive proposals, they can now do so with the profound yet accessible insight he has provided regarding what is truly at stake.

Greg McKinzie

Missionary

Arequipa, Peru

J. D. Payne. Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration and Mission. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012. 206pp. $10.91.

J. D. Payne serves as the pastor of church multiplication for The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama. Prior to his current position in Birmingham, Payne was a domestic missionary with the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention and an Associate Professor of Church Planting and Evangelism at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also directed the Center for North American Missions and Church Planting.

Payne’s book, Strangers Next Door, has a twofold purpose: (1) to educate Western evangelical churches on the large-scale global migrations that are taking place as the peoples of the world move to the West as long-term and short-term workers, students, refugees, and asylum-seekers (18); and (2) to challenge Western evangelical churches to reach, equip, partner with, and send the least reached people living in their neighborhoods to return to their peoples as missionaries (19). Payne’s book is neither a theology of mission nor a practical guide to missional living, though it includes elements of both. Rather, it is an impassioned plea and a vision, calling for evangelicals in the West to notice and act on a unique missional opportunity of the twenty-first century: the presence of migrants from least reached, unreached, and hard-to-reach people groups in Western countries, living right next door to us.

After defining his terms and outlining his theological assumptions in chapter one, Payne uses half of the book to make his case first that migration is occurring in the modern era on an unprecedented scale (chs. 2, 6, 7, and 8) and second that many of these migrants are moving from unreached or least reached areas of the world to Western countries (ch. 3), by which he means the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many of the countries commonly referred to as Western Europe. On both accounts, Payne demonstrates his claims very persuasively with extensive statistical data. However, with regard to his second claim, Payne reveals a significant theological bias that obscures much of his data, namely, he considers people groups comprised of less than 2 percent evangelicals as unreached. He borrows his definition of evangelicals from the Joshua Project (55), but based on which countries he labels as unreached, Payne clearly excludes most, if not all, members of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and mainline Protestantism, among others. For example, he lists France, Portugal, and Spain as among the most unreached countries in the world (60), three countries known for substantial Catholic populations. Although this bias does not diminish the importance of Payne’s overall thesis and argument, it does limit the usefulness of the book in determining which countries and peoples are unreached for one who operates with a more inclusive understanding of Christianity.

The rest of the book focuses on what Payne calls “diaspora missiology,” which brings migration research to bear on missiology. In chapters four and five, he demonstrates from Scripture that God has constantly worked through migrations to accomplish his purposes in the world. In chapter nine, he shares inspiring stories of people who have acted on this vision to reach the unreached through migrants. Finally, chapters ten through twelve offer guidelines and a strategy for accomplishing the task of reaching, equipping, partnering with, and sending migrants back to their home countries as missionaries to reach the unreached peoples of the world. Payne suggests helpful missiological insights in these chapters, but due to the nature of his book as a vision-casting plea, these suggestions remain surface level and brief. For example, his section on contextualization is three paragraphs long. Anyone wanting to learn about how to contextualize the gospel in migrant communities in their neighbors will need to look elsewhere for advice.

Payne’s overarching vision, that churches in the West should focus their efforts on reaching migrants in their neighborhoods from unreached or least reached countries, with an eye towards partnering with and sending those migrants back to their home countries as missionaries, is worthy of attention and consideration for all, including non-evangelical churches in Western countries. I recommend this book to any church leaders and lay people willing to re-envision their task of sharing the gospel with the nations. As Payne argues, for those of us living in the West, the nations have come to our doorstep and we are now confronted with an exciting missional opportunity to proclaim the gospel to them without ever having to set foot on a plane.

Garrett Matthew East

Missionary in Training

ACU Halbert Institute for Missions

Abilene, Texas, USA

Bryan P. Stone and Claire E. Wolfteich. Sabbath in the City: Sustaining Urban Pastoral Excellence. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 168pp. $15.60.

Stone and Wolfteich challenge the missional reader with the reminder that “while the Bible begins in a garden, it ends in a city” (90). Sabbath in the City: Sustaining Urban Pastoral Excellence records the discoveries of 96 urban pastors who are given the opportunity, through the Boston University School of Theology and the Lilly Endowment, Inc., to examine their missional approaches to ministry. The project seeks to answer two questions: “What constitutes pastoral excellence in the urban context? What sustains it?” (ix). Excellent urban pastoral leadership requires a unique approach to ministry, one that involves serving the city as well as serving oneself. “If your . . . soul and spirit is not growing and at peace with God, the sheer intensity of urban problems will overwhelm and crush you” (63).

While defining four needs of urban pastors—partnership, spiritual renewal, Sabbath, and study—the authors specify each need as an individualized spiritual discipline. Spiritual friendships are to be interpreted as one enjoys Christ as a friend: a life-giving addition to pastoral ministry. Spiritual renewal is found in embracing spiritual disciplines that continually refocus one’s energies on the purpose and presence of God. Sabbath, a challenge for an overworked and understaffed urban pastor, is a reminder that the work of God can find completion while the man or woman of God carves out mandatory rest. Study allows the pastor to contemplatively hear a sermon for the people as well as a sermon for oneself while lounging in the Word.

Through their partnership with urban pastors, the authors discover that excellent urban pastors know and love their cities. This means that they also know and love the people:

To know and love the people of the city and to practice a solidarity with them creates a space for confession, pardon, and forgiveness. To know and love the people of the city is to treat no one like a heathen, a demon, or an outcast, and this honoring of ‘the other’ we encounter allows us first to hear them; second to serve them; and third, to be open to allowing them to creatively transform our ministries. (xiii)

A warning repeats throughout the book, from authors as well as pastors, that if urban pastors overlook the practice of Sabbath, they will not effectively serve the city. Urban ministry presents many needs and few resources. With the focus on required renewal, the participating pastors also receive a four- to eight- week compensated sabbatical. “We cannot talk of sustaining pastoral excellence without talking about the pastor’s ongoing spiritual renewal, for receptivity to God’s Spirit precedes any work of ministry” (63). Sabbath not only includes rest, but play, setting higher boundaries, and a fresh commitment to one’s family. Counsel from one pastor’s spiritual director reminds her that, “Just because you have the time to do something doesn’t mean you should do it” (55). Rest is a requirement for renewal.

The honest voices of the 96 urban pastors should be heard by all pastors, not just those in the urban setting. Sabbath in the City should inform the students in seminary who begin with a vision of excellence and are often extinguished by exhaustion and frustration. The stories of the participants will powerfully inform future decisions for current readers.

Missional ministry requires one to go and serve incarnationally, fulfilling the missio Dei. Being a sent people requires preparation, partnership, and pauses throughout the journey. Urban pastors are by their very nature missional, since many have moved into the city to serve with decreased funds and increased functions. The practical guidance detailed in Sabbath in the City will enhance the journey of any seminary student, pastor, or layperson who seeks to serve. Stone and Wolfteich have gone into the city, found the hearts of servants, and are striving to replicate their beat through their excellent voices of wisdom.

Kate Sullivan Watkins

Doctor of Ministry Student

Lipscomb University

Nashville, Tennessee, USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to Modern Angola9

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to Our Ministry in Angola

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

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

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

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

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

VM Assumptions that Do Not Fit Angola

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnolinguistic ancestry is the key identity for Africans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Westerners maintain economic and cultural hegemony over Africa.

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

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

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

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

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

Implications for Vulnerable Mission in Angola

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

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

Conclusion: What Does Angola Have to Do with Africa?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

Andrade, Filomena, Paulo de Carvalho, and Gabriela Cohen. “A Life of Improvisation! Displaced People in Malanje and Benguela.” In Communities and Reconstruction in Angola: The Prospects for Reconstruction in Angola from the Community Perspective, edited by Paul Robson, translated by Mark Gimson, 119–61. Development Workshop Occasional Paper 1. Guelph, Canada: Development Workshop, 2001.

“Angola-Gate: Relations between Angola and France Remain Troubled.” The Economist (19 November 2008), http://economist.com/node/12630028.

“Angola’s Eduardo Dos Santos Offers Help to Portugal.” BBC News (11 November 2011), http://bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15790127.

Barrett, David B., George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds. World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2nd ed. Vol. 1, The World by Countries: Religionists, Churches, Ministries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Bender, Gerald J., and P. Stanley Yoder. “Whites in Angola on the Eve of Independence: The Politics of Numbers.” Africa Today 21, no. 4 (Fall 1974): 23–37.

Birmingham, David. Empire in Africa: Angola and Its Neighbors. Ohio University Research in International Studies, Africa Series 84. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006.

Development Workshop, Centre for Environment & Human Settlements, and One World Action. Terra: Urban Land Reform in Post-War Angola: Research, Advocacy and Policy Development. Development Workshop Occasional Paper 5. Luanda, Angola: Development Workshop, 2005.

Dicionário Plural da Língua Portuguesa. Luanda, Angola: Plural Editores, 2008.

Gal-Or, Jenny, and Eran Gal-Or. Electric Trees: Reflections of Angola. Lewes, England: Sylph Editions, 2009.

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

________. Vulnerable Mission: Insights into Christian Mission to Africa from a Position of Vulnerability. Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2011.

Henderson, Lawrence W. The Church in Angola: A River of Many Currents. Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1992.

Hodges, Tony. Angola: Anatomy of an Oil State, 2nd ed. African Issues. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.

James, W. Martin. Historical Dictionary of Angola, new ed. Historical Dictionaries of Africa 92. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2004.

Johnson, Scott. “China’s African Misadventures.” Newsweek (3 December 2007), 46–47.

Maranz, David E. African Friends and Money Matters: Observations from Africa. Publications in Ethnography 37. Dallas, TX: SIL International, 2001.

Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann, 1969.

McKinzie, Greg. “Vulnerable Mission: Questions from a Latin American Context.” Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Praxis 4, no. 1 (February 2013): 110–33.

Mendelsohn, John, and Beat Weber. An Atlas and Profile of Huambo: Its Environment and People. Development Workshop Occasional Paper 10. Luanda, Angola: Development Workshop, forthcoming in 2013.

Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. New York: PublicAffairs, 2005.

Ogot, Bethwell A., and William Robert Ochieng’, eds. Decolonization & Independence in Kenya, 1940–93. Eastern African Studies. London: J. Currey, 1995.

Oyebade, Adebayo O. Culture and Customs of Angola. Culture and Customs of Africa. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007.

Pacheco, Fernando. “Rural Communities in Huambo.” In Communities and Reconstruction in Angola: The Prospects for Reconstruction in Angola from the Community Perspective, edited by Paul Robson, translated by Mark Gimson, 51–117. Development Workshop Occasional Paper 1. Guelph, Canada: Development Workshop, 2001.

Parrinder, Geoffrey. African Traditional Religion, 3rd ed. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1976.

Robson, Paul. “Communities and Community Institutions in Luanda.” In Communities and Reconstruction in Angola: The Prospects for Reconstruction in Angola from the Community Perspective, edited by Paul Robson, translated by Mark Gimson, 163–81. Development Workshop Occasional Paper 1. Guelph, Canada: Development Workshop, 2001.

Robson, Paul, and Sandra Roque. “Here in the City There Is Nothing Left Over for Lending a Hand”: In Search of Solidarity and Collective Action in Peri-Urban Areas in Angola. Development Workshop Occasional Paper 2. Guelph, Canada: Development Workshop, 2001.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. “World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision.” New York: United Nations, 2011. http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Sorting-Tables/tab-sorting_population.htm.

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

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

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

Globally speaking, we seem to be in an endless cycle. The West has grasped the means of being materially productive that has resulted in its amassing wealth. Africa in the meantime engages monism, which perpetuates poverty but demands equality. The interaction of the West that seeks to alleviate the poverty of Africa, in ignoring its root causes, perpetuates it. The fact that the same interaction empowers Western languages gives African people distorted economic signals. It is in the economic interest of many African people to rote-learn foreign wisdom that makes little sense while neglecting locally rooted intelligence and disregarding efforts at countering African monism.

“The missionaries’ aim was to develop Christian communities that were self-supporting.”2

Introduction

The above quote by Grace Wamue demonstrates that attempts by Western missionaries to ensure that their projects in Africa are self-supporting are not new. Yet, dependency continues to plague the African church. This article attempts to ask and answer the question as to why this is the case. It goes on to suggest remedies to this situation.

The traditional approach to development projects is for Westerners to set up a system that should be economically viable, on the assumption that it will continue to be managed in the way that they advocate. Yet it has proved difficult for Africans to continue doing things in the way that missionaries did. This can be explained, at least in part, by considering African people’s proclivity to monistic as against dualistic thinking and philosophy. Because for many African people, the physical and the spiritual are not distinct and easily distinguishable categories, they are inclined to run entities set up on the basis of a material rationality according to more familiar (to them) spiritual-physical lines of reasoning. The West’s response to this practice has been to ignore it, assuming, as John Locke taught, that Africans are a blank slate onto which new things are being written. Unfortunately (or fortunately) previous understandings have continued to “interfere” with new inputs.

This article equates monism with witchcraft. Monism, the presupposition that all physical/material causation is also spiritual (and all spiritual causation is also material), is found to be very widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. Because at least in some parts of Africa “gods” are anthropocentric,3 it follows that misfortune always arises from or through a human agent. The human agent may be someone who is already dead, or an adverse orientation of the heart of another living person. Because the spirits of dead people work through the hearts of living people, the spirits of the dead empower witchcraft fears.4 I take witchcraft as being fear of the power of untoward feelings in the hearts of others, especially feelings of envy.5

The above relationships in African thinking are often concealed through the widespread and widely acclaimed practice in Africa whereby formal communication is in European languages. With the increase in globalized communication, African people are under increasing pressure to use these European languages in the same way that Europeans use them, regardless of their own understanding of what is going on around them. Thus, while the traditional worldview is propagated through widespread but informal uses of African languages, the same is concealed from formal contexts, which are the ones that are mostly in view to Westerners. Vulnerable mission, the use of local languages in ministry, is therefore advocated as necessary for a Western missionary to be truly “informed.” Vulnerable mission as here defined also includes the use of local resources in ministry. Such use of local resources frees African people from the need always to please their missionary as a donating foreign patron. Vulnerable mission is not optional. Local ministry really must be done using locally available languages and resources. The question is whether a foreign Western missionary can or is prepared to build on the local.

Following the Scriptures

The search for equality that currently dominates international relations, even in so far as it is rooted in biblical principles of equality, is not the whole picture presented in the Bible. A case can be made for charitable, material giving to those less well off, but a biblical case can also be made for the communication of a spiritual message that need not be underpinned by material resource provision. This is a message that is fundamental to the Scriptures, to the biblical worldview, and to God’s purpose for mankind. The call to Christian service in the Scriptures is not to persevere in service to God for as long as this proves to be materially rewarding. It is not one that puts material prosperity on par with one’s spiritual standing with God. It is not one in which God’s prophet pays people to do God’s will, or of obliging people to be followers of Jesus in furtherance of their own economic interests. Neither is it one of forcing people to proclaim “correct” theology in a particular language, while their innate and heartfelt understanding remains a vast distance away from such orthodoxy.

When Christ sent out his missionaries, he sent them as lambs amongst wolves, and he gave them specific instructions not to take a “purse or bag or sandals” (Luke 10:3–4).6 The instructions are repeated elsewhere (Luke 9:3; Matt 10:9; Mark 6:8–9). The reason Jesus gave these instructions has not in recent times been clearly understood. Many missiologists have passed over them, ignoring them or considering them to have been superseded (cf. Luke 22:35–36). The Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM) is seeking to revive these forgotten original principles of Christian missionary service.7 They are not exclusive—there may be a place for carrying a bag, but there may be a place equally for leaving it at home.

The principle of the use of local languages also has biblical support in the Pentecost event (Acts 2:6–12) and in Luke’s testimony of Paul (Acts 22:1–2). Again, I am not attempting to be absolutist. It would have been obvious to people in biblical times that it was advantageous to use a language in ministry that their listeners understood; something that Paul and Barnabas failed to do at their cost as recorded in Acts 14:8–20.

Languages

The statement, “the missionaries’ aim was to develop Christian communities that were economically self-supporting” struck me as incongruous and shocking, because it came from 1890.8 Having served in East Africa since 1988,9 I was amazed to find that concern to have been extant so long ago. I had mistakenly thought perhaps it became a concern to a more recent generation of missionaries. It is easy to blame prior generations for their bungles and to assume that we are more enlightened today. But I had to think, are we merely repeating past mistakes?

The approaches to helping people become self-supporting on the part of Western missionaries have doubtless had certain things in common in these last 120 years. One of those things is optimism—an implicit faith that the goal is possible. That faith has at times ebbed. I have witnessed a number of missionaries’ optimism being gradually worn away as years of field service have mounted. Indeed, it seems that the longer an observant and astute missionary serves, the lower his or her optimism regarding the chances of achieving project sustainability becomes. One problem with such a decline in optimism is that people at both ends, African and Western, do not like it. Those who lack optimism seem to share in the sin of the spies sent to report on the promised land, who discouraged the Israelites from taking the land that they could, with God’s help, have taken (Num 13).10

A love of optimists seems to be a deeply ingrained human trait. Hence people consistently love the politician whose forecast when running up to the election is highly positive. People often prefer an optimistic half-truth to a discouraging full-truth! Optimistic half-truths can indeed spur people into action, but what if (as in the case of mission and development in Africa) optimistic half-truths tend to favour foreigners and “fat cats” while leaving the masses struggling? Could it be helpful to consider this situation more carefully? For example, should we be more optimistic about African people’s ability to pass off witchcraft beliefs as irrelevant in “this day and age”? Concern for the plight of child witches11 seems in recent years to have helped to spark a renewed unease regarding problematic issues in African culture.12 “Religious” aspects of the culture of Nigerian peoples have recently been identified as evil, rather than as merely opium of the people.13 “Witchcraft” is the English term that continues to be widely used to encapsulate a set of apparently very contrary beliefs that are widespread on the African continent.14

I have pointed elsewhere to the problems that can arise in the course of translation into English.15 Labeling African phenomena with English terms invariably gives them baggage that is not necessarily rooted in the phenomena themselves. This is the case when it comes to witchcraft. The term is in contemporary times rarely used by people in the native English-speaking world to describe themselves. It is a term that implicitly raises the question of whether Africa is behind the times and should just stop “believing in”16 something that the native English-speaking world left behind long ago.

Without going into the linguistic debate in much more detail here, I do want to search for an escape from the somewhat arbitrary constraints in understanding imposed by Western ideas about the witchcraft that African people, supposedly erroneously, “believe in.” My “escape” is that instead of witchcraft, I want to talk of monism, and sometimes of envy. Monism I take as being an alternative to the dualism (in which the physical/material is taken as being different from the spiritual) which is widespread in Western nations. The increasingly popular Western explanatory system is dualistic; Westerners ever more frequently understand events in physical or material terms. This notion of what is real dismisses causative agents such as gods, spirits, curses, and omens. Monistic explanatory systems instead perceive a variety of causes that invariably include spiritual ones.17

In substituting the term monism (and at times, envy) for that of witchcraft, I hope we will find a little more room for maneuver in our consideration of “the problems of Africa” than has often been the case. Instead of means of overcoming witchcraft—which suggests rather gruesome practices like drowning, poisoning, or burning people, the obstacle to “development” is rather more philosophical in nature: monism. I also intend my use of monism to critique a tendency in some recent scholarship to value monism. I refer here to advocates of holistic mission, Tearfund’s use of the term umoja (“oneness” from Swahili) to describe their strategies for promoting self-sustaining development in the Majority World, and so on.18 (Some confusion seems to have arisen through the widespread use of English in which the words holy, holistic, and whole sound much the same.) I am not denying that there may be value in holistic approaches to situations, communities, or problems, but I would suggest that there is a dualism inherent both in the gospel and in Western society, and that this dualism is in both cases essential. The root of the essential dualism in the gospel is the distinction between God and the world. The essential dualism that I refer to in Western society is between the spiritual and the physical/material. The fact that these two are related reflects the Christian roots of Western dualism, though dualism arises also as a result of philosophical realism.19

If we assume that monistic thinking is contrary in various ways to human wellbeing, and for Christian believers that it incorporates theological error, the question arises as to how it can best be changed so that dualism comes to the fore. The preferred option in Western thinking seems to be to follow the teaching of John Locke, in so far as Locke considered the human mind to resemble a tabula rasa onto which information is drawn. According to him, the whole of understanding arises from physical stimuli made to the human senses.20 Such is the model of education that has been applied from the West to the majority world. It assumes that if educational inputs to the people of Africa are the same as those given to Western people, then African people will have as a result the same capabilities as Western people. There are two important, closely related assumptions that underlie this thinking:

1. That whatever Western people (children) already have as they enter the school system that enables them to benefit from the education they are given, African people also have the same.
2. That African people do not have anything in their understanding that can interfere with their ability to appropriate Western education in the way that Westerners appropriate it.

Unfortunately, we seem to hit a problem here quite quickly in terms of language of use. Education in Africa is largely carried out using Western languages. When languages are understood as needing to be integrally linked to particular Western cultures so as to function effectively, then this is something that African people do not have. African languages/cultures meanwhile are something that Western people do not have but African people do have. The presence of these languages/cultures “interfere” with African people’s engagement with Western education, for example through the way in which they affect how Western languages are understood.

It is very difficult to justify the assumption that a child entering school is a blank slate,21 not least because the home life of children prior to entering school, which surely is strongly formative of their character, differs between cultures, nations, tribes, and linguistic communities. Linguistically one can consider the implicit and explicit translations that must be going on as a child learns in English at school while using another language at home. In much of Africa a foundational monistic outlook on life is already in place before a child begins to acquire formal schooling. It is difficult for a child, or an adult for that matter, to break out of the kinds of strictures placed upon them by the monistic community within which they live and relate to others, even as they engage in Western education.

The dominant wisdom demonstrated in educational policy practice seems to be that the best way to provide an escape from the strictures of monistic thinking is to ignore them and to trust that they will go away. Hence educational systems (including theological education systems) being designed for and taken up by African people are no different from those in the West. This applies increasingly as advances in communication technology that enable globalization take hold. Globalisation enables the spread of provincialisms by people who think that their provincialisms are universal.22

That people are ignoring vast differences between themselves and others for the sake of some kind of superficial global uniformity ought to strike us as incredible. It would be helpful to adopt a thoughtful approach instead of ignoring contextual complexity. Popular educational wisdom states that learning should begin where someone is and then take them to where they are not. Contemporary educational systems in much of Africa, in assuming people to be “at the same place as the West” ignore cultural differences between Africa and the West.

If the educational system in Africa is so ineffective, then why is it so popular and so widespread? The answer in short is subsidy. The educational system in much of Africa is not homegrown, nor is its adoption motivated by what it can achieve or help people to achieve within the society receiving it. Were the latter the case, then Africans would educate their children using familiar languages. On the contrary, the perceived value of Western education in parts of Africa is in the links it provides to the wider world of European language-speaking peoples. The reason these links are so prominent and so critical to African communities is because English (perhaps more than other European languages) is the dominant language through which numerous varieties of charity and aid are distributed. Those with good English get this aid and get to control it, whereas those without good English are subject to the whim of those who get it. The power in English is not in the way it assists a community to help itself but the way it makes communities dependent on outside charity.

Such an educational system can severely restrict the development of a community: it forces students into great expense in terms of both time and finance to acquire the language of education, before being able to acquire the education in that language. It results in education being not from known to unknown, but from unknown to unknown. As a result the use of an African language is essential for education in Africa to be truly effective. There is a strong case to be made in favour of every people’s total education to be in their mother tongue.23 Even failing this, I believe there is still a compelling case that any African language used in education in Africa should be seen as a better prospect than the European languages that are widely used at present.

Some scholars may consider that the great advantage of the use of English in Africa is that it enables access to written resources and provides a lingua franca for the continent. Kwesi Prah powerfully critiques this view.24 Few scholars seem to ask themselves why it appears that every African language has failed to be the medium of enlightened advanced education. A question that should follow is, what are the implications of the fact that an African language apparently cannot be the medium of “modern” education? Could it be that there are qualities of African languages that render them incompatible with modern education? If such qualities exist, then how can learning a European language in itself enable a people to overcome such qualities? Presumably the content of African languages arises from the content of African lives. Does learning of another language “magically” result in a change in way of life? Or is the widespread use of English making people dependent on what they do not understand because it is not a part of who they are? If we had examples of non-European languages “succeeding,” then perhaps we could say that the choice of a European language for an African student is a free or arbitrary choice. As it is, if it is a choice at all, then it is a choice that largely precludes taking the African person’s own context seriously. This default option for African students handicaps them for the rest of their lives.25

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

In the globalizing world it is becoming more and more difficult for different peoples to use English as they like. There are too many people who are trying to align English with international standards for adaptation to happen easily. The main hope of many monistic people around the world is, in fact, to use English in the way that it “should be,” even when such use clashes with their way of life and makes little sense to them. English use has to be an imitation and cannot arise from understanding. That is, English has to be rote-learned, as is a large proportion of the African educational curriculum. Still, accusations of corruption in economic and other practices abound. As a result, the use of subsidy to promote English and other non-African languages in Africa may be crippling the continent.

Economics, God, and African Leadership

Dambisa Moyo has probably become the most internationally renowned economist from Zambia. Her book Dead Aid speaks loudly and boldly against “charitable” practices that are “the silent killer of growth.”26

To her the dependence of Africa on foreign aid is clear, gross, and wrong.27 Her statements regarding this dependence have intrigued me: “foreign aid . . . continues . . . to be the predominant source of financial resources for much of the continent.”28 Just how dependent is the continent on foreign aid? The answer must of course depend on the definition one will take of terms such as “aid” and “dependence.” What exactly qualifies as aid? What criterion is used for aid to be considered foreign?

A broad definition of aid is necessary in order to understand dependence comprehensively. Foreign control of the economy contributes to the aid-related dependence that Moyo discusses. Remittances sent by relatives from overseas into local communities, which official statistics do not take into account, should also be included in a comprehensive definition of aid. Moreover, we must account for the way that the impact of aid multiplies within the local economy. The gross receipts of aid are tremendous by themselves, yet this number alone does not reflect the depth of dependency that such income creates.29

What impact does aid money have? Some try to minimise its apparent impact by emphasising how small it is in relation to GDP figures. Subjectively speaking—as a member of a rural African village community (admittedly a village targeted by the Millennium Villages Project, but the same could really be said even before MVP came)—it seems that foreign donor funds are constantly in view. It would seem that locally available resources quickly get used up in immediate home needs, whereas it is donor money that is used to fund whatever takes people beyond the level of basic self-sufficiency and household survival. If Moyo is right, then the degree of dependency of many African communities is very large indeed. The withdrawal of aid could certainly result in a severe catastrophe, yet the current system seems to be increasing this kind of dependency.

My reason for delving into this area of economics is not to belittle or to put down African people who would like to believe that they are doing better than I am indicating. It is to point to a massive concern that is crying out for attention. This concern links in to our discussion of dualism and monism. Could it be that deeply implicit and widely spread monism is preventing African people from grasping what is necessary in order to develop their economies along the same lines as others in the rest of the world? If this is the case, then we are face to face with an enormous and critical question: how to help people to grasp principles of dualism without which the onslaught of poverty intertwined with dependency will persist.

The perception that what Africa needs is science and technology is not new in the West. Unfortunately, attempts at transmission of scientific/technological principles have been rooted in the presupposition of dualism, onto which to latch scientific insights. The question of how to “convert” a people from being monistic in their worldview to the adoption of a partially30 dualistic worldview looms large. What strikes me as perhaps the most interesting with respect to this worldview question is how we are challenging the secular agenda with what has traditionally been mission/Christian territory. By discussing monism instead of just material poverty, and then conversion as a description of “needed change,” religious faith has become the central issue for socio-economic development.31 Religious faith after all, in its engagement with heart and affection, contributes presuppositional foundations on which other things, including secularism, come to build.32

The shift from monism to dualism has a lot to do with monotheism or a “high view of God.” If some Africans do not have a traditional understanding of a high God,33 then that absence can help to explain why it has been so difficult for them to acquire a dualistic worldview. Fennella Cannell makes a clear case for Christianity as source of dualism.34 The key, then, to Africa’s social/economic development, lies in the appropriation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.35 That gospel must not be merely the prosperity gospel or the gospel that concentrates on driving out demons which seems to be the variant encouraged by today’s “aid culture,” but which can leave the monistic worldview intact. I refer here especially to Pentecostalism, that (including charismatics) claims one quarter of the world’s Christians,36 but as James K. A. Smith concedes, easily becomes compromised to primal worldviews.37

Before looking at the missionary strategy that reflects the nature of God as high God, I want to make a few further comments regarding how historically a transition from monism to dualism has been enabled. This was a transition occurring during the fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italian renaissance. In the course of this Renaissance monotheistic Christian belief was almost universally presupposed.38 In the seventeenth Century, according to Anthony Balcomb, “the main objection that arose against the belief [in magic] was [not science but] . . . that it threatened the idea of a transcendent omnipotent creator who could impose his will by divine fiat in the created order”.39 It is possible that the Greek discovery of dualism was connected to links between Greek culture and knowledge of the true God derived from Moses.40 Did Max Weber not also hint that economic advances in Europe were as much to do with “extreme faith” in Protestantism as with technological innovativeness?41 In fact movements of faith have often motivated masses of people in ways unequalled by either political revolution or “merely” social innovation.42

These observations challenge us to reconsider a lot of contemporary missions’ strategy. Why have missions produced dependent churches addicted to the prosperity gospel? In short, Western missions’ strategies have frequently presupposed the existence of dualism in the populations they have reached. For example, they have assumed that African people will understand that the resources provided by the Western mission body to support the spreading of the gospel are not the gospel. It has been very difficult, if not impossible, for many African people to grasp this. The challenge for the next generation of believers is how to spread the gospel without making the African church dependent on a dualism that it does not have, outside resources that it cannot control, and outside languages that it cannot own?

The West has been attempting to have African church leaders play a key part in the leadership of Western (-resourced and -language) mission efforts. Yet, we need to ask ourselves, How can African church leaders be expected to guide strategies to reach their own people that are rooted in misguided foreign assumptions? Instead of attempting to incorporate Africans into mission by educating them in Western languages and presupposing that they have a dualistic understanding that they do not, the challenge is now for Westerners to adjust their mission strategies to align with African realities. The lead, after God, must come from Africa. This requires the use of African languages as they are used by African people in Africa.43

African people leading Western mission efforts are invariably responding to an intricate and complex context of their own about which Westerners know relatively little. That context, including pressures from extended family and monistic presuppositions has almost invariably compelled the African to maximise the use of Western languages and to maximise foreign income in mission—to perpetuate dependence and the prosperity gospel. New mission efforts guided by the vulnerable mission principles of reliance on local resources and local languages must go beyond drawing on these “native informers.” Informers need to be allowed to speak more freely than is often the case. Listening to them in their own languages and ensuring that the economic equation not be loaded strongly in favour of their compliance enables such freedom. Such is what we are calling vulnerable mission.

Vulnerable Mission

We can define vulnerable mission as mission (or development intervention) by Westerners in the majority world that is carried out using local resources and languages. Instead of relying on “educated” foreign nationals to guide Western missionaries, Western missionaries and development workers must themselves become experts at intercultural communication. This requires that they become immersed in the languages and traditions of the people they are reaching. A vulnerable missionary will become dependent on locals and not on Western donors for the success of their endeavours. They will not so much devise “strategy” as they will respond in a Christ-centred way to the “strategies” of local African or other Majority World believers. Such can enable vulnerable mission to achieve a truly indigenous theology; something which money-laden strategists using Western languages have failed to accomplish for decades.

The carrying out of vulnerable mission depends on achieving the cooperation of nationals. Nationals have become increasingly accustomed to responding to proffered finance and other benefits. How Western missionaries will be welcomed if they do not have such to offer remains to be seen. The obligation is now, in the absence of the option of buying access, on the Westerner to adjust to the non-Western context. Will they be able to meet this challenge?

The new mission that emerges from vulnerable strategies on the part of Westerners opens numerous arenas full of challenge. Allow me to outline these by way of answering some of the critics of vulnerable mission strategies.

Some say that vulnerable mission is a way of denying African people access to Western languages or to funds. Yet, is a church pastor in the USA who is inviting young people to talk about God denying them access to education in mathematics? That pastor has not gone to the school to burn the mathematics textbooks; he has simply chosen to offer people something other than mathematics; so also for vulnerable missionaries with respect to English and donor funds.

My own prediction is that a VM will get the kind of stark view of “life” in African (Majority World) communities that has often been missed by contemporary missionaries. As the view becomes stark and clear, so will previously barely perceived challenges. Typically in Africa the major challenge is how to deal with the monism we are considering, which has in the West become known as witchcraft; something largely ignored by the current Western missionary force. The critics have long said that witchcraft does not “exist.” Recently, its impact has become more visible. Vulnerable mission provides an alternative to the perhaps much more common secular critique of monism.44

The rise in the visibility of African witchcraft in recent years has been notable. Stepping Stones Nigeria in particular has invested heavily in making the problem of child witches better known.45 Unfortunately, their work suffers the weakness of treating witchcraft as if it is an appendage to life in Africa that they can excise, rather than recognising it for what it is—an expression of the African worldview. Nevertheless the actions of Stepping Stones and others46 in drawing our attention to this issue can be considered progress. It is an improvement on those who perceive Africa’s problems to be only in the material realm—the position of many big players in the field of development, such as the Millennium Development Project, who are forced to be secular in orientation.

It is time for Westerners intervening in Africa to concede that beliefs related to monism are not there “objectively” waiting to be analysed using English as if they are in a laboratory. Treating beliefs in this way is like studying the habits of fish through first laying them out in the sun on a concrete surface. Monistic/witchcraft beliefs affect Africans’ communication about themselves and their communities. When talking with African people about witchcraft, even if the conversation is in English, one is not only discussing witchcraft, but one is also using witchcraft categories, and in that sense engaging in witchcraft, whether one knows it or not. In the course of discussion an African speaker may well be wary of the way what he says could implicate him in witchcraft attacks, and so on. Such topics are effectively tackled using African languages.

Envy is not given a great deal of prominence in many secular discussions today, despite the prominence of envy in Africa. The Western approach, rooted in objectivity, excludes such human sentiments as envy from view. Seen from the African side, the history of the interaction between Western and African people is intricately connected to issues concerning envy. This could be very evident to those who take a broader look at relationships between the West and Africa. Envy is the powerhouse of a lot of the evil associated with witchcraft (i.e., monistic beliefs).

Whether African communities can escape the clutches of envy/jealousy is a very important question. I take envy as a synonym for witchcraft. If they can do so, then in a sense they have already overcome one of the terrors of witchcraft. Such beliefs (i.e., fear of witchcraft) are very difficult to overcome, but if African communities cannot overcome their orientation to envy, then it will be hard to make progress on other fronts. Envy constantly curtails alternative options of mutual cooperation between community members. If each one has set out from the beginning to make sure that others not get ahead,47 regress is easier than progress. Envy easily disregards victims—if my focus is on how to close the gap between myself and others I consider to be better off than I, then I may have little energy left to consider someone else who is worse off.48 Africa cannot “be developed” by others without its own people’s active participation, yet envy undermines the possibility of that participation.

David Maranz articulates one outcome of envy: in many African communities, those who are better off have an innate and unquestioned obligation to give.49 (They are required to “give” so as to avoid the consequences of the envy (i.e., witchcraft) of others should they not do so.) What the receiver gives in return is a kind of servitude and verbal public praise. In terms of relationships between the wealthy West and Africa, this means that according to many Africans the West is required to keep giving and giving to Africa until material equality is reached. Such an equation includes relatively little consideration for the need to impart material productivity to Africa, because in the African view of the world much overlap between spiritual and “material productivity” looks different than it does in the West.

The flip side of Africa’s demands is of course the West’s willingness to give. The evidence demonstrates that the African approach to imbalances in wealth is proving enormously successful—to the tune of $1 trillion given to the continent in foreign aid over the last 50 years.50 Africa’s pleas for help would have accomplished nothing if no one was listening, but those who are listening are also responding generously. The sum total of reasons as to why the so-called international community responds as generously as it does to appeals for help from Africa is too large a topic for us here.

Summary and Conclusion

While the Bible may advocate equality, it does not insist that spiritual messages be accompanied by material charity. The Bible points us towards the advantages of the use of mother tongues.

Western missionaries have long recognised the need for African churches and communities to be self-supporting. African monism has hindered the achievement of that goal. Western experts have ignored monism, but contrary to their hopes, its persistence has revealed the shallowness of their aspirations for how Africa should develop. A necessary component to the overcoming of the ignorance of Westerners in Africa is a considered response to and not an ignoring of what is there, including monism and its products. Because monism will not simply go away, Western missionaries must carefully address it, which requires the use of African language(s) in church, leadership, and education.

Africa’s dependency on outside aid is massive. Empowering the continent’s people requires an appreciation of dualism, which has historically often come to a more monistic people by means of religious conversion—a kind of conversion which, contrary to popular opinion, has barely occurred in Africa. Because leading people from monism to dualism is different from the West’s education and leadership practices that operate within the boundaries of dualism, the best approach to African leaders ought to include an attempt to gain understanding from their perspective. The responsibility is on the West to communicate and interact interculturally.

To share the gospel and not Western culture remains an acute challenge to Western Christian missionaries. The rising visibility of witchcraft in Africa even in secular circles demonstrates an awareness of aspects of monism until recently deemed irrelevant by strict dualists. The way forward must be in a vulnerable approach to mission, that intends to overcome the intensity of envy associated with monism to foster belief in God as high God and to move away from the current widespread African Christian faith that hopes intently in this-worldly success.

Jim Harries (PhD) served for three years amongst the Kaonde people in Zambia. Since 1993 he has lived in a Luo village in western Kenya. In that time he has been teaching Theological Education by Extension at Yala Theological Centre and Siaya Theological Centre in western Kenya. He lectures part time at Kima International School of Theology. He has learned the languages of the Kaonde, Luo, and Swahili people. Harries is the chairman of the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission and serves as adjunct faculty at William Carey International University and Global University, both in the USA. He can be contacted at jimoharries@gmail.com.

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

The Goal of Mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Huge Methodological Choice for Western Missions Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Requests for Readers

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vulnerable Mission. http://vulnerablemission.org.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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