Category: md-4-1

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.

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Harries, Jim. “Meeting the Indigenous Church: A Personal Account of an African Missionary Journey.” Unpublished manuscript, 2009. http://www.jim-mission.org.uk/harries-bio.pdf.

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

________. “Witchcraft, Envy, Development, and Christian Mission in Africa.” Missiology: An International Review 40, no. 2 (April 2012): 129–39.

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Kail, Tony. Cry from the Bush: A Christian Response to Africa’s Epidemic of Witch Hunts, Child Witches and Deadly Exorcisms. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.

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Moyo, Dambisa. Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

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Sugiharto, Bambang. “Radical Consequences of the Primacy of Experience in the Hermeneutics of Culture.” In Communication across Cultures: The Hermeneutics of Cultures and Religions in a Global Age, edited by Chibueze C. Udeani, Veerachart Nimanong, Zou Shipeng, and Mustafa Malik, 93–105. Seminars: Culture and Values, vol. 26. Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2008.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesslie Newbigin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David J. Bosch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

An Ancient Ecclesiology: Church as Economy of Grace

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

Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economy of Grace in Ephesians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Locus of Initiative in the Economy of Grace

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

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

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

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

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

The Nature of Leadership in the Economy of Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economy of Grace as the Context of Mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

Duffy, Stephen. The Dynamics of Grace: Perspectives in Theological Anthropology. New Theology Studies 3. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1993.

Elliott, J. H. A Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy. Philadelphia, Fortress, 1981.

Gehring, Roger. House Church and Mission: The Importance of Household Structures in Early Christianity. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2004.

Hellerman, Joseph H. The Ancient Church as Family. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2001.

Hutson, Christopher. “Enough for What? Playacting Isaiah 53 in Luke 22:35–38.” Restoration Quarterly 55, no.1 (January 2013): 35–51.

Jeremias, Joachim. New Testament Theology. New York: Scribners, 1971.

Kenneson, Philip. “Visible Grace: The Church as God’s Embodied Presence.” In Grace Upon Grace: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Langford, ed. Robert K. Johnston, L. Gregory Jones, and Jonathan R. Wilson, 169–79. Nashville: Abingdon, 1999.

Lohfink, Gerhard. Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith. Translated by John P. Galvin Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984.

Sakenfeld, Katharine Doob, ed. New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. 5 vols. Nash- ville: Abingdon, 2006–2009.

Sandnes, Karl Olav. A New Family: Conversion and Ecclesiology in the Early Church with Cross-Cultural Comparisons. Studien zur interkulturellen Geschichte des Christentums 91. Bern: Peter Lang, 1994.

Snodgrass, Klyne. Ephesians. The NIV Application Commentary. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996.

Stark, Rodney. Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2006.

Ware, Timothy. The Orthodox Church: A Clear, Detailed Introduction to the Orthodox Church Written for the Non-Orthodox as Well as for Orthodox Chrisitans Who Wish to Know More about Their Own Tradition. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Yoder, John Howard. Body Politics: Five Practices of the Christian Community before the Watching World. Nashville: Discipleship Resource, 1992.

This essay argues that globalism retains the same qualities that defined ancient and modern empires. The all-pervading boundarylessness of capitalist enterprise is analogous to the Rome of Paul’s day, and in his first letter to the Thessalonian church Christians can find and appropriate his advice for living in the midst of empire. The virtues required of disciples today to live faithfully in empire are a reimagination of the vows taken by St. Francis: obedience, poverty, and chastity. By taking on these disciplines, followers can begin to root out the ways empire makes claims on their lives and resubmit themselves to the way of Jesus.

Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” is a familiar tale to most Westerners.  The story goes that a monarch with a penchant for finery searches for the most luxuriant, expensive clothing he can find.  In the midst of his shopping about for tailors who can fulfill this aristocratic need, he is approached by two such craftsmen promising to sew the most lavish linens possible.  The plot of the story turns upon the clever assertion of the tailors, that the clothing remains invisible to those either unworthy of their office, on the one hand, or those, on the other, who are mere fools.  Thus, as the swindling tailors daily pretend they are busy at work sewing a fine suit, the king and his court dare not question the invisible clothing, for such would be a confession of foolishness and unworthiness.  Finally, the tailors announce that the suit is ready and mime the dressing of the king, who then parades about the streets in the nude.  The matrix of pride and self-deception work their magic not only in the emperor’s court, but also in the streets, and the crowds of people proclaim their amazement at the finery of the monarch’s attire.  However, the spell is finally broken by a child, who, unburdened by the need for social standing, shouts that the emperor is indeed naked.  Once the elephant in the room has been spoken, the crowd’s whispers turn into a roar as they all guffaw in amazement at the emperor’s narcissistic nakedness.

Our world is in a state of undress much more insipid and tyrannical than the blunderings of the monarch in Andersen’s story.  Indeed, the fabric of globo-capital enterprise stands as the new empire, having neither boundary nor regulation. However, the ideology of this new empire stays true to the old story; globo-capitalist culture retains the character ascribed to ancient Rome by the historian Tacitus:

Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.1

In our day, global capitalism displays similar disregard for both peoples and land. For instance, in 1995, pharmaceutical company Pfizer tested their drug Trovan on children in Kano State, Nigeria.  Half of the patients in the study were treated with ceftriaxone, the gold standard treatment for meningitis, and the other half were given the experimental drug Trovan.  After eleven children died in the trial (and the ethics of such drug trials on children notwithstanding), parents claimed they were not informed that their children were being treated with an experimental drug.2 Pfizer, claiming their practices were ethical, fought the suit in court, and, according to a Wikileaks cable, investigated the prosecuting attorney in order to pressure him to stop the legal action against the drug company.3

An even more disturbing example of corporate misdeed is that of the technology firm, Foxconn Electronics, which builds parts for Apple iPads as well as Hewlett-Packard printers.  Reports reveal the firm hung netting around the dormitories where company employees sleep, in order to discourage suicide attempts.4  While no one can say for certain why fourteen workers jumped to their death in 2011,5 it may have to do with hours worked by employees, some of whom worked over 100 hours of overtime in one month.  In light of this, Foxconn’s tripartite business philosophy, consisting of “efficient ‘Total Cost Advantages,’” “revolutionizing the conventional inefficient electronics outsourcing model,” and “devotion to greater social harmony”6 seems rather weighted against the latter. The “revolutionizing model,” it seems, is a suicide machine.

In the first part of this essay, I further articulate how global capitalism functions as empire, engaging secular philosophers, political theorists, and theologians. In the second section of the essay, I suggest that in the writings of Paul we have resources to engage empire. Finally, I will suggest a theo-political response to our current situation of empire for disciples, including some suggestions for a post-imperial missiology.

Naked Empire

A sculpted relief at Aphrodisias in Asia Minor symbolically shows the power and terror of the Pax Romana. The relief features a male figure framing the top of the sculpture, nude, with the exception of a helmet on his head and a cape billowing behind him. On the ground below him lies a woman, right breast bared, hips on the ground, and torso raised. The male is grabbing her head with his left hand, and appears to be violently holding it up; his right arm is raised, and, though the relief is broken, appears to have been wielding a sword. The figures are identified as the Emperor Claudius and the woman as the nation of Britannia, Rome’s most significant exploit during his reign.

Of course, in this setting, the emperor’s nudity shows not his incompetence, but rather his heroic strength.7 The relief makes clear through its hierarchical imagery the power of Rome, embodied in the emperor himself. Thus, above is to below as man is to woman as Rome is to the nations as conqueror is to conquered.8 Further, the partial nudity of both figures, man and woman, suggests undertones of sexual violence. In this instance, the rape of Britannia is both figurative and literal; as Tacitus tells us, one of the grievances the woman warrior Boudicca names against the Romans is that “nowadays Roman rapacity does not even spare our bodies. Old people are killed, virgins are raped.”9 As I intend to show in the following section, the rape of Britannia described above reveals the lust for domination lying at the heart of empire.

While empire is a term frequently employed in political and philosophical discussions, it avoids easy definition. Political scientist Herfried Münkler describes a few characteristics of empires, analyzing empires from ancient Rome to modern nation-states:

First, “Imperial boundaries . . . involve gradations of power and influence”: that is, there is a structural difference between imperial and nonimperial space.

Second, “Imperiality . . . dissolves . . . equality and reduces subordinates to the status of client states or satellites”: that is, international relations are not between equals, but between a “center” and a “periphery.”

Third, “Most empires have owed their existence to a mixture of chance and contingency”: that is, there need not be a “will to empire” (i.e., “imperialism”) or a “grand strategy,” but rather, a series of circumstances that lead to increased power and control of people and/or territory.

Fourth, “The capacity for reform and regeneration . . . makes an empire independent of the charismatic qualities of its founder (or founding generation)”: that is, there is temporal continuity that transcends the original situation that generated the empire.

Fifth, “An empire cannot remain neutral in relation to the powers in its sphere of influence”: that is, it cannot allow either independence or nonparticipation without retaliation.10

These five aspects provide a good frame for descriptive purposes; however, they fail insofar as they do not account for nonpolitical entities which still exert massive control over economics and the daily lives of individuals.11 For instance, a corporate entity such as Google might compete for power in its technological sphere, similar to characteristic number five above, but it would require semantic bending to assert that Google has “client states.” Because of this, philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri assert that empire of today is unlike Rome in that it has no centralized government or military power; this is why the United States, despite its military strength, cannot control the Middle East or other parts of the globe.12

Political and corporate lines increasingly blur in today’s world. This was manifestly clear when, on the evening after the attacks on the World Trade Center, then President George W. Bush declared to the world, “the American economy will be open for business.” The subtext of such a statement is that “you can’t hurt us as long as people keep buying,” which reveals that true power lies in corporate stocks. In poorer countries, corporations have more direct influence. Naomi Klein notes that the economic power which companies yield give them the ability to dictate public policy, particularly in the factory-dependent countries of Asia.13 The mercenary corporation Blackwater took the power over life usually reserved for the state in its proceedings in Iraq, while the networking capability of Twitter has been celebrated as crucial to the recent popular uprisings across the Middle East and Africa.14 For this reason, I follow Hardt and Negri in their proposal:

Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.15

Hardt and Negri note that empire, as they view it, is founded ultimately upon boundarylessness. This boundarylessness has four qualities. First, they emphasize that this global empire has no spatial limits. As we have seen, corporate power moves fluidly throughout the earth with little resistance from traditional nation-state sovereignties. The Coca Cola company is one example of such borderlessness. I myself can attest that its products can be found from the epicenters of New York and Rome to the equatorial jungles of Kenya and the deserts of Mexico and Mali. Recent Coca Cola advertisements in the United States even show polar bears drinking Coca Cola in the Arctic. Second, Hardt and Negri explain, empire presents itself with no “temporal boundaries” as the end of history. Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History and the Last Man, a celebration of Western liberal democracy, effectively displays this arrogance.16 Third, Hardt and Negri assert that empire is the “paradigmatic form of biopower,” seeking to rule life in its entirety. They later explain that biopower “is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and articulating it.”17 While missiologists might find biopower strikingly similar to “worldview,” biopower connotes an element of createdness. Worldview or culture are generally considered passive concepts—no one entity makes worldview, rather all participate in it—while biopower has an active component. It assumes both an active party and recipients. When a company advertises for its product, seeking to create demand in consumers, or when a government dictates certain behaviors or modes of thinking, these are instances of biopower. A good example of biopower is in Orwell’s classic, 1984. In this dystopian novel, the main character, Winston Smith, tries to rebel against an authoritarian state led by a larger-than-life persona, Big Brother, who decries individuality and reason as thought crimes. Smith is eventually captured and tortured psychologically. Finally, the novel ends with a brain-washed Smith realizing, “it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”18 Biopower strives toward this telos—a political subject who, shaped by the forces of empire around her, desires that which the empire wants. The final quality, Hardt and Negri note, is that “although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.”19 This dedication to peace gives empire its mission. As Münkler notes, mission serves as a self-sacralizing virtue for empire, expanding its necessity beyond the interests of any private actors, as well as providing a theory of ends to justify any means needed to accomplish such a task.20 This mantra of “peace and security” will be discussed further below.

Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat suggest four characteristics as definitive for empires.21 First, empires are built on systemic centralization of power. This is related to both the first and second characteristics that Münkler describes, in dissolving equality and in gradating power. While Hardt and Negri contend that empire today is marked by decentralization, this does not necessarily contradict Walsh and Keesmaat, for indeed there are multiple centers of power that both compete and work together. Second, they are secured by structures of socioeconomic and military control. This characteristic relates to Münkler’s first, second, and fifth characteristics, and in fact, it is the control secured by military and economic forces that give empire, in Münkler’s definition, the ability to retain power. Third, they are religiously legitimated by powerful myths. For instance, one common American myth is that of “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps”—in other words, if you are poor, it is your own fault for not working hard enough—everyone can be successful if they want to. This myth undermines the notion that economically successful individuals or companies may have become so by disadvantaging others, as well as bolstering the idea of the lazy poor. Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” of the market which self-regulates wealth represents another common myth supporting the increasingly unregulated capital of the elite. Fourth, empires are sustained by imperial images that capture the imagination of the population. In ancient times, these images were distributed via sculpture, architecture, and coinage.22 In the Roman Empire, the dying Gaul was the image of the archetypal barbarian, while now Hollywood takes up the mantle by creating villains to match the political climate.23 Today, the ubiquity of advertisement is easy enough to see: from television to billboards to user-specific internet advertisement, empire takes captive the imaginations of the populace to serve its own economic interests. These last two characteristics—myths and imagery—are missing from Münkler’s defining features, while they relate to Hardt and Negri’s concept of biopower. In fact, imagination may be a better term than biopower, for in the “capture of imagination,” subjects can be manipulated toward certain ends by their own will rather than external force. This is the very heart of biopower.

The language of empire, as we have seen, is at times ambiguous and fraught with abstraction. Many institutions, from political states to corporations, can display qualities of empire. This aspect of empire as a qualitative term relates to theologian Walter Wink’s discussion of the language of the powers in the New Testament. He argues that the various words for powers in Scripture refer at the same time to both spiritual and material realities, and that these realities are not different, but rather, “simultaneously the outer and inner aspects of one and the same indivisible concretion of power.”24

To conclude, I suggest that empire is an inner aspect of many external realities which function together in a global network of power relations. Various institutions (governments and supra-governmental organizations, like the IMF or NATO) work with the help of ideologies (e.g., capitalism, progress, democracy, and security) to create a boundaryless empire. There is no one epicenter to this empire, rather, it has many foci, from the economic centers of London, New York, and Tokyo to the military nexi of the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and the Israel Defense Force in Tel Aviv. Internet-based Facebook, Twitter, and Google further function as gathering points through social technology. These epicenters of power are bolstered by a combination of military and socioeconomic structures, as well as biopower in the form of foundational myths with imagery supporting these myths.

Rhetorical Intifada

In the global economy, it is not the emperors who are stripped of their decency.  In a version of the story “Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils,” Alphonse Allais shows this with striking imagery.  As Salome the dancer removes her veils one by one, king Herod, overcome with desire, keeps crying out, “go on, go on,” until Salome, already naked, begins to rip the flesh from her body.  “Listen,” cries the prophet Micah, “you . . . who tear the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones” (3:1–2; niv).  Emperors, and the empires they serve, have a consuming appetite.

Understanding the prophets of ancient Israel as critical of the elites of their day has been easy enough throughout Christian history. More recently there has been a wave of scholarship reading New Testament Scripture through eyes focused on issues of empire. I will use this empire-critical lens to read what scholars consider Paul’s earliest letter, 1 Thessalonians, as a text with clear rhetoric against the empire of his day—Rome.

We learn about Paul’s missionary activity in Thessalonica via a short passage from Acts. After Paul and company made some converts in the synagogue, Jewish leaders became jealous and stirred up a crowd. Unable to find Paul and Silas, the crowd captured some new believers and took them before the politarchs (city officials), with the accusation that they were stirring up trouble as well as defying the dogmas of Caesar (Acts 17:1–9).

Thessalonica had a long history of loyalty to Rome. Its support of Octavian and Antony paid off when Thessalonica was given status as a free Roman city in 42 BC.25 This freedom gave Thessalonica ability to rule itself free of military occupation, and even could mint its own coins. Because of this, Thessalonica, by all evidence, worked with intention to keep strong ties to Rome. Coinage from 29 to 28 BC shows Thessalonians honoring Julius Caesar as a god; later, Augustus was inducted to this rank as well, considered “divi filius,” the son of a deity.26 A statue of Augustus, as well as a temple to him , were installed in the city, and are dated to the time of Paul.27 The installation of a priesthood for the goddess Roma both acknowledged the divine status of Rome’s power, as well as intimately linked the inhabitants of the city to that power.28 As Charles Wanamaker notes, “politically, the establishment of the imperial cult made good sense because it cemented Thessalonica’s relations with Rome and the emerging imperial order.”29

Further, E. A. Judge has shown that the politarchs of the city—to whom the angered crowd took Paul’s converts—were responsible for ensuring loyalty to Caesar and his decrees. An example of such an oath taken from Paphlagonia reads as follows:

I swear . . . that I will support Caesar Augustus, his children and descendants, throughout my life, in word, deed and thought…that in whatsoever concerns them I will spare neither body nor soul nor life nor children…that whenever I see or hear of anything being said, planned or done against them I will report it . . . and whomsoever they regard as enemies I will attack and pursue with arms and the sword by land and sea.30

Another oath of allegiance, this one to Tiberius, pledged reverence and obedience to the new Caesar.31 Finally, Judge cites an inscription suggesting that the local authorities had the responsibility to manage violations of the loyalty oaths.32 This evidence suggests that there was in Thessalonica an ideology of the Roman empire which Paul’s message threatened.

In fact, the Acts account tells us what that message was: there is a new emperor, one called Jesus (Acts 17:7). A quick survey of 1 Thessalonians tells us more about this “ideological intifada”33 which Paul and Silas were proclaiming. First, we note that Paul remembers the opposition to the gospel he preached (1 Thess 2:2). This antagonism was to the subversive nature of his counter-imperial gospel. As Dieter Georgi reminds us, the strongest correlation to Paul’s use of euangelion is the Priene inscription. Relevant text from this inscription reads as follows:

Providence . . . has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus . . . sending him as a savior (sotēr), both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things . . . and since the birthday of the god Augustus was the good tidings (euangelion) for the world.34

If this text represents a normative association of good tidings with the birthday of Augustus, called a god, then we can understand why indeed there was hostility to another gospel, one proclaiming Jesus as savior and Lord (kyrios). The Greeks had a long history of naming their current ruler as savior,35 while Deissmann notes that kyrios was used to denote a Roman emperor at least from the time of Nero, though probably from Augustus onward.36 Further, God has called the Thessalonian believers into his own kingdom (1 Thess 2:12). Again, such statements about another kingdom threaten the imperial rule of Rome, who throughout history were known to crush opposition.37 Moving to chapter four of the letter, we have the political terms parousia and apantēsis, the former denoting the visit of a royal official, and the latter word describing the entourage of dignified citizens who would greet such an official.38 This specific political terminology highlights that Jesus is the new royalty. Finally, we come to Paul’s mockery of Rome’s “peace and security” (1 Thess 5:3; nrsv), which Donfried calls a “frontal attack” on the early Principate.39 The peace and security mantra of Rome epitomizes imperial propaganda in the face of its “permanent crisis of legitimation.”40 According to historiographer Ernst Bammel, “Everywhere that Rome makes an appearance, the provision of peace and security is made to justify the loss of autonomy and more than compensate for all the initial terrors.”41 Thus, Rome’s peace was secured through military victory and the threat of violence, which explains why Augustus built his forum around the temple to Mars, god of war.42 For Paul, this peace and security is an imperial illusion. Peace comes from God (1 Thess 5:23), not an imperial benefactor.

The new believers are to be an assembly gathered in the name of God and his son Jesus Christ rather than Julius Caesar and his divine son Augustus.43 While the politarchs are obliged to act on their loyalties—ones the Thessalonian disciples may have once had!—the new converts now have different allegiances. Because of this, Paul urges his new believers to live in certain ways. They turned from idols (1 Thess 1:9); both idolatrous images of the Roma and her divine Caesars, as well as the mystic cults of the city.44 However, they are experiencing persecutions (1:6), no doubt similar to the very reason Paul and Silas fled the city as political subversives. Paul offers strong apocalyptic language as an antidote to this persecution; because of the ultimate lordship of Christ, he encourages believers to resist the pursuit of power through association with Rome. Instead, they should continue to practice faith and love (3:6). Faith was an imperial virtue, binding subject to conqueror. For instance, Augustus claims in his Res Gestae that, through him, the nations experienced the “good faith of the Roman people.”45 Paul understands that true faith is shown by sacrifice, not violence or fear. Further, the church should practice an economics which goes against the local grain. Wanamaker suggests that economic elites in Thessalonica encouraged cultic allegiance to Rome in order to benefit from such close ties.46 In the midst of this atmosphere of seeking power through benefaction, Paul tells the disciples to practice economic independence and lead a quiet life (4:11–12). Such anarchic practice enables the converts to speak more freely, as they do not need the largesse of the ruling elite, who depend on their associations with Rome for their economic and political success.47 The disciples themselves should model peace (5:13), but not that of Rome that comes with military might. Rather they should not repay wrong for wrong, but work for the common good (5:15). Finally, they should be of critical mind, discerning good from evil (5:21–22). This practice helps the disciples navigate the ways empire seeks to co-opt their imaginations through ritual and imagery.

Sketches Toward a Missiology of Resistance

In the Spanish fable on which Andersen based his story, the tailors declare that the clothing cannot be seen by someone of illegitimate parentage, making their ploy dependent upon social class and lineage.48 In this version, it is a black man who already has no social position and so has nothing to lose who breaks the spell of the tailors and utters, “to me it matters not whose son I am, therefore I tell you that you are riding without any clothes,” informing the king of his true state. Whether the child in Andersen’s story, with little notion of the social mechanisms of honor and shame, or the black man of the Spanish version, who is at the bottom of a race- and class-based economy, it is those at the margins of the socio-political empire who can see clearly.

Anthropologist James C. Scott notes that societies tend to have what he calls a “public transcript” between those in power and the dominated subordinates. This becomes heavily ritualized with greater disparity between the elite and the oppressed, and masks the intentions of both sides—that is, the public transcript functions as a display of power and control for the ruling class, and disguises the true feelings of the lower class in performance of deference.49 However, at times this transcript is broken. According to Scott, “the moment when the dissent of the hidden transcript crosses the threshold to open resistance is always a politically charged occasion.”50 When the oppressed can endure no more, when the severity of life under the public transcript becomes as difficult as the punishment for piercing the veil of subordination, or when like the black man in the Spanish tale, the dominated simply have nothing to lose, the subjugated breech the unspeakable and show their true beliefs. These moments change the ones who openly resist the public transcript, and in fact, function as a conversion of sorts, insofar as they give new life to the oppressed. For instance, Frederick Douglass writes after he stood up to his master, “I was nothing before; I was a man now. . . . After resisting him, I felt as I had never before. It was a resurrection.”51

My conviction is that one of the central tasks of Christians today is to break the spell of the public transcript—that is, to see empire for what it is, and to live and to speak against it. For those of us from the global North who benefit from empire, this will be difficult. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between the subjective and objective is helpful on this point. He notes that Stalin’s daughter Svetlana wrote memoirs describing her father as caring and warm, and propelled to mass murder mostly by his associate, Lavrenty Beria. Some time later, Beria’s son Sergo similarly declared that his father was a compassionate family man, who merely followed the orders of his terrible superior, Stalin. We too, lie in this tension, as we benefit from the military-industrial complex that oppresses others. Subjective experience perceives the technology of communication as benign, yet the iPhones we communicate with were made by workers in suicidal conditions. Medicines which heal us often are the products of unethical drug trials. Our Wal-Mart goods are cheap because someone else works for extremely low wages. The point is, “the experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie—the truth lies outside, in what we do.”52 Not only this, but we also think that we cannot live without what we now have. As Wendell Berry declares, “the great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent upon what is wrong. But that is the addict’s excuse, and we know that it will not do.”53

Undoing the roots of empire within and without requires the formation of communities of disciples analogous to those Paul worked to establish. These communities, like the ecclesia in Thessalonica, must live peaceably, practice a new economics, and work for the common good of each other. Lenin allegedly said the following words on his deathbed:

I made a mistake. Without doubt the oppressed multitude had to be liberated. But our method only provoked further oppression—and atrocious massacres. It is too late now to alter the past—but what was needed to save Russia were ten Francis of Assisi’s.54

This suggests that the quintessential Marxist revolutionary realized that material transformation depends on inner conversion. Similarly, Ched Myers suggests that discipleship communities should once again take up the spiritual disciplines of obedience, poverty, and chastity used by Francis and his followers.55

First, contends Myers, obedience should mark our mission. Obedience has to do with the sphere of social relations. The evangelical question of the first-century ecclesia was, “who is kyrios—Jesus, or Caesar?” What we learn from Paul is that submission to Jesus as kyrios entails a concurrent resistance to Caesar, which is why, as tradition tells it, Paul was executed by empire. The missiology of the church must recover submission to God as a central theme of the gospel. This has importance on a communal plane as well. That is, just as Christian anarchists understand the confession that “Jesus is Lord” means that no one else can be,56 so peaceableness between each other is predicated upon the dissolution of social hierarchies within community. All are on an equal plane in relationship to Christ. In this vein, discipleship communities have much to learn from Quaker meetings which have experience in testing the common good by means of consensus decision making.

Poverty relates to the sphere of economics. The discipline of poverty is helpful in many ways. First, as Paul counseled the Thessalonians, economic self-sufficiency enables Christians to free themselves from the yoke of empire. How can we practice this economic independence? Kirkpatrick Sale offers some characteristics of sustainable local economies.

Control over investment, production, sales, and development would promote economic stability and provide insulation from the boom-and-bust cycles of distant market forces;

It would break dependence upon remote bureaucracies, transnational corporations, and the “vortex of world-wide trade;”

The trade balance would tend to be favorable because the economy would be geared to local “import-replacements” rather than more expensive imports.

Locally controlled currency would provide quicker economic feedback and reinvestment and could discourage accumulation and capital flight;

Local production would enhance overall health of residents because of reduced consumption of toxic or nonnutritious industrially fabricated products.57

This “economy of scale” (Myers’s term) is already practiced by many Christian communities, like Catholic worker farms and Bruderhoffs, as well as secular ones. To carry out this sort of economics, disciples need community. It is difficult to be self-sufficient alone. Farmers, artisans, traders, and builders are all needed. A life of independence from the infrastructure of empire will be challenging.

Paul encourages the Thessalonian church to promote hard work, and such is good counsel for us as well. In the United States, the discipline of poverty relates also to the war-making of our nation. One of the ways some Christian communities choose to be prophetic is by refusing to pay federal taxes which fund the wars of the state. A common method to do this is by simply living below the taxable income level. In this case, the discipline of poverty keeps disciples free from imperial consumerism as well as the blood-soaked peace of empire.

Finally, the discipline of chastity is that apocalyptic practice of critical analysis in the midst of empire. Chastity has to do with boundary maintenance. As the boundarylessness of empire pervades all parts of life, Paul’s warning to discern good from evil remains appropriate—and perhaps even more difficult—for us today. Just as Jesus told his disciples on the Mount of Olives to stay awake and keep watch, so too must we practice “insomniac theology.”58 Chastity helps us to remain watchful and critical of the myths which undergird the power of empire. There is a Lacanian joke about a doctor whose friend asks for medical advice. The doctor—unwilling to give advice without a fee—examines his friend and tells him solemnly, “you need medical advice.”59 Chastity gives us the ability to resist corporate answers, and instead search for root causes of the symptoms of empire in our lives. Though the myths prevail in the rhetoric of political pundits, corporate ads, and pop writers like Thomas Friedman, disciples are called to discern the times and critically discriminate between that which promotes the common good and that which destroys it. We must use discretion in order that we do not proclaim the good tidings of Jesus while our lives betray the lordship of corporations in our lives. An apocalyptic theology, declares Ched Myers, must practice seeing what could be in the midst of what is.60

The following are some concrete suggestions for practicing obedience, poverty, and chastity:

1. If obedience marks the relationships both of disciples to God and of disciples to each other, then missionaries must dissolve the often hierarchical nature of missions. Paul quite clearly describes living among the Thessalonian disciples and working hard to do so. In contrast, many missionaries even today live in luxury in comparison to their target population—walled compounds, expensive vehicles, and imported foods are indicators of loyalty to empire rather than signs of solidarity with fellow disciples. From the beginning, include converts and local disciples in decision-making.
2. Practice downward mobilization in the pursuit of an economics of poverty. Plant a garden, and eat from it. In doing so, one rejoins the agricultural cycle of the energy that sustains us, and slashes the umbilical cord of empire that nourishes us with its mass-produced food. This undercuts the empire’s myth of timelessness that feeds us with tomatoes that are available year-round. As the global migration to cities continues, it will be more and more difficult for urban communities to practice self-sustainability, as land is the base for such an economy. Therefore, as missionaries help those in cities to learn urban gardening, they must also attempt to persuade those still in the countryside not to give up the “gift of good land,”61 a phrase coined by Wendell Berry. Use public transportation. This is inconvenient, but puts the missionary in closer contact with the population she is allegedly serving. Use the internet café to communicate with home. This alerts one to the real costs of technology, and at least diminishes one’s participation in it.
3. The practice of chastity is a matter of boundary-keeping. Make it a practice to examine the rhetoric of advertisements; find out the ways in which the corporations are trying to capture the consumer’s imagination. Similarly, examine the myths undergirding national holidays and events. These cultural rituals, often thought of as benign, propagate subtle messages about empire. In the United States, the patriotic holidays such as Independence Day and Veterans Day portray the nation-state and its subjects as the prime benefactor, vying for disciples’ loyalty over their commitments to Christ. Chastity means looking askance at the propaganda inherent in the midst of such holidays.

I conclude this essay with a joke. There is an old psychoanalysis joke about a man who thinks he is a seed of corn. After visiting his therapist for many sessions, the therapist tells him he is cured, and can now go about his life free of this delusion. A week later, to the therapist’s surprise, the man returns to the office. “What happened?” asks the therapist. “I thought you had finally concluded you were not a seed!” “Yes, yes,” the man replies, “the therapy worked for me. My problem is that I still don’t know how to convince the chickens!” Like the psychological ailments of the man in this joke, the roots of empire run deep, and resist easy conversion. My reading of 1 Thessalonians suggests that the gospel call is not to convince the proverbial chickens, but rather to create communities who model submission not to the empire of the day but to the cosmic lordship of Christ.

David Pritchett lives in North Manchester, Indiana, and works as a Physician Assistant. He spends free time reading and growing vegetables.

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