Mission Matters

In a passionate manner a respected proponent of mission issues a call to take seriously how world mission advances Christ, heals our divisions, and speaks with clarity to a confused world.

By Harold Kurtz, Senior Associate, Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship

Many feel that a split in the Presbyterian Church (USA) was averted by the overwhelming agreement of the 206th General Assembly (1994) that "Theology matters." No one believes that our troubles are over. But most people believe we have moved to a bedrock foundation where we will at least be dealing with our differences within a proper framework for an organization founded by Jesus Christ. Our future is wrapped up in our theology.

Our future is also wrapped up in our mission. Mission matters! It matters in a different sense than our theology but because mission is a product of our theology, one is always defective without the other. When our theology does not lead us to mission then it is both defective and powerless. I believe we are suffering many tragedies in the world today because we have had a defective theology which has not been instructed by mission.

I have been asked to do some "futurizing" in the area of missions and missiology, to look at the mission of God in the world and to contemplate "what form and self-understanding are we to look for as we move into a culture where we are a major mission field, and where God is breaking out in surprising ways in the nations of the world? What do you see?" I am attempting to fulfill that mandate.

I may, however, have interpreted the statement "where we are a major mission field" in a slightly different way than was intended. I see not only our USA society as being a "major mission field" but our churches as well. Our total church community -- evangelical and liberal alike in basically equal though different ways -- has become too much a part of the USA culture and too little the reign of God on earth. Therefore, I see mission properly understood and carried out as an instrument for evangelizing the church as well as evangelizing the world.

I believe that a major function of biblical mission for our day is to challenge our theology. To have theology without mission leaves us in a self-centered world which is constantly collapsing in on itself. To have theology without mission consigns us to an ethnically, and racially, elitist world that can easily dissolve into racial violence and hatred and any one of many forms of ethnic cleansing and class violence which can destroy our habitat as has happened in Lebanon, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda.

One of the near "fatal flaws" of the Reformation was the failure to take the many peoples of the world into account, so the Gospel we have received was truncated. Those reformers struggled with many important issues, but they did not wrestle within an honest context of the world and the many peoples of the world created by God. We have been paying the price ever since.

Francis Schaeffer writes of what he felt were the two greatest lacks of the reformers:

"At certain points the people in the stream of the Reformation were inconsistent with the biblical teaching they claimed to follow. There were many areas where the Bible was not followed as it should have been, but two are outstanding: first, a twisted view of race, and second, a noncompassionate use of accumulated wealth." (The latter relates to my concern about life-style which will follow.) How Should We Then Live, p. 113

I am convinced that the greatest issue facing the world today, and therefore facing the church, has to do with ethnicity or that twisted view of race which Schaeffer speaks of. It has to do with learning to live together with respect for differences of race, language, culture, religion, class. I don’t believe there is any other challenge that equals this one in its potential for destroying the future for the human race -- and even the close future of our children and grand-children.

One of the saddest pictures to contemplate is what has happened to that jewel of a country, Lebanon. Then we can go on and talk about the former Yugoslavia, then we can look at the whole region which had been controlled by the former USSR and realize that it is a tragedy waiting to happen. A number of countries in Africa have been ripped apart by ethnic violence, the worst in Rwanda and Sudan.

But we must not isolate ourselves, for the same is true here. Look what happened in Los Angeles and note other possible flashpoints of violence if we do not come to terms with our prejudices and racism.

Although the church normally moves along ethnic lines, travels over bridges of relationship, and flourishes in a cultural environment, it was never intended that the church become a prisoner of any ethnic group to the extent that ethnicity remains more important than commitment to Christ.

I consider the most dangerous and destructive heresy of our day is that which leads any of us to be more an ethnic Christian than a Jesus Christian!

Anyone who carries out a ministry which promotes an ethnic centered understanding of the church is not building the Kingdom of God but heresy. The Bishop of the Reformed Church of Croatia, Rev. Andre Langh, said recently that the current crisis has pushed the church to look at its own faithfulness in a more confessional way. "Did the church really live up to it’s calling? Were we really the salt of the earth, really the light?"

The Church As Prophetic Agent

The sad point in all of this is that the Church historically has not been the prophetic agent it should have been and as far as I can see, we are not being that in the USA today. By and large, the church remains part of the problem and not part of the answer. It is such an emotional issue that it is difficult to speak to without raising a variety of strong reactions. But, if there is one institution in the world today which should have the courage to addressing this problem, it is the church.

Yet, by and large, the evangelical community in the USA remains quiet on this issue. We still remain a very racist community but deep involvement in mission could help lead us out of that mindset and into a conviction of all tribes and people and tongues and nations being one family with us.

Interrupting the Headlong Dash of the World

Something must interrupt the headlong dash of the world to chaos through racism, ethnic cleansing, cultural wars. "Interrupt" is the term now generally used to describe a way of dealing with destructive behavior in children. "Intervention" is the term which we normally use with adults and it also describes what needs to happen in our world.

The present mood and move of the world needs to be interrupted and it is the followers of Jesus who have the message to do that. But we will only be able to do make a difference and speak a different message when we follow Jesus, read the Bible, order the life of our churches in the context of international mission and the world.

I believe firmly that there can be no true theology produced in one culture, one race, one sex, one nation. Our reformers went astray in their arrogance about the quality of their own culture. We deceive ourselves when we think we can do true theology while remaining in our comfortable cultural environment.

Theology of the Gospel cannot be truth unless it is formed and lived out in the mission context, unless it is understood to be for the whole world, for every tribe and tongue and people. If we don’t do our theology in the context of the world, it will be flawed. It will not deal biblically or realistically with many of the most important issues of our day of justice, racism, war, ethics, sexism, ecology, oppression, freedom. And most importantly, it cannot wrestle honestly with the true meaning of the reign of God on earth as Jesus envisioned it for us.

A central part of our preaching, our Christian education, our theology should be that we do not possess adequate insights or spiritual resources as a society to make life really worth living, to be fully human and fully alive.

This is true of every country, every culture, every denomination, every congregation, and every individual. The world is too complicated for all insights to be contained in any one social framework. And the human race is too "fearfully and wonderfully made" for all essential insights to be contained in one ethnic group. This should be part of our theology and our modus operandi. This is the way God created the world. We need one another to become all that God wants us to be. We need other faces of the Gospel.

Most of the early missionaries went out, gripped by their cultural ethos, their ethnocentric understanding of both the Gospel and the world. Some never got over it and some never get over it today. But in the challenge of mission, others came to understand the world dimensions of the Gospel, the inclusiveness of Jesus’ call. They were transformed and became a transforming force in the churches back home.

It is cross-cultural mission which continues to call into question the theology which has twisted the message of the Gospel and allowed us to continue to live out our Christian lives in ways that are destructive for ourselves individually, for our society and for the world. We have forgotten that it was the mission enterprise which led the church back home to examine itself in some of the major areas of Biblical and theological distortion. And it was mission and missionaries who first honored and appreciated other languages and cultures and so found themselves enriched by those people.

Mission Gives Insights into God's World

Missionaries made, and continue to make many mistakes. But some of them also gained insights into God’s world and God’s plan for the world which began to change theology and attitudes. We need to continue to learn those lessons and apply them in our civil and congregational life today. If we do that, we just might find that long-prayed-for renewal breaking out!

The antislavery movement came out of international mission and with it the first real battles against racism. Racism is still alive and well in most of our congregations and desperately needs to be addressed. Mission can help if properly undertaken.

Women missionaries were "equal" on the mission field long before they were equal in their churches back home. Sexism, also still alive and well in all too many evangelical churches today, needs to be addressed. The church in the world will decay and many societies will crumble if we lose the leadership and input of women.

The ecumenical movement started on the mission field. Still one of the greatest hindrances to mission and evangelism today, to planting the church is the lack of unity and cooperation on the mission field. It is not too strong a statement to make that your congregations should distance themselves from any mission groups which aren’t willing to work with other Christian groups. That should be an ironclad policy of your mission committee! Most of our churches are heavy supporters of unbiblical, arrogant mission which ignores or even destroys indigenous churches.

It was mission which continued to challenge the separation of the social Gospel and proclamation Gospel. The harmony of those two must be part of all that we do. Justice has to be at the core of mission involvement or we are not building God’s kingdom on earth. We should not be involved with mission organizations who do not see justice as a central part of the Good News.

Missionaries were the first anthropologists because of their respect for the customs and cultures of other people. All of our involvement needs to be with deep respect for other people’s journies in life with the Gospel presented in a culturally respectful manner. We need to go as learners as well as sharers of the Gospel.

The first linguists were missionaries who respected the language of other people and knew it was right that the Good News be translated in the mother tongue of all. We should never give the impression that we are trying to make people over in our image, not even our Christian image. We must show our willingness to let Jesus and the Spirit find root in their cultural life. We must also respect the God-given languages of the world when they appear in our neighborhoods and respect the people who speak them.

Our touch with the people of the world will challenge us, as it has all sensitive missionaries, to rethink some of the most troubling and challenging area of our lives -- life-styles, what is meaning, the importance of relationships vs. things, the joys of simplicity, what is happiness. (What does it say to us when we see more smiles on the faces of third world poor than on affluent USA?)

Life-style, in particular, is critical to us in gaining a new theological understanding of the human and Christian journey. Check again that quote from Schaeffer on lacks of our reformers. Mission at its best has always called us to look seriously at our life-style. As we struggle to find the balance of simplicity and affluence within the abundant life which Jesus promised us, mission has something to say.

Our material possessions are good in proper measure but in excess are destructive of abundant life. Our life-styles are destroying the very Life we seek to experience and we don’t have the courage to change. Mission -- intimate, sensitive contact with the vibrant churches of the two-thirds world -- can give us the courage to deal seriously with destructive abundance.

Like the genetic pools of the original plants and animals, the more primitive, third world cultures have preserved things we need for survival -- lest we self-destruct. We need to regain what has been lost in our affluent, industrialized, self-centered world. We have lessons to learn from them about what it really means to be human, and what it really means to be re-created in the image of Christ.

Serving the mission of God does not come easy for us. In fact, God finds in many of us an array of hindrances to doing his work, especially in modern, individualistically-oriented America. In his book, Wild Hope, Tom Sine warns that many of us conservative Christians are guilty of a serious distortion of Jesus’ message which places "the individual, rather than God, at the center of the gospel."

"From this viewpoint, instead of Christians being co-conspirators in God’s agenda of redeeming the world, God becomes a co-conspirator in their agenda of getting what they want out of life. God is there to help them get ahead in their careers, acquire their house in the suburbs, improve their relationships and ‘color them beautiful.’" (p. 198)

As we do "futurizing" of mission, I believe it is essential to do it with a realistic view of the presence of the church in the world. There is no way in which we can be effective agents in the mission of the church if we don’t face the realities of our day. All too much of mission planning, prioritizing, and implementing is done from a distorted view of how the world and especially the Christian world really looks.

Communicating An Honest World Context

I am continually amazed at how uninformed most of our people are. That will change only if they get a clearer, more factual world view from pulpits, publications, and education. We are not going to do any good if our mission is not carried on in an honest world context.

Here are some essential pieces of information which should be given out in many and varying ways in the teaching and preaching which goes out across the land.

First and foremost, we in the church need to realize at our deepest level of both knowledge and emotion that the center of Christendom is no longer in the USA, Western culture, or the Caucasian race.

In some places in our society -- and particularly the Bible Belt -- it is almost un-American to speak this way because it seems to challenge our self worth. Yet, we ought to rejoice in this fact because it is the result of a fabulously successful missionary movement which we have supported for generations. Now we need to make mission decisions based on the fact that a number of years ago the center of the church has moved to the two-thirds world.

By the year A.D. 2000, the geographical center of Christendom will be in Africa. By that time, if church growth continues at its present rate, the Christian community in Africa will number over 400 million people!

The fastest growing missionary force in the world is that of the two-thirds world. Before the year AD 2000, they will be the primary mission force of the world.

This adds up to the need to question the effectiveness of any mission outreach carried on without some essential partnership with other Christians in the world and calls into question any mission organization whose future is built primarily upon Western missionaries. And it should call into question any church mission policy which supports only its own missionaries, its own programs.

Most countries of the world and most major Unreached People Groups are represented somewhere in the USA! Cross-cultural mission has come to us and is a major reality of our day. If we are not doing cross-cultural mission in our cities we are neglecting one of the greatest God-given opportunities.

The largest network of Christians, Christian organizations, and Christian churches in the world today is an organization which most people don’t even know about! If you ask your church members about the largest network, most of them will reply the World Council of Churches. A few of them will talk about the Lausanne Committee Network. Those are "Western" organizations by and large coming out of the 50’s.

But the biggest network is a product of the 80’s. It’s the AD 2000 And Beyond Movement, with its roots in the Unreached People vision. It is primarily two-thirds world led and is far bigger than the other two. The theme which binds that network together is a missionary theme -- "A church for every people and the Gospel for every person by AD 2000." And did you know that through the Worldwide Ministries Division the Presbyterian Church (USA) is a member of the AD 2000 and Beyond Movement, the only mainline church that has joined?

Understanding Our Own USA Culture

That is a partial picture of the world which we need to keep in mind as we think of mission. There is also a USA cultural milieu which must be part of the picture as we work on our priorities and plan toward mission in the future.

The boomer generation and those that follow are "hands on" people. They do not make commitments on theology alone. Commitment follows experience. They need to see and feel and touch and hear. Mission policies and programs must allow that to happen. All forward-looking mission organizations, including the Presbyterian Church (USA), are gearing up to make that possible.

This is an anti-bureaucracy, anti-establishment era. Trust in all organizations is at a low ebb. That is also true of all historic mission-sending boards, leading to a rapid decentralization of decision making and initiative.

Relativism, live and let live, all roads lead to the same place, what right do we have to impose our beliefs on someone else -- these are common attitudes in church and outside. Mission is a hard sell in our day and we must have clarity in our minds about the uniqueness of Jesus.

There is a renewed parochialism in the society and in the church. All too often the church thinks about what a friend of mine calls M&Ms -- me and mine. The church is too much a mirror of the selfish and self-centered society around it. "Let’s take care of our own" is a common theme and "our own" keeps being defined more and more narrowly. It doesn’t even include the children of our neighborhoods anymore.

Glorious Opportunities for Mission? Or Black Holes?

Those factors add up to some glorious opportunities and some "black hole" dangers for mission in the future. The biggest black hole I can think of is running our mission programs as simply an extension of our M&M mentality--we do it to make ourselves feel good, to grow our churches, running rough-shod over other people, bring back into the fore paternalism, racism, elitism, ethnocentrism. We can make all of the missionary mistakes over again with terrible harm to the image of Jesus on the world scene.

I said that a deep commitment to mission can be a major factor in breaking the church’s ethnic and class and race heresy. But, it doesn’t automatically become so. Mission can also be carried out in a self-serving way. Those of you in large churches have the most danger in this regard because you have the resources to "go your own way" and "do your own thing" without correction by anyone else or real resistance from those in other countries you may be "using" in your mission activities.

Our mission can become an extension of our own ethnocentricity. We are only committed if it is our own people, under our own supervision, carrying our own ethnic brand of the Bible’s message. It is like American tourists wanting to see the world, visit other countries but doing it all by taking their culture with them -- they stay in Hilton Hotels, eat hamburgers, hear only English, fly everywhere and then think they have seen the world. They think they have experienced other people.

It is easy for churches to find themselves operating in their own cultural framework even as they live internationally. We can so structure a mission program that we insolate ourselves from face to face encounters with another culture, from heart to heart sharing of life, from faith to faith relationships, always talking, never listening.

One of the ways we can do this is by limiting our contact to those who have been educated and acculturated to our way of life so we never need to humble ourselves before another culture. We keep the initiatives and the programs in our hands. We call the shots, we set the agenda. We "use" two-thirds world people for our selfish purpose, to make us feel good, to grow our churches and youth programs at their expense with the primary motive of giving our people a "good experience." It is the height of arrogance for us to claim to be in serious mission if we do not do it in sensitive partnership with other Christians and in sensitive relationship with other nations and tribes and peoples and tongues.

"Like no other time in history"

But the glorious side is that like no other time in history, we have the opportunity to experience and influence the cutting edge of church planting and growth. Our own denomination is opening up its structures not only to allow but even to encourage local initiatives. A high-level person in the Worldwide Ministries Division said to me, "We are no longer going to be the gatekeepers of mission for our denomination but the facilitators of mission." That is radical stuff! And it is happening.

The San Gabriel Overture has officially opened the door to cooperative recruitment, appointment, and funding of new missionaries with presbyteries. Congregations are developing contacts and programs and then bringing the Worldwide Ministries Division into the picture to have their counsel, supervision, and broader base of long term support.

A special office of the WMD, Presbytery and Synod Relationships, sets up presbytery to presbytery relationships and they then have a life of their own which is transforming attitudes and changing priorities.

There are increasing opportunities to travel and experience other cultures and churches. Because of the "hands on" commitment of our society, churches are giving this a priority and are assisting their members to be part of the mission they support. We need to be careful that we don’t do this in a self-serving manner but if it is done right, if people are oriented before they go, and if there is an honest cultural interchange it can change people for the rest of their lives.

All of this is not to be and must not be a substitute for long term involvement, long term missionary service, long term cross-cultural commitments of language learning and cultural immersion. We must not reduce mission to amateurism! It must be tied to and lead into the planting of indigenous, self supporting, self propagating Christian communities rooted and grounded in the cultures with which God has gifted them.

This is also a time when our local mission and local evangelism can become the bridge of God over which the Gospel travels internationally and back to us again. Because the peoples of the world are in our communities, if we are faithful in our witness and our "grace of hospitality," we will have those people in our church family. When they become part of us, their country of origin should become a mission concern. It is one of the simplest, easiest, and most productive ways to both be in international mission and also to break down the ethnocentric barriers that are destroying our communities and our world.

There is a church in innercity Chicago that plants a new flag in front of the sanctuary the day a person born in another country is brought into fellowship. That flag then flies over the congregation every Sunday along with others as a reminder of the countries that contribute to their community. And the mission committee is immediately instructed to seek ways in which the congregation can express appreciation to that country for their gift by assisting in some kind of mission.

This is a thrilling time to be in mission!

Never before have we had such an opportunity to help change the face of the world -- and in the process have our own faces changed.

So, what "form and self-understanding" -- using the phrase given to me -- must we have in order to meet the challenges of mission in our day and in the process deal with the pagan culture around and in us?

1. No Exit Theology

First of all, we must cease to live and preach an exit theology -- subtly or intentionally. Do we preach or interpret the Bible, the Gospel, in a way which provides an excuse to exit from where Jesus needs us, from the difficult problems and places of the world? Do we make it easy for us to escape from the cities, the hard challenges, a suffering world, injustices? Do we make it easy to shut out the homeless, children by the millions on the streets of our cities and the cities of the world?

Do we make it easy to close ears and eyes to the horrors and wars of the world? Do we make it easy for to be absorbed in that M & M Christianity when the church needs to be planted in the remaining 11,000 people groups of the world? Do we make it easy for ourselves and our Christian community to become more parochial every year? Do we preach a theology which gives people permission to escape from the real world challenges? We are to be in the world even as we are not to be of the world.

2. Set Ourselves to Become World Christians

Secondly, we must deliberately set ourselves to become world Christians and provide the kind of leadership which will help move our congregations and Christian communities to think and order their lives as world Christian communities. Biblically, we ought to go back to the Christian community which launched the World Christian Movement -- Antioch. It was from Antioch that the Gospel first exploded around the world. It was here that the disciples were first known as Christians because they could not be tagged by any ethnic, national, language, or tribal label -- they were too diverse. So they called themselves "the people of Christ," Christians. This was a hot moment in human history and it was fueled by five pastors who represented three continents and probably four mother tongues.

3. Identify More with the World Christian Community

Thirdly, I think we must intentionally identify more and more with the world Christian community.

We must increasingly look to the world Christian community for fellowship, inspiration, prayer, and vision rather than to the culture which nurtured us -- even the Christian culture and even the evangelical culture.

Before going to Ethiopia, the denomination sent me off to take a course in anthropology. Knowing the antipathy between anthropologist and missionaries, I didn’t identify myself or speak up in class. But the teacher found out from someone that I was a Presbyterian pastor going to Africa as a missionary. He stopped me after class one day and mentioned what he had heard.

I wondered what he was going to say to me. He said, "When you get to Africa you will be surprised to find that because you are a minister you and the typical African are much closer than you and your American neighbors." He noted my surprise at his remark and went on, "Because you are a minister, you and the Africans have a common belief that life at its core is spiritual. Most of your American neighbors think it is material." It is because of that belief that we are essentially spiritual beings which has resulted in the explosion of the Gospel in Africa.

4. Deliberate, Intentional Actions to Break Ethnocentricity

Fourthly, if we are to meet the challenge of mission in our day, we must take some very deliberate, intentional actions to break ourselves and our congregations out of the prison houses of their ethnocentric way of thinking and living.

I believe in this regard that the vow we ask people to take when they enter the church is borderline heresy. In most of our churches the center of that vow is asking people if they accept Jesus as their personal Savior. To make belief in a personal Savior the center immediately starts a distortion. And I believe that is unbiblical.

It seems to me that the central vow ought to be, "Do you accept Jesus as the Savior of the world?" And the second one ought to be, "And do you accept Jesus as your personal Savior?" After all, the great verse, John 3:16, says, "God so loved the world that He gave his only Son." Then follows, "That whosoever believes in Him..."

Unless we see Jesus in the context of the world our theology is twisted, we do not see Him clearly as the Bible describes Him nor do we see Him clearly for what He wants to do in the world or in our lives. The world must become part of all that we do and say, a central part of our understanding of who we are in Christ.

5. Plant the Church in Every People Group

Fifthly, I believe it is a deep commitment to planting the church in every People Group which can be a major factor in producing a world-class church which can play a decisive role in bringing the world hope for a new future, for peace and justice.

The "Mission to the USA" program of the denomination helps congregations to gain this commitment. You ought to take advantage of this "Mission to the USA" program. It will help you bring into your congregation for at least a month Christian leaders from around the world. I know a number of congregations that have been deeply impacted through that program. When peoples of all ethnic and class groups become your sisters and brothers because we are one in Christ, then we have set in motion a basis for building the kind of world Jesus came to establish -- "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

6. Sound a Deep Prophetic Note of Challenge

Lastly, I believe as pastors and leaders you must be willing to spend a goodly portion of your ministerial capital to challenge people to move out of their prejudices, their racist attitudes, and their ethnocentric views of the peoples of the world, of God, and of the reign of Christ on earth.

We all have people who have felt an integrity in our ministries and our biblical foundations who will hear and respond to a deep prophetic note of challenge from us. And I have a gut feeling that if we are not on that cutting edge of God’s prophetic purpose for us and Jesus’ challenge to us that our ministry will grow dull, unrewarding, and bitter in our mouths.

Ministers should not be quarrelsome, but they should be continually quarreling with a church too comfortable with the society around and not uncomfortable enough with the biblical message. Most of us have a deep-seated core of people within the Christian community who want to be challenged and led into a deeper, world-changing way of life. I hope and pray that you will think seriously of expending a respectable portion of your life and ministry in the cause of holistic world mission. Then you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you have made a contribution to a world changed by the touch of Jesus.

A Ghanaian pastor, Rev. Isaac Fokuo, spoke to a group of us recently using the parable of the virgins waiting for the bridegroom. He spoke about how many people in Presbyterian churches across the USA have said to him that we need Africa’s faith in our lives. "We need Africa’s vitality, its evangelism zeal, its spiritual depth, its deep commitment to Jesus Christ," they have said to him. He told us that he understands their longing and that he and other Africans are willing to share the light that they have been given. Then he closed saying, "But we cannot share our oil. We need it for the challenges which face us, the work God has given us to do. We can share our light but you must go to the Merchant and buy your own oil!"