MISSION in the 21st CENTURY
Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission
Andrew Walls and Cathy Ross, Editors:
Maryknoll, Orbis Books 2008 219pp paperback ISBN 978-1-57075-733-0
Reviewed by Murdoch MacKenzie
The twenty first century has begun with a bang and not with a whimper. The winds of change have become a gale. The old order of Western hegemony has gone and things will never be the same again. Yet Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. The goal of missions is still the glory of God. The Church still exists by mission as fire exists by burning and ‘mission is prior to the church, and constitutive of its very existence’. Mission is indeed ‘the mother of the church’ and the mission-first agenda is the chief marker of discipleship in today’s world. This applies whether in Aotearoa New Zealand with someone just released from prison living in your house, or in Congo amidst violence, anarchy, HIV/Aids and corruption, or even in Aberdeen where former church buildings now house ‘Babylon – the ultimate night experience’, a casino named ‘Soul’ and a nightclub called ‘The Ministry’.
This remarkable book explores all of this and much more. Written by 19 gifted and reflective authors predominantly from Africa, India and Asia but also from North and South America, Europe and the Pacific we have here a range of essays ‘with the smell of the earth about them’. Each author has cross-cultural experience exemplifying the old adage quoted by Rowan Williams in the Foreword: mission must now be from all and to all.
Section 1 explores the Five Marks of Mission – 1. To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom 2.To teach, baptise and nurture new believers 3. To respond to human need by loving service 4.To seek to transform unjust structures of society 5.To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
Section 2 covers 7 topics plus an ‘Afterword’, exploring Theological Scholarship, Migration and Mission, The Post-Christian West and the Islamic Frontline, Reading the Bible in the Non-Western Church, a Japanese Reflection on Worship, Education as Mission, Discipleship, and a final reflection on Christian Mission in the last 5 centuries.
Another document ‘Towards 2010:Mission for the 21st century’ covers these same topics in preparation for the celebration of the centenary of the historic World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910. But as Ken Christoph Miyamoto from Japan points out, in neither the Five Marks nor the 2010 documents is there any mention of worship. The inability of Christians to come together at the Lord’s Table has serious implications for mission and evangelism in a country like Japan or anywhere else for that matter. The disunity of the church in the Eucharist is a scandalous hindrance for its mission, and rather than being deliberately set aside, as at Edinburgh 1910 and again in the Five Marks, it requires urgent attention.
Equally urgent is poverty on the one hand and climate change on the other. Many moving stories are told of loving service and of the transformation of unjust structures in society, likewise in relation to safeguarding the integrity of creation particularly through A Rocha’s work around the globe. Yet the chilling words of a Bangladeshi relief worker are salutary: ‘Forget about making poverty history – climate change will make poverty permanent.’
Similar urgency needs to be given to understanding the colossal changes being brought about by the end of the Great European Migration of the past 500 years, coupled with Newbigin’s challenging questions about the irreversibility of European secularisation, and by the phenomenal growth of Christian churches in the global South. With Africa likely to become ‘the next Christendom’ and the Christian world becoming ‘polycentric’ centred no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, London and New York but in Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Manila and elsewhere, Christianity has entered a post-Western phase. With an average loss in Europe and North America of 7,600 practising Christians every day and an average daily gain of 23,000 new believers in Africa, it is not difficult to realise that by 2025 Africa and Latin America together will account for at least 50 percent of the world’s Christians.
At the same time there is increasing migration of Christians from the global South to Europe and North America. With two-thirds of legal immigrants world-wide entering the United States, 65 per cent of whom are Christians, 3,500 Catholic parishes now celebrate Mass in Spanish and there are some 7,000 Hispanic/Latino Protestant congregations nationwide, most being Pentecostal and/or evangelical. In Europe the number of African Christians is estimated at over 3 million and 58 percent of churchgoers in London are non-white. The Nigerian-led Kingsway International Christian Centre has over 10,000 members – the largest in the United Kingdom. The largest single Christian community in all of Europe with 20,000 members, and over one million Ukrainians reportedly converted to Christianity through its ministry, was begun in Kiev in 1993 by a Nigerian pastor.
Thus Christianity has returned to type in reverting to being a non-Western religion and thereby being liberated from its acculturation to Hellenistic culture on the one hand and to the Enlightenment on the other. The normal run of Western theology is not big enough for Africa. It is now recognised that there is ‘the Gospel beyond the West’ offering opportunities and challenges which have taken Christian theological scholarship ‘into new areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions’. Rowan Williams sees this positively as a recognition “that we in the ‘developed’ world have not by any means finished reading the Bible…nor has the Bible finished with us because, read afresh in new contexts, it delivers more of God’s challenge and promise.” For all of this and so much more in this most readable book, we can give thanks to God for the skill and risk-taking imagination of Cathy Ross and Andrew Walls in bringing it all together.
The Rev. Murdoch MacKenzie is former Moderator of Milton Keynes Mission Partnership and Research Advisor at WCC Bossey
Exploring the Five Marks of Global Mission
Andrew Walls and Cathy Ross, Editors:
Maryknoll, Orbis Books 2008 219pp paperback ISBN 978-1-57075-733-0
Reviewed by Murdoch MacKenzie
The twenty first century has begun with a bang and not with a whimper. The winds of change have become a gale. The old order of Western hegemony has gone and things will never be the same again. Yet Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. The goal of missions is still the glory of God. The Church still exists by mission as fire exists by burning and ‘mission is prior to the church, and constitutive of its very existence’. Mission is indeed ‘the mother of the church’ and the mission-first agenda is the chief marker of discipleship in today’s world. This applies whether in Aotearoa New Zealand with someone just released from prison living in your house, or in Congo amidst violence, anarchy, HIV/Aids and corruption, or even in Aberdeen where former church buildings now house ‘Babylon – the ultimate night experience’, a casino named ‘Soul’ and a nightclub called ‘The Ministry’.
This remarkable book explores all of this and much more. Written by 19 gifted and reflective authors predominantly from Africa, India and Asia but also from North and South America, Europe and the Pacific we have here a range of essays ‘with the smell of the earth about them’. Each author has cross-cultural experience exemplifying the old adage quoted by Rowan Williams in the Foreword: mission must now be from all and to all.
Section 1 explores the Five Marks of Mission – 1. To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom 2.To teach, baptise and nurture new believers 3. To respond to human need by loving service 4.To seek to transform unjust structures of society 5.To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth.
Section 2 covers 7 topics plus an ‘Afterword’, exploring Theological Scholarship, Migration and Mission, The Post-Christian West and the Islamic Frontline, Reading the Bible in the Non-Western Church, a Japanese Reflection on Worship, Education as Mission, Discipleship, and a final reflection on Christian Mission in the last 5 centuries.
Another document ‘Towards 2010:Mission for the 21st century’ covers these same topics in preparation for the celebration of the centenary of the historic World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh in 1910. But as Ken Christoph Miyamoto from Japan points out, in neither the Five Marks nor the 2010 documents is there any mention of worship. The inability of Christians to come together at the Lord’s Table has serious implications for mission and evangelism in a country like Japan or anywhere else for that matter. The disunity of the church in the Eucharist is a scandalous hindrance for its mission, and rather than being deliberately set aside, as at Edinburgh 1910 and again in the Five Marks, it requires urgent attention.
Equally urgent is poverty on the one hand and climate change on the other. Many moving stories are told of loving service and of the transformation of unjust structures in society, likewise in relation to safeguarding the integrity of creation particularly through A Rocha’s work around the globe. Yet the chilling words of a Bangladeshi relief worker are salutary: ‘Forget about making poverty history – climate change will make poverty permanent.’
Similar urgency needs to be given to understanding the colossal changes being brought about by the end of the Great European Migration of the past 500 years, coupled with Newbigin’s challenging questions about the irreversibility of European secularisation, and by the phenomenal growth of Christian churches in the global South. With Africa likely to become ‘the next Christendom’ and the Christian world becoming ‘polycentric’ centred no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, London and New York but in Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Manila and elsewhere, Christianity has entered a post-Western phase. With an average loss in Europe and North America of 7,600 practising Christians every day and an average daily gain of 23,000 new believers in Africa, it is not difficult to realise that by 2025 Africa and Latin America together will account for at least 50 percent of the world’s Christians.
At the same time there is increasing migration of Christians from the global South to Europe and North America. With two-thirds of legal immigrants world-wide entering the United States, 65 per cent of whom are Christians, 3,500 Catholic parishes now celebrate Mass in Spanish and there are some 7,000 Hispanic/Latino Protestant congregations nationwide, most being Pentecostal and/or evangelical. In Europe the number of African Christians is estimated at over 3 million and 58 percent of churchgoers in London are non-white. The Nigerian-led Kingsway International Christian Centre has over 10,000 members – the largest in the United Kingdom. The largest single Christian community in all of Europe with 20,000 members, and over one million Ukrainians reportedly converted to Christianity through its ministry, was begun in Kiev in 1993 by a Nigerian pastor.
Thus Christianity has returned to type in reverting to being a non-Western religion and thereby being liberated from its acculturation to Hellenistic culture on the one hand and to the Enlightenment on the other. The normal run of Western theology is not big enough for Africa. It is now recognised that there is ‘the Gospel beyond the West’ offering opportunities and challenges which have taken Christian theological scholarship ‘into new areas of life where Western theology has no answers because it has no questions’. Rowan Williams sees this positively as a recognition “that we in the ‘developed’ world have not by any means finished reading the Bible…nor has the Bible finished with us because, read afresh in new contexts, it delivers more of God’s challenge and promise.” For all of this and so much more in this most readable book, we can give thanks to God for the skill and risk-taking imagination of Cathy Ross and Andrew Walls in bringing it all together.
The Rev. Murdoch MacKenzie is former Moderator of Milton Keynes Mission Partnership and Research Advisor at WCC Bossey
