#101: "Missional" Ain't The Answer

It May Be A Part of The Problem

Welcome to “Global Witness, Globally Reimagined.” You get a glimpse here of the kind of work that I do both at Church Mission Society and Missio Africanus where I help students of all levels (from unaccredited courses to PhD) explore the theological (and missiological) implications of the rise of World Christianity. In the newsletter, I focus on the subject of global witness in the twenty-first-century context. Every second Tuesday, I share a thought that has spoken to me, one or two resources that I trust will be helpful to you, and three exciting quotes about mission to give you something to think about as you go through your day. I pray one of these will energise you.

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1. A Thought I Can’t Shake Off

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There is a theological thought system among many of my Western friends that I find pretty strange — church and mission are, for them, two different things. Of course, they can be brought together to produce what we call “missional church,” “missionary congregation,” or indeed, a “mission-shaped church.” However, for many of them, the church exists to provide religious services to those who belong to it (who, until a few decades ago, were decidedly Westerners), and mission is something that some specially called and trained people do in other parts of the world (which, until a few decades ago, was in the non-Western world). The church is for those who want to give and send. Mission is for those who want to go. In the end, the church is for ordinary Christians, and mission is for heroes. (It requires a great deal of courage and/or a touch of self-sacrifice). Though separated, the church and mission have a cyclical and mutually beneficial relationship — mission leads to the formation of a church, and the existence of a church leads to mission. Thus, the church needs mission just as much as mission needs the church.

So we teach/study ecclesiology apart from missiology even though we are happy to quote David Bosch’s famous statement, “the church is missionary by its very nature.” Once in a while, we may even quote Ad Gentes: “The pilgrim Church is missionary by her very nature, since it is from the mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Spirit that she draws her origin, in accordance with the decree of God the Father” (Ad Gentes, No. 2).

Of course, Bosch (Transforming Mission, 1991, 372ff) goes on to exhort us with the following statements:

Ecclesiology therefore does not precede missiology …. Missionary activity is not so much the work of the church as simply the Church at work …. Since God is a missionary God, God's people are a missionary people …. It has become impossible to talk about the church without at the same time talking about mission. One can no longer talk about church and mission, only about the mission of the church …. A church without mission or a mission without the church are both contradictions. The church is both missionary and missionizing.

Yet, even for Bosch himself, there was a gap between mission and the church. (Darell Guder’s Missional Church was published seven years after Transforming Mission). It is in this context that I find the situation in the African church (especially in the 1980s, 90s and 2000s) bearing a gift for my Western friends. To various extents, the work of evangelising in African Christianity is the duty and responsibility of all believers. There is a thing I have come to call the evangelisthood of all believers that has often made it possible for entire congregations to commit to sharing the good news as part of their general day-to-day living. Local members of congregations evangelised at every opportunity; in the bus or at the bus depot, in the hospital or at the funeral, or indeed at work or at school. There is something in African Christianity that allows congregations to be the witnessing communities God made them to be. As a result, there is no gap for many of us between the church and mission (and between ecclesiology and missiology). In this post-Christian context in Europe, adding missional to church does not go far enough. We need to find ways to work with God in equipping and releasing all believers to bear witness of the risen Christ among their own neighbours as well as on their journeys as they migrate up and down the world.

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2. Resources I am Enjoying

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Book: Benjamin Aldous, Harvey Kwiyani, Penial Rajkumar, and Victoria Turner, “Lived Mission in 21st Century Britain: Ecumenical and Postcolonial Perspectives” (London: SCM Press, 2024).

Last year, in 2024, I had the great privilege of working with Ben Aldous, Victoria Turner, and Peniel Rajkumar as we edited a collection of really good essays exploring the subject of mission in the UK. The result of that work is this new book, Lived Mission in 21st Century Britain. Ben, the leading editor, has this to say about the book: “It proposes that there is still work to be done ecumenically for missiology to inhabit rightfully its role as critical friend, crosser of boundaries, advocate for justice and intellectual ankle biter. Bringing together a unique array of contributors, the book considers what mission as practice looks like both through the eyes of well-established theologians and reflective practitioners as well as those working on the ground who have written little about their daily lived experience.” There is an intentional mix of voices in this book that is hard to find elsewhere. Contributors include Jan Nowotnik, Graham Adams, Shemil Mathew, Timothy Boniface Carroll, Bisi Adenekan, Elizabeth Joy, Heather Major, Tom Hackett, James Woodward, Raj Bhara Patta, Paul Weller, Niall Cooper, Lisa Adjei, Shermara Fletcher and Anupama Ranawana. I am sure that everyone interested in understanding more about mission in the contemporary UK will find something helpful in this book.

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3. Quotes I am Pondering

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• The Church has got to realize its missionary responsibilities. We live in a society, whether that be urban or rural, which is now basically second or even third generation pagan once again; and we cannot simply work on the premise that all we have to do to bring people to Christ is to ask them to remember their long-held, but dormant faith. Very many people have no residue of Christian faith at all; it’s not just dormant, it’s nonexistent; in so many instances we have to go back to basics; we are in a critical missionary situation. — Archbishop's Council. Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions of Church in a Changing Context. Mission and Public Affairs. London: Church House, 2004, 10-11.

• Unlike the Western missionaries’ exclusive mission approach, Ghanaian Pentecostals approach mission in an inclusive manner. This is achieved through the emphasis on ministry of all believers. In their understanding, every believer is gifted and anointed to participate in the missio Dei according to their gifts and talents. Pentecostals’ view of missional inclusivity says that God is an extra-ordinary God Who uses ordinary believers who avails themselves to Him for extraordinary activities. — Peter White, ‘Decolonising Western missionaries’ mission theology and practice in Ghanaian church history: A Pentecostal approach’, In die Skriflig 51(1), 2017, p. 5.

• The writing is on the wall. In sub-Saharan Africa, biblical interpretation, its institutions, and readers will always be related to modern colonial history, for the Scramble for Africa was the Scramble for Africa through the Bible. As we shall observe, the scramble to get Africa back from the colonial clutches was and still is waged through the Bible (yet the Bible is not the only viable weapon). — Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Perspectives in African Biblical Interpretations Global Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, Vol. 13, Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2024, p. 4.

I pray that you will be faithful to the work God has for you this week.