Mission, Migration, and Thanksgiving

We Are All Migrants.

Welcome to “Global Witness, Globally Reimagined,” where we dream about mission in a postcolonial world. Every Thursday, I share one thought that has spoken to me in the week, some resources I trust will be helpful to you, and three exciting quotes about mission. I pray one of these will energise you in the coming week.

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1. Thought I Can’t Shake Off

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On this day when our friends in the US are celebrating Thanksgiving, I am drawn to the migration narrative that underpins much of what the US is today. Of course, Thanksgiving is about migration, especially of the Europeans to North America (and everything that comes with it — for instance, the colonisation of the land that became the US, etc). Migration is yet again on the rise around the world. Sam George (at Wheaton College and the Lausanne Movement) has spent a lot of time thinking about the implications of migration on mission. In the summer, he spoke about it at the Missio Nexus Conference in Florida. You can watch his talk here. He also published a great essay about “mission and migration” for the Lausanne Global Diaspora Network. You can access the essay here. I have two excerpts from the essay for us to consider.

Migration is the throughline of the human story, no matter how settled we believe ourselves to be. Whether motivated by curiosity or adventure as much as driven by war or hunger, human beings are fundamentally a migratory kind and sedentary stasis is more of an ephemeral exception in our long collective history. We are all either migrants or descendants of migrants. Despite the many uncertainties and dangers people continue to explore lands far beyond for we are homo migrateur.

There is a lot of truth in this.

The Christian faith is diasporic at its core. It is meant to go places which means that the epicenter of the faith always shifts from place to place. The movement of people is of the utmost consequence to Christianity, as migrants and diaspora communities have shaped and reshaped the contours of its growth and spread throughout history. Christian faith moves because Christianity is quintessentially a missionary faith. The ‘indigenizing principle’ makes Christian faith infinitely translatable, and the ‘pilgrim principle’ makes it inevitably transportable. Christian mission concurrently universalizes its particularity and particularizes its universality. Christianity is a deep and wide faith that possesses an innate dynamism within and cannot be bound to any particular place, culture, or people. It enters deep into every culture to redeem it (incarnation) and goes to the Ends of the Earth (mission). It always bursts its boundaries however strong and rigid they may be as it seeks to embrace all. Since the beginning, it has continually difused across cultural and geographical borders, and many different people in different places have been chief representatives of the Christian faith. Christianity cannot be held captive to any geographical location or domesticated by any people because its nature is to break free of the prisons we enshrine it in. Christianity is a faith on the move, always has been and always will be.

And, finally:

Every nation counts on the presence, participation, and power (either good or bad) of diasporas (short-term, long-term, or those with acquired citizenship). All missionaries are migrants for having to cross national or cultural boundaries. Likewise, all Christian migrants could be considered potential missionaries as they carry out the missionary functions of difusing the gospel cross-culturally.

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2. Resources I am Enjoying

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Video: Rei Crizaldo - Rethinking Mission

Such important insights Rei Crizaldo shares in this conversation on “Rethinking Mission” at the recent Emerging Leaders’ Summit of the World Evangelical Alliance. Crizaldo asks a critical question: “How can mission not be about a lot of different things if God is in the work of reconciling all things to Himself and accomplished through the peace of the cross of Christ (Col.1:19-20)?” Of course, the author proceeds to answer the question by noting that “Shalom is coming not only to people but the entire planet: beasts, rivers, and trees included, and all the rest of what Apostle Paul calls things invisible.” Therefore, Crizalso submits that as long as our Christianity is still patterned after the worldview of Western enlightenment, which is blind to the supernatural realm, “our mission will not gain traction in most parts of the world that remain to be attuned to the reality of the spirit-world.” Indeed, how can we claim to be on God’s mission in partnership with His Spirit when we do not acknowledge and allow our witness to speak to the spiritual world?

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3. Quotes I am Pondering

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• But Christian mission is not just about gaining converts; it is also about making sure that the converts become mature disciples and servants of Christ. — Tite Tiénou

• The Christian mission to embody Christ in the world focuses and relies upon empathy with other humans; but our faith ancestors were not alienated from their bodies or from the rest of the natural world, which together form the ‘Creation.’ — Tallessyn Zawn Grenfell-Lee

• As participants in God’s mission, we must acknowledge God’s ownership of all things – inanimate and animate, visible and invisible on one hand, and our duty to care for the whole creation on the other. — Hermann Mvula

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