#112. Mission Through Strength

Vs Mission Through Weakness

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. In these newsletters, I share a thought that has spoken to me in the week, 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. Thought I Can’t Shake Off

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There’s a line in Decolonising Mission that has stayed with me over the past few weeks—actually, two lines from the book have resonated deeply with me this week. The first suggests that much of our contemporary missiology is still shaped by the anxieties of 15th- and 16th-century Europe. These anxieties were stirred in part by the fall of Constantinople in 1453, which marked the definitive end of the Eastern Roman Empire, and were further compounded by the upheavals of the Reformations across Europe—Martin Luther in Germany, John Calvin in Switzerland, and, of course, King Henry VIII’s break with Rome in England. These were not only theological crises, but also political and cultural ones, and they continue to cast a long shadow over how mission is imagined and practiced today.

The other line concerns the notion of “peace through strength” that has been in public discourse this week. In the book, I phrase it as “peace through violence”—a distinctly imperial idea often associated with the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Elizabeth Speller, in her book Following Hadrian (Oxford University Press, 2003), makes Hadrian’s agenda clear: peace through strength—or, failing that, peace through threat (p. 69). This aligns closely with the broader Roman military philosophy captured in the phrase si vis pacem, para bellum—“If you want peace, prepare for war.” Or, at the very least, ensure you appear strong. This obsession with strength, (real or apparent) and dominance, the stubborn refusal to be or appear vulnerable, is arguably the Achilles’ heel of imperial ideology itself. As I write this, I am reminded of Tacitus words:

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 (Tacitus, Agricola, vol. 1, par. 30).

I would have liked to spend more time on this today, especially given the recent developments in the Middle East, which raise urgent and complex questions. There is much that could—and should—be said about the interplay of power, faith, and politics. But given my current schedule, I don’t have the space to engage it with the nuance it deserves. More honestly, I’d rather avoid inviting another takedown attempt from Ted Esler—a distraction I can’t afford right now. That conversation will have to wait. Let it suffice here to simply say that, after everything has been said and done, empires crush even their most loyal subjects. This is normal. Not only do empires exploit and dominate others, they also turn inward, consuming their own people in the name of power, unity, and survival. Empires demand loyalty above justice, silence over truth, and strength over compassion. Those who dissent, question, or simply fail to perform—whether prophets, poets, truth-tellers, or the vulnerable—are often cast aside, exiled, or crushed.

I do believe there is a strong and often overlooked link between contemporary mission and the logic of “peace through strength.” In fact, it may be more accurate to speak of a form of “mission through strength,” where the proclamation of the gospel is subtly (and sometimes overtly) entangled with displays of power, dominance, and control. This pattern, I would argue, is not accidental. It is the historical outgrowth of theological, political, and ecclesiastical developments that took root in the 15th and 16th centuries.

During this period, Europe was reeling from the loss of vast Christian territories to Muslim powers. The Ottoman Empire had established itself as the dominant force in what had once been the heartland of both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires. Christians in Europe, unable to recover those lands or mount a meaningful theological or political engagement with Islam, redirected their energies elsewhere. This redirection coincided with the so-called Age of Discovery, when European powers—armed with papal bulls such as Dum Diversas (1452) and Inter Caetera (1493)—received divine sanction to explore, conquer, and subjugate non-European peoples.

In this colonial framework, mission was no longer merely the sharing of the good news of Christ. It became entangled with empire-building, territorial expansion, and the extraction of resources. Theologies of superiority—racial, cultural, and spiritual—emerged to justify these actions. As a result, a missiology took form that bore little resemblance to the humility and vulnerability embodied by Christ. Instead, it reflected the ambitions of Christendom—expansionist, defensive, and triumphalist.

This legacy still lingers in various expressions of contemporary mission. The language may have changed, but the impulse remains: to convert through influence, to expand through control, and to measure success by numbers and visibility rather than by faithful presence or self-giving love. It is a form of mission more comfortable with conquest than with cross-bearing. In the end, I wonder: How has the idea of “peace through strength”—or even “mission through strength”—shaped the way we think about vulnerability, power, and success in Christian ministry today? In addition, what would a missiology rooted in the humility, vulnerability, and self-giving love of Christ look like in practice—and what structures, assumptions, or habits would need to be unlearned to get there?

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2. Quotes I am Pondering

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• God, Jesus Christ, the Church, and even the Faith of the missionary all derive from a culture, and this culture is what the speech testifies to. The “despair” of a Tempels or the temptations of a Dournes find their meaning here, in the objective impossibility of dialogue: in reality, the missionary has strictly nothing to communicate, has no revelation to unveil that would not essentially belong to the order of his own accumulated human experience. — Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, The Scent of the Father: Essay on the Limits of Life and Science in Sub-Saharan Africa. Trans. Jonathan Adjemian, Polity Press, 2023, p. 49-50.

• When Christianity thus becomes the object of transmission, when it is the traditional religion of everyone, and thus is no longer the object of a choice, it is transformed into a corpus of habits maintained by inculcation and the need to be integrated and to conform. The distinction between the essential and the secondary is lost. Kerygma dissolves in ecclesiality. What is presented today as the Good News is actually a church, a denomination, and the crite¬ ria of faith coincide with those of church membership. — F. Eboussi Boulaga, Christianity without Fetishes: An African Critique and Recapture of Christianity. Orbis Books, 1984., p. 34.

• While Western missionaries were part of a brutal colonization process in which Christianity was often equated with ‘civilization’, this did not mean that Africans received the Western Christian faith passively and uncritically. Rather, they considered the materials presented to them by missionaries, and in many cases, adapted it to fit their cultures and their needs. Early African Christians themselves drew parallels between the gods and spirits of their traditional religions and the God, angels and demons of the Bible. Early African Christian prophets and evangelists took the gospel to the interior of the continent when Western missionaries still huddled at the coastal fringes. Like their forebears, contemporary African Christians are encountering the messages of American and other Western Christians, but they are not adopting them unthinkingly or without significant local adaptation. Pentecostal Christianity thus becomes an empowering resource for building African cultures and shaping African worldviews. — Gladys Ganiel, “Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in South Africa and Zimbabwe: A Review,” Religion Compass, Vol. 5, (2010) p. 130-143.

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