Leadership: A word from Mennonite Church USA leaders

The world has changed, and with it mission has changed. While 66 percent of all Christians lived in Europe in 1910, by 2010 only 26 percent lived there. By contrast, less than 2 percent of all Christians lived in Africa in 1910; this number skyrocketed to almost 22 percent by 2010.

Realities like these have caused some to reflect that when delegates gathered in Edinburgh, Scotland, for the 1910 World Missionary Conference—the first major ecumenical mission conference—the typical Christian looked like a white Western male whose age was about 48. Today, however, the typical Christian is more likely to be a black African female whose age is about 28.

These demographic realities have a huge impact on the face of missions. Of the 1,200 delegates gathered at Edinburgh in 1910, only 17 were from the global South. At the 2010 gathering of the Lausanne Congress for World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa, more than 2,500 of the 4,000 participants were from the global South. (The change in location from the northern to the southern hemisphere reflects the shift in the center of gravity in the global church.)

This shift means those coming to Christ increasingly experience the gospel via the witness of Nigerian, Brazilian, Korean or South African missionaries. The gospel no longer bears the burden of being seen as a Western religion. This is a shift so profound that we have not even begun to appreciate its significance. “The day of Western missionary dominance is over,” says Scott Moreau, chair of intercultural studies at Wheaton (Ill.) College. Today’s missionary is just as likely to be a black African in Europe, a northern Indian in south India or a Korean in China.

For Mission Network these shifts, along with our core Anabaptist convictions about noncoercion, have prodded us to embark on a journey that is transforming the way we think about mission and how we lead our partners in area conferences and congregations in mission engagement. Here are some of the shifts we see as necessary in moving toward a transformed posture in mission:

1. We in the West must surrender to God and the global church the “burden of responsibility” for mission. Instead, we must join God’s Spirit working around the world through mission workers of all nationalities. We must surrender the “universal” validity of an affluent, white, northern interpretation of the gospel in favor of a story that has many faces and myriad cultural accents.

2. We must surrender the assumption that initiative and direction for any mission engagement is our birthright. We will need to cultivate the capacity to accept roles being assigned to us rather than assuming that the prerogative for leadership belongs to those from the West. This requires an identity shift from being architects, managers and enforcers of accountability to becoming companions, co-laborers and participants in a shared vision.

3. We will need to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to the gospel that distances us from the alliance between mission and colonial interests in a previous era. We must repudiate the perception of our mission being driven by a benign desire to disseminate the benefits of a perceived superior culture.

4. Since our partners in mission in the global South are faced with poverty and political oppression as a perennial challenge to the gospel, we must embrace a more holistic approach to our witness. Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and advocating for justice must be as integral to our mission as making verbal witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

5. For the sake of the gospel itself, we must imagine a way of being together in mission that is rooted in relationships of mutuality, integrity and authentic sharing. We can no longer see those with whom we engage as objects or statistics to be reported. We are subjects together in God’s mission. Our congregations must expect a different type of accountability than reports on the “number of souls saved.”

We must expect to hear stories of God at work through our partners as lives are transformed by Jesus Christ through the authentic witness of our partners. Our aim is to move beyond the perception in the South that people are “having something done for them” or “on their behalf” or— worse yet—“having something done to them.”

We are learning as we go what it means to surrender the need to be architects of the story. We are discovering, rather, the good news embedded in authentic partnerships and life-giving relationships through which we can point to Jesus, the Giver of Life.

Stanley W. Green is executive director of Menno­nite Mission Network, the mission and service agency of Mennonite Church USA.