Leadership: A world from Mennonite Church USA leaders

The phenomenal growth of the church outside Europe and North America and some regrettable facets in the history of mission have given rise to calls for a “moratorium” on mission from the West and focus on the local church and its context.

Almost any person reading these words can call to mind mission workers whose work was characterized by a commitment to advocacy for justice and respect for the human dignity of those among whom they live (including being strong champions in the antislavery movement).

Yet no one can deny that mission has suffered greatly from its mostly uncritical alliance with Western imperialism. That a broad swathe of the missionary establishment has been in cahoots with the military and expansionist spirit of the colonizing West makes the accusation undeniable and shameful.

In an article entitled “Issues in Mission Today: Challenges for Reflection at Edinburgh 2010,” Stephen Bevans observes that for much of its history mission stood as a sign of world conquest. Missionaries were referred to as “soldiers,” as Christian “forces” who engaged their work with “a crusading mind” (Water Buffalo Theology by Kosuke Koyam).

As a consequence, mission has been scarred by a legacy of identification with rapacious neocolonialism that seemed intent on destroying non-Western cultures and using violence or bribes to coerce people to adopt a foreign religio-cultural identity.

Mission was seen as aligned with imperialistic designs, and the message of mission was confused with the idea of the superiority of western culture and learning.

As Stephen Neill observes: “Missionaries in the 19th century had to some extent yielded to the colonial complex. Only Western man was man in the full sense of the word; he was wise and good, and members of other races, in so far as they became westernized, might share in this wisdom and goodness. But Western man was the leader, and would remain so for a very long time, perhaps forever” (A History of Christian Missions).

In January 2014, when the Council for International Anabaptist Missions (a coalition of about two dozen mission agencies/entities) meets in Chicago, these questions will be on the agenda.

Why are we (or should we be) involved in mission? Is it because we are driven by the need to extend the superiority of the culture we are a part of? Certainly not.

Mission is first and foremost of the very essence of the Triune God. The whole biblical story is infused with the energy of God’s missionary purpose of creation and recreation. As a creation of the Spirit of God, the essence of the church’s being is mission.

The church, in every place and in every time, is called to be involved in God’s mission, or, as a recent slogan, reaffirmed at the largest ecumenical gathering in the history of the Christian movement (Cape Town 2010), puts it: “”The whole church bearing the whole gospel to the whole world.”

This affirmation celebrates the fact that mission has migrated from its captivity as a unidirectional movement (“from the West to the rest”) to becoming multidirectional and polycentric.

The great new reality of our time is the shift from subject-object relations that have characterized missions in the last two centuries to a new era in which every church can embrace and live into its own identity as a subject of mission.

This invites a recognition that every church is called to global mission as both a receiver of the gifts of others and a sharer of the gifts that have been entrusted to it. This dawning of a new era in mission that is truly global, where mission is from everywhere to everywhere, must advance on the presumption of continued mission involvement from the West, partnered with the missionary energies from every other part of the world.

What we need is not a moratorium. Rather than indulge a withdrawal syndrome, based on our sense of guilt because of past failures, what we need in Western mission is a continuing conversion from what Koyama calls a “crusading mind” to a “crucified mind.”

We need a conversion from presuming that we are at the center of mission to a postcolonial mind-set that is vulnerable and committed to interdependence and mutuality.

What is needed from Western churches is not a disengagement from mission (a true aberration) or a reprehensible denial that continues to communicate superiority, paternalism, imperialism and the arrogance of the Western church.

We need a commitment to participation in the global mission community in the spirit of servanthood, humility and relationships.

As we like to describe it, “Third Way Mission”—or, simply put, mission in the way of Jesus.

Stanley Green is executive director of Mennonite Mission Network.