Leadership

2010 is now just weeks away. The year will include the FIFA World Cup, the world’s largest sporting spectacle, June 11-July 11, 2010, in South Africa, and the XXI Olympic Winter Games Feb. 12-28, 2010, in Vancouver, British Columbia.

2010 will also be a big year for much of the church. It will be 100 years since the historic World Missionary Conference, an ecumenical missions conference held in Edinburgh, Scotland. Three other global conferences will also be held in 2010, in Tokyo, Japan; Cape Town, South Africa; and Boston.

Noted Christian author George Weigel notes: “There were only 558 million Christians in the world in 1900, and there will be approximately 2 billion Christians by the middle of the year [2002], a huge increase.”

The phenomenal growth of the Christian movement has been accompanied by the global spread of the church. According to Philip Jenkins, over the past century the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted southward to Africa, Asia and Latin America. These are the regions where the largest and fastest-growing Christian communities on the planet are found.

Jenkins predicts that by 2050, only about one-fifth of the world’s 3 billion Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. While Western Christianity may be in decline, a new era of Southern Christianity is dawning. The face of mission has changed. About half of all cross-cultural missionaries today are non-Western. Korea has become the second-largest sender of foreign missionaries.

There will, indeed, be much to celebrate when church and mission representatives gather in the four 2010 gatherings to commemorate Edinburgh 1910. Another note appropriate with our praises is repentance. At the 1910 gathering were 1,215 delegates. Only 17 participants were from Asia. There were no African delegates.

Even more disconcerting than the lack of southern participants, however, was the way people from the South were regarded by conference participants. Wardlaw Thompson, missionary to Africa, referred in a speech at the conference to the primitive or barbarous peoples, where the missionary is admittedly one of a “superior” race and should see the docility of the “inferior” race as at once the missionary’s opportunity and peril.

William Jennings Bryan of the United States, a guest and speaker at the conference, spoke of Christianity’s character being revealed in its willingness to run the risk of educating the “inferior people of the world.” Such sentiments, often repeated at the conference, led to the objectification of the peoples of the South and to grave atrocities, including the denigration of whole cultures. Hopefully there will be a place for repentance.

Might we also wish for a commitment to revisiting our approaches in mission. From imposition and objectification of the “targets” of our mission, perhaps we can also imagine new ways of being in mission. Beginning around the midpoint of last century, Mennonites took seriously the need to reflect the example of Christ in their encounter with people of other cultures. That approach can best be described as accompaniment and is reflected in the stories in this issue of Melanie Quinn, Moriah Hurst, and Willis and Byrdalene Horst each of whom, whether in Botswana, the Argentine Chaco or Australia, have been modeling a different way of being in mission.

The dictionary defines accompaniment thus: Noun: (i) One who shares interests or activities with another: comrade, fellow, mate. Informal buddy, pal; (ii) One that accompanies another; (iii) One of a matched pair of things: counterpart. Verb: To be with or go with (another): accompany, attend, escort. Idioms: go hand in hand with.

The etymology of the word comes from the French “com” (with) and “panis” (bread). Thus, one who shares the same bread. To accompany others in mission is to listen, discern and share with our companions what the good news of Jesus means in their context and find ways to empower them for their response to God’s call. Mennonite Mission Network has been attempting to find ourselves and encourage Mennonite Church USA congregations on this journey toward a new way.

In 2010, as brothers and sisters meet across the globe, we pray we will find many others on this journey to a new way of being in mission. Certainly celebration, hopefully repentance, but also we pray for a reconceptualization that will restore the life-giving, dignity-conferring and liberating dynamics of mission for the century just begun.