While the following article
is over twenty years old, and the Church of the Brethren in recent years
has moved toward a better concept of missionary work, the same discussion
still happens. Many in leadership now speak of "mission" (singular)
rather than the older "missions" (plural). --Web Editor
THE SHIFTING FOCUS
IN MISSIONARY PHILOSOPHY
Editorial
May/June, 1980
Volume 15, Number 3
A pastor from one of our districts asked a member of the
World Ministries Commission to supply him with the names of some missionaries
that his local congregation could support. One of the missionaries that
was being supported had retired, and they hoped to contribute financially
to the support of another in a similar evangelistic role. The staff member
said, "We really don't have anyone to offer; we don't have that kind of
program anymore."
A check in the current Bethany Seminary Catalog reveals
that not only is there no "division of missions" (as there is, for example,
at the Evangel Seminary in Springfield, Missouri), but there is not even
one course devoted exclusively to missions. What has happened? Why has
the Church lost its older-type missionary vision and its burning zeal?
One big reason is that our church leaders have adopted a new philosophy
of missions, and have embraced some concepts that stifle the missionary
imperative.
It really all started when the joint assembly of the Divisions
of Home and Foreign Missions of the National Council of Churches met in
1959 under the slogan "From Missions to Mission." The assembly encouraged
the elimination of the traditional American Protestant missions
boards, and the creation of new ecumenical world mission machinery
which was to operate through the World Council of Churches (See editorial,
Christianity Today, August 1, 1960). Since that time the word "missions"
has been redefined.
The older view of "missions" was concentrated on verbal
proclamation. The word "missions" spoke of the proclamation of the Good
News to the nonChristian world. The message was one of pardon through the
work which Jesus Christ accomplished on the Cross. The traditional image
of the missionary was that of the preacher, who along with his proclaiming
of the message, ministered to the healthcare and educational needs of the
people. The more recent word "mission" is viewed as the whole historical
process of the renewal of society. In other words, everything God is doing
in the world is "mission." Any activity of the church - a sit-in in favor
of school integration - is said to be "participating in mission." The word
"mission" has become a synonym for Christian involvement in the socio-political
movement which aims to create a new world society.
The message featured in the May/June, 1980 issue of the
BRF WITNESS is an attempt to explain some of the concepts that
lie behind "the shifting focus in missions."
--H. S. M.
The Shifting Focus in Missionary Philosophy
By Harold S. Martin
Modern missions are usually dated from William Carey who went to India
in 1793. For Brethren, the era of missions to nonChristian lands began
in 1895 when Wilbur and Mary Stover and Bertha Ryan were sent to India.
The Brethren were zealous about missions from the beginning. Alexander
Mack traveled up and down the Rhine Valley - even south into Switzerland
- to preach the Gospel. The stories of pioneer Brethren preachers such
as Elder George Wolfe should be known by every member of our Brethren churches.
Wilbur Stover, more than any other person, popularized foreign missions
among the Brethren. He traveled many miles and preached countless sermons
to persuade the Brethren that "the first great work of the church is missions."
The church today needs to recognize that her first task is the proclamation
of the Gospel. There needs to be a loving concern for those who have not
yet learned to know Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour, or who know Him
imperfectly. After all, if Jesus is the only door to salvation, heaven,
and eternal life -then all those depending on any other means of salvation
are hopelessly lost (John 10:9; Acts 4:12). Thus it becomes tremendously
important that everyone hears about Jesus Christ and His power to save.
At the 1978 Annual Conference, a query from the Atlantic Northeast District
called for a more aggressive home and world mission program. The 1979 Annual
Conference Report on the query includes the following sentence: "The World
Ministries Commission understands and appreciates the concerns of the Query
and is working to incorporate its values insofar as present mission philosophy
and budget allow." (See page 577, Annual Conference Minutes,
1979). However, the Annual Conference delegate body was not satisfied with
General Board's answer, and referred the query to a committee for further
study. Speakers from the delegate body "called for an evangelistic thrust
in addition to programs that emphasize indigenization and mutuality"
(Seattle 79--Conference Journal Wrapup). Part of General
Board's answer said that the World Ministries Commission "is working to
incorporate its values insofar as present mission philosophy allows." The
question is: What is present mission philosophy?
The number of Brethren missionaries has greatly declined over the past
thirty-five years. Part of this was due to the closed doors in China and
the limited missionary presence permitted in India. But a more far-reaching
reason for the decline has been a new attitude toward the primary mission
of the church. A writer in the Messenger describes the post World
War I I period and says, "During this period we began to shift our mission
focus from personal conversion to social justice and human rights, and
our service focus from relief and rehabilitation to economic and social
development" (December, 1976, page 27).
There are some Brethren who have not grasped the depth of the real issue
between the ecumenical concept of mission and the older biblical concept
of missions. They believe it is a harmless matter of getting the proper
balance between the personal and social aspects of salvation - between
proclamation and service. They hope that someday the pendulum will swing
again in their direction. But such an analysis is far too superficial.
The real issue is that the ecumenical movement now has another Jesus, another
spirit, and another gospel (2 Corinthians 11:4). We want to examine some
of the charges often leveled at the older missionary programs and some
of the components that are basic to the new concept of mission.
1. CHARGES LEVELED AT THE OLDER MISSIONARY PROGRAMS
By "missions" we have traditionally meant "the business of sending out
particular members of the body of Christ from any given culture and geographic
area - to another cultural group in the same or in a distant geographical
area - for the purpose of proclaiming the Gospel and discipling believers."
The early missionaries thought of the Gospel as a message which centered
around the atonement as the substitutionary act of Christ - His blood being
the only means of saving men and women from everlasting torment.
Those who have adopted the more recent "mission" philosophy say that
the early missionaries practiced a colonial--type of paternalism and attempted
to westernize the peoples to whom they had gone. These charges have not
generally been true.
(a) Westernization
The thinking runs like this: "Missionaries from the West have attempted
to destroy the cultures of the East and Latin American countries, and to
impose their Western culture on the natives. Such missionaries should go
home and take their ideas along with them."
Most of the missionaries in the past two centuries have come from the
West. However, many of the most able missionaries in the earlier years
of the modern missionary movement, were people who "indigenized." They
adopted the culture of the people to whom they went as far as possible,
and sought to apply the Gospel in that cultural context. Robert Morrison
and John Williams were outstanding examples of this.
Even David Livingstone (who hoped to open Africa to commerce in order
to root out the slavery practice), would not practice his Western medicine
without getting the approval of the African witch doctors whom he treated
as colleagues. The Interdenominational China Inland Mission required
that "missionaries would wear Chinese dress, and as far as possible identify
themselves with the Chinese people." Later, when converts needed fellowship,
missionaries did tend to organize the new Christians after the pattern
of the church units they had known in their homeland, just as the early
Jewish-Christian missionaries organized the first congregations in the
Greco-Roman world on the pattern of the synagogues they had known in Palestine.
However, it is true that any person in any culture anywhere who embraces
the Gospel of Jesus Christ thereby accepts patterns of life that stand
in opposition to many of the practices of his native culture. Christian
missionaries did much to eliminate the superstitions and inhuman practices
supported by pagan religious beliefs - the murder of twins, burning a widow
alive on her husband's funeral pyre, etc. See "Social Concern in Christian
Missions" in Christianity Today, June 18, 1976 for a detailed
account of how missionaries helped natives to become more fully human.
The later missionaries were expected, by the very nature of their skills,
to bring to people the advantages of medical, educational, agricultural,
and industrial know-how from the West. In the meantime (completely apart
from the missionary presence) Western businessmen, commercial interests,
and technologists continued to infiltrate the East at an increasing rate.
The missionaries are really
not to blame for steps taken by other
nations toward Westernization. The tides of culture have always been on
the move, and the more aggressive cultures have often influenced and changed
the more passive ones. Cultural changes would have occurred even if missionaries
had never gone to overseas countries. Business, political, and technological
pressures have impelled Third World cultures to take steps toward Westernization.
(b) Paternalism
The word "paternalism" speaks of the principle of governing or
controlling a group of people in a manner that suggests the authority
of a father over his children. Ecumenical leaders today seem to think of
the older foreign missions, and present-day activities of the independent
mission boards, as a kind of "religious imperialism."
Some of the young church leaders overseas are becoming sensitive to
the domination over them by white missionaries, and speak of a "moratorium"
on missionaries. A leader in the Coptic Evangelical Church of Egypt put
it this way: "We would like to go to heaven with the help of brothers.
But if you want us to go to heaven by being our masters, we prefer to go
to hell" (page 11, What Next in Mission?,
Paul Hopkins, Westminster,
1977).
It is true that some missionaries have fallen for the temptation of
staying on the scene too long after planting a church, and have not moved
on to plant new churches. They have tried to maintain a tight control over
the established church. In such cases missionary boards need to relocate
the missionary personnel. Most missionaries, however, even those serving
under the auspices of the independent mission agencies, do not dominate
and lord it over the people they are trying to reach. There are many
missionaries who are truly honest, sacrificial, tactful, Spirit-led, and
charitable.
It is true that the rise of nationalism in many parts of the world has
created a new international climate. Proud peoples who were long living
under some form of colonial rule, are beginning to assert the values of
their own cultures, and insisting that they must create their own future.
They are not eager to have people from some other country move in and tell
them what to believe and how to live. That does not mean however that Christian
missionaries should not attempt to share the message of eternal life through
Jesus Christ with such people.
(c) Salvation
The warm message of the true Christian missionary is the truth that
God's Son bore the penalty for man's sin in His own body on the Cross,
and that through His atoning death and resurrection, He freely offers reconciliation
with God to the world of sinners. But at the World Council of Churches
Assembly in Bangkok in 1973, salvation was described as "the peace
of the people in Vietnam, independence in Angola, justice and reconciliation
in Northern Ireland." The emphasis by the ecumenical church leaders of
our day is being placed on human liberation rather than upon a spiritual
new birth, and thus the missionary with the message of eternal life through
faith in Jesus Christ is irrelevant.
Many ecumenical churchmen are attempting to interpret biblical salvation
in terms of the liberation of the oppressed. The Bible proof-text for this
view is found in Luke 4:18. The Scripture says, "He has sent me to proclaim
release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at
liberty those who are oppressed" (RSV). It is assumed by the liberationists
that the poor, the captives, and the blind
were those who
were materially and literally poor and blind and bound.
It is true that during His ministry, Jesus opened the eyes of the
blind, and certainly the blind should arouse our Christian compassion
today. But this example of Jesus can hardly betaken as an instruction for
us to perform similar miraculous cures today.
Concerning the poor, it is a well known fact that "the poor"
in the Old Testament were not just the needy, but the pious whose hope
and trust were in God. The Beatitude 'which says "Blessed are the poor
in spirit" cannot possibly be understood to teach that material poverty
is a condition of receiving God's kingdom.
And what about the captives? There is no evidence that Jesus
literally emptied the prisons of Palestine. In fact, the prisoner we hear
most about (John the Baptist), was left in prison and was executed! Would
it not have been an act of courage on the part of Jesus to deliver John
the Baptist, if "proclaiming release to the captives" meant literally emptying
the prisons of the land?
What Jesus did do, and what He described in Luke 4:18, was the act of
delivering people from the spiritual bondage of sin. Certainly, material
poverty and physical blindness and unjust imprisonment are conditions that
should incite us to bring relief for those who suffer in these ways -but
deliverance from these things is not the salvation for which Christ
died and arose again - in order to secure deliverance for mankind.
For many, the grand old word "salvation" has no eternal, spiritual dimension.
"Salvation" is a "this world-only" deliverance from social, economic, and
political oppression. The word "salvation" to the liberationists means
"God's intervention in human events, which turns
world history into
salvation history by overcoming evil powers primarily through political
means." The word "salvation," and many other timehonored theological words,
have been given new and secularized meanings. They use our vocabulary
but they don't use our
dictionary!
We have seen some of the accusations leveled at the older missionary
program; we want to look now at some of the ingredients that are basic
to the new concept of mission which is being advocated today.
2. COMPONENTS THAT ARE BASIC TO THE NEW MISSION CONCEPT
Recent materials coming out of Elgin present a strange" idea of "mission."
The number-one objective for the Church of the Brethren mission program
is the fight for social justice and liberation on behalf of people who
are oppressed in various ways. Much material could be quoted from a number
of documents to illustrate the revolutionary political approach to missions
which is now being advanced.
The issue is not personal vs. social gospel. Those of us who
are conservative and evangelical in belief are caricatured as "people whose
only passion is saving souls (moving into an overseas community and making
occasional evangelistic raids into it) - and who are concerned about developing
a personal and legalistic piety - with little or no concern about changing
society." This is an outdated accusation used as a whipping boy for those
who hold to the fundamentals of the faith. It is simply not a true statement.
What then is the real issue in missions as many of us see it today?
It is that our Church of the Brethren leaders have adopted a completely
new understanding of mission with the following basic components.
(a) Mission does not proceed from Christ's Great Commission to His
Church, but rather, from the sovereign activity of God in the world.
God, through a series of interventions and revolutionary acts, is leading
the world toward its ultimate goal. God is slowly moving the world toward
a state of prosperity for mankind. This is "salvation." God's intervention
in world events turns
world history into salvation history by
overcoming evil powers. God is active in the great revolutionary movements
of our time -in the fight for racial equality, in the attempt to liberate
women, and in the struggle to eliminate hunger, poverty, and injustice
in the world. To be Christian then, and to be in mission, we must desire
the new and must actively participate in the change.
Those who believe in biblical missions, rather than humanistic missionary
strategy, look to the Commission given by Jesus Christ in Matthew 28:19-20
as the mandate for their work. The command to "go into all the world" is
one with which we are all familiar. The night may soon come when no man
can work. Is it possible that thousands will go out into a lost eternity
-not because they couldn't be saved, or wouldn't be saved, or shouldn't
be saved - but because we don't care, or if we do care, we don't care very
much? There are yet vast multitudes to be reached with the Gospel message.
Countless villages must hear the Word of God. Numerous tribes must have
the message in their native tongue. The renaissance of Hinduism and Islam
is helping to keep a firm hold on many densely populated areas of the world.
Shintoism and Buddhism show no signs of yielding to Christianity. Animism
still has a grip on millions of people. Christians must not be disobedient
to the heavenly mandate (Matthew 28:19-20).
(b) The idea of God's presence being in the Church in some special
way is a heathen idea -- like Baal in the Old Testament - a god in residence.
The new theory is that the church is a part of the world. The only difference
between the church and the world, is that because of its knowledge of the
saving goal of history, the church now marches ahead of the rest of humanity.
The demarcation between the saved and the lost is rejected. Universalism
is often accepted. The reasoning goes like this: Either God could not
or would not save all persons. If He could not, He is not sovereign;
if He would not, then God is not totally good. The new universalism says
that it is not necessary to speak of eternal life and eternal death when
men are confronted with the Gospel - since all will ultimately and finally
be redeemed. The cry of the ecumenical mission boards is that now in
this age we go to proclaim that Jesus Christ is "Lord over all men."
We go - not to take Jesus to people, but "to find the Christ who is already
there." The writer in Church of the Brethren Agenda says,
"Since Christ is the Lord of all life, everyone already has a relationship
with Him, although many people have no awareness of His presence" (September
10, 1971).
Most of us in the Church of the Brethren believe that for every responsible
person, there is either eternal life (in Christ), or eternal condemnation
(apart from Christ)--and that it is selfish and antisocial to present
a ministry that does not take into account the whole man. However,
according to the new "mission" philosophy, all men will eventually become
a new humanity in Jesus Christ, and for the Church to claim to be a body
of called out saved persons, is the height of idolatry.
(c) The new missionary philosophy puts the various religions on the
same level, and thus the need for seeking for conversions is eliminated.
For a growing number of people at the policymaking levels of the Church
of the Brethren, the focus in missions is shifting away from confrontation
between Christian and non-Christian, and toward cooperation between Christians
and persons of "other living faiths." In our missions promotional literature,
conversion to Jesus Christ is noticeable by its absence.
Historic Christianity has always insisted that the gods of other religions
are mere idols (Psalm 96:5). The Bible teaches clearly that Jesus Christ
if the only way to heaven (Acts 4:12; John 14:6), and that all who
die without trusting His sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin, are headed
for eternal destruction. The early Brethren missionaries regarded the nonChristian
religions as false religions. They believed that Hindus and Buddhists and
Moslems were in bondage to Satan, and that they could escape the wrath
of God only by repenting of their heathen practices and accepting Jesus
Christ. See Christian Heroism in Heathen Lands, Brethren
Publishing House, 1914.
The cry today is that Christians must find ways to live together with
persons of other faiths, and find ways to resolve the fundamental human
problems that threaten the very survival of humanity itself. This is what
the "World Conference on Religion and Peace" was all about. The Church
of the Brethren representative to the Conference described the platform
in the January, 1980 Messenger.
These have been some of the basic components that lie behind "the new
look" for missions philosophy today.
The reporter describing events at Seattle in 1979, says: "There is a
great gap between the official mission philosophy of the denomination,
and the philosophy of the people in the pews" (Messenger, August,
1979). That is indeed a very true statement. Our people are being led deeply
into the whole humanistic, revolutionary philosophy of missions. It is
the conviction of the BRF that we ought not support a concept of mission
which is distorted and is not directed toward the conversion of men and
women to faith in Jesus Christ.
The real question is, "What does God command the Church to do regarding
the multitudes who have no knowledge of Christ?" Our Commander-in-Chief
says, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.
He that believes and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believes not
shall be damned" (Mark 16:15-16). Our missionary outreach must show a concern
for the eternal salvation of all persons, and the temporal well-being
of the human family - and in precisely that order. If soul-saving,
disciple-building evangelism is a major part of our mission activity, then
we urge commission leaders and curriculum writers and Elgin staff persons
to say it and print it and publicize it and keep on saying
it - instead of subjecting our people to a steady flow of sociological
and theological bafflegab!