Why Turn to Missionaries for Imaging the Church’s Future?

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

My last article pointed toward two men, David Bosch and Lesslie Newbigin, whom I designated as "trailblazers." But my piece did not answer the question of how did these two have such a view of the church and the world, of the Gospel and our cultures, that they uniquely have visions that are worth knowing if we are concerned with the future of the Church.

As I was writing my last article, I mused about the fact that one of the points of similarity between them was that both had spent part or all of their lives as missionaries. You might have noticed in the trailblazers’ article that the biographical part of David Bosch contained the sentence: “From 1957 to 1967 he served as a missionary of the Dutch Reformed Church, working with the Xhosa in the Transkei, where he became fluent in isiXhosa.” Likewise, Lesslie Newbigin’s life story includes: “he was sent by the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland as a missionary to southern India within its Tamil culture. In the course of his work, he became a major leader in the forming of the ecumenical Church of South India in which he was consecrated as one of the original bishops of the CSI.”

It could be just a coincidence that the authors of the two books I have recommended as central for plotting the church’s future both have the experience of a missionary, that is, one who goes to a foreign country to share with them the Gospel. But during the last couple weeks, one of the sources from which I receive a periodical email, Religion Dispatches sent me a pertinent posting.

At the end of the article is a sentence about the author: “David A. Hollinger is Preston Hotchkis Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His book, Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular, has now been released in paperback.”

After checking out the sample of the book I decided it contributed to this future church project and was worth buying, and I did so.

Hollinger tells us that “Americans in the early twenty-first century find themselves in an increasingly secular society saddled with an increasingly [right wing] religious politics….Christianity has become an instrument for the most politically, culturally, and theologically reactionary Americans.” He divides U.S. Christianity into two groups, the Ecumenicals and the Evangelicals. The Ecumenicals are the descendants of the earliest colonists who were dissenters to state religion in the old world and so sailed to the New World to establish that “city on the hill” undergirded by their Christian faith. “Ecumenical Protestantism channeled through Christianity the Enlightenment’s critical perspective on belief and its generous view of human capabilities,” says Hollinger.

Further, he says, “By the turn of the twenty-first century the pluralistic, proudly multicultural public life of the United States looked more like what ecumenical leaders of the 1960s wanted than what their contemporary evangelical counterparts advocated. But the evangelicals won in the narrower competition for the loyalties of the minority of Americans who now identify with the Republican Party. Evangelicalism created a safe harbor for white people who wanted to be counted as Christians without having to accept what ecumenical leaders said were the social obligations demanded by the gospel, especially the imperative to extend civil equality to nonwhites.”

Popular theory of modern religious history holds that evangelical churches flourished because they made greater demands on the faithful, while liberal churches declined on account of not demanding much of anything. The opposite is true . Evangelicalism made it easy to avoid the challenges of an ethno-racially diverse society and a scientifically informed culture.

So where does the issue of missionaries fit into Hollinger’s writing? In indicating what forces have contributed to American’s humanizing or dehumanizing of “others” he named two. One group were the Jewish immigrants whose coming to America brought an alternative religious and cultural dimension that Christian Americans have had to decide how they would treat.

The second influencing group were the missionaries they sent across the world.

“Mark Twain’s sense that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness ” does not always apply. But it did for thousands of missionaries. The experience of living with peoples really different from themselves, much to their surprise , changed their understandings of themselves, of their country, and of humanity. [italics mine] Missionaries were expected to make the rest of the world “more like us,” more like American Protestants. But by the 1920s, a steady stream of missionary writings insisted that this old aspiration was a mistake. The gospel ended up working like a boomerang, thrown across the sea but not staying there. It returned, carrying unexpected baggage .”

In his fourth chapter titled "The Missionary Boomerang," Hollinger contrasts the mindsets and methods of the Ecumenical and the Evangelical missionaries. The evangelical missionary’s task was simple. He or she was to preach the ‘gospel’ to the heathen. The gospel they took and expounded merged the values of Christianity and Western Culture. This is the view of missionaries that many secular Americans hold today. Lesslie Newbigin, on the other hand, describes how the newly minted missionary can easily think that what they learned as the Gospel as it is perceived in western culture is the true unadulterated Gospel that is to be shared with the people to whom they had been sent. But they discover that the culture of Africa or India is not like Europe’s or America’s.

They recognize that not only has there never been an ‘unadulterated’ Gospel. There never was one. In the writings of the apostle Paul, we discern his struggle to make a Gospel generated in a Galilean world relevant to a Gentile world.

“In the major denominations, the tone of missionary representation of foreign peoples moved steadily away from invidious language and toward the universalist vision of Galatians 3: 28: “ There is neither Jew nor Gentile , neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Ecumenical missionaries also differed from evangelical missionaries in their post=mission role in American public life. The evangelicals, even when liberalized by their experience abroad, almost never became State Department officers, Ivy League professors, best - selling authors, or leaders of social reform movements.”

Hollinger underscores his point by enumerating some of those former missionary voices which had made influence on Americans’ views of "the foreigner:" Pearl Buck, John Hersey, Ruth Benedict, Henry Luce (publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune), Minnesota Republican congressman Walter Judd.

So do we find our trailblazers expressing such a view as Hollinger develops?

David Bosch tells us in "Transforming Mission:" “By the time the large-scale Western colonial expansion began, Western Christians were unconscious of the fact that their theology was culturally conditioned; they simply assumed that it was supra-cultural and universally valid.” Further, “The Christian faith never exists except as “translated” into a culture .” Or “the gospel is foreign to every culture.” Finally, while saying that our time calls for a new paradigm of the church, he suggests: “This incarnational dimension, of the gospel being “ en-fleshed,” “em - bodied” in a people and its culture, of a “kind of ongoing incarnation” is very different from any model that had been in vogue for over a thousand years. In this paradigm, it is not so much a case of the church being expanded , but of the church being born anew in each new context and culture.”

Lesslie Newbigin writes in "Foolishness to the Greeks:" “Western missionaries have shared in the general weakening of confidence in our modern Western culture, they have become more aware of the fact that in their presentation of the gospel they have often confused culturally conditioned perceptions with the substance of the gospel, and thus wrongfully claimed divine authority for the relativities of one culture.”

The church, “while it has sought to explore the problems of contextualization in all the cultures of humankind from China to Peru, it has largely ignored the culture that is the most widespread , powerful, and persuasive among all contemporary cultures — namely, what I have called modern Western culture. It is this culture that, more than almost any other, is proving resistant to the gospel …in the areas dominated by modern Western culture (whether in its capitalist or socialist political expression ) the church is shrinking. The gospel appears to fall on deaf ears.”

Finally, “Can the experience of missionaries in the cross-cultural transmission of the gospel and the work of theologians who have worked on the question of gospel and culture within the limits of our modern Western culture be usefully brought together to throw light on the central issue I have posed?”

Both of these men see the complexities of trying to translate the Gospel from one culture to another but find that the churches of the future cannot escape doing just that. And the hardest missionary work will be required in our own Western culture.

The Rev. H. A. "Bud" Tillinghast of Oxford, England, is a retired clergy member of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church. "Preparing a Digital Library for the UMC's Future" is Dr. Tillinghast's joint project with United Methodist Insight.