Though violence is part of Christian history, it is not the Jesus way.  Instead, Jesus inaugurates a new way in which love and peace rule rather than hate and violence.  Rather than raining fire on people because of their indifference, or taking up a sword against those who come for him, or pushing people around because they are ignorant or ill-informed, Jesus follows a completely different path – he takes a towel and cleans the feet of one who will betray him, identifies with the outcast and diseased living at the margins of society, suffers ridicule and abuse at the hands of the powerful, and dies in the place of a common criminal.  This is the Jesus way.

As followers of Jesus, we are called to follow along the same path.  To be on the Jesus way means we draw a firm and bold line and state categorically that while violence may be the choice of others, it is not the way of those who follow Christ.  And yet, living in the Jesus way is more than just refusing to be a violent person.  Violence must be addressed at its root.

Violence stems from a number of sources.  Here are three that are obvious.  First, violence comes from a sense of superiority – “we know what is right, and thus, we must maintain what is right at all costs.”  Second, violence can arise from fear – “we must do something about these people before they attack or overrun us.”  And third, violence comes about as a form of retribution – “they have it coming to them because of what they have done/ who they are.”

Superiority, fear and retribution are attitudes that lodge in the heart and can in time manifest themselves as acts of violence.  First, they appear in coarse jokes, then as angry words, and finally with violent acts.  The progression from slur to assault can be clearly seen in the treatment of Jews by Germans during the Second World War.  Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when Jewish homes and shops were attacked and ransacked did not just all of sudden in a single night happen.  The violence of November 9-10, 1938 originated in the hearts of those who thought themselves superior, who feared those who were different, and who felt they had a right to exact retribution.  In many cases, these attitudes were condoned and fostered in churches and by religious leaders.

And still, such attitudes persist.  It saddens me to hear those who claim to follow Jesus joke about the bullying of others, or condone remarks that denigrate the humanity of certain types of people, or judge another person as despicable because of his or her race, social standing, political affiliation, or sexual orientation.  If confronted, they demur, “I meant nothing.  It was only a joke.  Can’t we laugh about these things?”  Jesus makes clear that our remarks and attitudes are not a laughing matter, as they reveal what is in our heart and are the root of what will eventually become lustful, hateful and violent behavior (Matt 5:21ff).  He says that we must acknowledge that these attitudes defile us, and thus, they must be cut off at the root before they bear fruit (Matt 15:18-20).

Shouldn’t the sins of others be judged?  Yes, but this judgment belongs to God alone.  Instead of judging, or even joking, we are to live with blessing and love toward others because of the knowledge that God blesses and loves us in spite of our sordid behavior, arrogant thoughts, and outright rebellion.  He does not bully, ridicule, or condemn us; rather, God demonstrates his love toward us, for while we are even sinners, Christ dies for us (Rom 5:8).

A surprising number of people inside the church feel that the only way to deal with the ugly past of missions is to throw it out with the bath water.  They want to “own up” to the fact that missions was party to some of the ugliest episodes of human history – colonial aggression, slavery, cultural genocide, and power grabs.  For its distractors, missions belongs to an era of unenlightened and even brutish abuse and disregard, motivated by religious naiveté and simplicity.  They insist that in order to be free from this unsavory past, we must distance ourselves from every part of it.  And yet, such an opinion is itself too simplistic and, frankly, is an over-reaction motivated by an attempt to resolve an uncomfortable past.

We must differentiate between value and filth.  Missions is too valuable to throw out for at least three reasons. First, the value of missions can be seen in the myriad of good done by men and women on mission.  In fact, I would say that far more good has been done in the name of missions than bad.  We must not allow ourselves to be blinded to the vast amount of good and noble by dark and unsavory exceptions.

Second, missions is valuable because it is an enactment of the mission of God.  Missions is a human endeavor, carried out by culturally bound and sinful men and women, and thus, it will always be in need of a bath – repentance, refinement and humility.  And yet, in some miraculous way God demonstrates his love, grace, and glory through the human means of missions.

And third, without missions the church becomes too established and secure in itself.  Much of the reason for rejecting missions is that it is not respectable, or it is unsophisticated.  Missions is an embarrassment.  The church needs missions because of its embarrassment and offense.  Through participation in missions, we are reminded that we are a pilgrim people, exiles, sojourners, and witnesses of someone far greater than ourselves.

Who am I to dismiss, vilify, or reject missions?  I am merely a broken, and yet redeemed, man invited to participate in God’s movement toward humanity.  God’s mission uses me – my dirty bath water and all – to reveal his love, grace and glory to the world.

“The Western theological academy is at present not well placed for leadership in the new situation.  It has been too long immersed in its local concerns and often unaware of the transformation that has taken place in the church.  It is often hugely ignorant of the world in which the majority of Christians live, their social and religious contexts, and the history and life of the churches.   Its intellectual maps are pre-Columbian; there are vast areas of the Christian world of which they take no account.  Nor are its products always readily transferable outside the West.  Western theology is, in general, too small for Africa; it has been cut down to fit the small-scale universe demanded by the Enlightenment, which set and jealously guarded a frontier between the empirical world and the world of spirit.  Most Africans live in a larger, more populated universe in which the frontier is continually being crossed.  It is a universe that comprehends what Paul calls the principalities and power.  It requires a theology that brings Christ to bear on every part of the universe, making evident the victory over the principalities that Paul ascribes to Christ’s triumphal chariot of the Cross.  The new age of the church could bring a theological renaissance with new perspectives, new material, new light on old problems, and a host of issues never faced before.” Walls, “The Great Comssion 1910-2010,” in Considering the Great Commission: Evangelism and Mission in the Wesleyan Spirit.  Edited by W. Stephen Gunter and Elaine Robinson (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), 19.

“Throughout most of the church’s history [mission's] empirical state has been deplorable.  This was already true of Jesus’ first circle of disciples and has not really changed since.  We may have been fairly good at orthodoxy, at ‘faith’, but we have been poor in respect to orthopraxis, of love.”  (Transforming Mission, 519)

Bosch’s words are a reminder that the kingdom of God comes via the feeble witness of weak, broken, and flawed individuals who even though they find it hard to love as they should continue in the hope that God’s love will be found in every word spoken and each act of kindness.  The hope of missions remains – God is love and his love reigns despite our imperfect motivations and deplorable means.

A majority of missionaries were women. Specialists in the field know this, but I still find audiences that are surprised to hear it, largely because the image of the missionary is almost entirely male. The problem in mission historiography is to establish the role of the wives of male missionaries as missionaries in their own right, which they were from the very first days of overseas missionary effort. There is a hidden clause, however, in most generalizations about nineteenth-century missions: “not counting the wives.” That unspoken exclusion makes it difficult to count the true number of women missionaries, but it is not impossible to make plausible estimates.

Women!

Around the globe, more women than men are practicing Christians. Measured by regular church attendance, pilgrimages, prayers at home, fund-raising, and teaching children about faith, Christianity is a women’s religion. The ratio of female to male Christians is approximately two to one. Within Catholicism, sisters outnumber brothers and priests by more than 50 percent. Yet because the priests, preachers, theologians, public leaders, and famous missionary entrepreneurs are typically male, the crucial roles of women in mission remain buried in the unwritten stories of human relationships. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in both Catholicism and Protestantism, the majority of missionaries were women.  However, until recently overview histories of mission have scarcely analyzed women’s roles or acknowledged that women typically make up the majority of active believers (p. 118).

It seems to me that the telling of the worldwide advance of Christianity from the vantage point of relationships and home, hospitality and social change rather than institutional power and privilege may produce a history of the faith in which women are the chief witnesses.  And yet, as Robert points out, these stories remain buried within relationships and not in the ecclesiastical records or institutional ruins.  There is the history written by those who dominated and won, and there are the stories of the faith winding their way through families and marriages, school rooms and marketplaces.  The history of Christianity is woefully incomplete without these women and their unwritten stories.

O holy Lord Christ draw near to us, we cannot follow Thee.  Give us a strong and willing spirit, and when the weakness of flesh appears, let Thy grace go on before us, accompany and follow us, accompany and follow us. For without Thee we can do nothing, least of all suffer a cruel death for Thy sake.  Grant a willing spirit, a fearless heart, true faith, steadfast hope, perfect love, that for Thy sake we may, with patience and joy, surrender our life. Amen. (cited in E. Schweinitz, The History of the Church Known as the Moravian, or the Unitas Fratrum …,1901, 70)

I am not in a prison cell this morning awaiting execution, but Hus’ prayer reminds me to have a fearless heart, true faith, steadfast hope, and perfect love in the midst of whatever is outside my door or in my heart.  Whether I die a cruel death or suffer through difficult change, perplexing relationships, or disappointments, a surrendered life and the accompanying presence of Christ is my only hope.

Alternative histories, especially those written from a western and/or denominational orientation, give the impression that the success of Christianity is due to one type of Christianity triumphing over errant forms.  In this attempt to frame the success of Christianity as the rise of orthodox faith, other ‘Christianities’ are characterized as heresy and dismissed from the main storyline, or they are not mentioned at all.  Such a one-sided interpretation of missions and Christianity is being revised by African, Latin American, and Asian historians, as well as westerners, such as Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, and Dana Roberts.  The story is truly much broader and more diverse than we’ve been taught.

Christian Mission belongs on your list of books to read.  When read along with Philip Jenkin’s The Lost History of Christianity, one cannot help but see the expansion of Christianity as greater than western colonialism or a religion exported from Britain, Germany, and America.  Until you get your copy of Robert’s book, here is an enticing excerpt.

But the story of Christianity around the world is not that of a simple, linear progression.  To become a world religion, Christianity first had to succeed on the local level.  Specific groups of people had to understand and shape its meaning for themselves.  What in totality is called a “world” religion is, on closer observation, a mosaic of local beliefs and practices in creative tension with a universal framework shaped by belief in the God of the Bible, as handed down through Jesus and his followers. … growth takes place at the edges or borderlands of Christian areas, even as Christian heartlands experience decline.

Robert’s history reminds me that I as go forth in mission I must do more than replicate my particular denomination and its theological formulations.  I am to proclaim Jesus Christ and then trust the Spirit to bring understand and hope from within every language, culture, and locale.  Robert and others give me hope that as I witness the demise of Christianity at what has been its center, it is exploding at the edges of the world.

First, the magnitude. In order to grasp the current situation of world Christianity concretely, consider what went on last Sunday. More Roman Catholics attended church in the Philippines than in any single country of Europe. In China, where in 1970 there were no legally functioning churches at all, more believers probably gathered for worship than in all of so-called “Christian Europe.” And in Europe (as reported by Philip Jenkins) the church with the largest attendance last Sunday was in Kiev, and it is a church of Nigerian Pentecostals. Last Sunday, more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the U.S. combined. And several times more Anglicans attended church in Nigeria than in these other African countries. In Korea, where a century ago there existed only a bare handful of Christian believers, more people attended the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul than all of the churches in significant American denominations like the Christian Reformed Church. In the United States, Roman Catholic mass was said in more languages than ever in American history. Last Sunday many of the churches with the largest congregations in England and France were filled with African or Caribbean faces. As a final indication of global trends, as of 1999 the largest chapter of the Jesuits was in India, and not as in the United States as had been the case for many decades before.

In a word, the world Christian situation is not what it was when your grandparents were born, or even when you were born.