Category — History

‘Throwing the baby out with the bath water’ is a way of saying that in an attempt to rid ourselves of the dirty, bad, or undesirable, we toss out that which is essential or prized.  The idiom is quite graphic.  Imagine a mother lovingly washing her daughter’s face, arms, and hair.  She is careful not to rub too hard but thoroughly washes between fingers, behind ears, and around eyes and mouth.  All the while, she softly reassures the child that she loves her.  Once the mother is done, she takes the tub full of water and baby to back door and toss both into the yard!  We get the message - you don’t throw out something or someone of value just because it sits in that which of no value.  Besides being mentally unstable or out of touch with reality, a mother might throw her child out with bath water because she thinks (wrongly) that the only way to dispose of the nasty water is throw it and its contents into the yard.  The problem is that she cannot differentiate between the value of the child and the filth of the water.

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.

Today I begin a summer-long sabbatical study in which I will be reading like a mad man and hopefully get some writing done.  I plan to post throughout the summer, and thus share with you, challenging, provocative, disturbing quotes and thoughts that I stumble across.  The first of these is from an essay by Andrew Walls regarding what the church in Africa could bring to us …

“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.

David Bosch ends his magisterial study of missions by concluding …

“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.

Jeffrey Cox, Professor of History at the University of Iowa, in an article entitled “What I have Learned from Writing The British Missionary Enterprise from 1700” (International Bulletin of Missionary Research, April 2008), distills a number of his conclusions from his study of and book on British missions.  Below is a quote from the article that coincides with and reinforces a salient point Dana Robert makes in her new book (see my post of March 31). 

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!

In the second half of Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion, Dana Robert highlights crucial themes in mission history.  In a section entitled ‘Women as Missionaries’, she notes-

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.

Two weeks before he was burned at the stake in 1415, Jan Hus penned these words in a letter to friends…

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.

Dana Robert’s new book has finally arrived.  Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 192 pages) recounts the history of Christian missions but not from a strict partisan perspective or as a mono-toned description of western institution and theology.  Rather, Robert presents missions as “a central process in the formation of Christianity as a world religion” (p. 2).  Missions gives strength and vitality to the faith through its multi-lingual and multi-cultural expressions right from the beginning (p. 17) and expands as it provides “catalyst for identity-formation” (p. 2) for the various peoples, locales, and cultures it encounters.  “Cultural fluidity” and translatability, Robert maintains, are the engines for the expansion of the Christianity into a worldwide religion.

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.

The following is an excerpt from a presentation by Mark Noll, Carolyn and Fred McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College, at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on March 2, 2005.  The full transcript can be found at The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

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.

In The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-and How it Died (HarperOne, 2008), Philip Jenkins recounts the growth, influence and glory of churches beyond Rome and the empire.  It is a fascinating story that most of us (self included) are only mildly aware of.  It is also a story of the rise and fall of the church in places like Ottoman Turkey, North Africa, and Syria.  I found the following quote particularly instructive for modern missionary practice.

The key difference making for survival is rather how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far the religion became part of the air that ordinary people breathed.  The Egyptian church succeeded wonderfully in this regard, while the Africans failed to make much impact beyond the towns.  While the Egyptians put the Christian faith in the language of the ordinary people, from city dwellers through peasants, the Africans concentrated only on certain categories, certain races.  Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial.  This difference became crucial when a faith that was formed in one set of social and political arrangements had to adapt to a new world.  When society changed, when cities crumbled, when persecution came, the faith would continue in one region but not another. (p. 35)

Faith must go deep, go native.  It must become part of the air.  And yet, for faith to go native, it must be native.  It must arise from the context, root itself and grow within the local soil.  This punctuates the absolute necessity of local believers and local church acting as the primary agents in the contextualization process.  While the outsider (missionary) has a role (which is another discussion), it is the insider who takes the faith deep, puts it into the vernacular, and translates it into daily actions, routines, and forms.  Ultimately, the faith survives not because it is coddled and protected, but because of its inherent power to transform communities.

In preparation for a conference in February, I am reading about World Christianity.  I invite you to think with me via some key quotes. 

Sociologist Paul Freston characterizes Christianity as both declining and expanding.  It is losing ground in its more traditional heartland and yet expanding in non-Western regions. 

[Christianity] was 81 percent white (i.e., European and North American) in 1900; but by 2000 that figure was down to 40 [citing Barrett and Johnson, IBMR, 23/1, Jan. 1999, pp. 24-25]. … The result is that Christianity has become a predominantly non-Western religion and indeed probably the leading non-Western religion (only Islam could possibly rival it). …  For the first time since the seventh century, the majority of Christians are not of European origin; Christianity is finally breaking out of the “Western” mold imposed on it by Islam. (”Globalization, Religion, and Evangelical Christianity: A Sociological Meditation from the Third World” in Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities, Eerdmans, 2008, pp. 29-30)

The same trend has been chronicled by Andrew Walls (The Missionary Movement in Christian History, Orbis, 1996), Lamin Sanneh (Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West, Eerdmans, 2003), Dana Robert (”Shifting Southward: Global Christianity Since 1945,” IBMR, 24/2, April 2000), and Philip Jenkins (The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, Oxford, 2002).  The common refrain among these writers is that the strength and vitality of the Christian movement has relocated.  And yet, the shift has been more than an adjustment in numerical strength or geographical locus.  The character and constitution of the faith, that which gives meaning to its forms and expressions, have changed as well.  While Andrew Walls characterizes this as “a seismic shift in Christianity,” Dana Robert nuances the change as “the seismic shift in Christian identity” (Robert, “Shifting Southward,” p. 50).

The gospel has moved beyond accommodated forms, rituals, and customs to penetrate and even renew peoples’ mentality or psyche with Christ-meaning and purpose.  Turning to Jesus, as Lamin Sanneh points out, has become “a refocusing of the mental life and its cultural/social underpinnings and of our feelings, affections, and instincts, in the light of what God has done in Jesus” (Sanneh, Whose Religion, pp. 43-44).  In other words, the faith is no longer a foreign guest in a strange land.  Rather, it is native to the soil, at home in locales throughout the world, and in touch with the deepest needs.  Thus, while Christianity may appear to be the world’s largest religion, it is in fact, as Dana Robert explains, “the ultimate local religion” (Robert, “Shifting Southward, p. 56).

And thus, the faith expands as it takes the form and shape of local societies.  Why?  Because Christianity finds a home in these places.  According to Walls, “The faith of Christ is infinitely translatable; it creates ‘a place to feel at home’” (Missionary Movement, p. 25).

Christianity is unique in its translatability; its ability to be at home in a myriad of languages, forms, mental frameworks (worldviews), histories, personal and national aspirations, etc.  This, of course, assaults the tendencies of some Western missionaries and church leaders to ‘internationalize’ their particular brand of Christianity.  And yet, the Christian faith was never intended to be captured or realized in one particular cultural form.

No primal form is prescribed that is to be introduced worldwide.  Indeed, it can be said that the church is infinitely translatable or adaptable.  The church can be established in every language and culture, taking the form that is appropriate to each particular cultural-linguistic group.  (Wilbert R. Shenk, “New Wineskins for New Wine: Toward a Post-Christendom Ecclesiology,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 29/2, April 2005, p. 74)

Christianity is translatable, and so the church in a particular society, cultural setting, and mentality must be translated as well.  For Christianity to be vibrant and authentic, a church in Ghana must be different than a church in Chicago.  Shenk concludes that

When we turn to examples from history where churches have shown authentic spiritual vitality, we observe that such churches have been marked by a strong sense of their identity as the body of Christ engaged in faithful witness to the world. To carry out this witness has invariably required new structures and forms appropriate to the cultural context. Old wineskins cannot handle new wine. (Ibid., p. 79)

Lamin Sanneh takes the discussion a step further to distinguish how new wineskins exist alongside older, more established ones.

“World Christianity” is the movement of Christianity as it takes form and shape in societies that previously were not Christian, societies that had no bureaucratic tradition with which to domesticate the gospel.  In these societies Christianity was received and expressed through the cultures, customs, and traditions of the people affected.  World Christianity is not one thing, but a variety of indigenous responses through more or less effective idioms, but in any case without necessarily the European Enlightenment frame.  “Global Christianity,” on the other hand, is the faithful replication of Christian forms and patterns developed in Europe. … It is, in fact, religious establishment and the cultural captivity of the faith.  (Sanneh, Whose Religion, p. 22)

Sanneh draws a sharp distinction between Christian faith that springs from the soil and that which is imported from a far.  The language of ‘world’ and ‘global’ distinguishes the two.  World denotes the new and emerging phenomenon, while global is representative of the period of colonial expansion and is now associated with globalization, McDonaldization, internationalism, etc. 

Ogbu U. Kalu develops the concept of globalism …

There has been a shift, however, from the global village concept to one of rather bewildering disintegration and flux.  One aspect is the pace and direction of change.  The other is that, at the core, globalism is a power concept, bearing the seeds of asymmetrical power relations.  There is no guarantee of equality or benefit for all.  Globalism is akin to the New Testament concpet of kosmos, the world order, controlled by an inexplicable, compulsive power, dazzling with allurements or kosmetikos. (”Changing Tides: Some Currents in World Christianity at the Opening of the Twenty-first Century,” in Interpreting Contemporary Christianity: Global Processes and Local Identities, Eerdmans, 2008, p. 7)

Thus, Global Christianity is to be viewed negatively as power religion accomplished via homogeneity or sameness.  Whatever the motivation (fear of syncretism, reinforcement of doctrinal orthodoxy, or naive and uncritical cultural imperialism), the result is the same - an “asymmetical power relation.”  And usually it is the one with the money which dominates in the relation. 

Some would argue that globalization has forever changed the world, and thus there are few place that exist in a cultural vacuum.  They contend that technologies and ideas run wild via television, radio, Internet, print mediums, movies, travel, etc., so talk of translation, indigenization, or contextualization is no longer relevant to the reality on the ground.  And yet, others argue that while secularization is taking place and plurality exists, it is “optionless plurality” (Freston, p. 31).  There are real and substantial barriers to conversion to a foreign (American) faith, and thus, if Christianity is to expand and thrive there must be “new structures and forms appropriate to the cultural context.”  Data indicates that the more vigorous expansion of Christianity is not occurring in places where traditional mainline denominations reign but where the faith has successfully delinked or disengaged from European and American influence and money. 

There is much more that could be cited and discussed, but this is enough for now.  The discussion is important for the North American Church as it contemplates its missionary program, its relationship to the surrounding culture, and how it relates to brothers and sisters half a world away.  Is the North American church really in a new position in its relationship to Christianity around the world?  If so, then in what new ways must it relate, participate, and contribute?