Reflections on the History of Missions
Reflections on the History of Missions
have been asked in this paper to reflect upon the recent history of missions and to connect these reflections to the issues to be discussed at the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism consultation in San Antonio next month. As I have reflected, two phrases have often been in my mind. One is a phrase from the address of that great and beloved missionary Walter Freytag at the Ghana Assembly of the International Missionary Council (IMC) in 1957 in which he spoke of the "lost directness" of missions.1 That is a very poignant phrase. I know what it is to go to a village where people have never heard the name Jesus and to tell them the Good News of God's love. There is a directness, a simplicity, and a joy in that exercise, something that has always given to the missionary enterprise its elan, its spiritual thrust. Now, when there is no longer any simple division of the world into Christian and heathen lands, that directness is easily lost. What is the spiritual thrust behind missions now?
The second. phrase comes from a great English missionary, Bishop Stephen Neill. "When everything is mission," said Neill, "then nothing is mission." To put it sharply, does a world missionary conference have to deal with everything that is on the Church's agenda, or does it have a specific task on which it must concentrate to the exclusion of other necessary tasks? If so, what is that task?
The early world missionary conferences had no problem of "lost directness." The conferences held in London in 1888, New York in 1900, and Edinburgh in 1910 did not think it necessary to write a message. Everyone knew what the message was. Edinburgh devoted splendid scholarly resources to exploring the best ways of communicating the message to people of each of the world's religions. No sharp line was drawn between the Christian message and the civilizing work of missions. It was still possible to speak of Christianity and civilization in one breath.
The conference in Jerusalem of 1928 no longer spoke in terms of Christian and heathen lands. It saw secularism as the looming danger everywhere. At moments some delegates were tempted to see the other religions as possible allies in the defeat of secularism.3 It spoke with vigor of the role of missions in bringing about a new socioeconomic order.4 And it did what none of its predecessors had done: it wrote a message. The message was so skillfully drafted by William Temple that it covered over deep disagreements about what the Christian message was. ("Our message is Jesus Christ.") These disagreements surfaced almost imme- diately.5 There was the American Laymen's Report on Foreign Missions (1932), which looked for a convergence of the world's religions in working for the creation of a new social order. There was the work of J. H. Oldham and his colleagues, which led up to the Oxford 1937 Conference on Church, Community and State - an effort to confront the new paganism and racism of Europe.6 And there were Hendrik Kraemer and his disciples with their affirmation of the uniqueness of the gospel and its discontinuity with all religions. At Tambaram (1938) it was Kraemer's thesis that set the agenda, but the debate was not concluded there - it rumbled on for the next twenty-five years.? Tambaram shifted the agenda in at least three ways. It saw the great danger not in secularism but in the new totalitarian ideologies that were sweeping Europe. It saw the necessity that churches should be missionary and that missions should be church based. And it made a passionate plea, voiced by the younger churches, for church unity. Tambaram, seen in retrospect during the dark days of war, was the beacon light that gave Christians everywhere the assurance that Christendom is now a family that truly encircles the globe. It made the ecumenical movement a reality for millions of people. It enabled Temple in his enthronement sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury to speak of "the great new fact of our time."
The WCC's Commission on World Mission and Evangelism held a conference in Bangkok (1973) that marked a clear shift in perspective. Here the title was "Salvation Today" and the question was, "What does salvation mean for me now?" Questions of culture moved into the center. There was passionate affirmation of the need to find forms of Christian life that belong authentically to one's own culture and are not copies of another. There were angry voices from the third world and an embarrassed silence on the part of the representatives of the old mission-sending churches. For me personally Bangkok is memorable because of a sentence spoken (not publicly but under his breath) by General Simatoupong of Indonesia. I heard him say, "Of course the number one question is: Can the West be converted?"
The Fifth Assembly at Nairobi (1975) was far more positive than these earlier meetings in its affirmation of the need for explicit confession of Christ. It responded to the question of Bangkok by saying that Christ does not make copies but always originals. But a new element at Nairobi was the report of the section dealing with interfaith relationships. This report provided sharp questioning and was not accepted. It seemed to suggest that there were two alternative forms of human unity, one with its center in Christ and one otherwise. This proposal seemed clearly to call in question the basis of the WCC. I was not at Vancouver (1983), but l understand that something similar took place there. At a meeting in Madras (1988) called to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Tambaram conference, strong voices were heard that appeared to deny the centrality of Jesus Christ and to suggest other models for human unity. In the earlier debates about mission, passionate as they were, there was never any question of the centrality of Jesus Christ. I do not think that the WCC can continue to play any significant role in the world missionary task if it does not adhere firmly to its basis. This is not one of the issues on the agenda of San Antonio, but it will certainly have to be faced. But the San Antonio meeting has the immense advantage of being able to build on the remarkable Ecumenical Affirmation on Mission and Evangelism approved by the WCC's Central Committee in 1982. This splendid statement is a worthy outcome of these years of debate and (sometimes) confusion, and should set the parameters for ecumenical missionary thinking for many years to come.
Before going on to look at the issues chosen for discussion at San Antonio I would like to reflect a little on the history I have tried to summarize. This may help sharpen the issues as we look ahead.
Looking over the debates about the content of the Christian mission during these decades, one can see that there have been three overlapping phases. In the first phase the main thrust was towards the articulation of the Christian message vis-a-vis the world's religions. This was the major concern during the fifty years up to and including the debates that centered around Kraemer's thesis. A second phase saw the dominance of questions about the gospel and culture. Perhaps this was made possible by the development of the Theological Education Fund (TEF), which in its second mandate coined the new word contextualization (an invention of Dr. Shoki Coe from Taiwan) and stimulated theological colleges all over the third world to give more attention to the question "How does the gospel come alive in the various non-Western cultures?"10 This question was very prominent, as I have said, at Bangkok and at Nairobi, and it continues to be a very important preoccupation in missionary thinking. Conservative evangelical missionaries have been particularly active in this regard. In a third phase, however, the emphasis has shifted toward the attempt to clarify the Christian message in relation to situations of injustice and oppression. This, of course, owes much to the development of the liberation theologies of Latin America, and it was in the center of attention at the Melbourne Commission on World Mission and Evangelism conference of 1980.
If one reflects upon this whole history from the point of view of the Church as one global community, the first comment to be made is one so obvious that it is often overlooked. All of these discussions have been conducted in one or more of the languages of EuropeEnglish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese. Those who have taken part in them from the countries of the so-called third world are the intellectual elite of these countries. They have had a high degree of assimilation into the worldview embodied in these languages through periods of study in universities that use these languages. The use of these languages means that one's thinking is inevitably shaped by the worldview that dominates the intellectual life of Europe and its cultural extension, a worldview shaped partly by the Christian tradition at the root of European culture, but even more by the assumptions of the European Enlightenment. If I may illustrate my point in a personal way, I could refer to the experience of discussing these matters in a meeting at the United Theological College, Bangalore, and in a village congregation, the former in English and the latter in Tamil. The two discussions took quite different shapes, but it was the Bangalore discussion that was fed into the ecumenical consensus, not the other one. The point becomes clear if one looks at each of the three phases of the missionary discussions of the past century that I have just outlined. To discuss "religions" as though they were a separate department of human affairs alongside other human concerns is typical of our post-Enlightenment privatization of religion, but it may not be the right framework for understanding the realities we are dealing with. Similarly the discussion about missions and culture presupposes the same privatization. What does it mean to speak of "culture" apart from the whole business of human living? Why has there not been a similar discussion about missions and personal behavior? And the discussion of missions and the options for the poor, as led by the liberation theologians of Latin America, has been explicitly based on a Marxist analysis of the human situation - another form of post-Enlightenment thought.
What has been lacking in the long debate has been the attempt to examine all these presuppositions from the standpoint of the gospel. This is where the remark of General Simatoupong seems to me to be so relevant. He said that the most important question for the Christian world mission was, "Can the West be converted?" The main bearers of cross-cultural mission in the past 400 years have been also the bearers of European culture, and - at least during the past 250 years - this culture has been largely shaped by the beliefs of the Enlightenment. Also, much of European Christianity has been fundamentally syncretistic in that it has sought to accommodate the gospel to the supposed requirements of "modern thought" rather than exposing the mistaken assumptions of modern thought in the light of the gospel. For these reasons, the long debates that I have been briefly summarizing have failed to raise the more fundamental questions about what constitutes rationality. The 1928 Jerusalem conference did direct attention to the challenge posed by secularism to the Christian faith, but the questions were not radical enough and were not followed up. In the 1930s and 1940s the churches had to give all their energies to the battle against the new Western paganisms. And when the question of secularism came back into focus, supremely in the 1960s, secularization was seen as the fruit of the gospel, and the advance of Western secular ideas into the old ontocratic societies was hailed as the contemporary form of the Christian mission. Man had come of age, and to be a Christian was to live etsi Deus non daretur (as if there were no God).11
It is in this ideological context that we must assess the contemporary proposals for religious pluralism. Modern Western culture, as has often been said, is now two cultures: there is on the one hand the world of science, of public truth, which is to be taught in all the schools, a world of facts about which statements are either true or false. There is on the other hand a world of beliefs and values, which are not matters of public truth but of personal choice. Everyone is entitled to his or her own beliefs and values. One does not ask whether the beliefs are true or false: to do so is arrogance. One asks only whether they are sincerely held. In the public schools it is proper to teach children about the various beliefs and values of different human cultures, but it is not proper to teach that one of these is true and the others are false. The contemporary beliefs about the biological origin of human beings are taught as truth. But it is no longer permitted to teach as truth that human beings are made to glorify God and enjoy him forever.12
The American writer Allan Bloom, in his best-selling book The Closing of the American Mind, has pointed out that this language of values is derived via Max Weber from Nietzsche. Nietzsche saw that the development of post-Enlightenment critical thought would make truth statements impossible. What would remain would be the will, the will to power. "Values" are a matter of will; they are what you desire for yourself or for others. Facts are what you have to accept, whether you like them or not. Within this worldview it is obvious that statements about the unique lordship of Jesus are not to be understood as factual statements. They are ways of expressing one's personally chosen values. As Wesley Ariarajah has written, they are to be understood on the analogy of the little girl who tells her father, "You are the best daddy in the world." It is not be taken as a factually true statement; it is an expression of love, of value.
It is at this point that the furor created by the publication of Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses is so significant. To Muslims, whose belief in the existence of God is not a matter of personally chosen values but the supreme fact, blasphemy is a terrible crime. For Western intellectuals, who have long ago ceased to believe that God really exists, the uproar is incomprehensible. Since the nation-state took the place of God in European thinking as the supreme disposer of health, wealth, and happiness, treason against the state is treated as the supreme crime, for which even democratic societies will award the death penalty. But blasphemy against God has no significance except that it offends the feelings of a few people who believe in him. As one watches the succession of Western intellectuals appearing on the TV screen to defend freedom of expression, they look more and more like schoolchildren who do not understand that it is dangerous to play with high explosives.
I think it is perhaps the new challenge from Islam that will compel us Christians to look much more critically-in the light of the gospel, not of the Qur'an- at the things we have taken for granted. I think when we do this we shall notice one thing that all the debates I have discussed have in common. It is that all of them have been terribly Pelagian. (As you know, Pelagius is the only first-class theologian that the British Isles have so far produced, so I should be an authority.) Let me say what I mean by this accusation. As I reflect on these debates, whether they are about how individual souls are to be saved, how truly humane Christian communities are to be fostered in all the cultures of the world, or how injustice and oppression may be removed, they have always seemed to be essentially about our program. Our activity was in the center of the picture. But as I read the New Testament I get a very different picture. There the center of the picture is God and his amazing grace, God and his mighty works of redemption in the Old and New Testaments, God in his faithfulness to what he has promised. In this perspective, mission is not a program so much as an overflow of grace. So the central question is not "How shall I or others be saved?" or "How shall this problem of cultural alienation or political oppression be solved?" but rather "How shall this glorious God be glorified?" Jesus warned his disciples that it was not for them to know the times and seasons that God had fixed by his own authority (Acts 1:6-8). He warns us against every tendency to see mission as our program. He promises that we shall receive power when the Holy Spirit is given, because the Spirit is the foretaste of the kingdom, the pledge that Jesus does reign even though his reign is hidden for a time so the world may have time to repent. The Church's mission is not primarily our program: it is the manifestation of the reality of the present, though hidden, reign of Jesus through the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. It is a kind of doxology, a glorifying of God in the midst of a world that turns its back on him.
It is interesting that the present decade sees two world missionary conferences with themes drawn from the Lord's prayer: the theme of Melbourne (1980) was "Your kingdom come"; that of San Antonio this year is "Your will be done." It would be wonderful if we had a conference in the 1990s with the theme, "Hallowed be your name."
And this brings me to some reflections, in the light of this discussion, on the four themes chosen for the San Antonio conference.
1. Turning to the Living God. This phrase comes, of course, from Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians: "You turned from idols to serve a living and true God." There are idols, false gods; and there is one living and true God. Radical choices have to be made. I think we have sometimes underestimated how radical this turning, this metanoia, has to be. It is often spoken of in merely moralistic terms - turning away from sins - and this usually means the things our society recognizes as sins. But what is called for is more radical. It is, as Paul says to the Romans, a transforming of the mind, so that one is not conformed to the ways in which our culture thinks. I have been much impressed recently by the work of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, formerly the great atheist scourge of Christian believers, and now returned to the Christian faith. In his book Whose justice? Which Rationality? 13 he develops at great length the thesis that all rationality is socially embodied, expressed in a language that is itself shaped by the specific historical experience of the community that uses that language. The idea (dominant in our culture) that there exists a supracultural rationality that can stand in judgment over all the culturally conditioned forms of rational discourse is an illusion. Christians are those people whose rationality is shaped by their indwelling the story of the Bible as it is lived out in contemporary society in the life of the Church. From within this indwelling, they see the world through the lenses provided by the story of the Bible with its center in the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This view is challenged by another view that finds the clue to the human story in the growth and development of human mastery over nature, the development of science, technology, and democratic political institutions. The question is which view provides in the long run the more coherent and effective way of understanding and coping with the whole of human experience, including the important experience of evil, pain, and death. Christians since the Enlightenment have been busy trying to show that the Christian view is reasonable, and "reason" in this exercise has been defined in terms of the rationality of this other socially embodied tradition. But reason is not an autonomous authority. It is a function of a socially embodied tradition of experience. Turning from idols to the living God means moving from one socially embodied tradition of rational discourse to another. It means, therefore, a more radical break with and critique of the reigning plausibility structures than has usually been recognized. It means becoming dissenters from the dominant assumptions of the world around us, no less here in western Europe than in Asia or Africa.
2. Participating in Suffering and Struggle. Turning from idols to serve the living God means following Jesus, and that means taking up the cross. It is right, therefore, to make this the next move. We are not authorized to proclaim the Kingdom except in the way that Jesus did; that is why, when Jesus sent his disciples out to continue his mission, he showed them his hands and side. To be with Jesus means to be with him in challenging the powers of evil in the power of his Kingdom, and in bearing the cost. I have two marginal comments to make in the light of recent ecumenical discussion of this theme. First, it seems to me that St. Paul sees the Christian as one who is already liberated and not as one who struggles for liberation. Struggle is not a New Testament word, but suffering is. We have been set free from slavery, Paul tells us, to be children of God, and the mark of our status as children of God is that we suffer with Jesus in order to be glorified with him. "Carry with us in our body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may be manifest in our body" (2 Cor. 4:9). Christian discipleship has this paradoxical character: right in the midst of suffering, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. That, it seems to me, is what gives its distinctive quality to Christian participation in the suffering of the oppressed, the alienated, and the marginalized.
Second, there are many situations, alas, in which the Christian struggle has to be directed against those who hold power. There is a tendency to universalize this and to see the Church as always and necessarily a protest group. The Church after Constantine is condemned for using the Christian faith as a legitimization of power instead of a protest against power. But one has to ask, then, where legitimacy is to be found for the exercise of power, for power is a reality and no one can pretend to be exempt from its use. Very specifically, where does the legitimacy of the power of governments come from? To distance the Church totally (or to pretend to distance it) from the exercise of power is to surrender to Manicheism. Missions in the nineteenth century operated from positions of power. We are now acutely aware of the distortions that produces. Yet numerical growth of the Church today comes from the witness of those who are without power. It is, as so often, the suffering churches that are the effective witnesses. But all Christians have some power and some Christians have much power. We need guidance about the use of power in responsibility to the living God, as well as about protest against the irresponsible use of power.
3. The Earth Is the Lord's The ecological problem, which is now such an urgent and daunting one, hardly surfaced at all during the missionary debates up to the beginning of this decade. It is only now, and suddenly, that we have become aware of the possibility of ecological disaster. This is one of the points at which we are becoming aware of the radical error at the heart of the dominant Western thinking of the past 250 years. In the development of our science and technology we have, as Jurgen Moltmann says, treated God's creation as if it were a bit of unclaimed property that we could use at our pleasure. This is a point at which the fundamental atheism of our culture has been most apparent. Yet in our rightful reaction against this, I think we must guard against another danger. Among those who have become aware of this radical defect in our European tradition, at least since the Enlightenment, there is an understandable tendency to look to the East, to Asia, for wisdom. One can understand this and sympathize. But a shift from atheism to pantheism will not bring us to reality. The dynamism Europe has introduced into world history cannot simply be switched off, nor can traditional societies be permanently embalmed in aromatic spices - however much the Western tourist industry might desire it. The integrity of creation is not something static. God has imparted what seem to be purposeful drives in the created world and certainly in human beings who are part of the creation. The only way to seek the integrity of creation is in a recovery of the sense of responsibility to the Creator and in a recognition that we have to answer before his judgment seat for the way we have exercised the stewardship he entrusted to us. One can understand the appeal of movements like the New Age as a reaction against the errors of our post-Enlightenment ideology, but they lack the one thing essential: an acknowledgment of God as the supreme reality, the living God who has committed himself in boundless love to his creation, and to whom we owe an allegiance that takes precedence over all else. The transition from atheism to pantheism is not difficult. There is not a great deal of difference between saying "God is everything" and saying "There is no God." But how shall those who have assumed for centuries that the world can be understood, developed, exploited with reference to the hypothesis of God, how shall these be converted and turned to the living God? That, as Simatoupong said, is the number one question for the world mission: Can the West be converted? That leads us to the fourth topic of San Antonio: Communities Renewed in Mission.
4. Western Communities Renewed in Mission. During the period when the missions of the Western churches were at their strongest, the agencies of mission were not local congregations but supracongregational agencies - whether voluntary societies or denominational boards. These were the agencies that created the IMC and have supported the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. The integration of the IMC with the WCC, along with the corresponding moves in the various nations, was an effort to relate church and mission - a necessary effort. But it did not really touch the local congregation. Congregations were invited to support the work of missionary agencies with prayer and money; they were not themselves the primary missionary agencies. During the early 1960s when I was working in Geneva, I was involved in initiating the study of structures for missionary congregations. In my own mind this had arisen from the experience of putting into practice the missionary principles of Roland Allen in an Indian rural situation.14 By departing from the traditional idea of the ministry of Word and sacrament, and turning responsibility over to ordinary village laborers and farmers and shopkeepers, we had been able to see a very rapid spontaneous expansion of the church. I was convinced that this had lessons for the churches everywhere. However, the program on missionary structures got carried away in the secularizing tide of the 1960s and ended up with the slogan "The world sets the agenda." I think that was a dead end.15 But I remain convinced about the centrality of the local congregation. Where the Church is growing today, it is through the witness of small local groups, base communities, house-churches, and ordinary congregations. The experience of working for nine years as the pastor of an inner-city congregation in an English city convinces me that nothing can make the reality of the living God credible except a company of people who believe it and live by it. Apart from this, mission, whether conceived as evangelism or as social action, becomes a mere program, a campaign. I think that the only thing that can make the gospel credible, the only thing that makes it possible to believe that the ultimate authority over the whole universe resides in a man nailed to a cross, is a company of people who live in the biblical story so that they know it as their own story and as the clue to the whole human story. I have seen this especially in the black churches in Birmingham. They are among the oppressed people of our society. But their life is marked by a remarkable joy and hope. "We were slaves and the Lord redeemed us out of Egypt. We saw the Red Sea divide and we crossed over and the armies of Egypt were drowned. We were led through the desert by a pillar of cloud and fire. We were fed with manna in the desert. We were there when they crucified the Lord, and we met him when he came from the tomb. This is our story and it is the true story. We relive it as we read and ponder it week after week, and as we share the broken body and the shed blood of the Lord and so share his risen life." This is the reality, antecedent to any program, any campaign. It is the given reality. And it challenges people to ask-as they asked on the day of Pentecost-"What is going on?" And that is the question from which the real missionary dialogue begins. I believe that the only hermeneutic of the gospel is a local congregation that believes it and lives by it. I think, therefore, that nothing is more central to the world mission of the Church than the renewal of the life of local congregations. But they must be congregations who really believe in and live by the story that is the clue to the whole human and cosmic story, the story that has its center in the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. I hope that the great gift of San Antonio to the world mission of the Church will be that it encourages local communities to believe in and live by the gospel and so to become the ministers of Christ to their neighbors.
13
ne must begin with some examination of the concept of secularization. Many sociologists now agree that the idea that has
been dominant during the past half-century - namely, that the progress of modern science and technology must increasingly eliminate
religious belief- has proved to be false. The present century has in
fact witnessed a marked growth in religiosity in Europe. It is true that
this has not been expressed in Christian terms. But in the forms of
many new religious movements, in the enthusiasm for Eastern types
of religious belief and practice, in the revival of various ancient forms
of pagan religion, and in the enormous-popularity of astrology among
European peoples, there is a luxuriant growth of religion in what is
called the secular society. Moreover, in those parts of Europe where
people have lived for forty years or more under the control of the
Marxist ideology with its claim to replace religion completely by a
"scientific" doctrine of human nature and history, the Christian
churches have shown a power of survival and renewal much more
impressive than what has been seen in the areas that called themselves
the "free world."
And there is a further point to be made. Leaving aside movements that are recognizably religious in the sense that they affirm realities not available for investigation by the methods of empirical science, it is clear that there are, even in the most secularized societies, forces that have a religious character in the sense that they have the status of dogma and command total trust. In the great debates about secularization in the decade of the 1960s, when many Christians (such as Arendt van Leeuwen) welcomed the process of secularization as a form of liberation made possible by the Christian gospel, it seemed to be taken for granted that secularization created a space free of all ideological or religious control. In this space, human beings (and Christians among them) would find the freedom to exercise their own rational and moral powers without coercion from any dominant belief system. The secular society was hailed as the free society. Writers such as Harvey Cox in the United States and Denis Munby in England encouraged the Christians of their day to welcome the process of secularization as a proper fruit of the Christian message and a further stage in human emancipation.
This article first appeared in Dutch in Kerk en Theologie, October 1990.
But a candid look at the societies that call themselves "secular" must surely dispel such illusions. Dogma does not vanish when the name is dropped. It is impossible to pretend that children in the state schools of Europe are not being taught to accept certain beliefs about human origins, human history, all shaped by certain assumptions. The loud complaints of Muslim parents that I hear in England are directed against precisely the claim that what their children are being taught to believe are simply "the facts," while everyone must know that they are in reality beliefs that a Muslim must reject. They quite rightly see that their children are being taught (not in the classes on "religious education" but in the classes on science, history, literature, and sociology) to believe that human life can be satisfactorily understood and managed without any reference to God. They protest against the arrogance that assumes that things taught in school are simply "the facts," while religious beliefs are merely private opinion.
The apostles of secularization in the 1960s seemed to believe that human societies can flourish without any shared beliefs. But this is obviously not so. The societies we know in Europe share the belief that what human beings need to know in order to manage their lives is the body of assured knowledge that is available through the methods of science. Perhaps those critics are right to see Descartes as the key figure. The attempt to find a kind of certitude that left no room for doubt, and the discovery of that certitude in the existence of the thinking self (cogito ergo sum), constitute the deliberate choice of a position that is open to doubt. Why should we imagine that human beings should have available to them a basis for certitude other than the one provided by a trustful dependence on the Author of our being? Descartes' starting point already begs that question. But the secular societies that have developed in Europe since the seventeenth century share the common belief that reliable knowledge about human nature, and therefore about how human life is to be managed, is to be found not by reliance upon divine revelation and grace but by reliance upon the methods of empirical science. This, broadly speaking, is the dogma that controls public life, as distinct from the private opinions that individuals are free to hold.
But the dogma does not measure up the realities of human nature. If there is no answer to the question "But why did this happen to me?" people will turn to astrology. If there is no answer to the question "What is human life really for? What is the purpose of human life and of the whole creation?" people will seek to fill the void with the search for instant pleasure in drugs, in sex, in mindless violence through which one can express the sense of meaninglessness. We have to be endlessly entertained and we have to have idols to fill the empty space from which the living God has been removed. In the end, the society we have is not a secular society but a pagan society, a society in which men and women are giving their allegiance to no-gods. The rational part of us puts its trust in the findings of science but is left with no answer to the question of ultimate meaning. The way is open for the irrational part of us to develop a pantheon of idols.
The "secular" society is not a neutral area into which we can project the Christian message. It is an area already occupied by other gods. We have a battle on our hands. We are dealing with principalities and powers. What, then, is evangelism in this context?
To our "secular" contemporaries the answer to this question is quite simple. The Christian Church is a voluntary association of people who wish to promote certain "values" for themselves and for society. These "values," like all others, are matters of personal choice. They are not matters of "fact" that everyone has to accept. It follows that the success of these "values" depends on the number of people who support them. There is a diminishing number of people who identify themselves with the Christian churches. The churches are therefore in danger of collapsing. Evangelism is an effort by the churches to avert this collapse and to recruit more adherents to their cause. It is even possible that this way of understanding evangelism may be in the minds of some church members. It then becomes impossible to conceal the element of anxiety that infects the enterprise. It becomes very important that we should succeed. The shadow of Pelagius hangs over the enterprise. In contrast to this way of seeing things, it is a striking fact that nowhere in the letters of St. Paul does the apostle lay upon the Church the duty of evangelism. The gospel is such a tremendous reality that he cannot possibly keep silent about it. "Woe is me if I do not preach the gospel" (1 Cor. 9:16). He seems to take it for granted that the same will be true for his readers. He is not slow to warn, persuade, rebuke his friends; it is a matter of life or death for him that they should be utterly faithful to Christ. But he never lays upon them the duty to go out and evangelize. Why should this be so?
The first evangelism in the New Testament is the announcement by Jesus that the Kingdom of God is at hand. This, if one may put it so, is not ecclesiastical news but world news. It is not about "values" but about "facts." It is, strictly speaking, news, and it requires an immediate response in action. There is immediate excitement. People flock to hear. But it seems as if God's reign was not what we expected. There is both enthusiasm and rejection. In the end there is betrayal, condemnation, and death. God's reign has not appeared after all. There is despair and suicide. But what seemed to be the end is the new beginning. The tomb is empty, Jesus is risen, death is conquered, God does reign after all. There is an explosion of joy, news that cannot be kept secret. Everyone must hear it. A new creation has begun. One does not have to be summoned to the "task" of evanglism. If these things are really true, they have to be told. That, I suppose, is why St. Paul did not have to remind his readers about the duty of evangelism.
But can this have any relevance to the ordinary comfortable, respectable Christian congregation in the suburbs of a contemporary European city? There is, let us admit, a big gulf between them. We have largely domesticated the gospel within our culture. We have quietly accepted, for practical purposes, the dogma that controls public life. We have accepted as the "real" history the story that is told in the school classrooms about the history of "civilization," which means the interpretation of the human story from the point of view of this moment and this place in the whole story. We have allowed the Bible to be inserted into this history as a very minor strand in the whole human story, one element in the history of religions, which is itself only one element in the whole fabric of human history. We have not had the boldness that, for example, our black-led churches in Birmingham show, to recognize the story that the Bible tells as the real story, the true story, the story that explains who we really are, where we come from and where we are going. If we were faithful to our best traditions, if we took the Bible seriously over the years by the constant reading of it, expounding it, meditating on it, then we would see the story that is told in the schools as a story that misses the real point. What is the real point of the human story, in which my life is only a small part? It is not in the achievement, somewhere in the distant future, of a perfect human civilization. It is not in the achievement of my personal ambition, after which I decline into senility. The point of the whole story has been made once and for all in the events that the New Testament tells. If we believe that, then we live by a different story from the one that is told in our society. And the difference will become clear and will provoke questions. I have taken the example of St. Paul to suggest that we may be missing an essential point if we speak about evangelism as a duty. One could also point to the striking fact that almost all of the evangelistic sermons that are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles are responses to questions asked, rather than discourses given on the initiative of the speaker. It would seem that if the Church is faithfully living the true story, the evangelistic dialogue will be initiated not by the Church but by the one who senses the presence of a new reality and wants to inquire about its secret.
How will the presence of the new reality become known? I suggest by three things: by a certain kind of shared life, by actions, and by words that interpret the actions. The first and fundamental one is a certain kind of shared life. At the heart of that life will be praise. St. Luke tells us that the first response of the first disciples to the resurrection of Jesus was that "they returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the Temple, praising God" (Luke 24:51). A community of people that, in the midst of all the pain and sorrow and wickedness of the world, is continually praising God is the first obvious result of living by another story than the one the world lives by. In our own century we have the witness of the churches in the USSR, who for three generations were denied the opportunity of any kind of outward witness by word or action, but who sustained through those years a life of praise, reflecting in their worship the glory of the triune God. It was that reality, the presence of something that by its very existence called into question the official story by which the nation was required to live, that drew men and women to faith in Christ through the darkest years of tyranny.
We know that the worship of a Christian congregation can become a dead and formal thing, having the outward form but lacking the inward joy of adoration. When that has happened, our duty is to pray for the reviving work of the Holy Spirit to kindle into flame the embers that are always there. We know that this prayer has been answered many times in ways beyond expectation. And where there is a praising community, there also will be a caring community with love to spare for others. Such a community is the primary hermeneutic of the gospel. All the statistical evidence goes to show that those within our secularized societies who are being drawn out of unbelief to faith in Christ say that they were drawn through the friendship of a local congregation. There is, of course, a kind of "loving" that is selfish - merely the desire to have more members for the congregation. This kind of "love" is quickly recognized. But a congregation that has at its heart a joyful worship of the living God and a constantly renewed sense of the sheer grace and kindness of God will be a congregation from which true love flows out to the neighbors, a love that seeks their good whether or not they come to church.
Second, the presence of a new reality will be made known by the acts that originate from it. Jesus' announcement of the gospel, that the Kingdom of God is at hand, was immediately implemented by actions of healing and deliverance. These actions are portrayed as simple evidence that the power of God, his kindly rule over all powers, is present. They are acts of sheer compassion. A victim of leprosy, sensing the presence of this reality, says, "If you will you can make me clean." Jesus replies: "I will; be clean," touches him and heals him (Mark 1:40-41). There are no conditions attached. Nothing is said about faith and repentance. It is the love of God in action. The reign of God has come near.
When the Christian congregation is filled with the Spirit and lives the true story, such actions will flow from it. Primarily they will be the actions of the members in their several vocations every day. While there are also actions that a congregation or a wider church body may undertake, these are secondary. The primary action of the Church in the world is the action of its members in their daily work. A congregation may have no social action program and may yet be acting more effectively in secular society than a congregation with a big program of social action.
What is important in these actions - whether the personal actions of individual members or the corporate programs of a congregation-is that they spring out of the new life in Christ. It can be otherwise. They can be designed to attract new members, or to justify the congregation in the eyes of society by its good works. The Gospels make it clear thatJesus resolutely refused to make for himself a public reputation as a healer and a worker of miracles. His mighty works were indeed signs of the presence of the Kingdom, but when he was asked for a sign, he refused. When a multitude of people who had gathered around him were hungry, he fed them. But when they pursued him, he sternly told them that they must seek for the bread that does not perish with the eating (John 6:25). A program of church action may arise not from sheer compassion but from an ideological commitment to some vision of society shaped by the story that the world tells and not by the story that the Bible tells. The Church then becomes one among a number of agencies for promoting justice and peace, rather than the sign and foretaste of the new reality where alone justice and peace embrace, the sign pointing to the crucified and risen Jesus in whom alone we can receive both God's justice and God's peace.
Third, then, the presence of the new reality will be attested to by words. The Church has to speak, to announce the new reality, to preach. Here we have to reject two false positions. On the one hand there is the view that "actions speak louder than words," the view that the Church will win people's allegiance to the gospel by good lives and good works and that preaching is unacceptable and unnecessary. The word mission is used to describe a range of activities in which explicit naming of the name of Jesus has no place. On this two things may be said. The first is that Jesus himself preached and instructed his disciples to preach. Not, as we have seen, that each act of healing or deliverance was accompanied by a sermon. Not at all. But the acts of healing and deliverance were not self-explanatory. They might even be the work of the devil (Mark 3:21 ff.). And when Jesus sent out the Twelve with the authority to heal and deliver, he also told them to preach. It is clear that the preaching is an explanation of the mighty works, and that the mighty works are evidence that the preaching is true. They are not separable (Mark 6:7). Second, therefore, we have to say that the preaching of the Church carries no weight if it does not come from a community in which the truth of what is preached is being validated (even though always imperfectly) in the life of the community. But the life of even the most saintly community does not by itself tell the story, the story in which the name of Jesus has the central place.
If these general affirmations are true, I would suggest that in thinking of evangelism in a secular society, and - in particular - in thinking of the reevangelization of Europe, the following five points may be helpful.
1. Evangelism is not the effort of Christians to increase the size and importance of the Church. It is sharing the Good News that God reigns-good news for those who believe, bad news for those who reject. Evangelism must be rescued from a Pelagian anxiety, as though we were responsible for converting the world. God reigns and his reign is revealed and effective in the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. As we grow into a deeper understanding of this fact, as we learn more and more to live by the other story, we become more confident in sharing this reality with those who have not yet seen it.
2. The clue to evangelism in a secular society must be the local congregation. There are many other things of which one could speak mass evangelism of the Billy Graham type, Christian literature, radio and television, study and training courses, and so on. These are auxiliary. Many of them can be very valuable. But they are auxiliary to the primary center of evangelism, which is the local congregation. The congregation should live by the true story and center their life in the continual remembering and relating of the true story, in meditating on it and expounding it in its relation to contemporary events so that contemporary events are truly understood, and in sharing in the sacrament by which we are incorporated into the dying and rising of Jesus so that we are at the very heart of the true story. The congregation that does this becomes the place where the new reality is present with its heart in the praise and adoration of God and in the sharing of the love of God among the members and in the wider society. And here, of course, an immense amount depends upon the leadership given through preaching, pastoral encouragement, and public action by those called to ministry in the congregations.
3. It will be a major part of the work of such congregations to train and enable members to act as agents of the Kingdom in the various sectors of public life where they work. This kind of "frontier" work is very difficult, and although many promising starts have been made during the years since the last war, there is still much to do. It must become a part of ordinary congregational life that members are enabled to think through and discuss the ways in which their Christian faith impinges on their daily life in their secular work. Here is the place where the real interface between the Church and the world, between the new creation and the old, takes place. Here is where there ought to be a discernible difference in behavior between those who live by the old story and those who live by the story the Bible tells. It ought at many points to lead to differences in behavior, to dissent from current practice, to questioning. And this, of course, will be the place where the counterquestions arise. The Christian will be asked, "Why do you do this? Why do you behave like this?" Here is where the true evangelistic dialogue begins. At present it is very rare to find this kind of situation because the churches have so largely accepted relegation to the private sector, leaving the public sector to be controlled by the other story.
4. From this it follows that it will also be the task of the local congregation to equip members to enter into this dialogue, to explain the Christian story and its bearing on daily life. And of course the explanation will be not be complete without the invitation to become part of the community that lives by the other story and to learn there what it means to do so. Here is where the call to conversion comes, but it is not only a call addressed to the heart and the will, and not only concerned with personal and domestic life; it is also a call addressed to the mind, a call to a radically different way of seeing things, including all the things that make up daily life in the secular world.
5. If this approach is right, evangelism is not just the call to personal conversion, although it is that. It is not just a program for church growth, although it is that also. It is not just preaching, although it is that, and it is not just action for changing society, although it is that too. It is not a program for the reestablishment of the Corpus Christianum in Europe with the Church in the supreme position. Most certainly it is not that. But I believe it is possible to hope for and to work for something different- a Europe (a "common European home") that is a Christian society, not in the sense that it is ruled by the Church, and not in the sense that everyone is a Christian, but in another sense, which I would indicate as follows. It is possible to envision a society in which Christians have engaged so seriously over several decades with the consequences of the Enlightenment (good and bad) and with the kind of society that has developed at the end of the twentieth century that those who achieve the highest standards of excellence in all the sectors of public life-politics, industry, learning, and the arts - may be shaped in their public work by the Christian story. Then the worship of the triune God as he is made known to us in Jesus may again be the focus of ordinary life in our towns and villages.
Whether or not that is in the purpose of God for our continent, the main point is quite simple. We are entrusted with good news, the news that God reigns. That must be the starting point of all our thinking, and our evangelism will be an overflow of that joyful faith. Who knows, perhaps God has in store for our poor old secularized Europe a new birth of faith in the twenty-first century.