The Pattern of the Christian world mission
The Pattern of the
Christian world mission
n these three talks I want to say something about the changes both
in the pattern or structure of the missionary enterprise and in the
theological understanding of the missionary enterprise that are necessitated by the profound changes in the world situation and in the
situation of missions.
It is not necessary to speak at great length concerning the changes in the situation of missions. I will very briefly speak of three -first, what one might call the reversal of the tides of world power. The missionary movement as we know it today, the modern missionary movement, took its rise and acquired its characteristic pattern and psychology in a period when the tides of political power, of economic and cultural expansion, were flowing out from western Europe and North America into the other parts of the world. It was assumed both in the Western world and in most of the rest of the world that it was the white races who determined the general direction and speed of the events throughout the world. The missionary effort of the churches of western Europe and North America was just flowing down the current, down the stream of world power, and its pattern of thought and action was profoundly shaped by that fact. For vast multitudes in Asia and Africa, the great fact of our time is not the so-called East-West conflict; it is not the conquest of interplanetary space by man. It is the ending of the era of the dominance of the white races. Missions, which have been accustomed to flowing down the current of world power, are now faced with the necessity of learning for the first time to swim against the current. (If you want bibliography for that, read K. M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, especially the last chapter.)'
The first of a series of three talks given in New York in late 1960 as part of a program to assist the integration of the International Missionary Council (IMC) and World Council of Churches (WCC). The manuscript of the second lecture has unfortunately been lost. It was probably on mission in relation to secular events. The third lecture forms the next chapter of this book.
The second closely related fact is the renaissance of the nonChristian religions. In the great period of missionary expansion, in the past two hundred years, the non-Christian faiths were to a large extent passive in relation to missionary advance. Their resistance to it was a conservative resistance. Today the situation is wholly different. These non-Christian faiths have passed over to the offensive. They are mounting an increasingly effective counterattack. Their ablest representatives are confident that they have taken the measure of Christianity and have nothing further to fear from it. They are convinced that they have learned what they need to learn from Christianity, that they have rediscovered the forgotten depths of their own faiths, and that they are now in a position to offer to twentieth-century man a more satisfactory answer to the problems of existence than Christianity can. They see the age that has ended as an age in which the white races, the so-called Christian countries, had an opportunity for world leadership and threw it away. I think it is difficult for those who have not lived outside of Europe or North America to appreciate the extent to which our Western civilization has discredited itself before the rest of the world. Our frightful wars, our atomic bombs, and our lamentable moral standards are together quite sufficient to convince most of the non-Christian world that any claim that we may make for moral leadership in the world can be laughed out of court. The educated Hindu-if I may speak of what I know best-the educated Hindu of today feels no sense whatsoever of inferiority in the face of our Western civilization with regard to technical and scientific aspects. He feels quite competent to master them, and plunges freely into the stream of modern technological advance without any sense that he is thereby losing his moorings in the ancient faith of his fathers. As for its religious aspect, he is completely confident that he has in the Vedanta a standpoint from which he can both appreciate what is good and useful in Christianity, and also see it as merely one of the local and temporary relative attempts to express in human terms the inexpressible truth that is finally embodied in the mystical and metaphysical tradition of the Vedanta.2 Naturally he regards Christian missions as a deplorable attempt to present a relative approximation of the truth as absolute truth, and as in fact simply a survival or a hangover from the colonial era that can be tolerated simply because it is totally ineffective.
The third new fact is the rise of "younger churches"3 to positions of maturity and authority. The existence of a great family of churches in all parts of Asia and Africa and the islands of the sea as the fruit of the missionary effort of the past two hundred years is one of the great facts of our time. The Christian mission from the Western world has been slow to recognize all the implications of this fact, but theological seriousness has required us to acknowledge that the existence of the younger churches invalidates much of the traditional pattern of the nineteenth-century Western missionary operation. If, as we must do, we acknowledge that the "younger church" is simply the body of Christ in the place where it is set, that it is the Church of God, the temple of the Holy Spirit, then it is no longer possible to conceive of the missionary task as something directed from a home base here in Europe and carried on from this base over the head of the younger church in the territory beyond. The center of the operation is there, with the church that God has placed there. This means that there is, as Dr. Walter Freytag said at the Ghana Assembly in 1957, a certain "lost directness" in the missionary task .4 It is no longer in quite the old sense a matter of going straight out from Christendom to heathendom. The missionary must place himself at the disposal of the body that is there, that God has placed there in the midst of heathendom as his appointed agent and witness. At once the question arises: Is the missionary today an asset or a liability for that church? He may bring with him very valuable gifts. But his foreignness, his imperfect understanding of the language and the culture of the people, and his obvious connection with the former colonial power may make him in many situations a liability. He may fail to detect the aroma of colonialism that still tends to hang about a mission station even in countries where the colonial era has ended in the political sphere. Who then can be surprised if many young missionaries, including precisely the most able and alert and spiritually sensitive among them, are uncertain as to whether they are in the right place?
These three changes, these three facts - the reversal of the tides of world power, the renaissance of the non-Christian faiths, and the rise of the younger churches - add up to a change in the whole situation so profound that it is understandable if on one hand the missionary enterprise appears to many in both East and West as an anachronism, and on the other hand the missionary administrator or director is pulled out of his office chair into his study chair, being compelled to rethink the basis of both the pattern and the motive of the missionary task.
The first and fundamental thing that needs to be said about the pattern of the Christian missionary enterprise is that we must recover the sense that it is the enterprise of the whole Church of God in every land, directed towards the whole world in which it is put. We have to recover a sense of the Christian mission based upon such fundamental scriptural texts as the word of our Lord in John 12:32 - "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." This gives a picture of the Church as the body that is drawn together by the risen and exalted Christ and that exists in the world everywhere as the agent of his gathering grace. We need to think of it in terms of the great power of John 17:18, 21: "As thou didst send me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. [I pray for them] that they may all be one ... that the world may believe." We need to think of it in terms of the whole argument of the Ephesian letter, as the working of God to break down the middle wall of partition, and to provide the place of reconciliation where all races and peoples are brought together in a single body through the cross (Eph. 4:15-16).
In other words, the immediate task of the missionary enterprise today can be formulated in the following terms: to recognize and to draw the practical conclusions from the fact that the home base of missions is now worldwide. The necessity of this task arises from two facts. Firstly, there is the simple fact that the Christian Church is no longer confined to a small part of the world, but is, though in many places a small minority, to be found in almost every country. This is the "great new fact of our time," as Archbishop Temple called it in 1942.5 The second fact is the rediscovery of the biblical truth that the missionary responsibility belongs to the Church as such wherever it is, that the Church - as Emil Brunner puts it in a much-quoted phrase - "exists by mission as fire exists by burning."
These two facts - one, that the Church is now no longer restricted to one part of the earth's surface, but is global in its extension, and two, the rediscovery of the theological truth that the mission is not a detachable part of the Church's being, but is the central meaning of the Church's being -these two facts require that we place as the number one priority in the missionary enterprise today the recognition of the fact that the whole base of missions is now in every country, and draw the consequence of this. This means we must move the Christian missionary enterprise out of the colonial era into a radically new situation. This is easy to say, but difficult to do. The pattern of the modern missionary movement, its attitudes and methods, were shaped by the fact that missionaries of the modern era (I am not speaking of course about missionaries of the early centuries) were also representatives of the expanding and colonizing races of the West. In this respect the modern missionary movement has been totally different from what we find in the New Testament. The modern missionary movement has depended, in a manner unparalleled in the New Testament, upon the continuing guidance, support, and direction of the "daughter" church by the "mother" church. There is no parallel to that in the Acts of the Apostles. The young churches of the modern missionary movement have been from the beginning placed in a position of dependence that is not only financial and administrative but also spiritual. The struggle of both the older and the younger churches to break out of this false situation and to recover a true relationship of spiritual equality has been at the center of the missionary movement for the past two or three decades. The ending of the colonial era in most parts of the world has hastened analogous developments in the church, but it is very unfortunate if the changes are accepted merely as a necessary consequence of the pressure of political events instead of being accepted as a theological imperative. What is needed is the widespread and deep recovery throughout the churches, old and young alike, of the truth that to be a Christian is to be part of a universal fellowship in which all are committed to participation in Christ's reconciling work for the whole world. The traditional picture of the missionary enterprise has been of the lonely pioneer going out from the secure citadel of Christendom into the world of heathendom. Today the picture must be redrawn. It must be the picture of one universal family present in almost every land, possessing the secret of reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ and offering that secret to all nations and peoples.
As one of the practical consequences of that picture, I suggest, first, that every church, however small and weak, ought to have some share in the task of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth. Every church ought to be engaged in foreign mission. This is part of the integrity of the gospel. We do not adequately confess Christ as the Lord of all men if we seek to be his witnesses only among our neighbors. We must seek at the same time to confess him to the ends of the earth. The foreign missionary enterprise belongs to the integrity of our confession. This confession is brought into living relationship with the other faiths by which men seek to guide their lives only if it remains a living confession. Without this actual meeting it becomes a mere slogan. And the dimension of the ends of the earth must be part of our acting, not merely of our speaking, if we will truly confess his Lordship. It is a very encouraging fact that the young churches of Asia are now accepting the responsibility to take the gospel to the lands beyond their own borders. At the Assembly of the East Asia Christian Conference at Kuala Lumpur in Malaya last year, it was important that there were already some two hundred missionaries of the Asian churches working in lands beyond their own borders, and plans were developed at Kuala Lumpur for extending this work, the foreign mission of the Asian churches, to some of the big cities of Europe and North America, especially where there are large nonChristian Asian populations. An increase in the foreign missionary activity of the younger churches will help to put the whole missionary enterprise into a more biblical perspective.
Second, there must be such a measure of internationalization of missions as will help to remove the taint of colonialism and meet the real needs of the rapidly changing situations in many countries. When, for instance, the National Christian Council of India pleads with the Indian government to permit the entry of foreign missionaries on the ground that the presence of these foreign missionaries is a symbol of the international character of the Church, the false impression is given that this is merely giving a new name to an old commodity, and that in fact missionaries simply represent the continuance in the ecclesi astical sphere of the colonial relationship that has been ended in the political sphere. It is necessary to be able to show that something more has happened than a mere change of terminology. It is necessary for the integrity of our preaching of the gospel that this gospel should come to all nations in the name of a body that is truly ecumenical, that represents in some recognizable way not merely the religion of the West, but the Savior of the world.
There are many situations that cannot effectively be tackled by one mission or even by the missions of one country working together. In most of the territories of Asia and Africa, missions from more than one country have worked. If they work in isolation from each other, following different methods, and with different kinds of resources, only confusion will result. Intimate and constant collaboration is necessary. A few examples will indicate this point. The first is the problem of penetration of the great non-Christian cultures by the gospel. It has long been recognized that Christianity has won its converts only from the outer fringes of Asian society, and that in general the great non-Christian cultures of Asia remain almost entirely opaque to the gospel. In fact there is less real contact between the gospel and these non-Christian faiths than there was fifty years ago. The situation calls for the mobilization of the able minds of the Church to assist the process of contact and dialogue between Christians and non-Christians. This is something that cannot be achieved by the efforts of any individual mission; it can only be achieved on an ecumenical basis. The recognition of this has led the International Missionary Council over the past three or four years to sponsor the creation of a series of centers for the study of the non-Christian faiths6 in the Near East, in Pakistan, at Bangalor in India, in Ceylon, in Burma, in Hong Kong, and now this year for the first time in Japan. These study centers are on an international and ecumenical basis. They represent a concerted ecumenical effort to bring the gospel into living touch with the great non-Christian faiths.
A second example is what we call the Islam-in-Africa project. For a long time it has been a matter of serious concern that Islam is spreading in large areas of Africa south of the Sahara, but that the churches and missions in those areas have little knowledge of Islam, little experience of it, and little idea of how to bring about a creative encounter between the gospel and Islam. Again it is a problem that cannot be tackled by any one mission, or even by the missions of one nation. So what is now underway is the development of a very simple piece of ecumenical organization by which specialists - theologians who are also scholars in the field of Islamic studies - are sent from many different churches or mission boards to key centers in different parts of tropical Africa, there to work as the center of all churches and missions in that area, providing training, teaching, and leadership in respect to the Church's contact with Islam. It is an ecumenical effort in which churches of different confessions and different nations are collaborating. It involves no elaborate machinery, it is very simple, but it is sufficient to indicate that we are speaking not on behalf of one culture or one power or one part of the world, but in the name of the ecumenical fellowship in Christ.
A third example that may well occur in the near future is an analogous effort to meet the spiritual problems arising from the rapid urbanization in Africa. Ecumenical teams could be stationed in key centers where urbanization is proceeding at a tremendous rate. It will be seen from these examples that what is contemplated is not the creation of an international missionary bureaucracy, a sort of super mission board. What is needed, and experience shows that it is possible, is a series of simple and flexible organs of cooperation by which the missionary work of the Church at these vital points will be both strong enough to meet the real situation and also recognizable as the mission of the universal fellowship that is as wide as mankind.
There must be a genuine partnership between older and younger churches for making decisions about the great issues of missionary enterprise. The present structure of relationships inherited from the missionary methods of the nineteenth century does not allow for this genuine partnership. It sounds like a very simple idea to say that the whole Christian Church throughout the world should be regarded as one fellowship in which the stronger will help the weaker. But it is much less simple than it appears, because we are facing the problem of the selfhood of the "younger churches." This problem arises from the fact that under the spiritual and financial dominance of the older churches, it has been exceedingly difficult for the younger churches to achieve spiritual freedom, a sense of responsibility to God, a sense of genuine selfhood.
We are familiar with the fact that the cutting off of all foreign missionary help to the church in China, rather than being regarded as a disaster by the Christians in China, was held by them as a deliverance that made them feel for the first time free to be themselves. We cannot reflect too long or too deeply upon the significance of that fact. And I have to confess that as a missionary in India, I have sometimes been tempted to pray that all foreign money and all foreign personnel might somehow or other be cut off from the church in India, because it seemed as though there were no other way the church in India could achieve a real spiritual freedom.
The place where I first worked as a missionary -a town called Kanchipuram had nearby a small village called Muthupettu where some fifty years previously two men had been converted and baptized and then had become the foundation for the Christian church. My predecessor,7 out of a generous desire to protect these two converts from the troubles of this world, had bought a piece of land for them, divided it in two, and presented it to them. The result of this charitable action is that there has never been another convert in that village, and it is possible to conceive that there never will be another convert short of the second coming, because if there were another convert that piece of land would have to be divided into three. That is a small symbol of a spiritual situation that profoundly affects the life of the younger churches. The financial and administrative power of the Western missions - a power, remember, that St. Paul never had - has created a situation in which it is possible for the Church to be a sort of vested interest for the original Christian families, and in which it is exceedingly difficult for the Church to be quite simply the people of God responsible for the whole village.
Therefore, like other missionaries, I have been tempted to pray that somehow or other all foreign support might be cut off from the church in India. And yet, that is only half of the dilemma, for the other half is this: I had been sent to India as a missionary to preach the gospel, to make Christ known to the whole people of India. Can I return to the church that sent me and say I am no longer needed, my mission is finished, I am returning home-when only 3 percent of the people of India have accepted the gospel, and probably 90 percent of the people of India have never heard of the gospel? Will not my own church that sent me reply, this is not mission completed, it is mission abandoned? There may be a case in certain situations for a temporary withdrawal of missionary support for the sake of the younger church. But it cannot be that the Christian mission as a whole can speak in terms of withdrawal when the unfinished evangelistic task is so stupendous in certain respects, so much greater than it was when the first missionary pioneers of the modern missionary movement set out. Is there a way out of this dilemma? Is there a way that the strength of the older churches can be used for the task of world evangelization without spiritually weakening the younger churches? I believe that there is.
First we must look at the reason for the present weakness. Each of the younger churches is at present locked into a relationship with a single mission board in the West. This one-way relationship between one body that is always the donor and the other body that is always the recipient does not provide the circumstances in which genuine partnership in freedom can be achieved. The older churches and mission boards feel themselves under an obligation to limit their financial support for the sake of the spiritual independence of the younger churches. But this means that fewer resources are available for the task of world evangelization. In the effort to escape from the relationship of paternalism on the one hand and dependence on the other, mission boards have taken as their goal the famous trinity: self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating churches.8 This has been for many decades the target that mission boards have set before themselves, but increasingly it is being recognized that this is a wrong statement of the goal. The true position of the church is neither dependence nor independence, but interdependence, a mutual interdependence of the different members of the one body that rests upon the absolute dependence of each upon God.
True interrelationships cannot evolve within the old pattern of one track between a single younger church and a single mission board. One of the very thrilling things we experienced at Kuala Lumpur at the inaugural assembly of the East Asia Christian Conference was to see the development of something new, a real sense of interdependence among the churches of Asia, based upon a sense of common responsibility to God for the witness of Christ. The peoples I lived among knew a great deal about the Church of Scotland, which was the church this mission had come from, but they did not know anything about the church in Indonesia, or the church in the Philippines, or the church in Sian, Thailand. They did not even know that there was a church there. This was the situation even twenty-five years ago. Today one can see the churches of Asia - of the Philippines, Thailand, Bangkok, Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Japan- coming together as one family, and accepting that "we are God's people in Asia, and we are responsible to God for the evangelization of Asia, and we therefore depend much upon one another for this task."
A growth of similar regional fellowships in Africa, and the first steps in the same direction in Latin America and in the South Pacific, are among the most encouraging developments of modern times. I believe that it is along this line that we shall break out of the dilemma I spoke of. One of the proposals that has been launched from the Kuala Lumpur conference is that in each area, in each territory, there shall be a periodic strategic conference at which all representatives of the churches and the representatives of the mission boards that cooperate with the churches can sit together around the table as equals, all potentially givers and all potentially receivers, to consider together the unfinished evangelistic task around them, and to agree together as to the deployment of the resources available for meeting that task. I believe that it is only in this multilateral pattern of relationships that we can achieve a genuine spiritual partnership between the older and younger churches, in which the resources of both can be used to the full for the completion of the unfinished evangelistic task.
Fourth and finally, there is need to bring members of the younger churches into more intimate contact with the life of the older churches, and especially with the tasks of missionary promotion and education in the whole churches of the West. I stress the importance of this for the following reasons.
Dr. Hendrik Kraemer has often said to us that the real meeting between the gospel and non-Christian faiths is still ahead of us. I believe that is true. And I think that the churches of the West are very illprepared for that meeting. The conception of missions, the conception of the heathen, the non-Christian people, that the Western churches are on the whole still working with and on the basis of which many of them continue to support foreign missions, is a picture that does not correspond with the reality. Unless I am much mistaken, the picture that is still projected on the screen when foreign missions are spoken about is largely a picture of the backward, the underprivileged, the underdeveloped, the sick, the blind, the uneducated, the ignorant. Consequently missions are able to appeal to the powerful motive of pity. This was possible in a day when the contacts between the Western churches and the great lands of Asia and Africa were very, very limited. Today the situation is different. Great numbers of not only students but also businessmen and government servants and people of all kinds move back and forth between the different parts of the earth. Ordinary church members in the West have the opportunity to meet the mature and cultured and highly competent representatives of the non-Christian religions, and the experience is something of a shock to them. The picture of the heathen that was in their minds is found to be invalidated, and the missionary appeal is therefore discredited. This means that precisely what Hendrik Kraemer has said is true, that there has not yet been a meeting between the gospel and the non-Christian world as it really is. We have been dealing with a picture of the non-Christian world that does not represent reality.
Now the ordinary Christian in the West is having the opportunity to meet a really spiritually mature representative of a non-Christian faith, and is having to ask himself seriously, perhaps for the first time: Is Jesus Christ the truth? Or is he only the name we give in the West, a symbol we have in the West, for that ultimate and universal experience of religion that is the general property of mankind? There is therefore no more important question before the churches in the West today than this: Will our methods of missionary promotion and education continue to work along the traditional lines, or can they become the means by which the ordinary church member in Europe or America is prepared for a real meeting of the gospel with the non-Christian faiths? I believe that one of the most practical ways of securing the right answer to this question would be to bring some of the ablest representatives of the younger churches for limited periods into the home organization desks of the great sending organizations of the Western churches.
The purpose of these few suggestions in the field of missionary practice is to ensure that the world mission of the Church is recognized as truly being not part of the cultural expansion of the Western world but simply the embassy of God's people on earth, the continuation of the mission of him who said, "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (John 12:32).
3
n my talks yesterday morning I suggested that we have to think of
the mission of the Church as the mission of the whole body of
Christ on earth in every land, directed to the whole world, and that
we must understand the home base of the foreign mission to be in
every place that the Church is.
This morning I wish to complete this statement of the missionary task by saying that it is not enough for us to think in these terms if we neglect the very central teaching of the New Testament, that properly speaking the mission is the mission of the Holy Spirit. It is not necessary, I think, to remind you of the many places in the New Testament where this fact is emphasized. In Mark 13:11 it is said with regard to the witness of the Church to all the nations: "It is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit." And the same thing can be illustrated at many different points. When he promises the coming of the comforter, our Lord says, "When the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father ... he will bear witness to me; and you also are witnesses" (John 15:26-27). The witness of man is secondary to the witness of the Holy Spirit. When the risen Lord sends forth his disciples and says, "As the Father has sent me, even so I send you," he immediately adds, "Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:21-22). So also in Acts 1:8 when he says to them, "you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth," he says in the same breath, "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you." Over and over again we find that it is taken for granted that witness is essentially a witness borne to Jesus by the Holy Spirit, and that the part that the Church plays is a secondary instrumental part.
This is the third and final talk of a series of lectures given in New York in late 1960 as part of a program to assist the integration of the International Missionary Council and the World Council of Churches.
I can best explain what I have to say in an autobiographical form. For I do not believe that I am any exception to the general rule when I say that I have come to this position not through pure theological reflection in a state of abstraction from the world, but rather by facing concrete and ordinary practical missionary experiences.
When I went as a young missionary to India, I came into a situation that was typical of large parts of the so-called mission field. It was assumed that the method of evangelization was to have paid catechists or evangelists who preached the gospel to various villages, and if the people of a village wished to become Christians, then someone was employed to live in this village and teach the people what Christianity is. Later they were baptized, and they continued to live under the guidance and control of this agent, this evangelist. So the missionary was a man who sat at a desk in a large bungalow, and he controlled a large army of agents who were the fingers, so to speak, of his hands and whom he sent and withdrew and transferred and dismissed in accordance with his own good pleasure. Now, I came at a time when, owing to various events in Wall Street and other places, the mission was running short of money. We were under instructions not to expand our budgets. It was therefore necessary that no more people should wish to be baptized. It was therefore necessary that we should not preach the gospel. It was therefore necessary to correct Mark 16:15 to read: "Go into all the world and preach the gospel, budgetary conditions permitting." I was sufficiently obstinate to believe that there must be a mistake somewhere in this logic, and that one must therefore reexamine this structure and ask whether this is really the only possible understanding of the missionary task.
The result of that argument was that this became the standard method, not only in India but in most parts of the world.3 Then the question was, How do you go from the mission agent to the ministry? What is the relationship between this army of agents and the ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons or pastors or whatever you call them? In a large part of the mission field this problem was solved in the following way. After the basic work has been done by the paid mission agents, one then begins to develop a ministry. With regard to the ministry there are three axioms we have to accept: (1) that the ministry is a paid profession, a full-time profession; (2) that it is composed of people who have an academic education comparable to that of the ministry in Britain or Germany; and (3) that the ministry should be supported by the giving of the people. None of these axioms is derived from the New Testament. If one adopts these as axioms, the result is that in developing countries one must ask not what is the fundamental theological relationship between the minister and the congregation, and not how many people one pastor can effectively shepherd, or for how many sheep one shepherd is necessary, but how many people with this particular income are needed to pay the salary of a pastor. The resulting situation is (and this is typical of large areas of the world) that you have ministers, pastors, presbyters, priests - whatever you call them - who are responsible for ten, twenty, thirty, or even fifty and sixty village congregations. There are areas in India where one ordained minister is responsible for sixty village congregations. You thus have a very peculiar ecclesiastical situation - a double tier of ministries. You have the basic layer of mission agents, who are a pragmatically developed phenomenon unrelated to any doctrine of the ministry. It makes no difference whether you are Episcopalians or Presbyterians or Congregationalists or Baptists - you have this basic layer of paid agents. And then over it you have a ministry that is constructed in accordance with your particular church doctrine. But this means that the following weaknesses result.
First, the people who are actually trained for the task of teaching and preaching, namely the ministers or pastors, have no time for that because they are engaged in administering a small diocese; they are principally employed as the peripatetic dispensers of sacraments. Second, the person who is actually pastorally in charge of the congregation, namely the village agent, is precisely the man who has not had the training for that task. Third -and this is most fundamentalthese village congregations are not congregations in the biblical sense of the word. They are outstations of the mission. They are not the ecclesia Theou in that place, with the dignity that belongs to the Church of God in any place. The relationship between the congregations and the man who lives among them is not the relation of a congregation to the minister. They are the outstations of an organization that is controlled from a center away from the congregations. And finally, as I have already said, under this situation no real evangelistic advance is possible except when there happens to be a surplus in the mission budget, which is rare.
Now, on finding this pattern unsatisfactory, I at least, like others, was compelled to look back again at the New Testament and ask whether it can show us a different pattern of missionary advance that delivers us from the kind of dilemma that I have described. And when you look at the Acts and the Epistles, even though there is very much that we cannot know about the methods of St. Paul, and even though we have to be careful about trying to copy the details of a missionary method applied to a different situation from our own, at least these three things are clear about the missionary method of St. Paul. First, there is nothing corresponding to the mission organization with which we are familiar. He does not establish in Philippi or in Derbe or in Lystra two organizations, one called the church and the other called the Antioch mission, Lystra branch. There is only one body in that place, which is at the same time both the church and the mission.
In the second place, this church is treated from the moment of its beginning as simply the Church of God. It is the eccleria Theou that is in Philippi, Thessalonica, or what have you. There is only the body of Christ. However weak, however backward, however erring, however sinful, as the church in Corinth certainly was, it is still simply the body of Christ, to which St. Paul addressed himself as to the body of Christ. He may have rebuked them, he may have warned them, he may have chastised them with his tongue and his pen, but he never treated them as a class of pupils who were being trained up to become the Church. This phrase, which we have become so accustomed to in missionary language-the idea of "handing over responsibility" to the young church-appears nowhere in St. Paul's writings. On the contrary, according to the theology of St. Paul, responsibility, freedom, liberty are not commodities in his possession to hand over to the church when he thinks they have reached maturity. Rather, they are given with the gospel. To receive the gospel means to be given freedom, to be given responsibility. It means to be put from that moment in the position of freedom under grace before God.
Third, therefore, it is taken for granted that from the very beginning the church is equipped with a ministry. There are bishops (superintendents) and deacons, there are elders, and there is a multitude of other ministries, various and flexible according to the needs of the situation. Now, we know that this whole approach of St. Paul came under severe attack. We know that there came out after him from Jerusalem and from the church in Judea those who said that the church must be circumcised and must be taught to keep the whole law of Moses, that it must be, in other words, trained up in accordance with the pattern of the mother church. And only in this way could it be regarded as in the way of salvation. St. Paul on the other hand appears to have been convinced that once the gospel had been handed over, once the church was established in the faith in Jesus Christ, then they were responsible to God and were equipped by his Holy Spirit with all the gifts and all the ministries needed for growth in Christ. When one looks at this picture, it seems to me impossible to avoid the conclusion that in our missionary methods we have been nearer to the Judaizers than to St. Paul.4
Well, these kinds of theological reflections led on, as far as I was concerned, to an attempt at experimenting in new patterns. As a very modest first beginning in the area where I was, faced with this budgetary barrier I have spoken of, we began to draw together the ordinary village elders, the farmers or coolies or artisans or whatever they were, who were regarded by the village congregations as their natural leaders. We began to gather them together for conference and Bible study, and to develop in them a sense of responsibility to the Church of God in their area. Then it happened that I was transferred and made a bishop in an area where the shortage of funds had caused such a drastic cutting down of budgets that a large number of village schools had been closed, the evangelists had been withdrawn, and more than half of the village congregations were without any kind of regular pastoral oversight. I took this as a God-given opportunity to experiment in the other understanding of the Church's missionary advance, and we were able to completely turn over the seminary that we had for the training of evangelists and catechists to the training of lay voluntary leaders of the congregations. We got the seminary out of its building, put it on wheels, and sent it around the diocese so that the staff of the seminary would be available in all parts of the diocese to give practical biblical and pastoral training to the natural leaders of the congregations. We very quickly began to discover that those congregations under a voluntary local ministry of this kind were far more spiritually alive than those under the oversight of the paid agents of the mission. We had a God-given opportunity to extend this experiment still further when a mass movement of the village people of a certain area began to develop. This was an extension of a movement that had taken place in the adjacent area under the Methodist mission. In that area they have developed this movement in accordance with the old pattern by putting a paid agent into every new village as the people turned to Christ and asked for baptism.
We decided that we would experiment in the exactly opposite direction on our side of the boundary, and that from the very beginning we would put each new congregation under the charge of one, two, or three of its own leaders. When any new group of people came, we would not offer to send them a paid agent to teach and train them, but we would first of all ask: Who are the men and women here whom the Holy Spirit has touched? Let them be the God-ordained pastors and leaders for this new congregation. And my own experience has always been that when such a turning to the gospel takes place, when a new group or village comes asking for baptism, there is in that group at least one man whose life has been actually touched by the Holy Spirit, who has had some genuine experience of the supernatural power of Christ. And that man, I believe, is the man whom God has chosen to be the elder, the presbyter, the pastor of this new group. It is absolutely vital that we begin by building upon what God has already done. The older pattern meant that we put that man aside and put in his place a young man whom we had trained in our seminary, who was under our control, and whom we could rely upon to guide the congregation in the way that we believed to be right. But the "new" method means that we begin by accepting as the starting point what God has done, and that we build upon that. We make it clear from the first day that the responsibility for further growth in Christ rests upon them, and that God will provide for them the ministries and the spiritual gifts they need for their growth in grace. When that is the starting point, we then go on to say: But you will need to learn much that you cannot learn for yourselves, and therefore we will send for a limited period, for six or nine months, one or two Christian people to live in your village and to give you everything that we can give concerning the gospel, the sacraments, the faith of the Church.
In this way I have seen the gospel spreading from village to village, so that in this particular area where there were only thirteen congregations ten years ago, there are now nearly sixty entirely as the result of this kind of voluntary spontaneous expansion of the Church, and without requiring the addition of further burdens to any kind of mission budget. I have been able to watch the development of some of these village men as genuine pastors with the authentic lineaments of the good shepherd, even though they were very simple and in some cases uneducated men. I think of two of such men, one of them a coolie who was baptized ten years ago, who has continued to devote his spare time to evangelistic work and has won three villages for Christ and prepared them for baptism. He continues to act as a pastor for his people even though he also earns his own living as a laborer. I think of another man who was a member of a congregation that was baptized about twenty years ago and that backslid, went away from the gospel, and was abandoned by the mission. The little prayer-house that had been built was closed and locked, and the whole thing was abandoned. This one man, who was illiterate, an ordinary village laborer, every evening when he came back from his work would kneel down in front of the closed door of this prayer-house and pray that the gospel might come back to his village. He continued in this way for about five years. At the end of this five-year period, a new movement began to flow in to the village, and a new group of people in the village came asking for baptism. When we discovered the history, it was clear to us that this man was the God-ordained pastor for that village; there could be no other man who had the same spiritual right to be their pastor. But he was illiterate, and therefore it was necessary for him to begin, even though he was forty years of age, to learn to read so that he could read the Scripture and explain it to his people. He did make that tremendous effort, and he is now able to read the Scriptures intelligibly and to conduct the worship of his congregation. And, what is more important, he has shown himself to be a real pastor. We have had a young American missionary living in that village for some years, and she has told me that in her times of spiritual difficulty, without her telling him this village coolie has understood that she was having some spiritual difficulty, and has come to her home and prayed with her, and put her back again into a right relationship with God. He is, as I say, an ordinary village laborer who has simply learned to read in order that he may fulfill this ministry. But I cannot possibly doubt that he is the man God had chosen to be the pastor of this little flock.
Now, I have given these personal experiences to illustrate a thesis that I want to put before you: that we have been tempted by our possession of wealth and culture and influence to think of the missionary task too much as a program of teaching and training and uplifting in which we were doing the guiding and the directing, in which we determined the syllabus and set the exams. And we have thereby created this relationship of paternalism on the one hand and dependence on the other, which is such a perplexing difficulty in the whole missionary enterprise. And this relationship of paternalism and dependence reproduces itself even where there is no racial difference between the two sides. I have found in India, for instance, that even where we have Indian missionary societies like the National Missionary Society of India and some of the other ones, under the word mission the same kind of paternalism develops, and the same kind of infantile dependent attitude develops on the other side. And surely the root of this error lies in our failure to take seriously enough the fact that the mission of the Church is not a program of teaching and training analogous to a cultural program of expansion; that while there is a teaching ministry involved in it, the fundamental witness to Christ is a witness borne by the Holy Spirit himself. He is able to create under totally different conditions the forms of the Church in such a way that they belong to that place and people, instead of being mere pale reproductions of the form of the Church with which we have been familiar so that they have their own authentic roots within the life and experience of the people themselves.
Please forgive me for telling, in conclusion, a story that you may think rather shocking and rather frivolous, but that I think is nevertheless relevant to what I have tried to say. The malaise, the weakness of the missionary enterprise nowhere becomes so clear as when the board secretary, the Missionsinspektor,6 of a home society engages in his travels around the Church. When this happens, one has the sad experience that even a church that has developed real selfhood and responsibility will throw its adult status to the winds and will become -I won't say a collection of children, but wherever the Missionsinspektor goes, there the church gathers, and they say, "You are our father and our mother, you are the body we depend on. We cannot live by ourselves, you must give us a school, you must give us a hospital, you much give us a catechist, you must support us, otherwise we cannot live." A friend of mine who is the Missionsinspektor of one of the big American societies was traveling around India for three months. For the whole three months he had nothing other than this experience, and he was getting very tired of it. At the end of his journey he visited a village near Bombay where as usual the people, after putting a garland round his neck and offering him a tray of fruit, said, "You are our father and mother, we have no catechist in this village, without a catechist we cannot be Christians, the mission must send us a catechist immediately." And my friend, with a kind of inspired desperation, said to them, "Kneel down, all of you," and they all knelt down. And then he went to the end of the row, and he said, "I appoint you a catechist. I appoint you a catechist. I appoint you a catechist ..." right down to the end of the row, and then he went to Bombay and boarded his ship for America. Well, these were simple people, they believed in God, they believed that this was a man of God, and they believed that this man of God had come and appointed them catechists, and so they were catechists, and so they began to behave like catechists. The result was that when he came back again two years later, he found, instead of a drooping and weak and infantile church, a church that was itself expanding and preaching the gospel to other people.
Now, this may perhaps be too frivolous a story. I know that everything is not so simple as that. Yet I believe there is a truth in it that is essential for us to learn in the missionary movement today, that in the last analysis the witness to Christ is the witness borne by the Holy Spirit himself, who is able to use as his instruments not only the educated and the able and the powerful, but also - and even much more -the simple and the uneducated. I believe that the glory of the Christian mission is that in every place God uses the Holy Spirit in his own way to create his own witness to Christ, and that it does not all depend on us. What does depend on us is that in each situation, whoever we are and wherever we are, we should be the faithful witnesses of him who is the Savior of the world.