Foreword
The theology of the Christian mission is no longer a subject only for specialists or enthusiasts. It has become a subject in which everyone who wishes to reflect seriously about the task of the Church in our time must interest himself. For the Church is now, in a sense which has not been true for many centuries, in a missionary situation everywhere.
The immense enterprise which usually goes by the name of foreign missions took its rise in a period when the word “Christendom” represented a limited and fairly well-defined part of the inhabited world, and when for centuries the Christian Church had been almost completely isolated from the other great religious cultures of the world. Christendom had become a self-contained society, concerned with its internal problems, and barely conscious of the existence of the rest of the world except for the constant presence on its border of the great culture of Islam which provided the barrier against contact with the religious cultures of India and China. The forms of church life, and the presuppositions of Christian thought, were all shaped by the experiences of this self-enclosed existence. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the evangelization of the greater part of the human race had not been begun or even thought of, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes could give thanks for “the more than marvellous conversion of all the world to the obedience of faith.” Christendom had become a largely isolated and self-contained enclave of humanity.
Foreign missions were a breaking-forth from that enclave into a strange new world. Their rise was part of that whole explosion of the human spirit which has carried the debris of Western Christendom into every corner of the world to shake the ancient structures of society and to create new forms of thought, of personal and family life, of commerce and statecraft. Of course they were much more than this. They were, and are, part of the continuing signs of the presence of the new creation in Christ. But, like every other part of the Church’s being, they were and are also part of the secular history of their time. And the time in which they took their rise and developed their characteristic patterns of thought [[pb:xii]]and practice has now ended. This ending is not a mere termination but a fulfillment; it is an ending which causes one who understands to look forward in hope.
In one sense this is obvious. The foreign missionary movement has reached a kind of fulfillment in the existence of indigenous Christian churches in almost every country of the world. The Gospel has reached “the ends of the earth.” While there are great areas of the world in which Christian witness is pitifully weak or almost nonexistent, yet there are not—in the old sense—“regions beyond.” Christendom is no longer a small and clearly defined sector of the inhabited world; it exists in dispersion, in a multitude of communities, most of them small minorities, scattered throughout the human race. The old picture of the missionary as one who sallies forth from a geographically defined Christendom into the outer world of barbarous superstition is no longer valid.
In another sense, also, the era in which modern missions took their rise has ended. The cultural explosion which has carried Western ideas of science, commerce, and politics (whether in their Marxist or “democratic” forms) into every part of the world has also had a kind of fulfillment. These ideas, and the explosive human forces which they release, are no longer the exclusive property of the West. They have become—or are rapidly becoming—the common property of mankind. The dynamism of Western society is being matched and exceeded by the new societies appearing in Asia, Africa and other so-called ‘areas of rapid social change.” The winds of change no longer blow all in one direction. In the nineteenth century these winds often helped to fill the sails of the missionary ship venturing into strange waters and among strange people. Sometimes the navigators became perhaps a little too expert at making use of these winds. Today they are as likely as not to blow the other way, and the missionary has to learn the art of navigating against the prevailing wind. If, in seeking to learn, he remembers that the greatest of missionaries had intimate experience of changing winds and knew much of their perils, he may be encouraged and emboldened; but that will not alter the fact that he has painfully to rethink many things which his predecessor took for granted.
It is at such a moment that the Church has the invitation and the opportunity to learn again that her history is not simply part of the secular history of her times. She faces a radically new situa[[pb:xiii]]tion, and nothing will suffice save radical rethinking of the nature of her mission. Such rethinking must include both a realistic understanding of the new facts with which the mission has to deal, and a humble return to the source of the mission in the Gospel. It must take both the Bible and the daily newspaper seriously. If it does, we can expect that the Church will be shown the new forms which must be taken for this new day by the mission which is the same from Christ’s coming to his coming again.
For, while in one sense the events which now confront us are the fulfillment of the missionary movement of the past centuries, in another sense they challenge us with an awe-inspiring sense of the greatness of the unfinished task. To anyone who understands the Gospel, the task of world-evangelization must surely be even more demanding and compelling than it was to the great missionary pioneers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But it is a task which has to be differently conceived. Today the mission field is everywhere, and the home base is wherever the Church exists. Today the pagan world is no longer something away over the horizon; it is here in the midst of us. Even the good Christian congregation which faithfully gave its yearly offering to foreign missions finds itself having to face for the first time the question whether it is really true that there is salvation in no other name than that of Jesus. We live in one world in which the competing faiths, no longer separated and insulated by distance, jostle one another in every city and even in the minds of ordinary Christians. Today the question of the theology of the Christian mission is a question that—whether recognized or not—knocks at the door of every congregation.
The essays which follow represent very varied approaches to this central question. Certainly not all of them will carry the assent of any reader. May they serve to stimulate everyone who reads them to play his own part in the task of helping the Church in our day to rediscover in the Gospel the source and nature of her mission to all nations.
LESSLIE NEWBIGIN
London