The Western Confucian: A Tale of Two Missiologies

More than a hat-tip to The Western Confucian: A Tale of Two Missiologies

Father Maryknoller in Korea on "what it was like in the [Catholic] mission stations during the early days of persecution" — How the Early Christians Nurtured the Church in Korea — and on the queen who "while her husband was torturing priests and thousands of native [Catholic] Christians... was secretly studying the catechism and preparing herself for baptism" — A True Story by Bishop Mutel, Bishop of Seoul, 1890.

Robert Neff on "violent Christian [Protestant] missionaries who did not respect Korean culture and the needs of the local people" and came only after the persecution ended — Were early Christian missionaries in Joseon Korea violent?

I would be interested to learn most about how this was affected by John Nevius, who, I have heard, had a different approach from that of most Protestant missionaries of his time (1890s) -- see Nevius, Allen, Kasatkin | Khanya.

St Nicholas of Japan (Orthodox, in Japan), Roland Allen (Anglican, in China) and John Nevius (Presbyterian, in Korea) advocated methods that differed from those of their contemporaries, and which Robert Neff's article complains about. I know least about Nevius, and would be interested in learning how his methods contrasted with those described in Neff's article.

Brethren, what shall we do?

In looking at other blogs this morning, I came across three in a row that dealt with questions about what Christians can do about injustice and suffereing in the world. Not just talk about it, not just deplore it, not just theologise about it, but DO something about it.

My friend Jim Forest writes in his blog On Pilgrimage: Works of mercy:

For many Protestants, the single criterion for salvation is making a “decision for Christ” -- an intellectual affirmation that Christ is Lord. It has very little to do with how we live and everything to do with how we think. But Jesus, as we meet him in the New Testament, says very little about the criteria for salvation at the Last Judgment. Mainly the Gospel has to do with how we live here and now and how we relate to each other. Jesus sums up the law and the prophets in just a few words: to love God with all one's heart, mind and soul, and to love one's neighbor as oneself. Just one sentence.

and goes on to say

Main point? The works of mercy (feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, etc.) connect us to the God of Mercy.

There are many works of art that give visual expression to this crucial aspect of the Gospel. Among those I find most impressive is a very local work of art made in 1504 by an artist who is known only as "the Master of Alkmaar." Originally his seven-panel work hung in the Holy Spirit House of Hospitality in Alkmaar. Later it was moved to the town's cathedral. In the last century, it became part of the Rijksmuseum collection in Amsterdam. Currently, while the Rijksmuseum is undergoing reconstruction, it hangs in Rotterdam at the Boijmans Museum, where Nancy and I visited it yesterday.

In five of the seven panels, Christ -- without a halo -- is present but unrecognized. In this first panel, he looks directly toward the viewer. Only in the panel of the burial of the dead, sitting on a rainbow, is Christ revealed as Pantocrator, Lord of the Cosmos.

And then Julie Clawson writes in Walking the Justice Walk: onehandclapping:

in the large sessions I attended at Urbana, I heard a lot about the pain in the world. I saw that there were starving and hurting people. I was also told that I am self-centered for Facebooking and Twittering. I heard the stories of immigrants who have nothing and are desperately trying to survive. I was shown the magnitude of my consumption habits. And Shane Claiborne even told me how evil it is to live in empire that hurts instead of helps the world. I got the message. I felt guilty. I understood that I should care for others. But nowhere did I hear what I should be doing instead. I heard loud and clear what is wrong with the world, but nothing about what I need to do to make it right.

Perhaps one possible answer is to be found at Margaret Pfeil: Tradition is a living thing | Faith & Leadership:

Catholic Worker houses were founded by Day (1897-1980) and seek to foster practice of the church’s traditional corporal works of mercy (to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit and ransom the captives, shelter the homeless, visit the sick and bury the dead) and spiritual works of mercy (to admonish sinners, instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, comfort the sorrowful, bear wrongs patiently, forgive all injuries and pray for the living and the dead). Catholic Worker houses also advocate for social justice in their local communities and beyond. Hat-tip to A Pinch of Salt: Margaret Pfeil on Dorothy Day

And I am reminded of a book I read more than 40 years ago, on the eve of writing a doctrine exam. It was far more interesting than my textbook, which I should have been reading. One way of escaping, as I said, is to theologise about it. We need a new theolo9gy of this or a new theology of that, people say. I know, I've been there, done that, made that excuse myself, and perhaps am guilty of that right now by blogging about it instead of doing something about it. And the book, by Colin Morris, a Methodist missionary in Zambia, put it in a nutshell:

That phrase Revolutionary Christianity is fashionable. But what it describes is more often a way of talking than a way of walking. It is revolution at the level of argument rather than action. We take daring liberties with the Christianity of the Creeds and the traditional ideas about God. We go into the fray armed to rend an Altizer or Woolwich apart of defend them to the death. We sup the heady wine of controversy and nail our colours to the mast -- mixing our metaphors in the excitement! The Church, we cry, is in ferment. She has bestirred herself out of her defensive positions and is on the march! And so she is -- on the march to the nearest bookshop or theological lecture room or avant garde church to expose herself to the latest hail of verbal or paper missiles. This is not revolution. It has more in common with the frenzied scratching of a dog to rid itself of fleas than an epic march on the Bastille or the Winter Palace. Revolutionary Christianity is so uncomplicated in comparison that it is almost embarassing to have to put it into words. It is simply doing costly things for Jesus' sake.

Dorothy Day did that, and so did Methodist Bishop Paul Verryn, but what about the rest of us?

The Second Day of Christmas

It's 5:30 am on the second Day of Christmas, and I've been up since 3:15 am, with the dogs, or one of them, barking, but our street lights are not working, so I can't see what he is barking at. But it disturbs me, so I can't do much constructive at this quiet hour.

In the Orthodox Church the second day of Christmas is the Synaxis of the Most Holy Theotokos, and we remember her whose womb was more spacious than the heavens, and contained the Uncontainable One. In our diocese most parishes celebrate Christmas according to the Gregorian Calendar, but a couple of parishes that follow Slavic traditions are still in the fast, and will be celebrating "Old Christmas" on 7 January Gregorian.

On 23 December I met Prof Germanos Marani of the Gregorian University in Rome, who came with a proposal for a missiological symposium, and I spent the whole day discussing it with him (there's more about this on my other blog, for those who are interested). On Christmas Eve he joined us for the Vigil Service at the Church of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton, Johannesburg. We had Great Compline followed by Matins. Though our choir director was conscious of many mistakes, I don't think many other people noticed them, and it was very pleasant.

On Christmas morning I took a couple of families from the Klipfontein View congregation we were involved with last year to the Divine Liturgy at St Nicholas. They had been part of the Tembisa congregation, and we used to take them to the services there, but the priest who is now in charge there doesn't have a big enough car to take them. Someone sometimes gives them a lift to St Thomas's Serbian Church in Sunninghill, but the services there are all in Slavonic or Serbian, so it was nice for them to have an English service for a change. There were several other visitors, including old parishioners who have moved away, like the Kilner family, now living in England, but who came home to visit family for Christmas. A new visitor was Reader John Burnett, originally from the USA, but who has been working in East Africa, and who has now come to work in our diocese. I've been in contact with him by e-mail before, and through reading his blog, and look forward to getting to know him and possibly working with him.

We came home and had Christmas dinner -- roast turkey, gem squash, cauliflour cheese and roast potatoes -- a nice way to break the fast.

Come, let us greatly rejoice in the Lord,
as we sing of this present mystery:
the wall which divided God from man has been destroyed;
the flaming sword withdraws from Eden’s gate;
the Cherubim withdraw from the Tree of Life;
and I, who had been cast out through my disobedience,
now feast on the delights of Paradise:
for today the Father’s perfect Image,
marked with the stamp of His eternity,
has taken the form of a servant.
Without undergoing change He is born from an unwedded mother;
He was true God, and He remains the same,
but through His love for mankind,
He has become what He never was: true man.
Come, O faithful, let us cry to Him:
“O God, born of the Virgin, have mercy on us!”

Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One,
And the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One!
Angels with shepherds glorify Him!
The wise men journey with a star!
Since for our sake the Eternal God was born as a Little Child!

A Baptist minister visits an Orthodox Church

Not for Lightweights | Real Live Preacher:

Last Sunday was the 4th of 13 in my sabbatical time. Each of them is precious to me. Each week I am choosing a place and a way to worship. I’m not a church tourist, hoping to see new things. I’m seeking spiritual experiences. I want to worship. Saturday night Jeanene and I still hadn’t decided where to go. I experienced something common to our culture but new to me. The “Where do you want to go to church - I don’t know where do YOU want to go to church” conversation. I found the Saint Anthony the Great website. It's an Orthodox church that has beautiful Byzantine art in the sanctuary. We decided to go there.

I've been reading blogs where people discuss "attractional" versus "missional" churches, and have struggled to make sense of these terms. They just don't seem to fit my understand or experience of church. And, perhaps this real live preacher 's experiwnce can give a clue about why "attractional" versus "missional" seems such a false dichotomy.

This one has been doing the rounds on Facebook.

Missions pioneer Ralph Winter dies : Townhall.com

I never met Ralph Winter, the missiologist who died last week, but through his writing and speaking and ideas he changed my life.

A few days ago I wrote a blog post in which I mentioned Ralph Winter, and the next day I learned that he had died.

News Headlines - Missions pioneer Ralph Winter dies : Townhall.com:

Ralph Winter a veteran missiologist who 35 years ago sparked an emphasis on unreached people groups worldwide died at his home in Pasadena Calif. May 20 after a struggle with cancer. He was 84. In 2005 Time magazine listed Winter as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America noting that in 1974 at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne Switzerland Winter revolutionized missionary work overseas by calling Christians to look beyond national borders and serve the world's 'unreached people.'

Winter's influence on me began when I attended SACLA, the South African Christian Leadership Assembly, in 1979.

There was a hall there where various Christian groups and NGOs were displaying their wares, and among them were many mission societies. It took me back to my schooldays when we had had speakers many of from some these mission societies, and I was rather surprised to find that they still existed. I collected their leaflets: the Sudan Interior Mission, the Sudan United Mission, the Leprosy Mission (formerly Mission to Lepers), and the Overseas Missionary Fellowship (formerly the China Inland Mission).

I remembered the last one well. A former missionary called Melsopp came to speak to us at school on several occasions, and he showed us Chinese dress, and spoke about Chinese culture, and emphasised the efforts of the missionaries of the China Inland Mission to identify with Chinese culture. Along with other Western missionaries, he had been kicked out of China in 1950 after the communist revolution there.

But there was one stall that had something new and different. It was about "Unreached Peoples", and it was manned by Debbie Bliss. I talked to her for quite a while, and she explained to me Ralph Winter's concept of "unreached peoples", and gave me more literature, which I read.

I was studying for History Honours at the University of South Africa (Unisa), and had done the first two Honours papers, but when I came to the last three the university put the fees up so that I could no longer afford them (I later worked for Unisa, and was able to complete the degree ten years later, with the help of a staff discount). But to continue studying I registered for a second bachelors degree, a B.Th., majoring in missiology -- a choice influenced by Ralph Winter's thought. At that time the B.Th. course was divided into 30 modules, which were cheaper than the postgraduate honours papers, so I could afford them.

At that time I was Director of Training for Ministries for the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, and my main work was training self-supporting priests and deacons. An influential section of the church-supported clergy were opposed to self-supporting ministry, and introduced rules and regulations designed to make it more difficult for people to join the training programme, so I left to become Director of Mission and Evangelism in the Anglican Diocese of Pretoria, and one of the things we did there was hold an "Institute of International Studies", with the help of David Bliss (husband of the aforementioned Debbie Bliss). The course was based on a book edited by Ralph Winter, Perspectives on the world Christian movement, a collection of essays on various missiological topics. The essays in the book were a mixed bag, but the ones that impressed me most were two by Winter himself -- The kingdom strikes back and The two structures of God's redemptive mission.

At the "Perspectives" course we also had a video of Ralph Winter speaking about "The Kingdom strikes back", and that was even more impressive than it was on paper. It changed the way I looked at church and mission history.

One of the points that Winter makes is in the section on "No saints in the middle?":

It is wise to interrupt the story here. If you haven’t heard this story before you may confront a psychological problem. In church circles today we have fled, feared or forgot- these ten middle centuries. Hopefully, fewer and fewer of us will continue to think in terms of what may be called a fairly extreme form of the “BOBO” theory—that the Christian faith somehow “Blinked Out” after the Apostles and “Blinked On” again in our time, or whenever our modern “prophets” arose, be they Luther, Calvin, Wesley, Joseph Smith, Ellen White or John Wimber. The result of this kind of BOBO approach is that you have “early” saints and “latter-day” saints, but no saints in the middle.

Thus, many Evangelicals are not much interested in what happened prior to the Protestant Reformation. They have the vague impression that the Church was apostate before Luther and Calvin, and whatever there was of real Christianity consisted of a few persecuted individuals here and there. For example, in the multi-volume Twenty Centuries of Great Preaching, only half of the first volume is devoted to the first 15 centuries! In evangelical Sunday Schools, children are busy as beavers with the story of God’s work from Genesis to Revelation, from Adam to the Apostles—and their Sunday School publishers may even boast about their “all-Bible curriculum.” But this only really means that these children do not get exposed to all the incredible things God did with that Bible between the times of the Apostles and the Reformers, a period which is staggering proof of the unique power of the Bible! To many people, it is as if there were “no saints in the middle.”

And I discovered that the Missiology Department at Unisa also operated on that assumption. After a look at the "Biblical basis of mission" they would jump straight to Western missionary movements after the Renaissance -- there were no saints in the middle.

I remember in one essay I mentioned St Boniface, the English apostle to the Germans. I noted that since the English had immigrated to Britain from Germany in the preceding centuries, Boniface would probably not have had as many language difficulties as missionaries going from other places. Prof. David Bosch, who marked my essay, was quite incredulous. The idea had never occurred to him. Western missiologists, with one notable exception, simply ignored anything that happened in that period. The exception was Ralph D. Winter.

So when I came to do my doctoral thesis on Orthodox mission methods I modelled it, in part, on Ralph Winter's The Kingdom strikes back. Winter's account of ten epochs of redemptive history mainly followed Western mission, but I thought the same could, and should be done for Orthodox mission, to highlight the "saints in the middle". Some warned that this was far too broad for a doctoral thesis, which should be on a very narrow topic. But I thought that Western missiology was far too narrow-minded, and that something broader was needed. And Ralph D. Winter provided the inspiration to broaden it.

Thirty years ago the focus of my life switched to mission and missiology, and in that switch the thought of Ralph D. Winter played no small part.

So that's how Ralph Winter influenced me. He influenced many other people, in many different ways. You can read about how he influenced Tall Skinny Kiwi here, for example.

Missional Synchroblog

Today there will be a Missional synchroblog, where 50 bloggers discuss the term "missional" and what it means to them.

In calling for a missional synchroblog Rick Meigs says:

I have a continuing concern that the term missional has become over used and wrongly used….I think it is time to make a bigger effort to reclaim the term, a term which describe what happens when you and I replace the “come to us” invitations with a “go to them” life. A life where “the way of Jesus” informs and radically transforms our existence to one wholly focused on sacrificially living for him and others and where we adopt a missionary stance in relation to our culture. It speaks of the very nature of the Jesus follower.

Rick also says quite a bit about the word “missional” on his Web page Friend of Missional.

My contribution is posted on my Khanya blog.

You may find the participating blogs at the links below:

Alan Hirsch
Alan Knox
Andrew Jones
Barb Peters
Bill Kinnon
Brad Brisco
Brad Grinnen
Brad Sargent
Brother Maynard
Bryan Riley
Chad Brooks
Chris Wignall
Cobus Van Wyngaard
Dave DeVries
David Best
David Fitch
David Wierzbicki
DoSi
Doug Jones
Duncan McFadzean
Erika Haub
Grace
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Jeff McQuilkin
John Smulo
Jonathan Brink
JR Rozko
Kathy Escobar
Len Hjalmarson
Makeesha Fisher
Malcolm Lanham
Mark Berry
Mark Petersen
Mark Priddy
Michael Crane
Michael Stewart
Nick Loyd
Patrick Oden
Peggy Brown
Phil Wyman
Richard Pool
Rick Meigs
Rob Robinson
Ron Cole
Scott Marshall
Sonja Andrews
Stephen Shields
Steve Hayes
Tim Thompson
Thom Turner

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Supply

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Vicarage Allsorts: Clergy Supply:

After 30 years of designer angst about clergy shortages I am amazed that this should be so, but the simple fact is that there are actually more active C of E collars on the streets of England in 2005 than in 1959. I don’t know about you, but this surprised me. It also strikes me as the kind of raw figure that won’t be of any interest to Fleet Street, because it neither provokes fear and anguish, nor validates their prejudices and fantasies about the C of E.

The distribution, however has entirely changed. The preponderance is distributed more, I would guess, according to population. The bad story then was rural/urban. Now I would anticipate it to be North/West as against South/East. There are far fewer full time collars of the conventional sort, but far more retired active and self supporting. Looking ahead this means their shelf life and deployability is far lower. People in the 1960’s complained that vicars were too young and inexperienced about the rest of life. Now they complain that they’re all on second careers. You can’t have it both ways! Or can you? Training needs, however are radically different.

The report Bishop Alan was quoting was picked up by a journalist of the Sunday Telegraph to produce an alarmist report quoted by Fr David MacGregor, and prompted Bishop Alan to take the mickey Bishop Alan’s Blog:

The most important person in a business is always, in a way, the person on the front desk. The wellbeing of clergy is, in that obvious sense among others, vital to the wellbeing of the Church. Since Chaucer’s time there’s been public anxiety about this subject. 200 years ago Sidney Smith lamented the decline in the quality of clergy since the enforcement of residence was preventing gentlemen from desiring ordination. In the roaring 20’s, Hensley Henson bemoaned the decline in the quality of ordinands since the first world war. The document quoted in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, however, is barking up a very different tree. A more accurate headline than “poor quality of vicars alarms church leaders” would probably be “desperation to dramatize drab HR questionnaire twits journalist.”

I find this interesting because though it was a different time and a different place, 30 years ago I was responsible for training self-supporting clergy in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, and I thought most people in the diocese had the wrong idea of the role of self-supporting vis a vis church supported clergy.

Many parishes had anything between 5 and 30 "outstations", and the clergy would itinerate to celebrate the Eucharist. I thought each outstation should have, if possible, 2 or more self-supporting priests and 2 or more deacons. The "rector" (who need not necessarily be ordained) should be a pastor/teacher (a somewhat different kind of ministry) equipped to train and support the clergy at the outstations, and itinerate for training and teaching, not sacraments.

That was the sort of thing advocated by Roland Allen in his book Missionary methods, St Paul's or ours? nearly 100 years ago, but never really put into practice anywhere. I still think it should be applied, mutatis mutandis, in Orthodox mission, though in practice it would need to be modified. It is difficult to have self-supporting clergy, since most of them would be among the urban unemployed.

Among Anglicans in South Africa there may have been similar patterns. In 1971 a book was published. The vanishing clergyman : a sociological study of the priestly role in South Africa by Trevor Verryn. He noted a marked decline in the number of Anglican ordinands in training. Within a year or two of the publication of his book, the trend was dramatically reversed, as a result of the spread of the charimatic renewal movement, and at least one of the Anglican theological colleges in South Africa had to be enlarged to cope with the influx of new students, most of them married and entering second careers.

There was a similar study to Verryn's in the Church of England, The fate of the Anglican clergy: a sociological study by Robert Towler (London, Macmillan, 1979). Though it was published eight years later, the period of study was similar to Verryn's; Bob Towler followed the 1966 intake of five Anglican theological colleges in England over the next 10 years. I was one of them.

It was quite an interesting period, and I suspect one of great change in outlook for many -- the time of hippies, of student power. Now most of those in Towler's study will be approaching retirement, and it might be interesting to see what has happened to them and how their views have changed. How did they change the church, and how did the church change them?

Prayer and temperament

My friend blogging friend Sue has just posted a review of a book that suggests that people of different temperaments pray in different weys.

Sue's Book Reviews:

'Prayer and Temperament' attempts to reconcile the differences of temperament, as described by David Keirsey, Linda Berens and others, with preferred and most helpful methods of Christian prayer. It's based mainly on a big survey that was taken, discussing various methods of reading the Bible and praying, and correlating with each person's personality type in the Myers-Briggs system.

It mainly deals with the four temperaments (Idealist/NF, Artisan/SP, Guardian/SJ and Rational/NT) as proposed by Keirsey, and the different ways people find easiest to relate to God. There are useful broad descriptions of the needs and strengths of each temperament, and explanations of different methods of praying, with specific recommendations.

Has anyone ever done research to find out whether different temperaments are attracted to different Christian traditions? Are Calvinists inclined to be one personality type, Pentecostals another, and Orthodox a third?

Perhaps there's a doctorate waiting for someone willing to find out!

Memory Eternal -- Pope Petros VII

This is the third anniversary of the death of His Beatitude Petros, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa, who was killed in a helicopter crash on 11 September 2004.

He was the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians on the African continent, as the secular media would say. Several other clergy were killed with him on that day, including three bishops, so it was a severe blow to the Church in Africa.

Among those killed was His Grace Nectarios, Bishop of Madagascar, whose short period in that country as a missionary priest and later bishop was amazing.

Father Nectarios Kellis was a priest in Australia, and he read in a magazine published in Greece that a priest was needed in Madagascar, because they had been without a priest since 1972, when political changes had led to the expulsion of many foreigners, including the Greek priest.

Father Nectarios asked his bishop if he could go, but the bishiop said no, he needed him in Australia. As the computer fundi for the diocese, he would be hard to replace. But later the bishop relented. I can see that you will just be miserable if you don't go, said the bishop, so go with my blessing.

Father Nectarios went to Greece, and found the author of the article, so see how he could make contact with the people in Madagascar who were appealing for a priest. He was told that there weren't any. The person who wrote the article had made it up -- he had just seen that there hadn't been a priest there for a long time, and thought it would be nice if there was one.

Father Nectarios set out for Madagascar not knowing what to expect, and arrived there in 1994. He found two churches, neither in use, one in the capital, Tananarive, and one of the coast. There was a local family that was acting as caretakers of the church in Tananarive, and I met a member of this family, a young man, at the Makarios III Orthodox Theological Seminary in Nairobi in November 1995. I was then doing research for my doctoral thesis on "Orthodox mission methods", and was interviewing the students (who came from various parts of Africa) to find out how the Orthodox Church was growing in their home countries.

The story I heard from Madagascar was quite amazing. Father Nectarios had been there for 18 months, and had started 15 new parishes in that time. He travelled down the coast taking the student with him, and when he saw a village with no church, would speak to the chief of the village and ask if he could come on a date to be arranged to explain the Orthodox Christian faith to anyone interested. Then a few weeks later he would return and speak to the people there, and then gather the interested people to catechise them and baptise them, and so 15 new parishes had been started within 18 months.

Six months later I met Father Nectarios in person.

At that time Madagascar fell under the Archbishopric of Zimbabwe, and Father Nectarios had travelled to Bulawayo where the Patriarch was blessing a memorial in the local church. While they were there, the Archbishop of Zimbabwe suffered a heart attack, so Father Nectarios stayed on for a few days to look after him. When he eventually returned to Madagascar, he had to change planes in Johannesburg, and as the plane for Madagascar only left the following morning he was booked into a hotel overnight near the airport. The hotel was in Isando, an industrial area, all over factories, where there is nothing to do and nothing to see, but the seminary student had given him my phone number, so he phoned me, and we said we would fetch him and show him around a little, rather than leave him sitting in a lonely hotel room. It was Monday 1 April 1996, in the middle of Great Lent, and we wanted to take him to supper at a restaurant, but finding a restaurant open on a Monday in Gauteng is not easy, never mind one that serves fasting food. Still, we took him round to see some churches and a priest we found at home, and while we were going around he told us the story of how he had found himself in Madagascar. He was quite a delightful character, short, with a reddish hair and beard, and he spoke Australian with a Greek accent.

Later Madagascar was made into a separate diocese, and Father Nectarios was consecrated as its bishop, and served there until his death on 11 September 2004. His successor was Father Ignatios Sennis, who had served as a priest in Calcutta (Kolkata) in India, where he served mainly among the very poor people.

The 11 September 2004 was a sad day for the Orthodox Church in Africa, and for those who died and their families we pray: Memory Eternal!

The Caucasian Church is flourishing

When I think of Caucasians I think first of Stalin, who was probably the most famous Caucasian of the last century or two, the former seminarian who tried to destroy the Church and propagate atheism. Under his rule more than 200000 clergy and monastics were killed, and many more were sent to concentration camps.

But what is happening in his homeland, Georgia, today?

What is happening to the Christian faith he once tried to destroy?

The Church is flourishing, that's what.

Read all about it in Notes from a CommonplaceBook, travellers tales, with beautiful pictures, of a recent visit to Georgia.

New SAMS Web page

Since August 2007 the Southern African Missiological Society has had a new web site at
http://missiological.org.za/

Please go there to see the latest news and information about SAMS. The material on the old site at http://www.geocities.com/missionalia/ will be retained to preserve links and search engine listings, but, with the exception of the AIC pages and material, it will no longer be updated.

In future I may use the old site to post more material specifically on African Independent Churches (AICs).

the next SAMS congress will be held on the campus of the North West University in Potchefstroom/Tlokwe from 23-25 January 2008. Since the Edinburgh 2010 organising committee has asked SAMS to take responsibility for the commission called "The development of Christian communities in contemporary contexts", the SAMS business meeting agreed to focus in the following two congresses on gathering and analysing stories of vibrant and sustainable Christian communities in Southern Africa. The theme for the 2008 SAMS was fixed as "Mission in humilty and hope: Stories of hope-giving Christian communites in Southern Africa." It was also agreed that hope-giving has alot to do with healing and reconciliation, so that a concerted effort will be made to gather stories of healing and reconciling communities.

Brian McLaren to speak in Pretoria

I gather Brian McLaren is one of the gurus of the emerging church movement, and I've just had news that he will be speaking in Pretoria soon, but there is quite a hefty price to attend his lecture, so I would really appreciate comments from my emerging church friends on whether it's worth shelling out 150 bucks to go and hear him. As a missiologist I feel I ought to keep informed about such things, but is he a good source of information?

Start: 3 May 2007 - 18:30
End: 3 May 2007 - 21:00
Organiser: Sean Callaghan
Contact details: sean@melvillejunction.net
Summary:

Public Lecture and Q&A – The Secret Message of Jesus. Cost: R150
Venue: NGK Universiteitsoord, Pretoria. 105 Duxbury Ave, Hillcrest, Pretoria.

The "secret message of Jesus" label worries me a little too -- it sound gnostic.

Mission is a two-way street... or is it?

Mission is a two-way street.

So they've been telling us for the last 50 years or more, so much so that it's almost become a cliche. It's become one of the unquestioned axioms of Western missiology. Mission, we were told, is giving and receiving. We need to be partners in mission. As the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Dublin once put it, "If we once acted as though there were only givers who had nothing to receive and receivers who had nothing to give, the oneness of the missionary task must now make us all both givers and receivers."

The phrase "Partners in Mission" is also used very widely in Western mission; it is used by Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Roman Catholics and the Salvation Army, to name but a few. Among Anglicans, at least, it replaced a much more verbose and cumbersome phrase that meant something similar: Mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ.

Nearly 50 years ago a friend of mine, John Davies, wrote, in a paper entitled Religion versus God

Missionary work is essentially two-way; Christ said, `Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them' (Matthew 7:12). If we took this seriously, we should probably have to pack in half the missionary work of the Church that we are used to, if it meant that blacks would start teaching whites , and doing good to them, and expecting them to be grateful. Our mission is not, in a one-way traffic, to extol the greatness of our religion: it is to hear and know the living God - and just as between God and man, so also between Christian and non-Christian, all real living is meeting. If this is not our way, we misrepresent the God who has sent us out, whose very nature as trinity is one of reciprocal relations.

And now that is beginning to happen, at least in the Anglican Communion. Blacks have begun teaching whites, and the whites don't like it. I've noticed a growing number of Anglican bloggers in the West writing about "the African problem".

But why is it "the African problem"? Why not "the American problem"?

Why do so many people in the West think it's OK for Americans to spread their values, culture, fast food and cluster bombs all over the world, but when Iranians or North Koreans or Africans do any of these things they scream blue murder?

And doesn't this talk of "the African problem" show that noble phrases like "partnership in mission" and mission being a two-way street are just empty rhetoric, and have been all along? Only a few benighted Africans were foolish enough to take it seriously.

Mission and civilisation

This is a third-hand reference to a blog that summarises a paper read by missiologist Father Michael Oleksa on the differences between Eastern and Western missionaries in their approach to "civilisation".

Briefly, it is that Eastern mission arose in a part of the world where imperial conquests were by Alexander the Great, and were of cultures that were equal to, or greater than the one from which he had come. So there was an element of respect.

In the West, however, the Latin empire conquered "barbarians", and so tried to impose their idea of the "civis", and thought they were taking "civilisation" to those they conquered.

That's enough of my distorted third-hand summary of a summary. Read the rest on Glory to God for all things

Orthodoxy and the emerging/missional church

There has recently been quite a lot of talk in Western Christian circles about the "emerging church", or the "missional church", or the Emerging-missional Church.

Most of the discussion seems to have emerged in the blogosphere, and not in many other places. One of the more useful sites I found was Friend of Missional, which gives a description of what a missional church is, and what it is not.

I wondered how any of this linked with Orthodox Christianity, and here are some preliminary thoughts. I think that some of the things that distinguish missional from non-missional churches are covered in an article I wrote on the difference between evangelism and proselytism.

I discovered the "emerging church" phenomenon soon after I started this blog, and searched for other bloggers who were interested in missiology, which is one of my interests. I discovered that a large number of them had also listed "emerging church" among their interests.

There is a sense in which the Orthodox Church is emerging, or re-emerging. Most Orthodox Christians live in the former Second World, and in those places the church is still emerging or reemerging from 40-70 years of Bolshevik persecution. I visited some of the places where Orthodoxy has been emerging: Russia, Bulgaria and Albania, and something different seemed to be emerging in each of those places. I saw only a tiny fraction of it, of course.

I gather from my reading in the blogosphere that the Western "emerging church" is concerned about Christianity in the postmodern world.

In Africa, where I live, Orthodoxy is faced with a society in which modernity, premodernity and postmodernity are mingled together in swirling ever-changing patterns like paints of different colours being poured into a pot and stirred. What eventually emerges may be a dull beige-grey, but for the moment they are not yet all mixed up, and the mixing is still taking place.

A similar process seems to be taking place in Albania, where much of the premodern world survives. Albania was a tribal society until well into the 20th century, and that was the dominant loyalty, above religion or political affiliations. Enver Hoxha tried to stamp out religion, but he didn't manage to eliminate tribalism. And where else do you see farm labourers cutting hay with scythes and loading it onto a horse-drawn wagon, and taking it back to a farmstead with a TV satellite dish on the roof?

Orthodox Christianity and Western Christianity encountered modernity in different ways, and so perhaps the approach to post-modernity may be different. In the 19th and early 20th centuries Western Christianity was fairly thoroughly contextualised into modernity. For Orthodoxy modernity remained something external, something that the Bolsheviks tried to impose on society, but that the Church resisted.

As for how Orthodoxy will end up relating to the postmodern world, well, not enough has emerged yet.

But I'd welcome thoughts from others to help clarify my own thinking.


Technorati tags (they don't work, but still): Orthodox theology, Orthodoxy, Orthodox mission, Christianity & culture, emerging church, missional church, modernity, postmodernity

Emerging/Missional divide

Wow, I only recently learned that there was an "emerging church" (as opposed to the Church emerging from wherever it has been hiding), and now I discover (from Ecelctic Itchings) that there is an Emerging/Missional divide!

The problem with Western theology is that it's so hard to keep up. By the time you discover what a new theological trend is actually about, it's already split into rival factions, and you have to discover what they stand for.

I've seen the term "missional" associated with the "emerging church" movement, but I assumed that it simply meant the church in mission -- and the definition of "missional church" is pretty standard, and seems to support my original assumption. But no, it seems that it's now something else, and well on its way to becoming estblished as a rival movement, or a spin-off or something.

Tags: theology, theological language, Christianity & culture, gospel and our culture, missiology, emerging church, missional church