The Deepest Motive for Mission
A word from Newbigin
What motivates mission in a postcolonial world?
I was recently reminded of the way many Evangelicals still answer this question: the “unreached people groups” of the world need to hear the gospel. Technical definitions of “unreached” have developed (see the link). People, in other words, are lost and need the opportunity to be saved. Hence missions.
I was raised on a close analogue of this mentality (Churches of Christ not being Evangelical, exactly, but close enough). It is certainly a part of what motivated my youthful commitment to mission work.
There are other theological commitments underpinning this perspective, which I’ve written about previously. These make it exceedingly difficult to shift gears. That’s how theological systems (like other systems) work.
Still, I’ve always been at least a little suspicious of the pomp and circumstance around motivating the church with such claims. Suspicion of pomp and circumstance is a natural endowment of my personality. But that suspicion grew as I committed to serve in urban Latin America, which is on no one’s list of unreached people groups.
At this point in my journey, little of that old perspective remains. Both theological shifts and historical consciousness have led me elsewhere. Not least, the rise of world Christianity in the wake of Western colonialism has provoked questions that few of us, if any, know how to answer well. Granted, missiology has matured, and modes of missionary engagement have improved radically among those who have learned from it. Postcolonial missiology exists. God grant that tribe increase.
At present, I wouldn’t say an increase is the trajectory. I had the strange feeling at Urbana 25, a gathering with impeccable Evangelical credentials and motivations to suit, of being with “my people” for the first time in a long time. There were moments of dissonance, but it was as special as it always has been to gather and worship with people unwaveringly committed to saying yes to mission. And that commitment is, as far as I can tell, still rooted almost entirely in the idea of unreached peoples.
Strangely—at least in comparison with many of my compatriots who have made the theological shift away from this mentality—I find myself no less motivated to encourage and advance world missions. In fact, I feel more motivated than I was as a young man planning his future around a calling to the foreign mission field.
I suspect that my compatriots have shifted away from the unreached-people-group mentality toward no other motivation for missions, or toward motivations too anemic to justify the sacrifice that cross-cultural mission work demands. This explanation is too reductive to be an explanation of much, but I think Western Evangelicals are losing the same battle, albeit slowly. The decline of Western churches, and therefore church budgets, does not suffice to account for the dwindling of the Western missionary endeavor. We’ve historically done far more with far less. The once-dominant motivation for missions has simultaneously become more difficult to defend. Fewer and fewer young people are going to give their lives for it.
My shift has been from that old mentality to a different, deeper motivation for missions—or rather, participation in God’s mission. Happily, at Urbana 25, I was also reminded of a quote from Lesslie Newbigin:
We want to be able to show that we accomplish something, produce results; that we have rescued some perishing souls. I don’t read the New Testament that way. I think that the deepest motive for mission is simply the desire to be with Jesus where he is, on the frontier between the reign of God and the usurped dominion of the devil.1
Newbigin is on my Mount Rushmore of twentieth-century theologians. He is also the forefather of missional theology. The idea of being with Jesus where he is, on the frontier of God’s reign, gets to the heart of missional theology. But I don’t think it has replaced the old missionary fervor for producing results, even among missional church advocates. It should, but it hasn’t.
Let me explain. Missional theology persists despite its many cultured Christian despisers. It’s not going away any time soon. And Newbigin-esque language abounds among its ranks. But part of the pushback is quite practical. The call to live missionally requires not just a small group of missionaries but whole congregations to give their lives for God’s mission.
Most churches are still content, if they support missions, to send those few zealots to pursue results. But they are not about to make their own churches’ lives about the same thing. And why would they? They might be surrounded by unconverted people, but they are not in the midst of an unreached people.
So what about an alternative, deeper motivation? Will churches send missionaries to be with Jesus as the kingdom breaks in, results be damned? Very few. Will churches (not committees, not programs) commit to mission in their own location, with all that entails? Fewer still. Missional ecclesiology faces a serious challenge: it requires a motivation that matches that of missionaries who sacrificed comfort, health, finances, safety, and often life for results. Is participation in God’s mission enough?
My point is this: I think motivation for cross-cultural missions among Western churches will be a strong correlate of the viability of missional churches in the West in the years to come. Those of us in the missional theology world like to talk about alterity, and maybe there is hope for alternative motivations among a minority. But that is not good enough when we’re talking about the reason for the church’s existence. If Western churches cannot accept that participation in God’s mission is a sufficient reason for some people giving everything abroad, they will not accept that motivation as a sufficient reason for their own people giving everything at home. If they do, transformation will follow, and nothing, not even the gates of hell, can stop what comes next.
Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions (Eerdmans, 1994), 129; emphasis added.