While the following article is over twenty years old, and the Church of the Brethren in recent years has moved toward a better concept of missionary work, the same discussion still happens. Many in leadership now speak of “mission” (singular) rather than the older “missions” (plural). –Web Editor
Editorial
May/June, 1980
Volume 15, Number 3
A pastor from one of our districts asked a member of the World Ministries Commission to supply him with the names of some missionaries that his local congregation could support. One of the missionaries that was being supported had retired, and they hoped to contribute financially to the support of another in a similar evangelistic role. The staff member said, “We really don’t have anyone to offer; we don’t have that kind of program anymore.”
A check in the current Bethany Seminary Catalog reveals that not only is there no “division of missions” (as there is, for example, at the Evangel Seminary in Springfield, Missouri), but there is not even one course devoted exclusively to missions. What has happened? Why has the Church lost its older-type missionary vision and its burning zeal? One big reason is that our church leaders have adopted a new philosophy of missions, and have embraced some concepts that stifle the missionary imperative.
It really all started when the joint assembly of the Divisions of Home and Foreign Missions of the National Council of Churches met in 1959 under the slogan “From Missions to Mission.” The assembly encouraged the elimination of the traditional American Protestant missions boards, and the creation of new ecumenical world mission machinery which was to operate through the World Council of Churches (See editorial, Christianity Today, August 1, 1960). Since that time the word “missions” has been redefined.
The older view of “missions” was concentrated on verbal proclamation. The word “missions” spoke of the proclamation of the Good News to the nonChristian world. The message was one of pardon through the work which Jesus Christ accomplished on the Cross. The traditional image of the missionary was that of the preacher, who along with his proclaiming of the message, ministered to the healthcare and educational needs of the people. The more recent word “mission” is viewed as the whole historical process of the renewal of society. In other words, everything God is doing in the world is “mission.” Any activity of the church – a sit-in in favor of school integration – is said to be “participating in mission.” The word “mission” has become a synonym for Christian involvement in the socio-political movement which aims to create a new world society.
The message featured in the May/June, 1980 issue of the BRF WITNESS is an attempt to explain some of the concepts that lie behind “the shifting focus in missions.”
–H. S. M.
The Shifting Focus in Missionary Philosophy
By Harold S. Martin
Modern missions are usually dated from William Carey who went to India in 1793. For Brethren, the era of missions to nonChristian lands began in 1895 when Wilbur and Mary Stover and Bertha Ryan were sent to India.
The Brethren were zealous about missions from the beginning. Alexander Mack traveled up and down the Rhine Valley – even south into Switzerland – to preach the Gospel. The stories of pioneer Brethren preachers such as Elder George Wolfe should be known by every member of our Brethren churches. Wilbur Stover, more than any other person, popularized foreign missions among the Brethren. He traveled many miles and preached countless sermons to persuade the Brethren that “the first great work of the church is missions.”
The church today needs to recognize that her first task is the proclamation of the Gospel. There needs to be a loving concern for those who have not yet learned to know Jesus Christ as a personal Saviour, or who know Him imperfectly. After all, if Jesus is the only door to salvation, heaven, and eternal life -then all those depending on any other means of salvation are hopelessly lost (John 10:9; Acts 4:12). Thus it becomes tremendously important that everyone hears about Jesus Christ and His power to save.
At the 1978 Annual Conference, a query from the Atlantic Northeast District called for a more aggressive home and world mission program. The 1979 Annual Conference Report on the query includes the following sentence: “The World Ministries Commission understands and appreciates the concerns of the Query and is working to incorporate its values insofar as present mission philosophy and budget allow.” (See page 577, Annual Conference Minutes, 1979). However, the Annual Conference delegate body was not satisfied with General Board’s answer, and referred the query to a committee for further study. Speakers from the delegate body “called for an evangelistic thrust in addition to programs that emphasize indigenization and mutuality” (Seattle 79–Conference Journal Wrapup). Part of General Board’s answer said that the World Ministries Commission “is working to incorporate its values insofar as present mission philosophy allows.” The question is: What is present mission philosophy?
The number of Brethren missionaries has greatly declined over the past thirty-five years. Part of this was due to the closed doors in China and the limited missionary presence permitted in India. But a more far-reaching reason for the decline has been a new attitude toward the primary mission of the church. A writer in the Messenger describes the post World War I I period and says, “During this period we began to shift our mission focus from personal conversion to social justice and human rights, and our service focus from relief and rehabilitation to economic and social development” (December, 1976, page 27).
There are some Brethren who have not grasped the depth of the real issue between the ecumenical concept of mission and the older biblical concept of missions. They believe it is a harmless matter of getting the proper balance between the personal and social aspects of salvation – between proclamation and service. They hope that someday the pendulum will swing again in their direction. But such an analysis is far too superficial. The real issue is that the ecumenical movement now has another Jesus, another spirit, and another gospel (2 Corinthians 11:4). We want to examine some of the charges often leveled at the older missionary programs and some of the components that are basic to the new concept of mission.
1. CHARGES LEVELED AT THE OLDER MISSIONARY PROGRAMS
By “missions” we have traditionally meant “the business of sending out particular members of the body of Christ from any given culture and geographic area – to another cultural group in the same or in a distant geographical area – for the purpose of proclaiming the Gospel and discipling believers.”
The early missionaries thought of the Gospel as a message which centered around the atonement as the substitutionary act of Christ – His blood being the only means of saving men and women from everlasting torment.
Those who have adopted the more recent “mission” philosophy say that the early missionaries practiced a colonial–type of paternalism and attempted to westernize the peoples to whom they had gone. These charges have not generally been true.
(a) Westernization
The thinking runs like this: “Missionaries from the West have attempted to destroy the cultures of the East and Latin American countries, and to impose their Western culture on the natives. Such missionaries should go home and take their ideas along with them.”
Most of the missionaries in the past two centuries have come from the West. However, many of the most able missionaries in the earlier years of the modern missionary movement, were people who “indigenized.” They adopted the culture of the people to whom they went as far as possible, and sought to apply the Gospel in that cultural context. Robert Morrison and John Williams were outstanding examples of this.
Even David Livingstone (who hoped to open Africa to commerce in order to root out the slavery practice), would not practice his Western medicine without getting the approval of the African witch doctors whom he treated as colleagues. The Interdenominational China Inland Mission required that “missionaries would wear Chinese dress, and as far as possible identify themselves with the Chinese people.” Later, when converts needed fellowship, missionaries did tend to organize the new Christians after the pattern of the church units they had known in their homeland, just as the early Jewish-Christian missionaries organized the first congregations in the Greco-Roman world on the pattern of the synagogues they had known in Palestine.
However, it is true that any person in any culture anywhere who embraces the Gospel of Jesus Christ thereby accepts patterns of life that stand in opposition to many of the practices of his native culture. Christian missionaries did much to eliminate the superstitions and inhuman practices supported by pagan religious beliefs – the murder of twins, burning a widow alive on her husband’s funeral pyre, etc. See “Social Concern in Christian Missions” in Christianity Today, June 18, 1976 for a detailed account of how missionaries helped natives to become more fully human.
The later missionaries were expected, by the very nature of their skills, to bring to people the advantages of medical, educational, agricultural, and industrial know-how from the West. In the meantime (completely apart from the missionary presence) Western businessmen, commercial interests, and technologists continued to infiltrate the East at an increasing rate. The missionaries are really not to blame for steps taken by other nations toward Westernization. The tides of culture have always been on the move, and the more aggressive cultures have often influenced and changed the more passive ones. Cultural changes would have occurred even if missionaries had never gone to overseas countries. Business, political, and technological pressures have impelled Third World cultures to take steps toward Westernization.
(b) Paternalism
The word “paternalism” speaks of the principle of governing or controlling a group of people in a manner that suggests the authority of a father over his children. Ecumenical leaders today seem to think of the older foreign missions, and present-day activities of the independent mission boards, as a kind of “religious imperialism.”
Some of the young church leaders overseas are becoming sensitive to the domination over them by white missionaries, and speak of a “moratorium” on missionaries. A leader in the Coptic Evangelical Church of Egypt put it this way: “We would like to go to heaven with the help of brothers. But if you want us to go to heaven by being our masters, we prefer to go to hell” (page 11, What Next in Mission?, Paul Hopkins, Westminster, 1977).
It is true that some missionaries have fallen for the temptation of staying on the scene too long after planting a church, and have not moved on to plant new churches. They have tried to maintain a tight control over the established church. In such cases missionary boards need to relocate the missionary personnel. Most missionaries, however, even those serving under the auspices of the independent mission agencies, do not dominate and lord it over the people they are trying to reach. There are many missionaries who are truly honest, sacrificial, tactful, Spirit-led, and charitable.
It is true that the rise of nationalism in many parts of the world has created a new international climate. Proud peoples who were long living under some form of colonial rule, are beginning to assert the values of their own cultures, and insisting that they must create their own future. They are not eager to have people from some other country move in and tell them what to believe and how to live. That does not mean however that Christian missionaries should not attempt to share the message of eternal life through Jesus Christ with such people.
(c) Salvation
The warm message of the true Christian missionary is the truth that God’s Son bore the penalty for man’s sin in His own body on the Cross, and that through His atoning death and resurrection, He freely offers reconciliation with God to the world of sinners. But at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Bangkok in 1973, salvation was described as “the peace of the people in Vietnam, independence in Angola, justice and reconciliation in Northern Ireland.” The emphasis by the ecumenical church leaders of our day is being placed on human liberation rather than upon a spiritual new birth, and thus the missionary with the message of eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ is irrelevant.
Many ecumenical churchmen are attempting to interpret biblical salvation in terms of the liberation of the oppressed. The Bible proof-text for this view is found in Luke 4:18. The Scripture says, “He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed” (RSV). It is assumed by the liberationists that the poor, the captives, and the blind were those who were materially and literally poor and blind and bound.
It is true that during His ministry, Jesus opened the eyes of the blind, and certainly the blind should arouse our Christian compassion today. But this example of Jesus can hardly betaken as an instruction for us to perform similar miraculous cures today.
Concerning the poor, it is a well known fact that “the poor” in the Old Testament were not just the needy, but the pious whose hope and trust were in God. The Beatitude ‘which says “Blessed are the poor in spirit” cannot possibly be understood to teach that material poverty is a condition of receiving God’s kingdom.
And what about the captives? There is no evidence that Jesus literally emptied the prisons of Palestine. In fact, the prisoner we hear most about (John the Baptist), was left in prison and was executed! Would it not have been an act of courage on the part of Jesus to deliver John the Baptist, if “proclaiming release to the captives” meant literally emptying the prisons of the land?
What Jesus did do, and what He described in Luke 4:18, was the act of delivering people from the spiritual bondage of sin. Certainly, material poverty and physical blindness and unjust imprisonment are conditions that should incite us to bring relief for those who suffer in these ways -but deliverance from these things is not the salvation for which Christ died and arose again – in order to secure deliverance for mankind.
For many, the grand old word “salvation” has no eternal, spiritual dimension. “Salvation” is a “this world-only” deliverance from social, economic, and political oppression. The word “salvation” to the liberationists means “God’s intervention in human events, which turns world history into salvation history by overcoming evil powers primarily through political means.” The word “salvation,” and many other timehonored theological words, have been given new and secularized meanings. They use our vocabulary but they don’t use our dictionary!
We have seen some of the accusations leveled at the older missionary program; we want to look now at some of the ingredients that are basic to the new concept of mission which is being advocated today.
2. COMPONENTS THAT ARE BASIC TO THE NEW MISSION CONCEPT
Recent materials coming out of Elgin present a strange” idea of “mission.” The number-one objective for the Church of the Brethren mission program is the fight for social justice and liberation on behalf of people who are oppressed in various ways. Much material could be quoted from a number of documents to illustrate the revolutionary political approach to missions which is now being advanced.
The issue is not personal vs. social gospel. Those of us who are conservative and evangelical in belief are caricatured as “people whose only passion is saving souls (moving into an overseas community and making occasional evangelistic raids into it) – and who are concerned about developing a personal and legalistic piety – with little or no concern about changing society.” This is an outdated accusation used as a whipping boy for those who hold to the fundamentals of the faith. It is simply not a true statement.
What then is the real issue in missions as many of us see it today? It is that our Church of the Brethren leaders have adopted a completely new understanding of mission with the following basic components.
(a) Mission does not proceed from Christ’s Great Commission to His Church, but rather, from the sovereign activity of God in the world.
God, through a series of interventions and revolutionary acts, is leading the world toward its ultimate goal. God is slowly moving the world toward a state of prosperity for mankind. This is “salvation.” God’s intervention in world events turns world history into salvation history by overcoming evil powers. God is active in the great revolutionary movements of our time -in the fight for racial equality, in the attempt to liberate women, and in the struggle to eliminate hunger, poverty, and injustice in the world. To be Christian then, and to be in mission, we must desire the new and must actively participate in the change.
Those who believe in biblical missions, rather than humanistic missionary strategy, look to the Commission given by Jesus Christ in Matthew 28:19-20 as the mandate for their work. The command to “go into all the world” is one with which we are all familiar. The night may soon come when no man can work. Is it possible that thousands will go out into a lost eternity -not because they couldn’t be saved, or wouldn’t be saved, or shouldn’t be saved – but because we don’t care, or if we do care, we don’t care very much? There are yet vast multitudes to be reached with the Gospel message. Countless villages must hear the Word of God. Numerous tribes must have the message in their native tongue. The renaissance of Hinduism and Islam is helping to keep a firm hold on many densely populated areas of the world. Shintoism and Buddhism show no signs of yielding to Christianity. Animism still has a grip on millions of people. Christians must not be disobedient to the heavenly mandate (Matthew 28:19-20).
(b) The idea of God’s presence being in the Church in some special way is a heathen idea — like Baal in the Old Testament – a god in residence.
The new theory is that the church is a part of the world. The only difference between the church and the world, is that because of its knowledge of the saving goal of history, the church now marches ahead of the rest of humanity. The demarcation between the saved and the lost is rejected. Universalism is often accepted. The reasoning goes like this: Either God could not or would not save all persons. If He could not, He is not sovereign; if He would not, then God is not totally good. The new universalism says that it is not necessary to speak of eternal life and eternal death when men are confronted with the Gospel – since all will ultimately and finally be redeemed. The cry of the ecumenical mission boards is that now in this age we go to proclaim that Jesus Christ is “Lord over all men.” We go – not to take Jesus to people, but “to find the Christ who is already there.” The writer in Church of the Brethren Agenda says, “Since Christ is the Lord of all life, everyone already has a relationship with Him, although many people have no awareness of His presence” (September 10, 1971).
Most of us in the Church of the Brethren believe that for every responsible person, there is either eternal life (in Christ), or eternal condemnation (apart from Christ)–and that it is selfish and antisocial to present a ministry that does not take into account the whole man. However, according to the new “mission” philosophy, all men will eventually become a new humanity in Jesus Christ, and for the Church to claim to be a body of called out saved persons, is the height of idolatry.
(c) The new missionary philosophy puts the various religions on the same level, and thus the need for seeking for conversions is eliminated.
For a growing number of people at the policymaking levels of the Church of the Brethren, the focus in missions is shifting away from confrontation between Christian and non-Christian, and toward cooperation between Christians and persons of “other living faiths.” In our missions promotional literature, conversion to Jesus Christ is noticeable by its absence.
Historic Christianity has always insisted that the gods of other religions are mere idols (Psalm 96:5). The Bible teaches clearly that Jesus Christ if the only way to heaven (Acts 4:12; John 14:6), and that all who die without trusting His sacrifice for the forgiveness of sin, are headed for eternal destruction. The early Brethren missionaries regarded the nonChristian religions as false religions. They believed that Hindus and Buddhists and Moslems were in bondage to Satan, and that they could escape the wrath of God only by repenting of their heathen practices and accepting Jesus Christ. See Christian Heroism in Heathen Lands, Brethren Publishing House, 1914.
The cry today is that Christians must find ways to live together with persons of other faiths, and find ways to resolve the fundamental human problems that threaten the very survival of humanity itself. This is what the “World Conference on Religion and Peace” was all about. The Church of the Brethren representative to the Conference described the platform in the January, 1980 Messenger.
These have been some of the basic components that lie behind “the new look” for missions philosophy today.
The reporter describing events at Seattle in 1979, says: “There is a great gap between the official mission philosophy of the denomination, and the philosophy of the people in the pews” (Messenger, August, 1979). That is indeed a very true statement. Our people are being led deeply into the whole humanistic, revolutionary philosophy of missions. It is the conviction of the BRF that we ought not support a concept of mission which is distorted and is not directed toward the conversion of men and women to faith in Jesus Christ.
The real question is, “What does God command the Church to do regarding the multitudes who have no knowledge of Christ?” Our Commander-in-Chief says, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believes and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believes not shall be damned” (Mark 16:15-16). Our missionary outreach must show a concern for the eternal salvation of all persons, and the temporal well-being of the human family – and in precisely that order. If soul-saving, disciple-building evangelism is a major part of our mission activity, then we urge commission leaders and curriculum writers and Elgin staff persons to say it and print it and publicize it and keep on saying it – instead of subjecting our people to a steady flow of sociological and theological bafflegab!
