Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Home Missions
Peter Leithart writing at First Things recently penned what amounts to an extended metaphor concerning missions:
I think it is because we use our own culture to hide from Christ. That's right, we hide behind culture rather than have a genuine confrontation with Jesus. We let the culture stand in for Him.
We keep forgetting the essential ministry of Christ - it was not to change culture, it was not to change behavior, it was not to change "the world" - IT WAS TO CHANGE US. We keep getting things a little backward. Christ changes us, then by simply being those new creatures, our behavior and our culture will change in order to conform to our new nature. But we don't want to change, we want everyone else to change, so we go about trying to change all that stuff.
Next time you have an urge to change anything other than yourself, start with confession of the urge. Drop into self-examination, find out where you failed.
If we all did that, the world really would change.
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Time was when Christian missions occurred “over there.” Every now and then, the missionary would show up at church dressed like a time traveler, to show slides of exotic places and to enchant the stay-at-homes with tales about the strange diet and customs of the natives. Foreign missions still happen, but that model seems like ancient history. With the new immigration and the increased ease of travel and communication, the mission field has moved into the neighborhood, and every church that has its eyes open is asking every day how to do “foreign missions.”The metaphor is great and I really agree with it, but as I read his introduction just quoted, I could not help but wonder why we insist on the typical slash and burn mission that is referenced?
That poses a problem. Missions has always been the place where the bookish question of “Christ and culture” turns practical. Now, at the same time that missions has become a challenge “right here,” multiculturalists question the very legitimacy of missions. Since the gospel always comes clothed in culture, how, on the premises of multiculturalism, can missionary work be anything but a veiled form of cultural imperialism? From Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, missionaries are depicted as tools of Western hegemony. But, if we’re all missionaries now, are we all cooperating in genocide?
Under the regime of multiculturalism, mission efforts face a cruel dilemma. Either missionaries can preach an uncompromising gospel that will cause everything to fall apart, or they can soft pedal the gospel of God’s judgment and grace in order to permit non-Christian cultures to survive. But is the situation as dire as this? Does the Bible perhaps offer a model for re-conceiving the question in a way that avoids the unhappy choice between compromise and cultural cataclysm?
The answer, I think, is yes. The Bible provides a theology of missions that is neither accommodation to existing culture nor total war that leaves the existing culture in smoking ruins. Mission is more like cultivation, a process of nurturing the hidden but unforeseen potential within a culture. Mission, we might say, is like water. Tertullian said, Nunquam sine aqua Christus—Christ is never without water. Neither is the Church; neither is her mission.
I think it is because we use our own culture to hide from Christ. That's right, we hide behind culture rather than have a genuine confrontation with Jesus. We let the culture stand in for Him.
We keep forgetting the essential ministry of Christ - it was not to change culture, it was not to change behavior, it was not to change "the world" - IT WAS TO CHANGE US. We keep getting things a little backward. Christ changes us, then by simply being those new creatures, our behavior and our culture will change in order to conform to our new nature. But we don't want to change, we want everyone else to change, so we go about trying to change all that stuff.
Next time you have an urge to change anything other than yourself, start with confession of the urge. Drop into self-examination, find out where you failed.
If we all did that, the world really would change.
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