Rethinking Christian Mission in This Pandemic Time

If you’ve ever refinished an old but beautiful wooden table, you know what hard work it can be—but how great the reward is! It takes time, dedication, and elbow grease, but if you persevere in stripping away the aged, distorting layers of varnish, you will see the beauty of the creator’s original intention.

The First Era of Christian Mission –First to Fourth Century (from the bottom-up)

In a similar manner, I believe that successive eras of history distort our understanding of the God’s mission to the world. In fact, if we divided up the history of the Church in mission into three major segments, we would see that from the time of the persecution and scattering of the Early Church in Acts, chapter 8 in the first century C.E. (Christian Era) until roughly the early fourth century, the Good News of Jesus Christ was carried primarily by refugees, migrants, and persecuted Christians.

When these “Christ-bearers” arrived in a new community as refugees, they found that, as foreigners, they were often at the bottom of the social hierarchy. But they “ministered from the margins” in the way of the One who washed his disciples’ feet and, according to tradition, God’s Word was thus introduced throughout the known world from Spain (St. James) to Egypt (St. Mark) to India (St. Thomas).

The Second Era of Christian Mission – Fourth to Fifteenth Century (from the top-down)

The Four Evangelists by Jacob Jordeens (1593-1678)In the second era of mission history (fourth to fifteenth centuries), the Gospel was transmitted in Europe primarily from the top-down: the chieftains of the Franks, Slavs, Anglo-Saxons, and other tribes were converted (sometimes by military defeat) and then decreed Christianity to be the new religion of their kingdoms. Mass conversions, state-sponsored churches, and, often, coercive mission by the powerful towards the weak were the hallmarks of this era when Christianity advanced to the march of national armies.

The Third Era of Mission –Fifteenth to Twentieth Century (making others just like us)

Europe’s transformation of the world’s economy and the global political map was the primary movement in mission history’s third era from the late fifteenth century until the 1960s. Most students of mission recall that the modern missionary movement grew up hand in hand with the colonial movement. In fact, most observers of the period would have had difficulty separating the two: indigenous people saw the missionary priests and evangelists, doctors and educators, as colonial agents.

But as detailed in Willie James Jennings’ masterful, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, the beginnings of the North Atlantic slave trade and Europe’s need to portray colonial mission as noble—to theologically justify the theft of indigenous lands and the trafficking of millions of human beings—also led to the racialization of mission whereby mission was an activity that sought to improve persons of color by making them more like the white colonizers and missionaries.

Because, the reasoning went, they spoke “dialects” not languages; they believed in “superstition” rather than religion; they were “primitive,” and we were civilized. The blatant ethnocentrism and nascent assumptions of white supremacy, Jennings argues, begin here in the era of European colonial mission.

At its best, of course, colonial mission extended the Church of Jesus Christ by placing highly dedicated Western missionaries in communities across the global South where their shared life together transformed all of them and sowed the seeds of the multicultural, polyglot movement that is global Christianity today. But at its worst, mission in the colonial era not only flowed hierarchically from the top down, from colonizer to colonial subject, it sowed other seeds as well—racist assumptions about who knows best in discerning God’s mission.

The mission of Jesus in the Twenty-First Century (simply serving others well)

La Salette Sisters and Fathers with laity at Mass on the Holy Mountain in FranceHow can we see the beauty of the Creator’s original intention in reaching out in love and mercy to fallen humanity? An urgent task of mission today is to strip away the many layers of varnish that have accumulated over the centuries of mission history and that distort our view of God’s mission. Because mission in the way of Jesus Christ is best engaged in from the kneeling position as servants. It flows most naturally from below—as mission from the margins of society.

Any missionary will attest to two truths. First, that it was when they were at their weakest that they saw God move most powerfully. And second, that God’s mission is profoundly mutual: most missionaries say they were blessed much more by the people they were sent to help than any good they might have done.

Yet these missional realities can be hidden by the distorting colonial narrative that foregrounds the Western missionary, upstaging the God of Love. It is imperative that we restore the lost beauty of God’s surprising, bottom-up mission. This is the task of decolonizing Christian Mission today.