Walk Humbly With the Lord

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WALK HUMBLY WITH THE LORD





WALK HUMBLY WITH THE LORD

Church and Mission Engaging Plurality

Edited by

Viggo Mortensen & Andreas Østerlund Nielsen

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Grand Rapids, Michigan / Cambridge, U.K.







II. Christianity in Contexts of Plurality

Beyond the Boundaries: The Church Is Mission 53

Stanley Hauerwas

Mission: Invitation to Community 70

Jan-Olav Henriksen

The Fluid Mission of the Church 74

Niels Henrik Gregersen

The Church in a Multireligious Europe 85

Friedrich W. Graf

On Good Manners and Hospitality: Protestant Liberalism and a

Multireligious Europe 97

Arne Rasmusson

III. Ecclesiologies of Mission — Considerations in Context

The Ecclesiality of Mission in the Context of Empire 105

Bryan Stone

Emerging from the Dark Age Ahead: The Canadian Church

in the Third Millennium 113

Charles J. Fensham

Transforming Ecclesiologies in a Multireligious World 135

F. LeRon Shults

Resisting McDonaldization: Will “Fresh Expressions”of Church Inevitably Go Stale? 150

John Drane

The Missional Church and “Homo Areligiosus” 167

Martin Reppenhagen

A Minority Community of Equality and Difference 184

Helene Egnell

vi

Contents



Pro me in the Age of Authenticity: The Missiological

Significance of “Christ in Us” and “We in Christ” 191

Hans Raun Iversen

The Mission of the Church: To Be a Christian Minority

in Muslim Lands, Wishing for an Embrace 205

Munawar K. Rumalshah

IV. The Future of Missiology

The Future of Missiologies 217

Mika Vähäkangas

Missiology as Vocation 230

Andrew F. Walls

Mission: Understanding Reality 238

Ulrich Dehn

Missional Spirituality in the Contemporary World 247

Jacques Matthey

Out of the Abundance of the Heart: A Missiology

for the Future 265

Viggo Mortensen

The Futures of Missiology: Imaginative Practices and the

Transformation of Rupture 278

Darrell Jackson

Attending to Local and Diverse Communities:

Toward a Theological Learning Community for a Missional Era 300

Patricia Taylor Ellison and Patrick R. Keifert

Theological Formation for Missional Practice 307

Darrell L. Guder

Contributors 313

vii

Contents



Acknowledgments

Our thanks go to all who have contributed to this book for their timely and

well-thought-out analysis and proposals on how to negotiate the present

predicament for the Christian church and mission. When we in Aarhus in-

vited them to the first academic and scholarly celebration of the jubilee forEdinburgh 1910, Church and Mission in a Multireligious Third Millennium,

our proposal was met with enthusiastic support, not only from the partici-

pants in the conference in January 2010 but also from a wider public and

from our sponsors. We want to thank the Research Foundation of the Uni-

versity of Aarhus, the Theological Faculty represented by Dean Carsten Riis,

the Danish Research Council for the Humanities (FKK), the Foundation

Areopagos, and the dioceses Aarhus and Haderslev of the Evangelical Lu-

theran Church in Denmark for their support.

We want to thank the many people who contributed to the successful

completion of the conference — first of all Marlene Jessen, who coordinated

all the organizational details together with members of the organizing com-

mittee: Peter Lodberg, Marie Ramsdal Thomsen, Peter Fischer-Nielsen, Jens

Linderoth, and Jeppe Bach Nikolajsen.

Finally our thanks go to the highly professional editorial team of Wil-

liam B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and to President Bill Eerdmans, Jr.

personally, for once more bestowing trust on the Danes and accepting this

voluminous book for publication.

Viggo Mortensen and Andreas Østerlund Nielsen

viii



Church and Mission Engaging Plurality:

Edinburgh 1910–Aarhus 2010


The pluralization of reality and the world is exuberant and overwhelming.

The sense of an enormous growth in plurality is the single most important

feature that sticks out when we want to describe the global development be-

tween 1910 and 2010. This pluralization has also influenced the missionary movement from Edinburgh 1910 until today. In a world immersed in a pro-

cess of pluralization the Christian church can only proclaim Jesus Christ by

following his example by walking humbly with the Lord. It is time for a new

beginning; confidence must be regained and our theology of mission recon-

sidered. It is the aim of this book to contribute to this by presenting a num-

ber of innovative contributions to the formation of the present missiological

field, essays on church and mission engaging plurality.

This book is organized into four sections. In what follows we will begin

by providing a short introduction to each part,followed by a fuller description.

Approaching the Scene — Realizing Plurality

part i — history and future of the missionary movement

Even though Edinburgh 1910 may not have been all that is now mythologically

ascribed to it, it today stands as a monument for the mission movement of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that spread the seeds of current worldwideChristianity. With the — at times forgotten — exception of the 10/40 window

(the area of the world, 10 degrees to 40 degrees north of the equator, that con-

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tains the largest population of non-Christians), mission has now become

“home policies of a world religion.” But this situation was not reached without

detrimental failure, which renders the call to academics to contribute to unit-

ing sound theology and dynamic vision in strategic thinking of future mission

all the more pressing.

When some church leaders coming out of the Student Christian Movement

in 1910 convened the epoch-making World Missionary Conference in Edin-

burgh, Christianity was very much tied to the Western Hemisphere. Europe

was still the powerhouse of Christianity. Of the 1,215 delegates, only twenty

came from outside Europe: nine from India, four from Japan, three from

China, one from Burma, and one from Korea. And only one single delegatefrom Africa. The young African churches were represented through their

white missionaries.

In 2010, when a similar crowd of people interested in the mission of

the Christian church came together in Edinburgh in commemoration of the

centenary it was quite different. Mirroring the existing global church, it was

the intent of the organizers that the majority of delegates should come from

the South, and should be nonwhite and women. Because that is what hap-

pened in the twentieth century: Christianity, originally so immersed in theWestern culture and civilization and thus allied with the imperial coloniza-

tion, gradually lost this position. Because it developed the vernacular it in-

spired sentiments of national identity and in this indirect manner contrib-

uted to decolonization and made the way for a colossal indigenous Christian

growth. So the history of the twentieth century is a history of Christianity

becoming a global religion and moving south.

Were the delegates of the Edinburgh conference 1910 thus wrong when

they proposed and believed in “the world’s evangelization in this genera-

tion”? Yes and no! The world’s evangelization or Christianization did not

happen. Christianity has barely — measured in numbers — been able to

keep up with the population growth. But in another way they were right

when they predicted a grand future in the world at large, because Christian-

ity became a truly global religion. When Christianity goes global and moves

to the South it changes. The form of Christianity that grows in the South is

another form than the Western one, which means that the present Christian-

ity is a much more diverse religion than it used to be; and it is not easy to say

where the center is. The ultimate growth movement of the twentieth century is the Pentecostal/charismatic movement. Around 1900 there were not more

than a million adherents and now there are more than half a billion; growth

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is predicted to hit one billion around 2030. So 1910 was the last time the

Western missionary movement could claim center stage: “The most vision-

ary of missionary statesmen had not the vaguest intimation that they were at

a historical fault line and that Christianity would soon embark on its course

to become a more widespread and diverse religion than at any other time in

its history. It would be the era of unprecedented missionary surge.”1

Edinburgh 1910 gave birth to an influential trend in the twentieth cen-

tury, the modern ecumenical movement that tried to bring together the differ-

ent churches and church families under the catchword “visible unity.” After a

grand beginning, a series of World Missionary Conferences was also held dur-

ing the century. Many times it was attempted to coordinate the missionary

movement and the ecumenical movement, which had a common origin in themissionary field. The missionary movement was annexed as the Commission

on World Mission and Evangelism and later, at the General Assembly of the

World Council of Churches in New Delhi 1961, it was structurally incorpo-

rated into the WCC. Both movements were children of modernity; when mo-

dernity itself experienced a crisis in the second half of the century, they experi-

enced a similar crisis. Consequently there was much talk of “crisis” and

“winter.” Voices were raised calling for a paradigm shift. The fluid character of

modernity and the fragmentation of postmodernity finally also hit themissional movement. Will the twenty-first century witness a new beginning?

In 2010 there was not only a jubilee conference in Edinburgh; there

were a lot of other events celebrating and reviewing the development since

Edinburgh 1910. At the University of Aarhus the Center for Contemporary

Religion convened a conference, Church and Mission in a Multireligious

Third Millennium, in an attempt to look ahead. The essays in this book were

all presented at this conference. In the invitation to the conference the situa-

tion and the new agenda were described:

It has been documented in several recent studies of religious diversity

that globalization, secularization, and the return of religion lead to plu-

ralization of the religious landscape, the result of which is the reigning

multireligiousness so dominant in Western and other societies. This

multireligiousness has changed the way religions live their lives and op-

erate. Many different religions are in mission; and mission is eventually

from everywhere to everywhere. This situation has given a totally new

3


1. Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford: Ox-

ford University Press, 2008), p. 272.



dynamic as to how religions spread and interact. Especially the Christian

churches have been challenged to adapt to the new situation. A rethink-

ing of the relationship between mission and ecclesiology has here

proved to be crucial. Because the concept of mission has also come un-

der scrutiny from postcolonial studies, and because the study of mission

has been renewed in the direction of intercultural studies or studies in

global theology and world Christianity, the academic study of mission is

entering a new era. This happens as we celebrate the one-hundred-year

anniversary of the World Mission Conference in Edinburgh 1910. The

evangelization of the world was not achieved “in this generation” and

will not be in the next. Although the vision of Edinburgh was never real-

ized, the commitment for a church in mission still stands. The confer-ence will focus on the actual and future challenges for the Christian

church and mission in an era of multireligiousness and will highlight

the following themes:

• Ecclesiology and Mission

• Church Renewal for the Third Millennium

• Church in Cyberspace

• The Future of Missiology

Setting the Stage — Facing Plurality

part ii — christianity in contexts of plurality

How will the mission of God contextualize in the Western world in

(post)postcolonial and multireligious times? One important and inevitable

choice will be between a particularistic ecclesiology like that of Stanley

Hauerwas and protestant liberalism as presented in this volume by Friedrich

Wilhelm Graf. Hauerwas and Graf agree on the public and political art of the

matter. Either Christianity can seek to be appreciated as a sensitive contributor

to peaceful, liberal societies or establish the church as an alternative, pacifist

public. Mission can accordingly be grounded in the universality of individual-

ized humanity (theologically: in creation) or the particularity of the catholic

church (theologically: in Christology). The means are either to permeate plu-

rality or establish an alternative to plurality. This raises the question: What

kinds of churches will that take?

Christianity has of course always been immersed in multicultural environ-

ments, but now this is the situation also in the heartland of Europe, followed

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by a colossal decrease in knowledge and practice of the Christian tradition.

The driving forces behind this development toward diversity and plurality

can among others be identified as:

• Globalization followed by localization

• Urban industrialization and other macro-structural tendencies

• Secularization followed by de-secularization or the return of religion

• Mediatization and marketization and other mid-range structural ten-

dencies

• Individualization and hybridization and other micro-social changes

Plurality is a given fact also in the religious field. Plurality means thatthere is a variety — in this case a variety of religions, confessions, and

worldviews; convictions are therefore experienced as a matter of choice. The

ultimate questions asked by people today often relate to the issue of identity.

Questions such as Who am I? What can I believe? How should I live? are on

people’s minds, and the answer is seldom just to adapt to the heritage of

their fathers and mothers. However, modernization and secularization did

not lead to the replacement of religion but to its revival — and in many dif-

ferent forms. Multireligiousness manifests itself, first, as a competition be-tween distinct historical religions and their claim to possess the truth and,

second, as a syncretistic bricolage of different understandings of faith and,

finally, in the revival of all kinds of quasi-religious phenomena. The culture

may agree with Nietzsche that “God is dead,” but in return we have received

an army of gods and divine manifestations.

Religious diversity is reflected in society in many ways, and plurality

shows itself in different forms. There is first the external plurality that

comes as a consequence of the decisive idea in modernity, the idea of free-

dom of religion. The moment there is freedom of thought, belief, and

speech, people will use this freedom, and the way is paved for religious plu-

rality and plurality in worldviews. It will take some time before the full con-

sequences are known and pluralism flourishes. The growth of plurality

during the past fifty years is due to development in the fields of mission,

migration, and media. Freedom of religion liberates the missionary efforts

of the different religious communities. Migration involves a large degree of

movement of people, and people on the move are often in vulnerable situa-

tions where religious feelings and conduct become more important. Mod-ern media, TV, the Internet, and mobile telephony mean that a wide variety

of religious offers are available everywhere at the same time. This is the

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simple definition of globalization: everything is available at the same time

everywhere.

The second factor is internal plurality, a “pluralism of the mind.” This

is in the spirit of the times and affects us all for better or for worse. It belongs

to modernity and in a sense can be said to be the condition for democracy.

Plurality is basically good and not at all unfamiliar for Christianity.

Christianity is a religion welcoming diversity. There is one God and one sav-

ior; but there are several narratives about this savior. The Gospels and the

biblical writings documenting the salvation that Christians believe in were

all written by different people, who made individual records of what they

heard. Because of this genesis of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation,

Christianity is a truly pluralistic religion. This can also be seen from the way Christianity expands. In a way, it could be said that Christianity is not at all a

religion, but a translation movement. In the words of Lamin Sanneh:

“Christianity is a translated religion without a revealed language . . . without

translation there would be no Christianity or Christians. Translation is the

church’s birthmark as well as its missionary benchmark: the church would

be unrecognizable or unsustainable without it.”2

In order to introduce Christianity to a new nation, the Bible must first

be translated. Everybody concerned with translation knows about the prob-lems encountered in such a process. The conclusion is often that, to convey

the proper meaning of a text, a literal translation must be complemented by

the insight that Christianity necessarily must assume new forms in the new

context to be able to authentically serve its followers. Contextualization —

which everyone agrees is the most important issue for Christianity in gain-

ing a foothold in new areas and cultures — necessarily leads to plurality.

Thus plurality is the order of the day — plurality inside Christianity

and among the religions. Uniformity cannot be the ideal, and it is unlikely

that there will ever be one normative stream of Christianity at the global level.

Christianity will experience very different futures in its various global mani-

festations. The religious encounter happens everywhere and every day. This is

a position not very different from the situation in which Christianity found

itself at the very beginning. This development revitalizes “theology of reli-

gions” as a discipline. How are Christians and Christian churches to encoun-

ter the religious “other”? Christianity is challenged to provide good reasons

for choosing the Christian God. The greatest challenge faced within the inter-

6


2. Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand

Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 97.



religious encounter is to give a renewed witness and a trustworthy testimony

validating the Christian conviction and confession. Other religions also do

intense missionary work, and this challenges Christians and the Christian

churches to be well prepared and ready to give account for their conviction.

Reinventing the Drama — Playing Plurality

part iii — ecclesiologies of mission — considerations in context

Church is mission or mission is church. In any case ecclesiology is intertwined

with missiology. The missio Dei and the use of it in the Missional Church

movement might lead to an “instrumentalization of the church.” An undue fo-cus on the ecclesiasticalness of mission might neglect the search for an authen-

tic — i.e., individual — relation to God, “pro me.” In light of mission both

ecclesia and ecclesiology are no doubt to be contextually transformed and

transforming, and all kinds of philosophical and theological questions arise as

a result. Instructed by the failures of past mission endeavors and the fall of

Christendom, many recent proposals in ecclesiology and missiology are clearly

marked by the humility and sensibility characteristic of the notion missio Dei.

Where Christians are a minority they are forced to take part in mission by sim-ply “wishing for an embrace.” In post-Christendom settings the church is better

advised to seek self-imposed self-limitation in order to avoid use of power and

coercion. In a context of plurality, difference and otherness become crucial

matters. These can either be recognized as a difference between church and

world essential for the ability of the church to witness to the story of God, or ap-

preciated as a diversity in and surrounding the church, and fostering an atti-

tude of listening and dialogue.

Globally we are witnessing some ecclesiological megatrends.

• The traditional confessional churches are in decline, sometimes dra-

matically.

• Individual congregations that very consciously put all their efforts and

money in one direction can experience a moderate success.

• There is an overwhelming worldwide dominance of independent

churches, often buying in to a prosperity gospel.

• The most important megatrend is growth — not in agreement, as they expected in the ecumenical movement — but in syncretism between

different Christian as well as other religious traditions.

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These megatrends are the results of transformations of which the most

important is that Christianity is, as already mentioned, moving to the South.

As this becomes true, it is natural to ask: What will happen to Christianity in

the North?

What makes the development in Europe quite dramatic is the enor-

mous loss of knowledge and practice of Christian tradition during the past

fifty years. Whereas religious/Christian commitment was previously found

in many places, in the church, in the school, in society, and in the home, a

consequence of secularization is that religion has become a private matter

and Christianity merely a church matter. The development can be seen as a

movement

• from orthodoxy to orthopraxy

• from division of confessions to division of religions

• from defense of secularization to defense of faith

• from absoluteness to universality to particularity

• from “fixed” forms of religion to “loose” spirituality

• from official and professional thinking to authenticity and presence

• from conversion and re-Christianization to a comeback of the witness

• from habit to choice

In a pluralistic society the traditional communities break down and

the individual is left quite alone and unprotected. As the segmentation con-

tinues, individualization becomes more pronounced, and thus it is more dif-

ficult to outline the commonalities that can function as bridge builders.

Christian mission therefore has two options for addressing this new

situation constructively: to offer community as a critical alternative to indi-

vidualism or to strengthen and equip the individual to be better able to cope

with a still more complex reality. This empowerment might in the end help

individuals unite with other people and enable them to create new commu-

nities. One cannot imagine a future for humankind without community and

communion.

Options for ecclesial reaction to the current developments seem to

include:

• arguing from Christianity’s historical role and cultural influence in or-

der to preserve and revive what remains• offering to be the civic religious actor by lowering the traditional dog-

matic identity markers in order to continue to embrace the nation

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• developing committed missional communities in order to act as a cat-

alyst for personal discipleship

When culture is secularized and the churches marginalized, it is natu-

ral to assume that this is the beginning of the end of Christianity. And this

assumption seems to be right when talking about established Christianity in

its Constantinian shape. But there are signs that this situation can develop

into a renewal movement within the church. Such a renewal movement

could mean a final farewell to Constantinian Christianity and to the concept

that this is the ideal model of the church’s position in society. A static church

model like that does not fit well with the fluid modernity and dynamic situa-

tion of the church in today’s globalized society. It is therefore necessary toregain an understanding of the church as a missional community, which is

constantly on the move, bringing a message that it finds vital to pass on. This

includes the never-ending job of dealing with the fundamental issue of what

the gospel is and how it is to be preached. What is the aim and practice of the

church according to the gospel? How can the church adequately react to the

current post-Christian situation? In other words, the cultural captivity that

the churches have gotten into must be abandoned, and it must be seriously

reconsidered — in the light of the missional experiences of the early Chris-tian congregations — who Jesus truly is, in order to spread the gospel. Just as

the reformers claimed that the church should be constantly reformed, the

advocates of the missional church claim that the church always needs con-

version to do mission.

This renewal movement in post-Constantinian/post-Christendom

contexts might have to materialize as a church in “exile,” with Christians re-

alizing that they are pilgrims and “resident aliens.” Paramount still, however,

is the missio Dei perspective — that we are sent, not in order to save the mes-

sage and save ourselves until the “end time,” but to the world.

Happy End? — Rationalizing Plurality

part iv — the future of missiology

Missiology is a discipline in the making. Its object — mission — has bad press,

and there is no consensus about the actual content of this object. Missiology is

stretched between two “publics”: the secular academia and the church; further-more, specialization and diversification threaten to splinter the discipline. At

the same time global experiences query the Enlightenment reductionism of

9




Western missiology. What will the future bring? As the trend to do missiology

as historical and empirical descriptive studies increasingly dissatisfies, it seems

that the outcome will be a polarization — following the opposite paths laid out

by Graf and Hauerwas in this volume — as the discipline regains its self-

confidence. Either local missiologies will follow a secularistic normativity and

evolve into interreligious studies, or they will establish symbiosis with ecclesial

mission praxis as missional formation and facilitator of learning communities.

However, both will — though separate undertakings with incompatible ends —

benefit from mutual criticism, which is the hoped-for outcome of this work.

In missiology a multiplicity of reactions to the exploding cultural, political,

and religious plurality can be observed. Sometimes “the others” have beenconsidered as either false or subordinate in relation to Christianity’s truth

claim; at other times they have been included in the Christian system of

thought. The theological typology is unfortunate, as the most used terms —

“exclusivism,” “inclusivism,” and “pluralism” — are better used for demean-

ing others than for describing actual positions. The term “exclusivism” in-

sinuates fundamentalism, “inclusivism” syncretism or imperialism, and

“pluralism” relativism. This speaks in favor of some hesitation, taking the

time to actually listen to the various positions and to sort out anew the in-volved issues. Whether this will lead to “Christocentric pluralism,” “univer-

salistic particularism,” or quite different designations is still unsettled.

When a society lacks consensus regarding fundamental orientation or

organization, each group — and each individual — is called to give account

for the convictions on which his or her acts are based. Religion cannot be a

purely private matter, but must always be a factor in social discourse. The

challenge facing theology now is to develop a theology open to plurality, i.e., a

theology that can embrace plurality without indulging in fundamentalism,

syncretism, or relativism; a theology able to enter the net of relations charac-

terized by plurality and formulate and speak out of a new identity in order to

gain the communicative competence that takes the tension between plurality

and particularity seriously, while at the same time making one’s own point of

view plausible compared to other points of view. Plurality does not necessar-

ily dispute the unity in Christ. The core of the Christian faith becomes the

faithful witness. This testimony is based on the firm conviction that the gos-

pel message is true but that the testimony cannot by itself convince others of

this truth. From the perspective of theology, only God can do so.The overall present multireligious situation calls us back to the center.

This is also the call that is heard in the current ecumenical endeavors. Theol-

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ogy must once again return to its sources, which are the Scriptures and Jesus.

Now must be the time for rereading the Scriptures and repeating Bonhoef -

fer’s well-known question: “Who is Christ for us today?” When we are called

to the center, Christ, we are at the same time embedded in a story that pro-

claims a universal hope: that this is meant to be for everybody. That is the

point of departure for Christian mission: “All authority in heaven and on

earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”

(Matt. 28:18-19).

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