Tena tātou katoa e te iwi mīhana… (Greetings to all the people in mission)

This month’s whakataukī is: “Ka mua ka muri”  (shortform for, “my past is my present is my future”).

This Māori saying has become somewhat cliché in my experience. But that doesn’t make it any less potent as a perspective. It is often cited as “walking backwards into the future” to describe the fact that as we walk into the future we should see (and learn from) the past.

Oceanic navigators retained a sense of simultaneous existence between their place of departure, their present location, and their destination.

A Western perspective argues that immediately after the future reveals itself in the present it becomes the past, an abstract series of static snapshots in our memory. Not so for indigenous peoples. In the book, Wayfinding Leadership, Chellie Spiller explains how the Oceanic navigators retained a sense of simultaneous existence between their place of departure, their present location, and their destination. In the navigator’s mind, their waka is a fixed point and it is the world that passes by them. With this understanding, rather than going to the destination, it actually comes to them. It is a perspective of becoming, rather than begoing.

We know the ‘what’ and ‘who’ and ‘how’ of all that has gone before us. We do not know that which is approaching, but we do know that we can make adjustments as information is received because we know the destination and the ‘why’. For the navigator (as humorously seen in the movie Moana) that means taking stock of the shifting sun, stars, wind, wave structures, tidal pull and… water temperature.

For us in missions it’s being constantly aware of the forces at work around us in the world to discern the times and know how God’s people should respond (cf.1 Chron.12:32). We need great discernment in order to make adjustments so we can more effectively carry out our great commission.

At the 2017 Missions Interlink AGM I brought a devotional along these lines, broken in two parts with declarative sung worship bridging them. The transcript of my address, “Our Witness”, can be downloaded in article form here. I pointed back to the fact that God’s mission prevails even though the witness of other gods such as Artemis has long since ceased. My address was an attempt to set the scene for historian Roshan Allpress, Principal of Laidlaw College, to help us understand better the origins of the modern missionary movement with its roots in colonial evangelicalism of the 18th and 19th Centuries and it’s connection with the founding of what we now know as Aotearoa New Zealand (AoNZ).

It was a packed 38min presentation in which Roshan identified some fascinating connections that ultimately led to early missionary involvement in AoNZ. You can download here an audio recording of Roshan’s presentation. We need to understand from whence we’ve come and the innovations that set us on the course to where we are, so that we can make necessary adjustments and create new innovations to navigate the future as it comes to us.

And we need to do that together in order to #stayonmission. 👊🏼

Ma te Atua e manaaki koutou (may you all experience the very best things from God),

Jay