Room For The New
Tena tātou katoa e te iwi mīhana… (Greetings to all the people in mission),
The whakataukī (Māori proverb) for this post is: “Tungia te ururua, kia tupu whakaritorito, te tupu o te harakeke.” [Get rid of the overgrowth and the new flax shoots will spring forth.]. This proverb is about the process of change—remove the old to let the new flourish. It should not be interpreted generationally, as Māori culture maintains deep respect for elders, but it does speak to change of roles and functions, and allowing the young room to sprout and flourish. It is also a metaphor for adapting to environmental/social changes and new ideas.
Free-market global capitalism has spectacularly failed.
In his May 14 article in The Correspondent, Dutch historian Rutger Bregmen quotes from Milton Friedman’s 1982 book, Capitalism & Freedom… “Only a crisis (actual or perceived) produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around”. Friedman is best known as the architect of the neo-liberal theory of economics (think: free markets and globalisation—it manifested as ‘Rogernomics’ in Aotearoa New Zealand). AD2020 marks the dramatic end of this economic era. By all accounts, Bregmen argues, free-market global capitalism has spectacularly failed.
As I write, we are watching the USA collapse into chaos as the Black Lives Matter movement found its tipping point with the death in custody of George Floyd, in the context of a crippling pandemic and an accelerating trade war with China; even as the President lauded a Billionaire’s recyclable rocket launch into space and mobilizes a militarized response to protests. As COVID-19 passes the 6.5 million infections mark as one of the biggest killers of 2020, we are living in strange times indeed. With reference to the Australian bushfires that kicked off this year, the old overgrowth is burning, the new has room to flourish.
Missions is forever shifting because God is forever moving.
What of missions? My days (and nights) are consumed by chasing leads to potential answers to that question. It’s like chasing a mirage. It always has been and probably always will be. “Like chasing the wind” says the ancient teacher of Ecclesiastes. Missions is forever shifting because God is forever moving. Jesus knew this when he warned, “people will not say here it is or there it is” (Luke 17:21), because the Kingdom of God is within (or among) the People of God. So missions shifts according to the needs of the emerging people of God. Missions is humans furthering the purposes (mission) of God in a particular context, beyond the influence of a local church. That can take many forms but should ultimately result in God being glorified and humans, their communities and their environment flourishing—shalom.
Taking Lausanne 1974 as marker, the Evangelical concept of missions has grown in a particularly narrow way, under a particular eschatology, with a particular concept of how the Kingdom of God is “expanded”. For 220+ years the central Scripture has been Matthew 28:18-20 or what became known as “The Great Commission”. As I’ve written elsewhere (most recently here), I believe a new era of Evangelical missions needs to emerge for a post-(you name it) era, rooted in John 17:18-25, which I like to call “The Great Commitment”.
In a recent Virtual Forum with global missions leaders, one of many discussing “the future of missions”, a well-respected missions information researcher observed,
People in missions organisations are turning inwards, engaging in introspection and speculation and they all seem to want to tell me about their conclusions! Many seem to see the crisis as a justification for the way they feel God had already been leading them.
This could be interpreted two ways, 1) that missions are seeking to protect their ‘reason for being’ based on preexisting personal or organisational convictions, or 2) that change agents are seeking to justify their insistence that missions should shift based on selective data that reinforces biases they formed prior to the pandemic. The former view will not last long because too much evidence is amassing that missions leaders cannot afford to ignore—change is coming. Holders of the latter interpretation would be wise to heed the warning to not be quick to assume their bias is God’s way forward. I put myself in this second camp and took pause for thought. I took it as a caution to not let my biases lead me.
It is time for ideas that have been in gestation on the margins of missions and evangelistic activity to come to the fore.
For all the problems now evident with his economic theories, Friedman was a master change agent. His argument is sound and well proven, even if the way he applied it isn’t likely to last. Our current crises provide an opportunity for missions ideas untenable a few months ago to become mainstream strategies. It is time for ideas that have been in gestation on the margins of missions and evangelistic activity to come to the fore. The old must give way to the new because the old is no longer fit for God’s purposes: industrial to indigenous, individual to collective, imposition to invitation, contract to covenant, rapid to deep, task to relationship, power to service, separation to inclusion, influence to suffering, will to surrender, human agency to God’s Spirit.
The wind blows wherever it pleases… So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). As our ‘new normal’ in missions sprouts and flourishes, let us boldly follow the Spirit together into a new era and #stayonmission.
Whakapaingia te Atua, to tatou kaiunga ki te ao whanui (May we be blessed as God sends us into the wider world),
Jay
