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About the Author:
Ralph D. Winter is a senior mission thinker who has been actively involved from the beginning of the massive mission transition from simply thinking in terms of countries or individuals to thinking in terms of peoples. He is founder of the
U.S. Center for World Mission,
and is currently chancellor of
William Carey
International University. |
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1. The long-standing and indeed illustrious campaign to take Western Christianity to the world’s minority groups is slowing down because fewer and fewer such groups remain untouched.
One of the miracles of the 20th century— which forever changes the focus of missions for the 21st—is the fact that the Western missions have been so successful in transforming dark mission fields into bright mission sending forces.
We must give credit to the AD2000 Movement and others in the last ten years for high- lighting the fact that there are still dark pockets needing the light of the Gospel. But, nevertheless precisely because of the efforts of Western missions and, now more recently the active missionary outreach from many Third World countries, the fact is we are running out of "traditional pioneer mission fields." There aren’t many left. Are we going to be without a job? Yes, in the traditional sense, more and more.
Because pioneer missions have planted well-established churches in so many parts of the world, the 21st century looks radically different from that the 19th or 20th when Western Protestant missions began their work in earnest. Pioneer missions of the kind we have undertaken in the past are useful and essential in far fewer places around the world compared to the situation in the days of William Carey.
Thus, on the world level we now have the miracle of what is very nearly a single Christian family. English, for example, has more and more become the lingua franca of international Evangelicalism. This is a good thing and it is a joyous thing, this relatively unified global cultural tradition of Christianity. But it is probably not the final thing.
It is actually wrong to think that reaching the final unreached people with Western cultural Christianity will be the fulfillment of the Great Commission. It is a marvelous beginning. It is not a mistake. It is nevertheless not the whole picture.
2. Both Western and Non-Western missions are now more and more assisting Christians in other parts of the world to build their churches and schools and to reach out to their own people, rather than tangling with the remaining non-Christian peoples.
This continuing post-pioneer part of the picture is bright and shining and a blessed reality. But it is a very different process from the continuing activity of pioneer mission to the small remaining unreached groups in the world. Ironically, the very success of missions in producing vital overseas churches has meant, for one thing, that donors are becoming less and less interested in supporting mission work. Missionaries have sought to "work themselves out of a job" and they have succeeded in many places beyond their dreams. But their dreams have turned into nightmares as their faithful supporters have lost interest in their work. Donors have by now long been complaining that the Great Commission must not be redefined to read, "Go ye into all the world and meddle in the national churches." Many mission supporters have turned to assist the continuing growth and impact of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, since they are known to be working where there is not yet a church that can stand on its own two feet.
3. Meanwhile, as missions have often had great success among oppressed and minority groups, the Gospel of Christ and the Bible has also gone beyond the physical extension of the Western institutional church structure and has entered into the large "Resistant blocs" of non-Christians producing seemingly syncretistic forms of
"semi-Christian" faith. Millions of Africans and Asians are in this second category.
The so-called "Resistant blocs" of Chinese, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists resist the Western cultural style of our faith while being very acceptive of Christ. So while the Gospel has created a substantial movement of “Christianity” within most of the small groups it has only extracted a token few individuals out from within these large groups. At the same time, some people within these large blocs are accepting the Gospel and the Bible in strange and unexpected ways. We may wish to ignore them, but we cannot deny that they are there.
4. It becomes suddenly clear that history may be repeating itself and that the experiences of the New Testament and early church throw remarkable light on the present.
It is necessary to speak of a "global stalling" of the Westernized form of the Gospel. We rejoice that millions have turned from their own culture and embraced the culture of Westernized Christianity, at least in part. They have the freedom in Christ to do so.
This is just like the 100,000 Gentiles in Paul’s day who turned from their own people and embraced the Jewish vehicle of faith, becoming circumcised "proselytes." These people were mostly genuine believers, but had shifted culturally in a way Paul considered a legitimate option but an illegitimate require- ment, non-essential to faith. This is the kind of "proselytism" that has evolved around the world among minority peoples but which is mostly feared and fought by those in the majority cultures.
But in Paul’s day, there were many more people— maybe ten times more—who were not proselytes, but "God-fearers." These were people like Cornelius, who were attracted to the Word of God in the synagogues, but who had not made the shift over to the Jewish cul- tural tradition. Paul’s mission strategy made both Jews and Proselytes—who had settled on the Jewish cultural tradition—furious. What did he do? He acknowledged the reality (despite the remaining weaknesses) of a new, unplanned, "Greek" version of the Biblical faith. This new version was based on Jesus Christ and the basic principles of the Jewish Bible, rather than literally upon all the Jewish customs described in the Bible.
From the standpoint of even believing Jews Paul’s efforts helped to generate a vast and—to them—tragic movement which soon encompassed most of the million "God fearers" and eventually became at home in the Greek, Latin and Syrian Christian traditions. Naturally, as soon as these major mediterranean traditions cast an influence beyond their home cultures hundreds of different varieties of semi-Biblical faith resulted.
For example, the Greek tradition of faith influenced the slavs and the celts, while the Latin influenced both celtic and teutonic, and the Syrian the Arabic. Germanic Lutheran- ism, slavic Orthodoxy and Semitic Islam resulted, employing different languages, literatures and cultures, the most significant common denominator being the Bible. These all, to some significant extent were "people of the book," the Bible of the early church. All of them in addition were influenced by the New Testament and generated their own addi- tional semi-scriptures as well.
Greek Orthodoxy naturally considered the Greek scriptures most authoritative. Latin Catholicism enshrined its Latin translation, and the Lutherans, to be different, chose the Hebrew. However, because the Arabic trans- lation of the Bible did not come soon enough, the Islamic tradition emerged with far less direct access to "the Book." There were many arguments about what form of the faith was the one, right form.
When Islam engulfed Egypt, two different Christian traditions were at that time at each other’s throats. All of these various cultural traditions tended to consider their own cultural derivation of the faith correct, and any lingering presence of the followers of a "foreign" faith were resented, rejected or marginalized.
Actually none of these cultural traditions of faith were perfect even though most of them were barely salvific.
5. Thus, it seems possible that the 21st century will see further unification around a generalized form of Western Christianity but at the same time see the looming up of radically different forms of our faith which may be barely recognizable and may be alienated or even antagonistic.
We need only to reexamine our own past to see how drastically unity was shattered by the various deviations in Western history. The Quakers were considered a radical departure—and they were. Evangelicalism itself was, but so were Christian Science, Sev- enth-Day Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Pentecostals— all with varying degrees of similarity to the Reformation tra- ditions and with varying degrees of relation- ship to the Bible. All these became, and per- haps still are for many, shocking departures nevertheless from "the faith once delivered."
However, figures like Billy Graham have succeeded in gaining a hearing to some extent from within almost all of these diver- gent traditions, just as Brahmins in India have been attracted to Graham’s message and his Bible without affiliating themselves with the formal movement of Christianity.
The phrase "churchless Christianity" has thus been employed to describe some phenomena in South India. It is possible that a more accurate phrase might be to speak of "Christianity-less churches," since we see people still regarded as “Hindus” involved in home meetings much like the "ecclesias" of the New Testament but we do not see any close affiliation of these believers with the cultural tradition of Christianity. It is as though we must ask whether we are to preach Christ and not Christianity. A recent secular editorial in India recounted the gruesome tortures early missionaries of Portuguese Christian tradition inflicted on the people of Goa wherever departures from faith were suspected. We can protest that that was "Catholic" Christianity. But our own Protestant "Christian" cultural tradition includes similar events such as when John Calvin consented to the death by fire of Michael Servetus as well as thirty-some women accused of witchcraft, whose departures from the faith seemed threatening to the unity of the Gospel. How can we not therefore try to understand the disinclination today of high caste Hindus to see their cultural unity threatened by invading missionary forces which may find it difficult to conceive of a Hindu cultural tradition that validly understands the Gospel?
We have always thought that one of the blessings of the achievement of a worldwide Church movement is the possibility that this miraculous global fellowship would enable those of us in the West to reexamine our faith, our theology, our very study of the Bible. What neither the Western church nor its converts in the Third World are fully pre- pared for is the radical de-Westernization of the Gospel. But the 21st century may be the time when this will happen without our power to stop it.
Paul’s ministry begs for a parallel today. Our impact on the non-Western world has been primarily on the relatively few who for various reasons want something of our Western cultural tradition. We suddenly realize that both Western and non-Western missions are promoting our Westernized forms of religion. Some of the non-Western missions are just as much involved in this as are the Western missions. This is understandable and it is not evil, unless we believe and preach that the Gospel can only exist in its Western vessel.
Paul said circumcision did not need to carry over. For many in his day this was as outrageous as for anyone today to say that baptism by this or that method is not essential. If the parallel is at all valid that our missionary movement is similar to the Jewish diaspora and its "Gospel," then we are not likely to see the missions, whether Western or not, capable in general of doing so radical a thing as Paul did.
7. It is possible that some of the non-Western peoples are more interested in the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ—as they see His glory in the face of Jesus Christ—than they are interested in our procedures for gaining Salvation. It may be that we ought to more deliberately "Declare His glory among the nations" than we are to sell our formulas for getting people into heaven, even though we ourselves may find it difficult to distinguish between these two related things.
Jesus demonstrated the character of God in His preaching and healing ministry, and on that basis, asked people to repent and believe. And he talked to people who had a great headstart in understanding His father in heaven. Today we are trying to build on a far thinner foundation. Once people know God through our science and medicine and through scriptures like Proverbs, and even better by knowing the Christ of the Gospels, then our missionary efforts to the major blocs will be more effective. There will still be those who want simply to become Westernized, learn English and so forth.
Can Western and non-Western missions in the 21st century change enough to encourage and nourish some of these highly indigenous movements? Our overseas church constituencies may be as opposed to such an approach as the Jewish believers were opposed to Paul’s approach.
Thus, our task in the 21st century is not so much to promote a Westernized Christianity as to defend the name of God, to represent Him more faithfully, to point out the role of Satan and be on God’s side in striving to destroy the works of Satan. We are, as Paul put it, “to open peoples’ eyes, turning them from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God.” However, the outward results of this process may both surprise us and also not be immediately recognizable to our sup- porters.
In summary, the difference between the activity of Western and non-Western missions is not very great. They are both highly Western compared to the new indigenous movements which derive their faith more directly from the Bible more than from Chris- tianity. We have long gloated over the fact that Christianity is now geographically global. However, our faith and our Bible, just as in the past, has quickly gone beyond any particular codification of it.
Third World Missions may be able to leave their own inherited Christianities and choose to follow the growth of Biblical faith and worship where this flows beyond the bounds of traditional Christianity. It is possible that these non-Western missions will be more able to do this than the traditional missions in the West. The culture of the West is itself changing so rapidly that traditional denominations are all on the decline while newer and unusual movements are those which are growing. The West today needs the help of the Third World Churches and missions, especially if they are willing to follow faith and not form. |
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