Lausanne World Pulse – Recovering Mission: Majority World Mission—A Return to Mission for the Majority

By The Rev. Canon Mark Oxbrow
March 2012

For many centuries, it was the religious communities who carried the Christian faith from village to village, tribe to tribe, to India, China, and beyond. Today, we see the rise of a new monasticism¹¹ and renewed interest in missional communities. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European empires, rising from the heart of Christendom, brought religiously-motivated philanthropy (as well as other things considered destructive and evil). Civil servants, ship owners, and school teachers saw the gospel as part of their “civilising” programme for subject peoples. Only in the last two centuries have we seen the rise of what I call “professional missionaries” who are recruited, trained, deployed, and financially-supported for a life of full-time mission.

A New Kind of Dance
I have taken some time to rehearse this mission history because it is not only Western Christians who forget that refugees, merchants, monks, and civil servants can also be missionaries. Addressing the mission community of the World Evangelical Alliance in 2006, Duncan Olumbe, director of Kenyan-based Mission Together Africa, warned his Majority World colleagues of the dangers of seeking to join the European-choreographed “power dance,” “imitation dance,” and “position dance.” In other words, the “professional missionary” paradigm has become so pervasive that even those who today have a much stronger missional rhythm in their “spiritual bones” feel constrained to do mission in the European style.

Duncan Olumbe, director of Mission Together Africa, warns his Majority World colleagues of the dangers of seeking to join the European-choreographed dance.

Many Majority World churches would struggle to support one traditional, “professional,” missionary family, but how many of their members could be resourced as refugees, migrants, business women, overseas students, or traders in cross-cultural mission? Olumbe continues, “I long for a different dance! However, how can we allow space for the different dancers—African, Asian, European, American, etc.—with all their different rhythms, beats, and paraphernalia?”¹²

Olumbe’s question is addressed to mission leaders in North America and Europe, as well as those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. While rejoicing in all that “professional” missionaries continue to achieve for Christ’s kingdom, we need to create space for the other dancers. This will involve reallocating resources, for example, to fund the training of the 400,000 Filipino Christians currently working as migrants around the world.

It will mean rethinking training, as Christian entrepreneurs and business people seek to be fully equipped gospel carriers as they move cross-culturally. It could also mean a Minority World church reassigning funds which were intended for a missionary family so that Congolese and Rwandan asylum seekers entering European countries are equipped to bring gospel hope to those arid soils.

All of this requires partnership on a global scale where power relationships are renegotiated and resources are pooled. My greatest hope, however, is that as the Majority World begins to control the dance tune and discover new steps and rhythms, and that we in the Minority World will at last escape our blinkered professionalization of mission. My hope is we will again see clearly that every baptized believer is a missionary; that most of them are women; most are poor; and the monk, the diplomat, the refugee, the trader, and the overseas student are all in this together. God’s mission comes in all shapes and sizes.

Endnotes

1. 2003. The New Global Mission. Downers Grove, Illinois, USA: InterVarsity Press, 17-18.

2. 2002. The Next Christendom. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2006. The New Faces of Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2007. God’s Continent. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3. 1912. Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? London: World Dominion Press.

4. 1927. The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church. London: World Dominion Press.

5. 1964. “Non-Professional Missionaries” in Missionary Principles. Ed. Rowland Allen. London: World Dominion Press.

6. 1992. Transforming Mission. Maryknoll, New York, USA: Orbis Books.

7. 2004. Constants in Context. Maryknoll, New York, USA.: Orbis Books.

8. 1937. A History of the Expansion of Christianity (seven volumes). New York: Harper and Row.

9. See, for example, 2004. “Business as Mission,” Lausanne Occasional Paper No. 59. Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization.

10. Stewart, John. 1961. Nestorian Missionary Enterprise. Piscataway, New Jersey, USA: Gorgias Press.

11. See, for example, 2008. Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan. New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church. Houston, Texas, USA: Brazos Books.

12. 2006. “Dancing a Different Dance” in Connections 5(2&3). WEA Mission Commission, 17.

The Rev. Canon Mark Oxbrow is international coordinator of the Faith2Share network and previously served as assistant general secretary of the Church Mission Society (CMS). During his twenty years with CMS, he had a particular responsibility for building missional relationships with churches in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.