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

By The Rev. Canon Mark Oxbrow
March 2012

David Bosch, Stephen Bevans, Roger Schroeder, and others have provided us with helpful historical reviews of how mission has been understood and developed over the centuries. Bosch⁶ speaks of six epochs, while Bevans and Schroeder⁷ talk of periods during which different primary models of mission dominate.

In his much earlier work, Kenneth Latourette helps us to understand the changing roles of “professional” and “voluntary” Christians in the mission of the Church.⁸ For our purposes here, it may be more helpful to focus on the actors rather than the history, and to see that, in fact, although one band of actors might have predominated or been “historically visible” during particular periods, they have all engaged in effective mission side by side. The five groups of “missioners” I identify (although there are obviously more) are:

• refugee evangelists,
• witnessing traders and entrepreneurs,
• monastic communities in mission,
• imperial philanthropists, and
• professional missionaries.

Those who have known suffering and found God to be faithful are often the best evangelists.

As already suggested, these five groups can represent stages in Christian history; however, they also represent significant movements in mission which can and do co-exist within the contemporary Church. My contention here is that the experience of Majority World Christians in mission today could help us recover this much broader understanding of what our missionary God is doing among and through his people today.

Refugee Evangelists and Business as Mission
Reading the accounts of the early Church (e.g., Acts 8:4), it is clear that some of the very first cross-cultural missionaries were fleeing for their lives. In each century, faith in Jesus Christ has been taught by those fleeing from persecution, war, ethnic cleansing, famine, and drought. It seems that those who have known suffering and found God to be faithful are often the best evangelists. The challenge for the global Christian community is to discover how we might best support, equip, and encourage “refugee evangelists” today.

Business as mission⁹ has become a popular concept in recent decades and a way in which those with entrepreneurial skill and business acumen can discover their vocation in mission serving the holistic needs of communities who lack employment or faith.

The idea of Christian business people in mission, however, is hardly new. In the early centuries the news of salvation in Jesus was carried along the “silk roads” of Central Asia and into China. Nestorian Christians were especially effective at planting churches while engaged in bringing communities the advantages of international trade.¹⁰ Entrepreneurs, traders, business executives, and skilled workers often find it difficult to be recognised as missioners by their churches; however, by sharing the work of our creator God, they have many opportunities to witness to his son, Jesus.

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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.