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

By The Rev. Canon Mark Oxbrow
January 2009

In one city in the Arabian Peninsula, an Ethiopian pastor trains every one of his church members as a missionary. There are thirty-five thousand Ethiopians working in that country; ninety-six percent of them are young, female, domestic workers living on a few dollars a week. The Christians among them come (like every other young Ethiopian woman working in that country) hoping to send home a little money to support their families. They discover, however, that God has placed them in a key mission context.

In just eleven months young women have taken the JESUS film and Arabic New Testaments into eight hundred Arab homes

In just eleven months these young women have taken the JESUS film and Arabic New Testaments into eight hundred Arab homes where they are able to share the film with children and read the Bible with their mothers. Sadly, these women (who are actively engaged in evangelism in one of the most closed mission contexts in the world) will never appear in any statistics of “foreign missionaries.” They will attract little prayer or financial support from Minority World (Western) churches so concerned to “reach the unreached.”

I start with this story of Ethiopian missionaries because we need to radically revise our understanding of who a missionary is in the contemporary, globalised world. In fact, we also need to revise much of our mission history in order to take a much more realistic account of who really have been the “midwives of the gospel” over the past two thousand years. Samuel Escobar writes,

Another missionary force is also at work today, although it does not appear in the records of missionary activity or the databanks of specialists. It is the transcultural witnessing for Christ that takes place as people move around as migrants or refugees, just as in New Testament days….They are missionaries ‘from below’ who do not have the power, the prestige, or the money from a developed nation, and are not part of a missionary organisation. They are vulnerable in many ways, but have learnt the art of survival, supported by their faith in Jesus Christ.¹

Although I would argue that “mission from below” has always been a highly significant aspect of Christian mission, it becomes more significant in the twenty-first century for three reasons.

1. As a result of the rapid shift in Christian demography, powerfully illustrated by Philip Jenkins,² most Christians today are financially poor, politically marginalised, and socially restricted by their gender, age, or ethnicity.
   
2. The increasing prevalence of migration has radically increased the opportunities for migrant Christians to be effective in cross-cultural mission. Migration continues to take place as a result of war, natural disaster, and persecution; however, increasingly, Christians are migrating due to education, employment, financial security, and family unity.
3. In a world in which international travel, and to an even greater degree, international communication, are becoming easier, even Christians with very modest financial resources are able to be in touch with—and therefore potentially able to share the gospel with—those without faith in very different parts of the world. One example of this is the “evangelising” effect one student or migrant worker who comes to faith while abroad can have on his or her extended family through emails, texts, and telephone calls back home. I heard of a case where a Malaysian student at college in Singapore saw several of her family and friends embrace her newfound faith in Jesus before she finished her course. All of them were evangelised by email.

The Professional vs. the Voluntary Missionary?
It has been almost a century since Rowland Allen completed his seminal comparative study of the missionary methods of St. Paul and those of the twentieth-century Church³ and encouraged us to look more closely at the “spontaneous expansion of the church”⁴ and the place of “non-professional missionaries.”⁵

Allen, of course, was not the first to suggest that it is through the rite of baptism that we are ordained as missionaries—participants in the mission of God—and that we do not need to wait to be selected, trained, and commissioned as professionals in mission before sharing in the privilege of being co-missioners with God. Perhaps the major shift we are currently seeing toward mission from the Majority World will help us recover a deeper, more ancient, understanding of who a missionary is. Some historical reflections might help.

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.