Roger S. Greenway
Professor Emeritus in Missions, Calvin Theological
Seminary, Grand Rapids, MI, USA
Republished in Global Missiology, Featured Article, July
2005, www.globalmissiology.net
Part 1............................................................................................................................................... 1
The Foundation of Kinship: Theology of holism................................................................................... 1
A fundamental missiological question.............................................................................................. 3
Overview...................................................................................................................................... 4
Together in
the Old Testament................................................................................................... 5
Together in
the New Testament................................................................................................. 8
Four Movements –................................................................................................................... 12
The Modern Missionary Movement........................................................................................... 14
The Great Reversal.................................................................................................................. 15
Part 2............................................................................................................................................. 20
The Cost of
Kinship........................................................................................................................ 20
The Big Questions....................................................................................................................... 23
A Growing
Convergence.............................................................................................................. 31
End Notes:.....................................................................................................................................
35
Part
1
The Foundation of Kinship: Theology of holism
Let
me tell you an allegory about a man by the name of Christopher Prince. Prince
founded a company called Prince
Enterprise, which grew into a large, international business. Prince had two sons, whom he loved very much, and his
intention was to see his sons working with him in Prince Enterprise.
All
went well as the two boys grew up. They got along with each other and they
shared the same vision of working with
their father in managing and expanding Prince Enterprise. But it so happened that when the young men went off to
college, and later to graduate school, they chose different institutions. The father hoped that the
different orientations his sons received would enhance their participation in Prince Enterprise. But this did not prove
to be the case.
As it
turned out, Prince’s sons learned two different approaches to doing business.
They learned to set different goals. Their schools taught them different values.
They both studied international business,
but they learned different ways of organizing workers, predicting outcomes,
reporting earnings and evaluating their work and accomplishments. Upon
graduating from their respective schools,
both sons wanted to go to work with their father in Prince Enterprise. But they
found it difficult, in fact
impossible, to work harmoniously with each other.
ur oyaty to you an to te amy s eyon queston. ut
you w ave to et us organze separate
divisions of the company. We must each have our Own particular assignments
within the company. We will need
separate offices. We have chosen different management structures, and each of us has to have authority to control
our separate activities. Otherwise we will constantly be in each other’s hair, and we know you don’t want that. We
will each report to you, but you will
have to allow us to use different reporting systems. And of course, we’ll keep separate financial accounts.
“You
understand, Father,” the sons said, “that we expect to produce different
products, though hopefully they will be
compatible. We love Prince Enterprise. We will always uphold the company name. But at the same time we need to be
free to carry out our separate programs. Oh yes, we want to be free to enter into joint ventures with different
overseas partners too.”
The father knew that his sons loved Prince
Enterprise, the company that he had sacrificed so much to establish. And they intended to be loyal
to him and the family. But he also knew how independent and strong-minded his sons were, and how determined each of
them was to prove his own importance.
So the father let them have their way. Each son established a separate division
of Prince Enterprise. The father hoped that eventually they would come
together, do their planning together,
coordinate their efforts, adopt the same goals and work with the same values.
But he accepted the fact that for some time, Prince Enterprise would be a
divided house.
Time passed. Both divisions of the company
prospered. Each developed its own line of products, and each had its own investors and clients. Each
developed its own corporate philosophy and management system. As could be expected, some tensions developed between
the brothers and between their separate divisions of the company. They tried to
keep the tensions hidden, because after
all they were brothers and both were part of their father’s company, Prince
Enterprise. It wouldn’t be good for business if clients heard about their
disagreements.
The brothers were kept very busy
in their separate offices, managing their separate affairs. They traveled
overseas a great deal to visit subsidiaries in other countries and meet with
their clients. Sometimes they’d run into each
other at airports, but they never had time to talk seriously with each
other, except at family get-togethers and occasionally at an executive-level
conference. On company matters, each communicated directly with their
father, but seldom with each other. And sometimes
they could be heard talking against each other.
Years passed, and then one day the brothers met at
a beautiful resort. How are things going? one asked the other. “Great,”
his brother responded with a smile. But after a pause he added, “Sometimes I think we’re missing something. It’s something
Dad taught us when we were growing up but somehow we’ve forgotten.
“Years ago,
before you and I split up, Dad had it all together. The company didn’t have
separate divisions, each going its own way.
There wasn’t any competition between one branch and the other. There was one main office, one plan, one
set of company goals, and one accounting system. When anyone said ‘Prince Enterprise,’ they thought of one
company. It sure made a lot of sense.”
A long silence followed. It had taken years to
bring the brothers to this moment. They were kin, with one father, working for the same company, but
they hadn’t acted like it. Oftentimes they hadn’t felt like it either.
Moments passed that seemed like hours. Then the
other brother nodded and said softly, “I’ve been thinking the same thing. Maybe
it’s time to put Prince Enterprise back together. Let’s go talk to Dad.” The brothers looked at each other,
hardly believing what they had just said. Hardened attitudes of long standing had begun to change.
A short time later, when the father saw his two
Sons walking toward his office he noticed something different. Neither son was trying to get ahead of the other.
Before a word was spoken, the father
guessed what they had come for. His heart leaped for joy. Prince Enterprise was
going to be together again.
A fundamental missiological
question
The
central truth of Christianity, to which all of us are committed, is that the
God of the Bible, out of sheer love and grace has
intervened in this fallen, fractured and suffering world, and through
Jesus Christ his Son has redeemed lost sinners and reconciles them to himself
through the gospel; and by his Spirit he is establishing a new order in this
world. Jesus called the new order the “kingdom of God.” In
this kingdom, Jesus is the King and kingdom workers are his disciples.
His disciples, those kingdom workers, are concerned about many things:
1) Proclamation of Gods Word, calling people to repentance and faith,
2)
Demonstration of love, compassion toward the poor,
and righteousness in society,
3)
Responsible exercise of stewardship toward
creation and its precious God-given resources,
4) Spiritual
warfare against Satan’s dark kingdom, which has its tentacles everywhere—in individuals,
communities and the power structures that control much of the world.
Speaking boldly and inclusively, kingdom
ministries are services rendered in any or all these areas. Their ultimate goal is to glorify God and
advance his kingdom by defending and practicing love, truth and righteousness in a sinful world. All these dimensions of
kingdom ministry are closely intertwined. All will be needed until Christ
returns and all things are made new (Rev. 21:1-4). 1
I assume that among us this foundational position
is not in question. What is in question is whether at this time we who are engaged in kingdom work can recover the
unity we lost in the past fifty years,
and can regain the wholeness and the efficacy of a common mission. To consider this question is the main purpose of our
conference. The value of our discussions will be measured by what we do in the days to come.
Overview
Let
me at this point give you a brief overview of what I was asked to do in these
two presentations. Part I focuses on the biblical and the
theological basis for “kinly” togetherness in holistic
ministry. I will focus particularly on two areas:
the
relationship of evangelism and church development to relief and development. I
can only touch
lightly on the areas of stewardship of creation and spiritual warfare. Part 2
will address the demands, the obstacles and
the hurdles we will have to overcome if we are to demonstrate that we are
brothers and sisters with the same Father and serve his enterprise, the kingdom
of God. We begin with a look at the Old Testament.
Together in the Old Testament
All dimensions of Israel’s life and mission were
clearly together in the Old Testament. Among all the nations and kingdoms of the ancient world, with their countless
gods and pagan practices, Israel was
a kingdom composed of people who were chosen by God to be witnesses to him. In the laws of Israel the nations could see how the
one true God wanted to be worshiped, how a just society should be
ordered, and how the resources of the earth should be managed for the common
good.
From the writings of Moses to those of the
psalmists, to the teachers of wisdom, to the early and later prophets, one thing was made clear: There
was only one God. He alone was to be worshiped
and he had carefully prescribed, in the laws of the covenant, the way in which
he chose to be worshiped and served.
The entire life of Israel as a theocratic kingdom was meant to be a covenant-keeping life. Every aspect of life
was to be lived for God’s glory, and all human relationships and activities were governed by God’s law.
The laws of the covenant were regarded as holy
laws. By keeping them the people would be holy and pleasing to God. God’s laws set the standards of justice and
righteousness in all human relationships,
including the treatment of foreigners and sojourners. God’s laws provided for the
proper care of the soil, the rotation
of crops, and rights of ownership. By means of his laws, God graciously gave Israel the knowledge, values and
standards that they needed to worship him rightly and to live healthy, balanced lives that would honor God and
benefit themselves and others. By
keeping God’s covenant Israel would fulfill its mission, which was to be a
kingdomon-display, a people set apart for others to look at and learn. Israel
was to be a continual witness to all
other kingdoms as to the nature of the one true God, Maker of heaven and earth,
and his will for human conduct.2
The Old Testament makes it abundantly clear that
care for the poor and the protection of the innocent against injustice were essential elements in the covenant life
of the kingdom. The destitute and
disabled, widows, orphans and sojourners were in fact singled out by Old Testament writers as worthy of and in need of
special consideration by God’s people. 3 In Exodus 2 1-33, which is often called the Book of
the Covenant, we find the oldest prescriptions on covenantal responsibility. God said to his people:
• Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were
aliens in Egypt (Ex. 22:31).
·
Do not take advantage of a widow
or orphan. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly
hear their cry (Ex. 22:22-23).
·
Do not deny justice to your poor people in their
lawsuits (Ex. 23:6).
After Moses, the sermons and writings of the
prophets sounded the same notes. The prophet Amos, for example, condemned the whole nation for its heartless
treatment of the poor and the oppressed:
For three sins of Israel, even for four, I will
not turn back (wrath). They sell... the needy for a pair of sandals. They trample on the heads of the
poor... and deny justice to the oppressed (Amos 2:6-7).
Amos singled out the unrighteous judges (5:12),
the profiteering businessmen (8:6) and the pleasure-seeking women of Samaria
(“cows of Bashan,” 4:1) as those that “trample the poor” (2:7; 5:1 1), “crush the needy” (4:1), and buy or
sell the poor with silver or a pair of sandals (2:6; 8:6). 4
The great prophet, Isaiah, from whom we learn so
much about the forthcoming Messiah, spoke against Israel like a prosecuting attorney. Isaiah charged:
Your rulers are rebels, companions of thieves;
they all love bribes and chase after gifts. They do not defend the cause of the
fatherless; the widow’s case does not come before them (1:23).
Isaiah challenged Israel’s leaders to:
Stop doing wrong, learn to do right! Seek
justice, encourage the oppressed. Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow
(1:16-17).
The prophets were not inventing new moral codes.
Rather, they were speaking as representatives of Israel’s true King—the Lord God who stood for truth, compassion and
righteousness. The prophets warned,
exhorted and threatened judgment, because they knew that neglect of covenant obligations meant denying God and would result in
divine punishment.
Many Old Testament passages can be cited, but one
deserves special attention. In Jeremiah 21:11-23, the prophet contrasts King Jehoiakim’s corrupt reign with that
of his father, the good King Josiah.
Here the prophet makes an important statement about what it means to know God. Addressing Jehoiakim, Jeremiah says:
Woe to him
who builds his palace by unrighteousness, his upper rooms by injustice, making
his countrymen work for nothing, not paying
them for their labor... Does it make you (Jehoiakim) a king to have more and more cedar? Did not your
father (Josiah) have food and drink? He did what was right and just, so all went well with him. He defended the cause
of the poor and needy, and so all went
well. Is that not what it means to know me? declares the Lord. (Jer. 22:13-16)
In these verses, King Jehoiakim was judged, Josiah
was praised, and God’s people instructed in what it meant to know the Lord. To “know the Lord” was to pursue justice
for the poor.
Like other prophets, Jeremiah took the position
that the absence of justice was a sure indication people lacked knowledge of the Lord. Israel’s
leaders, above all, were to be champions of the poor and the oppressed, and the
people as a whole could be expected to follow their leaders’ example. The
virtue of concern for the poor was to characterize kings and citizens alike.5
I realize this Old Testament material is familiar
to us. We have read it and heard it, many times before. Yet I feel that
given the history of tensions and debates among us evangelicals, we need periodic reminders that holism is biblical. In
fact, the Scriptures offer us no other option. From the beginning, the Bible has taught that covenant
people, citizens of God’s kingdom, are concerned
about truth, love and righteousness, because God is concerned about them. We
are kingdom people who know the Lord and show it in ways that the Bible clearly
lays out.
The
kind of dualism that separates the physical and the spiritual, word and deed,
was not found in Old Testament theology. In the Old Testament,
theology and ethics were bound together in the same
law. Israelites could not with integrity announce the name of the Lord if they
did not demonstrate in their lives mercy and justice as the Lord
required.
This unity of theology and ethics
was essential to Israels mission to be a showcase kingdom among
the nations. In the whole ancient world there was no other deity like the God
of Israel, whose character was that of mercy, justice and
redemption. In the pantheon of the gods there were
vicious power struggles, petty quarrels, gross sexual behavior and countless
other things that made the gods of the nations unfit models for
human community. But Israel’s God was different. He alone could say, “Be holy
because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:1).
The God to whom Israel bore witness was a God who
was mighty to save from bondage, a God whose worship and service involved high
ethical standards, and a God who cared about the poor and the oppressed. To those who knew him, his
character was the highest motivation for holy living, and to anyone, anywhere, who truly sought righteousness the laws
of his covenant were a shining light.
Israel’s high calling was to bear witness to such a God. Speaking for God,
Isaiah wrote:
I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from me there is
no savior. I have revealed and saved
and proclaimed—I, and not
some foreign god among you. You are my witnesses, declares the Lord, that I am God. (Isa. 43:11-12)
Together in the New Testament
Israel failed the Lord in many ways. This grieved
the prophets greatly. But still the prophet Jeremiah foresaw a day coming when God’s covenant would be renewed and a
people raised up whose minds would be
quickened by the Spirit of God. They would return to the foundations of kingdom life and witness. Freed from sin’s bondage
through the atoning work of Messiah, they would apply themselves to their covenant obligations with joy and
exuberance.
“The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will
put my law in their minds and write them
on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer
will a man teach his neighbor, or a
man his brother, saying ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from
the least of them to the greatest.” (Jer. 31:3 1ff)
Jeremiah expresses his point in a very forceful
way here: What does it mean to know the Lord? It is to do what is just and right, and to defend the cause of the poor
(Jer. 22:15-16). This,
says the New Testament writer of
Hebrews, is precisely what characterizes the “new covenant” community,
the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This kingdom consists of men
and women, boys and girls who know the Lord.
They have seen his face in Jesus. They know him who is both Creator and Redeemer, the Holy One, the God who shows
compassion on the needy and defends
the oppressed. Knowing him, new covenant people become like him. Washed in Christ’s blood they yield themselves to doing
God’s will (Heb. 10:15-18).
In Luke 4, we find the account of Jesus preaching
in the synagogue at Nazareth. It was there that Jesus announced the
commencement of the new era that began with him and his ministry. Jesus himself was the fulfillment of everything Israel
was called to be and do. Subsequently, the mission of the church would flow from Christ’s own messianic mission.
In the story as we find it in Luke 4, Jesus had
just completed a tour of Galilee “in the power of the Spirit,” says verse 14, and news about him had
spread everywhere. As was his custom, when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue. He stood up to read the
scripture, and the scroll that was
handed to him contained the writings of the prophet Isaiah, where it said:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to
proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Isa. 6 1:1-2)
Having
read this, Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant. He began
his sermon with the words: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
This announcement by Jesus in Nazareth is one of the keys to
our understanding of the essential unity of service and proclamation.
Anointed by the Holy Spirit, Jesus spoke of a gospel that was at one and the
same time good news spiritually, socially, emotionally and physically. It proclaimed
good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, and
sight to the blind. When he called it the “year of the Lord’s favor,”
he was saying that a new stage in the unfolding of the kingdom of God was at
hand. In God’s redemptive plan the floodgates of grace were now
open to all nations, and henceforth people everywhere would be
called to repent, believe and enjoy the blessings
of Gods kingdom and the challenges of its service.
Someone may ask, “Did the early believers
understand what we today call ‘holism’?” Did the apostles and the early church understand the linkage between the verbal
and the visible proclamation of the
kingdom? I believe they did. They may have lacked the vocabulary we use, but understood the message. Acquainted as they were
with the first-hand accounts of Jesus’ preaching
and healing ministry, they could not possibly have separated word and deed. The
stories about Jesus that we read in
the four Gospels were stories told over and over in their preaching. The apostles knew the character of
Jesus, his message, and the way he ministered. Wherever the gospel was heralded, people heard what Jesus had said about
the fallen stranger on the wayside
and the “neighbor” who saved his life. They heard about blind men crying out for
mercy, and Jesus healing them. And
they heard about lepers grasping for one last thread of hope, and Jesus making
them whole.6
If we evangelicals are to have solid biblical and
theological foundations for holistic missions, we need to keep in mind the broad sweep and kingdom
teaching throughout the Bible. The background
of Old Testament life and teaching, plus the teaching and example of Jesus
during his earthly ministry, are for
new covenant people the source of instruction and continual inspiration. And as Jesus predicted, we are
empowered to move beyond Old Testament Israel, because the Spirit of the Lord
has written his laws upon our hearts and minds.
The personal changes that occur in people who have
experienced regeneration and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit bear this out. Unless the impulses born of the Holy
Spirit are suppressed by some evil
influence, or are left to wither, unnourished by true and consistent
instruction from the Word, regenerate
people almost immediately start to look toward a lost and suffering world and begin to minister in Christ-like ways. They seek to
lead old friends and relatives to Christ. They show concern for the poor and suffering. Evils that before their
conversion they hardly even noticed
now disturb them, and they try to correct them. In one area of life after
another they seek to change what was
bad into something good. What I am claiming here is not mere theory; it is historical fact, attested to repeatedly in the
history of Christianity.
Lets examine the record: Over nineteen centuries,
the church had it together. From the beginning
of the New Testament church and its outreach to the world, the proclamation of
the gospel and what today we call “community development” have gone hand in
hand.7 Acts 6 tells us that when widows from the Greek-speaking
segment of the church at Jerusalem felt neglected in the daily distribution of food, seven men with
Greek names were appointed to take care of them (Acts 6:1-6).
The apostle Paul, whose primary gifts and calling
lay in evangelism and church planting, was involved in collecting funds for the poor and transporting relief money
to believers who were in need (Rom.
15:25-28; 1 Cor. 8:19-20). During his ministry at Ephesus, Paul worked with his
hands in order to supply his own needs
and the needs of his fellow workers, and to help the poor (Acts 20:34-45).
The world in which the early church grew and
thrived was struck with awe at the love and sacrifice shown by Christians. Christians not only preached the gospel,
at personal expense and often at risk
of their lives, they cared for orphans and abandoned children, they brought
food to prisoners, nursed the sick and in times of plague, buried the dead,
including strangers. One of the key
reasons why the gospel made such an appeal in the first three centuries lay in
the fact that Christians addressed the
urgent needs and problems of the day in practical ways. They thereby demonstrated that citizens of Christ’s kingdom had
a new life within them, a life that showed itself by making positive contributions to the welfare of society.
This same pattern has been repeated throughout
history. From the fourth to the eighteenth century, nearly all missionaries were monks. While the original purpose
of monasticism was not missionary, but
grew out of the desire for the spiritual renewal of the church, most monastic movements became missionary in the course of time.
Some were ardently missionary, like the Nestorians who spread east into Arabia, India and across central Asia
into China; and the Celts, who arose
in Ireland and moved into Scotland and England and across central Europe;
followed later by the Franciscans,
Dominicans and Jesuits.
These communities of monks
functioned as both missionaries of the gospel, and promoters and preservers of civilization in places where warfare
and chaos had reigned for years. Monks promoted
education, especially literacy, and a better
way of life based on agriculture, more advanced
technology, discipline, hard work and Christian faith and morality. Almost everywhere, monasteries became centers of
religion, education and civilization.8
As best they could with the resources of their times, the monks held it all
together, word and deed, down to the
beginning of the modem period.
Four Movements —
All four of the early Protestant renewal movements
were what we today would call “holistic” in their approach. All four made an impact on Protestant missions later on.
1. Puritanism
The puritans aimed at “purifying” the Church of
England along more Calvinistic lines. It was among these Puritans that Protestant missionary theology first developed
in the English-speaking world.9
The two greatest Puritan advocates of missions were Richard Baxter, a pastor in
England and John Eliot, who became a
missionary among American Indians.
The life of Eliot and other missionaries like him
has been described in the following way. He (Eliot) traveled on foot and horseback, taxing his strength to the
utmost, sometimes drenched for days
at a time, all to bring the gospel to the natives. He brought cases to court to
prevent defrauding of Indian land,
pleaded clemency for convicted Indian prisoners, fought the selling of Indians into slavery, sought to secure lands and
streams for Indian use, established schools for Indian children and
adults, translated books, and attempted to show a deep humanitarianism that accompanied their concern for salvation.10
That certainly sounds holistic.
2. Pietism
In Germany, the church was
dominated by the state and spirituality was at a low ebb. Philip Jacob
Spener, influenced by Puritan writers, published in 1675
a book in which he presented suggestions
for the renewal of the church. These suggestions included:
(1) more use of the Word of God,
(2) a more diligent exercise of spiritual
priesthood by all believers, and
(3) the obligation of all believers not only to confess
true religion with their mouths, but to practice
it by acts of love and compassion, following the example of the Good Samaritan
in the parable of Jesus.
Al] the great
Pietist leaders—August H. Francke, George Mueller and Bartholomew Ziegenbalg—maintained Spener’s well-rounded
emphases, including his insistence on a comprehensive approach to ministry and missions. Besides preaching the
gospel and building churches,
Pietists built schools so that children and adults might learn to read. They
healed the sick as best they could with
the medical knowledge of their day, and they built and maintained orphanages, they opposed cruelty and injustice,
they sought to bring peace between warring groups, and they promoted legislation to end social evils. No one could
ever charge the Pietists with not having word and deed together.11
3. Moravianism
The Moravians sprang from German Pietism and had
roots that went back even before the Reformation.
Moravians were one of the most remarkable missionary movements in history. They
were intensely devoted to prayer, evangelism, and sending missionaries to
distant lands, and especially to American Indians. Their missionary approach
was holistic. Wherever they became
established the Moravians taught local people improved agricultural techniques,
horticulture, animal husbandry and
ways to engage in trade.12 Within the limitations of their times, the Moravians kept word and deed together.
4. The Wesleyans
The
fourth movement that flowed into the modern Protestant missionary movement
was the Wesleyan revival that came out of Anglicanism in England. The Wesleyan revival was
closely associated with the great awakenings in North America that were themselves outgrowths of Puritanism.13
Both streams were concerned about evangelism and
the needs of the poor and destitute. Unquestionably,
John Wesley focused on preaching. He preached some 45,000 sermons and published
more than 200 books and pamphlets. He organized cell groups for prayer and
Christian nurture. However, he also started
the first free dispensary in England for medical assistance to the poor. Wesley organized the Friends Society to
give emergency aid to strangers. He supported
efforts to provide elementary education to children
of the poor. He vigorously opposed the slave trade and promoted prison reform. All this from a man who was first of
all a preacher.
Likewise, the
great preacher and evangelist, George Whitefield, spoke out against the cruel
and inhumane treatment of slaves. Whitefield
raised money for orphanages and insisted that Christians work for the betterment of human society at all levels.
As a result of these movements and
the influence of great evangelical leaders, eventually there came
many organized efforts such as Sunday schools, orphanages, homes for “fallen
girls” as they were called, and rescue missions. In every
case, the goals were to minister to the lost and needy
by means of evangelism and social action together.
The Modern Missionary Movement
William Carey is generally referred to as the
“father of the Protestant missionary movement.” Many Protestant missionaries preceded him, of course. But without
question, Carey lighted a fire that
spread to every corner of the Protestant world and set in motion the modern
missionary movement. And who was more
holistic in his missionary approach than William Carey?
Carey addressed the challenges of presenting Christ
to the Hindu world from every possible angle.
He learned several Indian languages, and preached in them. He supervised the
translation of the Scriptures,
established schools, introduced advanced methods of agriculture and horticulture, attacked the inhuman treatment of
lepers who were often burned to death or buried alive. Carey campaigned against infanticide and the burning of widows,
until both evils were officially
prohibited by the colonial government.
Carey’s
pattern was followed by most Protestant missions throughout the nineteenth
century and the early twentieth
centuries. Beside setting up and staffing schools, hospitals and clinics, missionaries introduced improved methods of
agriculture. They were involved in countless things that today we would call “community development.” Some
missionaries exposed themselves to
slander and violence by fighting the slave trade, traffic in opium, the
exploitation of children in mines and
other industries, and prostitution.
Besides all these things, no force was more
influential in raising the status of women than the missionary movement. In places where women had no
rights, were never allowed to go to school or learn to read and write, missionaries came in and evangelized women.
They helped women learn to read, and
taught them to see themselves as children of God.14 This dynamic
influence continues today in places
where the gospel is just now entering.
The Great Reversal
Now we
have to ask: With such a holistic heritage behind us, what happened in the
twentieth century to drive a wedge between evangelism and
social concern? One writer, Linda Smith, calls it the “great reversal.” She
says:
The
early 1 900s brought great upheaval among Christians in America. Kantian philosophy,
Darwinism, the rise of sociology and psychology, new understandings of science, and new ways of
examining the Bible based on analyses of historical and literary contexts were perceived as threatening basic
beliefs about the nature of reality, human nature, God’s role in creation, the
nature of the Bible and historicity of Jesus and his miracles.15
As a backlash against liberalism, the inheritors
of the evangelical tradition went into a period of retreat and separatism which had a profound impact
on their social concern. All progressive social concern was nearly eliminated among evangelicals by the end of
the 1900-1930 period.
George
Marsden, one of the foremost historians of evangelicalism, attributes the
decline of private social concern to the increasing stigma
caused by the Social Gospel, which was in its zenith
during the first three decades of the 20th century and was strongly identified
with theological liberalism. The Social Gospel emphasized
Christian obligation to respond to physical need and oppression, the priority
of social action and the task of establishing the kingdom of God on
earth now through human efforts. Fundamentalists rejected these and emphasized
spiritual need, evangelism and the future heavenly aspects
of the kingdom of God. Theological conservatives began to rigidly
dichotomize evangelism and social concern, word and deed.
Following Marsdens lead, Smith goes on to say that
while historically word and deed had been held tightly together in evangelical
missions, now the strong negative reaction against liberal theology, and especially against the Social Gospel,
had a depressing effect on the fundamentalists’
attitude toward social ministries of any kind other than “emergency” relief. In
an effort to avoid the dangerous
mistakes of liberalism, American fundamentalists, and many of their evangelical offspring, abandoned a vital part
of their own beliefs and historic tradition. 6
The effects of the Great Reversal spilled over
into mission structures and organizations. Divisions occurred within the evangelical family which led in the second
half of the twentieth century to the creation of many new and separate
agencies. Some emphasized evangelism and others focused on social needs. Separate missiologies developed, with
books and articles promoting each of
them. Overlapping overseas programs appeared with their own administrations, goals and methods. Consequently,
competition for funds developed, as each program and agency developed its own supporting constituency. Overseas,
each agency developed its own set of partners. The result was that a
confusing image of the whole missions enterprise
emerged.
Worst of all, there occurred a tearing asunder of
something the kingdom of God intended to be united visibly and actually. The holism of the kingdom vision became
garbled. Kingdom ministries that were
supposed to be integrated so as to address spiritual and social needs in a
unified way were turned into a circus of competing priorities and
organizations.
Some of us feel that much of the
malaise that missions is currently experiencing in some places, and
some of our financial problems as well, are prices we pay for the mistakes of
the past. Yet we cling to old ideas and dichotomized structures, though the
warning signals multiply around us.
I believe it is time for us to awaken to the fact
that many younger people in our churches are catching a holistic vision for the kingdom. They are looking for new
paradigms that demonstrate an
integrated approach to kingdom ministry.
With that in mind] will address in Part 2 what I
consider to be the burning question we must answer if this meeting is to amount
do something more than shop talk. The question is: What must we “kin” folk do to go get together? Are we
willing to pay the price of collaboration, maybe of merger, so as to advance
Gods kingdom in a more
biblical and holistic way in a world where resources are limited, time is short and the poor and the lost are so many? Are
we willing to do what it takes to overcome the differences that keep us apart?
Part 2
The Cost of Kinship
Recently
my wife and I visited our daughter, Kathy, and her husband, Jeff, and their
four boys in the Dominican Republic. While we were there they
celebrated the fourteenth anniversary of their arrival in that country
and the beginning of their evangelistic and educational ministry among the country’s poorest children, the children of the
Haitian cane cutters who live in scattered villages called “bateys.” From the outset, their goal was
to establish a school along with every church so that the children might receive a Christ-centered education and someday
escape the grinding poverty and
inhumane treatment of the cane cutter’s life.
The Lord has wonderfully blessed their efforts.
Since 1983 the program has grown from one school with 30 pupils to 35 schools with nearly 4,000 pupils. All the
teachers are local men and women,
most of them trained by the mission’s own teacher development program.
As to the impact of the Christian schools on the
growth of the churches, just ask the pastors. Pastors clamor for more schools because they see what the schools do for
their members. For more than a
decade, not one of the young people that went through the Christian schools has
had to take up cane cutting to earn a
living. To the people in the bateys, a school and church together offer Christ-centered hope that former generations
never knew.
About
three years ago, one of the Christian school teachers, Julio, became seriously
ill. Earlier he had hepatitis and had received
several blood transfusions, and he soon died of AIDS. Julio’s death
was mourned by the village church, by the Christian school where he had been a
teacher, and
by his
widow, Mariluz and
their two sons. A year later the younger of the sons died, also of AIDS. This left Mariluz with one boy, six-year-old Benjamin.
It was a year ago last May that
Mariluz, thin and wasted by the disease that now ravished her body, appeared without
notice at the door of our daughter, Kathy, in Santo Domingo. Next to Mariluz stood her one remaining child,
six-year-old Benjamin.
“I’m dying,” she said to Kathy, “and I’m asking
you to take Benjamin. I’m all he’s got. Nobody in the family will take him.
They are all afraid because they think he has AIDS. Will you take him... and make him your son?”
During the next few days Kathy and Jeff did some
fervent praying. What did God want them to do? They already had three sons, the
youngest about Benjamin’s age. Benjamin might very well be HIV-positive. His father had died of AIDS two
years earlier; his little brother shortly after that, and now his mother was dying of the disease.
Should they first have Benjamin tested for HJV, and
then make a decision as to whether to take him? Or should the risk of AIDS not even be a factor in their decision?
A few days later, after much emotional and
spiritual wrestling, they came to a decision. They would take Benjamin
whether he was HIV-positive or not. When Benjamin’s mother heard their decision, she immediately turned the boy over to
them. She gave Kathy and Jeff a legal document,
already notarized, stating that she wanted Benjamin adopted by them. A week
later, Mariluz died.
All that is now history. Benjamin has been tested
three times for HIV, and thankfully the test results are negative. Like
all adoptive parents, Kathy and Jeff now face the challenge of meeting Benjamin’s special needs. He has some deep wounds
which only time, love and divine grace will heal. The family’s goal is to help Benjamin develop in every way into
the kind of person God wants him to
be.
Their plans for the boy are shaped
by the goals and values of the kingdom of God. The spirit of that kingdom is
love. When you love a child biblically, you see that child as a precious image-bearer
of God. This immediately makes you concerned about all dimensions of the
child’s wellbeing——physical, emotional,
educational
and religious.17 That is holistic love. Anything less than that is
sub-Christian and a deception.
What kind of parents would they be if they decided
to reduce their stress by drawing certain lines and staying within them. For instance, what if they would provide
Benjamin with food, clothing and a
bed to sleep in, but would not send him to school and would keep religion out
of the picture? What if they left it up to Benjamin whether he chose to inquire
about God or go to church? Or what if in certain areas they set high goals for
Benjamin and monitored his development
carefully, but treated him more as a project than a person, and withheld the
love and security of intimate
personal relationships?
What if they told Benjamin: “We intend to help you
until you are eighteen, but after that you are on your own. Don’t come back to
us if you run into trouble. Find someone else to help you.”
We all know the answers to these questions. By
taking Benjamin, Kathy and Jeff made a commitment that is comprehensive
and long-term. It cannot be reduced to quick-fix solutions designed to get the boy off their hands as quickly
as possible.
They have taken as their goal the development of a
human being into a useful citizen of God’s kingdom. For that goal to be
achieved, the love and nurture they give must be multi-dimensional and of one piece. Christ must be at its center. It
must embrace Benjamin’s spiritual needs and also his physical, mental and emotional needs. Neither in the home, nor
in the church or the community can
love and nurture be carved into pieces and compartmentalized without losing their power and integrity.
Of
course we realize that there are differences between parenting a child and
evangelizing, making disciples, planting churches and developing
communities. But there are also parallels, and
reductionism is always a serious temptation. Making disciples and developing
communities must both be undertaken holistically, because they
are motivated by the same comprehensive love and
are manifestations of the one kingdom of Jesus Christ who came to save people,
people made in God’s image, people with bodies, minds, emotions
and eternal souls.
The driving force in
all our ministries is love, and love is holistic or it isn’t love at all.
Genuine love cannot be reduced to one
facet of human well-being while others are ignored. Love does not permit its diverse and multiple applications to be
segregated or compartmentalized. On the contrary, love wraps them together in one dynamic whole with Christ at
the center. And of such is the kingdom
of God.
The Big Questions
Having
said this, we turn to the questions that I posed at the close of yesterday’s presentation:
What must we “kin” folk do to advance God’s kingdom in a
holistic manner, and are we willing to pay the price of changing our
reductionistic ways and removing barriers that have kept us and our ministries
apart?
The price, I believe, is as high and perhaps for
many of us as painful as repentance itself. “Repentance” is not a popular idea
for any of us. But I believe that nothing short of humble repentance is
what is needed if we are going to remove the difficulties. I mean by
“repentance” a profound change of attitude
based on a new vision of kingdom servanthood. I invite you to consider with me the particular form of repentance
required in four areas.
1. We
need to repent of our dichotomizing between “word” and “deed” in evangelical missiology and return to the holism of the kingdom
that is plainly biblical.
Dr. Craig Ellison, who teaches Missiology at Nyack
Seminary in Nyack, New York, points out that “most of us in Western society
have Greek minds.” 18 He means to say that our way of thinking focuses on analysis. Science and
technology depend on this kind of thinking. We are trained to divide the whole into parts and treat
the parts as though they existed independently from each other and from their context. This is the Greek way of
thinking about reality. “Because of
our Greek-mindedness,” says Ellison, “we talk about spirit, mind, emotions and
body as though these intricately
interrelated dimensions of the person can be separated and adequately addressed in isolation.” 19
This
segmented view of human beings affects our practice of Christian missions.
Those of us that are preachers and evangelists
direct all or most of our energies
toward the spiritual
side of people. We leave the other dimensions, the physical and psychological, to other “specialists,” who often
are secularists. Ellison points out that this segmented way of thinking about people is not the biblical way, as we
were reminded yesterday in our review
of the Old Testament writings.
Says Ellison:
“Greek mindedness is dramatically different from
the Hebraic or Old Testament orientation, which sees people as a whole. Hebraic thinking focuses on fusion rather
than fission, synthesis rather than
analysis, intuition rather than empiricism, system rather than segment. It resists the kind of reductionism that makes people
into less than what God created them to be, whether it is the reductionism of secularism or the reductionism of
fundamentalism. 20
If we are to make any significant progress in
bringing back together word and deed ministries,
we will have to address the missiological issues arising from our
reductionistic and segmented way of thinking about people and their
needs. We must learn to see people as complex,
whole beings, because that is the way God created us and that is how he is redeeming us. Even our frail bodies, Ellison
points out, will be eternally redeemed in incorruptible form (1 Cor. 15:42). 21 God obviously regards these bodies as precious.”
This leads me to believe that we do not need a
separate missiology of development, as distinct from a missiology of evangelism and church growth. There is just one missio
del. It is the mission of the kingdom. While kingdom mission
embraces various dimensions of service and a variety of functions and applications, these are all intimately related
to one another. They are intended to
work together synergistically, and when we dichotomize them conceptually we set
the stage for functional divisions that
confuse our witness and weaken the Christian mission as a whole.
Such
compartmentalization, in my opinion, has been a major weakness of evangelical
missiology in the past fifty years. To say this, I realize, is
tantamount in some circles to waving a red flag before
a belligerent bull. Yet I sense that younger missiologists, particularly those
from non-Western countries, are eager to see changes. Are we who
have been so long identified with certain
patterns
of thought and ministry willing to admit that we may need to be corrected? Are
we willing
to pay the price of reconceptualizing evangelical missiology in terms of a more
biblical holism?
2. We must repent of the truncated vision and the narrow
goal-setting which many of our organizations have invested in
during the past forty years, and come to agreement on what the
Lord has called us to do together.
I
propose to both sides of the missionary family—relief and development workers,
church planters and evangelists—that we agree on the following
statement of a unified kingdom-focused missiology:
It is
our understanding that the fulfillment of the Great Commission requires that we
proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, plant and nurture
churches, apply the principles of Christ’s kingdom in all areas of
community life (compassion, justice, stewardship), and seek to
reclaim the whole cosmos (soil, water, air, minerals) from the control of Satan
and his kingdom.
To
that end we will proclaim the gospel of Christ’s kingdom in words and deeds,
accept suffering and if needs be persecution, in order that
Christ’s name be known, his Lordship over all of life acknowledged, and the
love, truth, and righteousness of his kingdom spread everywhere.
In all that we do we will seek to gather a saved
people, the church, and motivate and equip its members to be agents of transformation in terms of truth, love and
justice in tangible ways in their
communities and nations.
We affirm in our hearts and commit
to showing in our lives that we are Christ’s “kin-folk” and with
Christ our goal is that God’s glory will be revealed throughout the earth and
his kingdom extended everywhere.
Can all of us sign off on that
statement? If we can, then I see no reason why we cannot begin to take new
steps of visible, operational togetherness. Collaboration based on a united
commitment to kingdom values and perspective has great
potential for the future. It will require, however, that with a repentant spirit we
openly affirm ministries that in the past we played down. It means that henceforth we will embrace as vital and important
colleagues in kingdom
missions those that in the past we regarded as working for
“the other side.” Are we willing to
pay that price?
3. We all need to take a closer look at ourselves and
admit to the middle-class “captivity” of evangelical
thinking about ministry among the poor, and repent.
It is uncommon, not to say uncomfortable, for
leaders of evangelical agencies to admit that for the most part we are profoundly middle-class in our
thinking. We have been educated in middle-class schools, we live in middle-class homes, and we attend middle-class
churches where we listen to sermons
delivered in middle-class language within the conceptual framework of middle-class people. And, admit it or not, when we engage
in Christian ministry we approach the work with middle-class attitudes toward the poor, the needs of the poor, the
message the poor need to hear, and the
best strategies to help them. Worse yet, we are too ignorant to admit our own captivity to middle-class values, biases and
methodologies.
A North American missiologist whom I admire for his
insights on many issues is Bryant Myers. Myers works with World Vision and writes regularly in the “MARC
Newsletter.” In a recent article
entitled “What Is Poverty Anyway?” Bryant tries to help middle-class
evangelicals like us see the poor as
they really are. Lie describes how broken relationships, oppressive political
and economic systems, and cruel
cultural patterns lie behind so much of poverty. If we sincerely want to operate holistically and help the poor by
undoing the wrongs that keep them in misery, we will have to pay a high price.
Let’s take a close look at the price tag.
Myers warns that if we challenge comfortable
middle-class thinking and ways in regard to the poor, some people will get angry, including some who support our
agencies. For, says Myers,
The world cannot, and doesn’t
even want to transform political, economic, and social power into
something that is pro-life, pro-poor and pro-kingdom. Sustainable change will
not come through community organizing, political processes, or more
education.
Challenging the
poverty-creating nature of power will demand the transformational power of the gospel. It will be about personal sin and social
sin. Only the Good News—all of it—contains the hope that the poor will someday be able to build homes and live in them.
22
I hear in Myers’ words a cry for integrated
ministry, for an end to reductionism on the left and on the right, for the word of the gospel joined to
honest efforts on behalf of the poor, and a willingness to sacrifice for
the sake of both. I sense also an appeal for a repentant spirit, a humble admission that many of our efforts have not in the
long run accomplished very much, and a confession
that even we who say we serve the poor love power, whatever we have of it, when
it works to our advantage.
Since I teach in a seminary, I cannot help but
think of these academic citadels of middle-class values and theology where we train church leaders and a good number of
missionaries. Bewailing the lack of
understanding of the poor that he sees among church leaders and those who
teach them, Harv Oostdyk points out that while exhaustive scholarship has been
applied to uncover the precise etymology of the words of Scripture, and
hundreds of books are written and published
every year covering almost every area of theology, not much energy is extended
to help church leaders understand the
poor and how Scripture applies to them.23
Oostdyk observes that very few pastors and seminary
professors have even rudimentary experience
among the poor. They are “experientially deprived,” he says, because they have
spent most of their years in
middle-class churches and seminary classrooms, but hardly ever in a ghetto.
24“If every biblical scholar, student and preacher,” says Oostdyk,
“spent one month living among the poor, no
church in America would ever be the same. Neither would any poor neighborhood.” 25
Are we willing to pay the price of
relating personally to poor people? Dare we walk the streets they walk and
sleep where they sleep? And can we expect other evangelical leaders to pay the price
of becoming genuinely and consistently pro-poor with us?
The
places in the world where the gospel is spreading fastest and church growth is
by conversion, are the places where this “middle-class
captivity” does not exist. In these “grassroots”
churches, members and leaders know from
experience
the nature of poverty. They do not need that anyone explain to them the
importance of biblical holism. Nor do their pastors and
leaders need conferences that argue for what the Bible
so plainly teaches.
Some of the
most effective holistic ministries I know are those that originate in the
“grass-roots” churches of the Southern world. They operate without fanfare and
in ways so down-to-earth that Western
evangelicals would probably never think of them. But one thing characterizes
all of them: word and deed are woven
together. What God joined together in ancient times these “grass-roots” churches have not put asunder.
Can we humble ourselves to learn from them?
The fourth “repentance” addresses a number of attitudinal
evils that have driven a wedge between
kingdom workers and between their ministries for several decades. The only cure
for these evils begins with
repentance, and a profound change of attitude.
4. We must repent from:
· The evil of our “priestly” tradition, which is the
tradition of a clergy class controlling the church
and its ministries;
· The evil of “elitism” among missionaries that places one
class of kingdom workers on a pedestal above
others;
· The evil of avoiding or muting the verbal presentation of
the gospel and sometimes even arguing that
“deed” ministries are enough by themselves;
· The evil of avoiding
the organized church overseas, or merely using the church when it serves our
purpose, but not really taking the church seriously or seeking its best
interests.
·
The evil of private “empire building,” which has
been a driving force behind many of the separate agencies begun in the past four decades.
Whenever a Christian relief and development worker
serving overseas out of love for Christ and people is made to feel second-class among missionaries it is sin. Those
who thrust such feeling on their colleagues need to repent, for their attitude
is a hindrance and embarrassment to the kingdom of God.
Whenever
relief and development workers conduct their activities without pointing people
to Jesus and verbalizing the gospel in some way, they deny
the Lord and his cross, and they should repent.
Whenever
mission workers of any kind bypass the church they not only deprive their
efforts of the best chance for long-term sustainability, they
show an ungodly attitude toward the community for which Christ died.
They need to repent.
Whenever we see in ourselves and in our
organizations indications that crave for power and control, rivalry and
competition, and the impulse to grow our own “empire” play a role in our agencies and in our planning for the future, we
need to get down on our knees. Such things are not of God, but of the flesh and the devil.
S. We
need to repent from practices and procedures that treat people as “clients” and
which replace honest and durable relationships with a string of
numerical goals, glowing reports and short-term solutions.
No one can do effective evangelism or establish
durable churches, or carry on development work that has long-term sustainability, who operates out of a mindset that
does not build, and continually
maintain solid relationships, and networks of relationships, grounded on trust,
shared values and common long-term
commitments.
Over the past several decades I have seen many
flash-in-the-pan operations among both community development workers and
church planters. They followed a quick-fix approach that ignored on the one hand the complexity of human
needs and on the other hand the central issue of salvation through Christ alone. This approach usually is the product
of two evils: the first, of not
taking Christ and the gospel seriously, and the second, of not taking people
seriously, but instead treating people
as “clients,” or “projects” to be worked on until they reach a level that satisfies us, at which point we drop them.
Douglas
and Judy Hall are two people I admire very much. For nearly four decades they
have managed the Emmanuel Gospel Center (EGC) in inner-city
Boston. Their ministry has always been kingdom-focused, blending
emergency relief, social action, evangelism and church planting.
EGC has helped to start and develop literally scores of multi-ethnic churches
in the Boston area. At the same time, the mission has addressed almost every
conceivable social need in the inner city.
The
key to their ministry, says Douglas Hall, has been to focus on people and the
long-term process of developing people and their communities
rather than becoming overly product- or goal-oriented. Too often, says Hall, we
who work for Christian organizations fall into a pattern of
manipulating people in order to meet our own objectives. In our typical Western
preoccupation with meeting our “goals,” we forget the
importance of human relationships without which neither strong
churches nor long-term development is likely to be achieved. Unfortunately,
says Hall, we are driven by a system that requires us to report that “last year
we fed so many, or during the summer campaign we saw so many
saved.” 26
When we become obsessively goal-oriented in our
ministry, and when our goals are reductionistic
rather than holistic, we easily fall into the trap of fragmenting people. We
divide them into manageable and
measurable pieces, and we assign each piece to this or that person or agency to offer the appropriate service. When we
do that, people become our “clients.” Personal respect and dignity, and relationship-building are lost, while we hasten
to produce another glowing report of
the numerical goals we achieved.
That is not the way Jesus worked. Nor has it ever
led to long-term transformation of human beings and communities. It is not my intention to berate goal setting or
belittle the insights of modern
management. But many of us have become so obsessed with “results,” “numbers,” “progress reports” that we have disregarded
certain fundamental truths that the Bible teaches and history repeatedly illustrates.
The kingdom of our Lord consists of people who
know, love and serve the King, who is none other than Jesus the Savior revealed in Scripture and proclaimed by the
word of the gospel. The citizens of
his kingdom have a common spiritual center, namely Christ, and they share the
values he teaches—unselfishness, accountability, compassion, justice and truth.
The first responsibility
of kingdom workers is to represent their Lord honestly, accurately, and as completely as possible, not in some fragmented
form, but as he is, the one Lord who offers to sinning, suffering human beings
not only mercy to “die with dignity,” (to use Mother Teresa’s well-known phrase) but grace to live with dignity
as Sons and daughters of the one true God, and in the end to die at peace with
him, and spend eternity with him because of Christ.
It is not the highest good
we desire for ourselves, and should we seek anything less for others? Nothing short of that goal is worthy of the
kingdom of God.
A Growing Convergence
My friends, to the extent to which we have lost
that overarching kingdom vision, we need to repent and seek to regain the holism we somehow lost. We need to focus
again on people, and on the
transformational process that Jesus vividly described in his parables of the
kingdom. Both the church world and
the development world are riddled with sad examples of our mistakes. Of all people, we evangelicals should feel ashamed,
because had we listened to the Scriptures and observed our Lord more attentively, we might have avoided many errors.
Today, however, I am optimistic. Because I see a
growing concern that we regain lost ground and come together in new and more biblical ways. I see a growing
awareness, evidenced by the agenda of this conference, that “kinship” must mean
more than “spiritual” kinship. We must start to plan together, strategize holistically, and evaluate outcomes in terms
of kingdom goals and values.
One of the of the encouraging signs of a growing
convergence of visions and goals is he appearance
of training programs, like that of Ted Yamamori, president of Food for the
Hungry International and that of Bob
Moffitt, president of Harvest. These programs train pastors and local congregations in methods of local ministry
that are holistic, biblically balanced and whole-person focused. 27
Further,
I no longer sense Opposition to two propositions that I formulated years go and
which in the beginning encountered resistance. The statements are
these:
If we
wipe out poverty but neglect to tell the poor people the Good News about Jesus
Christ, we will have failed in our mission. And f we preach the
gospel but ignore the plight of the poor, we are false prophets.
Scriptures supports both statements, and together they commit us to a
united ministry of word and deed in Christ’s name. If they are separated, the
overall witness of the gospel suffers.
Brothers
and sisters, we are “kith and kin,” and we need each other. We share the
kingdom mission of showing and telling the world about God’s love
and grace. Let me illustrate from my own quite ridiculous
experience what happens when the “show-ers” and the “tell-ers” aren’t
together.
I am basically a “preacher” type. Over the years I
have been pulled into a variety of mission-related ministries, but I remain basically an evangelist and a church
developer. I know little about
agriculture and even less about things mechanical. Back in the l950s at the old
Kennedy School of Missions, I got some
training in first aid tropical medicine and what to do when there was no doctor around. But other than that, I can’t
offer much.
However, wherever I planted churches, I tried to
help people in tangible ways. Because I did not have a relief-and-development type co-worker, I made a lot of mistakes
and really didn’t help people very
much.
During the decade of the l960s, I
helped plant a number of village churches among the Mazahua Indians in the mountains
of the State of Michoacan, in southern Mexico. I worked closely with a Wycliffe Bible translator, Donald Stuart. Don was
translating the New Testament into Mazahua, and we would go from village to village together. Don would read the
Scriptures in Mazahua
from his big
blue notebook, and I would preach in Spanish. The Lord blessed and a string of
new churches were organized.
The Mazahua villagers were terribly poor. Mothers
and children were malnourished and as a result infant mortality was high. Vaccinations were unknown, and epidemics
could wipe out a dozen children in a single night. None of the villages had
electricity. They had no sewer system of
any kind and securing safe drinking water was a major problem.
Despite
my lack of technical know-how, I attempted various remedies. In one village I
dug a well and brought in a pump. But it didn’t work for very
long. In another village I set up a gas-powered corn mill to make it easier and
faster for the women to grind corn. But the men fought over
the mill. Finally someone threw nails into the hopper and that ended its life.
My greatest success,
if you could call it that, occurred when I launched a campaign against rats in the village of Rancho Viejo. Rats were
everywhere, and they ate a large share of the villagers’ corn crop.
One night in mid-September, when the corn had just
been harvested, I made the mistake of placing my sleeping bag on the church
floor near the corn offerings that the members had presented during the worship service the evening
before. All night long I was kept awake by the sound of rats chomping away at the corn. Worst of all, some of the
pesky fellows kept running back and forth over my sleeping bag. It was during
that long, sleepless night that I declared war on the rat population.
But how to go about depleting the rat supply was a
tough problem. I did not dare introduce rat poison, because children might eat it and become sick. Even a hundred
traps would not do the trick. Then I notice that there was not a single cat in
the village. Cats and dogs, of course, represented
food and unless the villagers valued the animals for some service they might perform, they would soon end up on the dinner
table. But, I reasoned, maybe the villagers would spare cats if they saw that cats ate rats, and
without rats everyone would be better off.
It so happened that I knew a
Christian couple that worked for a rich and eccentric old lady on the outskirts
of Mexico City. This lady maintained an enormous kennel for stray cats and
dogs. She had hundreds of the animals, all housed in neat,
clean cages, and the animals ate better than did thousands
of Mexican children. My friends, the caretakers of these privileged animals,
agreed to supply me with 13 cats—12 pregnant females, and one healthy torn cat.
One weekend I delivered the cats to the village. With
prayers and solemn ceremony in which I explained the cats’ mission, I
turned over one cat each to 13 different families. Each family promised not to
eat the cat, but to let the cat take care of the
rats.
Well,
it worked for a while. The next time I came to the village the cats had
delivered their kittens. Young cats could be
seen everywhere and the rat population seemed to be down. But about
a year later, food supplies ran low and most of the cats disappeared. Nobody
ever told me what happened, but I suspect the cats were eaten.
That is the kind of
foolishness you get when a person like me tries to do relief and development without a skilled co-worker. Don Stewart was a
linguist and a Bible translator; I was an evangelist and church planter. What we lacked was a team member who
could have helped villagers like those
in Rancho Viejo. Had we had such a person working alongside us, the villagers’ grinding poverty might have been
relieved, children’s lives saved, churches strengthened and praises to God shouted by a thousand lips. Indeed, the
kingdom of Jesus Christ did come to
Rancho Viejo, and to other villages like it. But it might have come more
holistically, with greater transforming power, and with more evidences of God’s
love, had a third person, a development
worker, been part of our team.
My hope end prayer is
that, starting now, sons and daughters of the same Father will determine to take steps to bring together their mission
efforts. If we work together “synergeticelly” as well as “symbiotically” we will mightily enhance each
other’s ministry. Together we will achieve far more than we could ever
accomplish apart. 28
End Notes:
1
Edgar J. Elliston, citing Orlando Costas, in “Christian Social
Transformational Distinctives,” Christian
Relief and Development: Developing Workers for Effective
Ministry, edited by E. J. Elliston. Irvin, I. TX: Word
Publishing, 1989. p. 168.
2 John Steward, Where God,
People & Deeds Connect. Biblical Wholism. Melbourne: World Vision Australia. 1990. p. 6.
3 David Engelhard, “The Lord’s
Motivated Concern for the Underprivileged,” Calvin Theological Journal.
Vol. 15. No. 1. April 1980. p. 5.
4 Ibid., pp. 6-7.
5 Ibid., pp. 9-10.
6 David J. Bosch. Transforming
Mission: Paradigm Shjfts in Theology of Mission. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991. p. 119.
7 Paul E. Pierson, “Missions and
Community Development: A Historical Perspective” in Christian Relief and
Development. p. 8.
8 Ibid., pp. 10-11.
9
Ibid., p. 11. In Holland, J. Voetius developed the first Protestant missiology
already in the 1600s, and remarkably he gave us the three
goals of Christian mission—the conversion of sinners, the planting of the church and
the changing of society in accord with the Word of God.
10 Sidney H. Rooy, The Theology of
Missions in Puritan Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 316-317. Cited by Pierson,
Christian Relief and Development. op. cit., p. 11.
11
Ibid.,p. 13.
12 Pierson, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
13
lbid.,p. 14.
14 lbid.,p. 20.
15 Linda Smith, “Recent Historical
Perspectives on the Evangelical Tradition,” in Christian Relief and Development,
op. cit., p. 25.
16 Ibid., pp. 25-26.
17
Craig Ellison makes this observation in his chapter, “Addressing Felt Needs
of Urban Dwellers,” in Planting and Growing Urban Churches.
From Dream to Reality, edited by Harvie M. Conn (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
book House, 1997), p. 101.
18 Ibid., p. 97.
19 Ibid., p. 98.
20 Op.
cit.
21 Op. cit.
22 Bryant Myers, “What is
Poverty Anyway?” In MARC Newsletter, number 97-1, March 1997. p. 3.
23 Harv Oostdyk, “Step One: The
Gospel and the Ghetto” (Basking Ridge, NJ: SonLife International, 1983), p.
190-191.
24 Op. cit., p. 191.
25 Ibid. p. 191.
26 Douglas Hall, “A View
from Boston’s Inner City,” Transformation, April-June 1991. p. 20.
27 Robert Moffitt, “Wholistic for
the Local Church: Curriculum Project Report.” Tempe, Arizona. July 1997.
28 Tetsunao Yamamori, God’s
New Envoys, (Portland, OR: Multnomah Press, 1987). pp. 140-141.
Editor’s Note:
Republished
with permission. Originally published through MARC, a division of World Vision International.
Copyright 1998. Roger S. Greenway is professor of world missiology at Calvin Theological
Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan. A former missionary in Sri Lanka and Mexico,
he was among the first to call the mission community to address
the challenge of the world’s great cities. He is a former director of the
department of world ministries of the Christian Reformed Church. This
publication is adapted from two presentations given at the joint executive
forum of the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission
Agencies (EFMA) and the Association of Evangelical Relief and Development
Agencies (AERDO), at Glen Eyrie, Colorado Springs, Colorado, September
15-18, 1997.