AOCM

World Mission: Why Bother?

Andy Lines is the General Secretary of Crosslinks. Crosslinks is a mission agency founded in 1922 that works mainly within the worldwide Anglican Communion.

In my time as a soldier in the British Army in a tank regiment the inside of our tank turrets became increasingly festooned with metal boxes and wires. These served the dual purpose of providing neat little places to tuck pencils and maps out of the reach of dirty black boots and providing extra obstacles for an unprotected head to negotiate in the dimness of tactical lighting, in addition of course to the purpose for which they were designed. The point was that these new benefits of advancing technology were bolted on to the turret wall without ever removing redundant boxes so the wall appeared more like a barnacled ship’s hull with each addition.

• World mission is extremely and increasingly marginal in many churches. It is like one of those redundant bolt-on boxes on the walls of my tank: often redundant but never removed completely. World mission committees are good places to ‘park’ awkward church members where not much damage can be done;
• In the current financial climate the world mission budget is an easy one to cut;
• There is so much to be done locally in Britain anyway;
• The Two-Thirds world church is thriving, so we are told, so they should be helping churches here;
• World mission was an optional course at theological college so it cannot be core to Christian ministry.
• Mission partners and mission agency reps have to be accommodated occasionally and that is best timed to give the hard-pressed local minister a break or a holiday. Hopefully there won’t be too many people around, as they tend to handle the Bible badly and always take longer than they are asked for.

These are all reasons why ordinands may be tempted to move on to the next article in the hope that it may have more relevance to the preparation you are undertaking for Christian ministry. This attitude, which puts world mission on the margins of church life, is possibly encouraged by the ‘voluntary principle’, the means by which mission agencies came into being: a voluntary association of keen individuals committed to the goals of mission in the absence of denominational commitment.

Whatever the cause and outworking it is not an attitude that a Christian has the liberty to subscribe to. As Vaughan Roberts says in ‘God’s Big Picture’: “Mission is not an option for the keen few, it is an obligation for us all”.

Why is this the case? Is not mission to the ends of the earth mandated in relatively few biblical passages commonly referred to as the Great Commission passages towards the end of the Gospels and in Acts? The Bible contains selections of texts on a whole range of issues and world mission would appear to be just one such, important but not necessarily for everyone. The answer is, as Chris Wright has put it, “the whole Bible is a missional phenomenon”. God is a missionary God and this fairly oozes out of his written revelation from every pore. Throughout the Bible God demonstrates his loving concern for all humanity, from Genesis to Revelation, and he expects his children to share his concern and join in his mission as co-workers. We live in the ‘last days’ before Christ returns and our chief activities are to “pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into his harvest” (Matthew 9:38) and to “proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Peter 2:9).

At this period in time about 2/3 of the world’s population are strangers to the love of God in Christ Jesus. Alongside a passion to share that wonderful and undeserved love with others we need to remember that “he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness” (Acts 17:31) and we know that for those without Christ that day will be a terrible one indeed.

So participating in God’s mission to his world is not a ‘bolt-on’ but part of the warp and woof of genuine Christian discipleship for all Christ’s disciples. Whilst Christians must, of course, bare witness to our Lord through attractive godly living and lives of sacrificial service to others, without a verbal proclamation of Christ’s person and work then a needy world cannot come to know him. Our churches (and many non-Christians) must respond to the tragedies of the Darfur region of the Sudan which happen with sickening frequency, but our churches must also demonstrate a commitment to respond to the greater need of all people, rich and poor, to repent and believe in Christ for salvation. Non-Christians will understandably not join us in this and it is only too easy for Christians to fail to see people from God’s perspective because spiritual need is not photogenic.

Our prime concern in God’s mission must be for our immediate ‘neighbours’ whoever and wherever they may be because we are best placed to reach them. Wonderfully, in God’s providence, in addition to the westerners around us we now have the rest of the world coming to these shores as migrants, students etc. Many of them are from countries where Christian witness cannot be carried out openly.

Let us not however forget the needs of the rest of humanity beyond these shores. God still requires that British Christians pray, give and go to the ends of the earth to make Christ known. This is not some vestige of a colonial era for which we should be embarrassed but a continuation of the sacrificial service of our forbears who were responsible for planting churches in many other countries. There is still much for us to do. There are however many other creative ways in which our churches can engage in world mission. Let me outline a few:

• Praying for God’s world in all our meetings, perhaps using (corporately or by ourselves) Operation World.
• Thinking out a strategy for world mission involvement so that our church is a local church with a worldwide mission.
• Encouraging church members, young and old, to consider a short-term placement elsewhere. English teaching, for example, is a much sought-after skill worldwide and can provide a platform in even the most closed countries hence their being termed ‘creative access countries’!
• Mobilising and encouraging business travellers and tourists from the congregation to engage in mission.
• Sending incumbents and other leaders on sabbaticals and visits to churches elsewhere.
• Sponsoring students from and in other countries so that they can be better equipped to engage in God’s mission where they are.
• Training congregations in how to reach out to other faiths groups in their vicinity.

In all these and many other ways the local church may find that mission agencies can help them to be more effective stakeholders in mission. Mission agencies exist to serve local churches to do things that are better and more easily done together so use them.

Perhaps in the past we have unhelpfully glamorised world mission thinking merely of poor countries in the Southern Hemisphere. Actually, then as now, the frontiers for mission have been spiritual rather than geographical, and we must not forget the huge and difficult needs of the rich West in addition to other more exotic parts of the world.

May we be like the Philippian church members; Paul was pleased to call them partners in the gospel. We have, under God, a glorious heritage in this country of involvement in his work worldwide. Now is not however the time for us to be on the receiving end only. Engagement in God’s mission was and is a key mark of a healthy local church.