Where Everybody's Crazy

The prayer meeting last night was run by the Operation World team. OW is a fantastic resource, and one of those things that WEC does that nobody knows is WEC. So I love OW, and I particularly love the way that we here, with the OW staff on hand, can use the most current research that they're doing to help us pray for brothers and sisters around the world with the issues that they face right now.

You know there's a "but" coming, don't you? We'll get to that.

The other thing we prayed for at the OW prayer meeting was the Lausanne Younger Leaders Conference. This was a big meeting of church leaders between 25 and 35 that's come out of the Lausanne movement, the Evangelical missions conferences that started back in the 70s. Now I personally think Lausanne has run its course. Not because there's anything wrong with what it's doing, particularly, but because anything that runs for 30 years runs the risk of institutional fossilisation unless it's really good at rethinking itself. The Younger Leaders Conference is an idea to make this rethinking happen, but I still think we're better off shutting down and starting again.

What struck me, though, about the whole idea of a Younger Leaders Conference is that it got me thinking about some of the delegates there from Japan or China. Within the leadership culture of those places, the concept of "younger leader" is negatively nuanced. "Younger leader" is less wise and experienced than "older leader". So we're trying to encourage multicultural diversity, which is cool, but we're doing it based on the assumption that younger leaders are interesting people to listen to, which is something of a postmodern, Western starting point. Oh, the neo-neo-colonialistic irony!

Speaking of hidden ideological assumptions, here's my beef with Operation World. It's more with the way people use it. Some people seem to think that OW tells them about the "remaining task". All we need to do is Christianize the people who haven't been Christianized yet, and then the job's done and Jesus comes back. They treat OW as a guide to do-it-yourself apocalypse.

I find this actually quite scary. Really scary, if I'm honest, because it conjures up images of this unstoppable militaristic expansion, whose population percentage points will always increase at the expense of the religious enemy of the day. (Was atheism, now Islam.) It easily gives rise to the crusading mindset, and it is, fundamentally, based on the modernist, evolutionary worldview: things will get more and more Christian (or scientifically advanced, or biologically complex, or closer to proletariat revolution) by degrees until they reach the goal.

This is not true and not helpful. Not true because it denies the possibility of regress. Spectacular regress happened, of course, when Islam came along. Another religion may do the same; it's happened before. The world changes. Things do not get more and more Christian by degrees. We cannot tell when "the remaining task" will be complete, as we know by looking back and laughing at the various missioanry pronouncements of the early 20th century, which talked about "the evangelization of the world in this generation", or the apocalyptic furore around the year 2000.

Not helpful, also, because it denies the possibility of rejection. In fact, it assumes the rather unscriptural idea that Christianity is to become a dominant religion. This is a very common assumption. I don't know why, because church history shows that Really Bad Things tend to happen when Christianity does become the dominant religion. And not just history, but Scripture tells us that "many are called, but few are chosen." The New Testament is a book written by, for and about a tiny and persecuted minority. Why should we demand to have things any better?

Yes, yes, I know that the Gospel is to be preached to the ends of the earth. But the ends of the earth may well reject it. When that happened to the disciples, they were told to shake the dust off their shoes and go somewhere else. But so long as we continue to measure the spread of the Gospel in terms of reaping rather than sowing we tread a dangerous path - and we tread it over and over again.

The world will change around us. New people groups will come and go. The Gospel will need to be recontextualized to new subcultures, which rise and fall all the time. (Is there a Gospel to the British Asians? The skateboarders? The goths?) And, of course, people keep making more people.

The work on earth will never be "done". At least, not by numerical standards.