Where Everybody's Crazy

I have spent much of this afternoon reading "Christanity Rediscovered" with tears running down my cheeks. It is an absolutely fantastic book. If you are a missionary, sell your other shirt to buy this book. (Your first shirt should have gone towards obtaining "Transforming Mission")

It tells of a Catholic missionary to the Masai who decides that the whole way he has been doing mission is broken, and he goes out purely reliant on the strength of the Gospel, not the mission schools, hospitals or the cultural accretions of twenty centuries. It's so good that picking out individual quotes is difficult, but here we go:

I mentioned that after having explained God and Jesus Christ to the people, I had come to the end of the good news. It might seem a bit abrupt, but I believe it is true. After proclaiming all that God has done in the world because of his love for the world and for human beings, and after announcing the depths to which this love has gone in the person and love of Jesus Christ, the missionary's job is complete. What else is there?

The church? Church-planting and church-establishing have often been used as descriptions of a missionary's task. But such descriptions can be misleading since they necessarily imply a kind of fixed and predetermined outcome to the preaching of the Gospel.

So he didn't plant a church. He planted the Gospel, and the Masai community organised itself into a church.

The baptisms, as they took place in the six communities, were simple affairs, the bare essentials of the baptism ceremonies. I was afraid to take any steps beyond the bare essentials, for fear of cultural encroachment, even in the matter of such things as symbols to be used. Certain symbols might take my fancy, and I might think they are very fitting. But it would be up to them, not me, to enhance those essentials in any way they wanted in later ceremonies, and enhance them they did, as the months progressed, into very elaborate baptismal liturgies. They were masters of liturgy in their own right, as pagans. Liturgy is part of a culture. So is a way of praying. Now that the gospel had come to them, they would have to have their own liturgy, their own way of praying. That was their affair. Mine was the gospel.

When they were there gathered on the banks of the stream, I spoke to them... I said, "I have finished my last instruction here in this village. I will never come back to teach anyone else here. From this day on, it is you people who must teach the word of Christianity. You must anoint the people with sheep fat. You must baptize them. The brotherhood of God [their term for the church] is yours.

"I will return to you another time to break bread together as Jesus told us to do. When one of you, or more than one of you, is ready to call this community together, and to lead it in the baptism and in the breaking of the bread, and in your life outside this meal of holy food, I will leave you and you will be on your own. Learn to stop depending on me today. Start depending on the one you receive today, the Holy Spirit of God."

The book tells of whole communities coming to faith, teaching each other, coming up with their own creeds and sacraments, weaving together Masai symbolism and culture; of missionaries evangelising groups rather than individuals; of the most authentic Mass I have ever read about; and a fair number of swipes at current mission practice on the side. But I think what I like best is the stories Jesus told to the Masai:

The green pastures of God are like a wedding feast or a circumcision feast, where there will be dancing and singing, and sugar cane for the children to suck on, and beads for the women, and tobacco for the elders to chew on, and milk and meat for everyone. And honey beer. And many will come from beyond the white mountain of Kilimanjaro on the other side, and from beyond the Serengeti plains on the other, to rejoice at that feast.

Oh, wait: Japan!

We had always looked at the Masai and said, "It is the terrible indifference of the tribe that makes it so hard for an individual to be a Christian, the terrible inertia of the tribe". What chance does an individual stand in such a set-up? Precisely. That same inertia can turn into a dynamic vital force enabling an individual to cast off his despairing, hopeless, futureless vision of the world, and share in community hope. I know many individuals who would never have been able to take that tremendous step on their own. In community, they have.

The individualism which comes from our culture not only shapes the missinoary who arrives on the foreign scene; it is part of the exported Christianity, in theory and in structure, he tries, with such good will, to pass on to a communitarian people.