Where Everybody's Crazy

There's a big huge rant which occasioned this post which I hope I will write down soon, but for now, here's a solid gold principle:

Every time that missionaries encourage a local church to come up with their own contextual ideas, they will inevitably be vehemently opposed to the results.

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.

(The title alone should tell you that I'm off on one.)

So the other day I read the thing on indigenous Japanese churches, and we found that actually, they're doing just as badly as the "mainstream" churches. So while there's a load of emphasis on contextualisation here at college, that was a welcome reminder that indigenizing the forms, even the content of the Christian message doesn't guarantee better association with it - especially in a country like Japan where import-and-improve is very much the norm. Nor, annoyingly, does turning churches over to local control.

So what works? Of course, who am I to say, having precisely zero years field experience, but I'm an academic, so here's the academic answer: instead of contextualising for form (what our services look like, say) or for content (what angle we take on the Gospel), couldn't we go one level back and contextualise for religiosity. By that, I mean, how people in general "feel" about a religion and what religion, in general, should like. There's a lot of thinking about what Japanese attitudes are towards particular religions - but not that much on the religiosity, why those attitudes are as they are.

Thankfully Joseph Spae's been doing a lot of work on this, with fantastic books like "Japanese Religiosity" and "Christianity Encounters Japan" - big thick books full of surveys about religious consciousness, sociology, anthropology and a fair bit of theology too. For instance, he talks about how religious motivation in Japan is founded on the family unit - yet our mission tends to center on individuals. And then there are mindblowing sentences like this:

The existence and nature of doctrinal concepts and moral rules within the religions of Japan is, existentially speaking, of comparatively little importance to the believer in determining the group of his choice... acceptance of a religion is made on a pragmatic or functional basis; it is practical, not noetic; it is utilitarian, not dogmatic; it is variable, not continuous; it is a mood, not a view of life; it is eclectic, and hence tolerant and pluralistic; it is integrative of even contradictory values and doctrines.

Translation: Japanese people don't join religions because those religions are "right", (religion as history?) or even "good", (religion as sociology?) but because they're "beautiful" (religion as art?) or they "work". (religion as ... economics?)

Indigenizing Christian religiosity to Japan would change the way we do apologetics. (We wouldn't.) It would make our faith broader, more accepting, less doctrinal, more mystical, less scientific, more emotional. And once we do that, that would have knock-on effects changing the angle we choose on our message (content) and the way we put it across. (form) The upper layers of contextualisation would fall out naturally.

So that's the academic answer. It's a theory; try it, I dunno, it might work.

But there's another answer, which Morinaga-sensei came up with at the shuyokai: unite the church. I think he's onto something, there - that sermon is a must-read.

Most of my reading here at college actually has nothing to do with my course; I'm just taking the opportunity, which I probably won't have again^*, to use a lot of time and a fantastic collection of resources to prepare myself for the road ahead.

Tonight I ought to be reading more of the masterful David Bosch, but I've picked up another book on Japanese Christianity, "Christianity made in Japan", by Mark Mullins. Some choice snippets so far:

There is in Japan another Christianity than the familiar array of churches left behind by missionaries from the West, one virtually unknown abroad and as yet neglected by scholars of religion. It is the Christianity of indigenous movements established in a direct act of resistance to the failure of imported varieties of Christianity to reach deeply into the Japanese soul.

Now, a little bit of history for you.

Missionaries from Reformed, Presbyterian and Congregational church traditions met that same year [1872] for the first Protestant Missionary Conference to discuss how cooperative missionary activities could be carried out and schismatic Western-style denominationalism averted in Japan. In order to create a united "body of Christ in Japan", it was decided that denominational names would be avoided and missionaries from various traditions would all use the name "Church of Christ" when organizing new congregations.

So far, so good.

This was the general orientation of the Protestant missionaries until 1873, when the notices proscribing Christianity were finally removed. With the change in political climate to one of relative freedom came a rather sudden reversion to the old denominational orientation on the part of many missionaries. The concern for a united witness through cooperative mission was soon replaced by a focus on establishing Western denominational churches.

"Oh, those naughty missionaries"? Well, actually...

After ten years of study in the United States, Niijima Jo returned to Japan in 1874 and made a strong appeal to the Church of Christ congregations in the Kansai area to adopt the congregational polity in order to create a free and independent church in Japan.

Now I really understand what Morinaga-sensei was talking about when he planned to reunite the church in Japan. On the other hand, a useful note of caution for people like me:

If indigenization is the "cure" for nongrowth, one would expect to find indigenous movements to be dynamic and growing. An overview of growth and decline patterns of representative organizations, however, reveals a more ambiguous pattern.

Fair enough. But on the other hand, why are we still considering quantity, not quality?