Where Everybody's Crazy

So I do read the comments here, even if I don't always respond to them. And if there are good and interesting questions I do try to answer them. (Gervase, I am not ignoring your question about doctrine; I have half an answer in my head, and I'll post it in a bit, but it's a good and interesting question so I want to spend some more time thinking about it.)

One of the questions was about how supporters can help missionaries overcome the work guilt I wrote about previously. Well, I'm aware there's a danger in generalizing too much from my own experience; I'm just one guy who happens to be workaholic, and I don't mean in any way to say that all my contemporaries are. (There do seem to be a lot of them, though.)

But anyway, it got me thinking about how supporters can support missionaries. What do we guys on the field want from our partners back home? Well, again, I don't want to generalize too much from my own experience, (so please note that any passages written in the first-person-plural are so written for stylistic reasons) so I can give you a few things which I would really appreciate from churches and individual supporters.

This is not meant to be a list of demands or a cry for help, either. I'm actually doing pretty well at the moment. But the question was asked, albeit in a slightly different form, and it got me thinking. I've put down as much as I can think of because any supporter who does at least one of these things is doing a good and appreciated job, and I want to include as many people as possible.

1. Prayer. That has to be number one. Now remember who's writing this. You know that I'm not normally some super-spiritual "we can nothing without the supporting hand of God" type. We can do loads of stuff without the supporting hand of God, as many millions of people prove every day. But prayer is the fuel of the mission engine. Without it, the car might move, but only if we're pushing it hard. I have experienced the difference it makes to my life and my work when people are praying; I have felt supported and comforted even though I only found out afterwards that people were praying for me. I've experienced that, and I really don't want to do without it.
2. Communication. When I go back to visit my church in August (oh yeah, I'm coming to the UK for a bit in August. Should probably have said. We're not necessarily great at communication either.) I'll probably know about half or a third of the number of people I knew there when I left. I'm aware of this and prepared for it, so it's not going to hit me that hard. But still the blow can be softened by hearing a bit more of what's going on in church. What's the teaching on at the moment? What challenges are you facing, and what new stuff are you doing? Are there any projects starting? What's going on? Who's getting dedicated/married/buried? If you've got a weekly newsletter in electronic format, send it to your missionaries. Here's why: I came back from Bible college once to a service to find that my church had a new vicar. That was a surprise. Don't do that. (To be fair, he's been one of the best communicators with and encouragers of missionaries in the church.)
3. Challenge. Most of us are providing the teaching in our churches. If we get off track, our church gets off track. So we need some contradictory and thought-provoking stuff thrown at us to keep us real. And hey, expecting us to get our own spiritual nourishment from our sermon preparation is all well and good, but it's nice to hear stuff from outside the echo-chamber once in a while. Has there been a really good and gritty sermon in church recently? Send us a copy of it. Have you read anything that impacted your spiritual life? Tell us about it. Do you think we're talking a load of rubbish on our blogs? Say so. :)
4. Encouragement. Out of sight can mean out of mind; we know this, and so it's not a huge problem. But that's precisely why just the occasional note every so often to let us know that we're still remembered and we haven't dropped off the radar is a huge, huge encouragement. Replying to the prayer letters we send is a good one, even if it's just a few words, it stops us thinking we're talking into a vacuum.
5. Participation. In these days of Skype and high-speed Internet access, I can "virtually" turn up at your events. You don't actually need to make a big thing of me being there. I did a couple of Skype interviews with my church groups recently, but actually one of the nicest bits was just sitting there and listening to the service like everyone else. Give me an AV feed and I'll be happy. It helps with the whole catching-up thing I mentioned above, and it keeps that connection between us going.
6. Places to stay. I know this is the biggest issue for me when I return to the UK. My mother is in Wales but my church is in Oxford. I was renting a flat there but now I'm not renting one any more so when I visit I have to rely on the kindness of friends and church members. It's actually pretty stressful having to approach people and impose on them for however long. Organising hospitality for me when I visit is one of the most practical and powerful ways you can show that you care. Nothing amazing, just a bed for the night; but someone on location is much better placed to ask around and find people who can offer than trying to do it from five thousand miles away, and it takes all the stress out of it.
7. Care packages. I'm in two minds about this one. I love my life here in Japan, and I'm happy living like a Japanese. But I hope that even those who are into radical contextualization would be prepared to turn a blind eye to the odd jar of Marmite or Fray Bentos pie every six months or so, and of course it's the thought that counts more than the pie. Oh man, the pie... (Kudos to my pastorate for their gravy-and-stuffing drop around Christmas time.)
8. Briefing and debriefing. When we come back to our home countries, or set off again, we're going to be in a whirl. Maybe those missionaries in troubled countries are going to have seen some disturbing stuff - now mostly the mission agencies will help them deal with that or put them in touch with professionals who can - but everyone will come back to reverse culture shock, disorientation and above all change. And as Marjory Foyle puts it, you can have stress without change but you can't have change without stress. Getting us in for a debriefing will (a) help us adjust to what's changed so we can expect it, and (b) show us that you are prepared to invest some time and organisation into helping us. (b) is probably more important than (a), when it comes down to it. Similarly for briefings when we go again. Having some sensible questions prepared to talk through with us can help identify any areas where you can help us more or we can help you more. (Oh yes, that reminds me: this isn't a one-way thing, and it actually helps maintain that connection between us if it's not one-way. If there is anything we can do to help serve you better, we want to know about it.)
9. Money. It would be a bit insane to pretend that this isn't a consideration but honestly, it's got to appear at the bottom of the list because it's often the least of our problems. We can tighten up our belts and our budgets, we can borrow from the field or pitch in with other missionaries, but we can't magically create a connection with our supporters from out of nowhere. I would honestly much rather be supported a church which couldn't offer me much money but which loved me than one which gave me all the cash I needed and just left me to get on with it.

   I'll add more ideas as I think of them, but again, this is (a) just personal opinion, and (b) not a wishlist but a set of ideas. Don't stress about doing them all. Just feel good if you're doing one of them. :)

The missionary life is, let's face it, luxurious, unreal and a little bit scary. Now I don't doubt that for some missionaries, the word "luxurious" may raise a few hackles. I know many of my brothers and sisters out there are having a really hard time. But at the same time, I imagine that most of them still have the freedom to decide their own schedules, to determine their own workload, and to prioritize spending time with people - rather than having to get up and do whatever someone else tells them, which is most of how their friends back home live.

If I really wanted to slack off, there are only two things I absolutely definitively need to do every week to keep people here content with my work: I have to turn up to church on Sunday with a sermon, and turn up to a meeting on Tuesday. Well, every other Tuesday. And I can miss that if I can come up with a good enough reason. So one and a half things a week. And that's before people here notice. People back home can get by with a newsletter a month. Not even that - I know missionaries who write home three or four times a year. If I really wanted to slack off, my base workload would not get in my way.

Now of course I have no intention of slacking off, and anyone who knows me knows that I would find it actually physically abhorrent. I am, if anything, a pretty driven person - I think that probably you have to be a little bit driven to be in this game - and I still consider any day I don't achieve something to be a wasted day. This is a bad attitude that I need to change; I'll be talking about the Sabbath principle in my leadership seminar in April and how the leader is not meant to be a superman.

But one of the things which actually adds to my natural drivenness is the guilt of knowing that I have this slack-friendly workload and someone else is paying for it all. I'm being supported because people back home think that what I do is worth paying for, so I try to make absolutely sure they're getting their money's worth out of me. Even then, however, because of the nature of a lot of my work, I still end up with a lot of guilt.

I spent yesterday afternoon playing go, which is my hobby. I normally do this on Thursday afternoons, but I had some time after a meeting, so I went over to the local community center and spent a few hours talking to people there. I used to play in Kyoto, but the players there are more serious and don't talk much, and now I've found somewhere in my own town I feel I'm a bit more part of the community. People in the community center aren't coming just to play go, they're playing because they're elderly and they want to have some human contact as well as a good game. So they chat a lot more, and as a foreigner (and fairly good player) I stand out and get chatting to them. And naturally they ask about what I'm doing here, and I tell them. Now there are people who have recognised me in the streets because I've met them at the community center, which is a state I've wanted to get to since I arrived. There's someone I got talking to yesterday who was interested in me and what I'm doing here and specifically asked me to come back and have another game and a chat tomorrow. Which of course I will do.

But looking at it objectively, that's two afternoons this week "off" playing games. On someone else's dime. Do you see where the guilt comes in? There's a sense of luxury and privilege here I find it hard to get away from.

This is, of course, the big problem with a job whose focus is on human relationships. You can't really measure the quality of the work that you're doing, except in terms of things like conversions per year - something that at the same time you admit you have no direct control over. Sometimes I wonder if some of the impetus behind "managerial mission" and trying to put hard statistics on a missionary's "performance" has less to do with trying to "haste the evangelization of the world" and more to do with managing the guilty of the good old-fashioned Protestant work ethic.

I was asked recently by the editor of our in-house magazine to come up with something controversial for him to print. Well, he didn't use those exact words, but the implication was very much there. And he pointed out a phrase I used a while back about church planting, and wondered if I could expand upon it. Here we go.

Our mission, WEC, defines itself as a church planting mission. Our strapline is "reaching people - planting churches". I was present at the UK field meeting when we decided on our UK strapline, because "church planting" has a different connotation where I come from. I met someone on a bus in Oxford who had come from a certain denomination to "plant a church" in Oxford. I told him that we already had more than fifty, most of which were growing and serving the community well, but that wasn't what he was interested in. We didn't have a church from his denomination, so he came to plant one. "Church planting" in UK parlance can look very similar to ecclesiastical colonialism. I will come back to this idea later.

So anyway, at the UK meeting, we ended up after a fairly laboured process with the strapline "planting where there is no church", which avoids the unfortunate juxtaposition of those two words. I noticed, though, at the meeting, that many people did not understand the point of a strapline.

A strapline is not meant to be true. The idea that WEC is "planting where there is no church" is, well... Here's a chart which shows the correlation between the number of WEC workers in a country (from our communication directory) and the percentage of Christians there (using the methodology and figures found in Operation World).

Do you see how, as the number of workers increases, the pink bar gently falls? No, neither do I.

Anyway, that's OK, because straplines aren't meant to be true. They're just for advertising. We say that we're reaching people and planting churches, but in reality, WEC has more people primarily involved in medicine and teaching - activities which are explicitly considered secondary by our constitution - than the 16% of WEC missionaries who are primarily involved in pioneer church planting. (These numbers come from our communications directory.)

The point of straplines is that they represent the vision and hope of the organisation. They reflect what we're aiming at. We're not a church planting mission by any means, but we do want to be.

But sometimes I wonder why. I am sure that some people will consider "church planting" to be the "Biblical mandate". Now the Bible is a fairly big book and if you look hard enough you can find a mandate for anything, but I think that in this case, they are mistaken. We have a mandate to make disciples, a mandate to baptise in the name of the triune God, to be witnesses to the ends of the earth, to preach the good news to all creation, to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the leper and drive out demons. Plenty, I feel, to be going on with for the moment, without any need to make up other work for ourselves. But if you want a mandate to plant churches, you will have to find it from someone other than Jesus Christ - and I'm not convinced that that is a very good idea for anyone who considers themselves to be his follower.

It is true, of course, that Jesus does talk about the "church". He mentions the word all of twice - once when he talks about how Peter will be the rock on which it will be built, and that gets pretty Catholic pretty fast so we try to ignore that one, and once when the NIV spectacularly badly translates "ekklesia" as "church" rather than the obvious contextual meaning of "town assembly". (cf. Kittel & Bromiley, TNDT, p.400.) Jesus concern, and his mandate, was that of disciple-making. The church was what happened as a result.

Why is this distinction important? I leave the explanation to Bosch: (Transforming Mission, p.332.)

The medieval missionary policy of plantatio ecclesiae had still operated on the assumption that one day, all the world would be put under the sway of the church. By the middle of the nineteenth century such an ideal was no longer deemed possible, at least not in Protestant circles... So the Protestant variant of plantatio ecclesiae was the carving out of small, exclusive "territories" of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Lutheranism and the like. The "advance of the gospel" was measured by counting tangible things such as the number of baptisms, confessions, and communions, and the opening of new mission stations or outputs. The church had, in a sense, ceased to point to God or to the future; instead, it was pointing to itself. Mission was the road from the institutional church to the church that had still to be instituted... The relationship of these churches to society and to the wider ecumenical and eschatological horizons was largely ignored.

Anyone can plant an empty church. Anyone can plant a social club which meets on a Sunday and sings some songs - and then write back in their newsletter having justified their continued existence. The success of a "church planting mission" like WEC directly depends on the number of churches it plants - a recipe, if ever I saw one, for the kind of base ecclesiastical colonialism we saw in my young friend from Oxford.

But how all this church planting relates to the Kingdom of God is unclear. Indeed

questions were seldom asked at this time about the relationship of this churches to the kingdom of God. Their very existence appeared to be its own justification and no further discussion of mission goals was required. (Scherer, Gospel, Church and Kingdom, p.77.)

The church is not the goal. The Kingdom of God, in all its various and unfathomable richness of manifestations, is the goal. The church is purely the community of those who live in the Kingdom of God.

If you think you can "plant" a church, then your understanding of church is way too small.

Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?

As a mission, we at WEC say that we go "where the need is". Not where it's easy, or where it's personally convenient, but where the need is. And, well, I could be cynical but for the most part we do that pretty well. I keep forgetting how well we do it.

A few months after coming to Japan, I joined the Japan Evangelical Missionary Association. I had this thing about professional development and joining relevant organisations and reading the professional journals, and... that's another story for another time. Anyway, every month or so JEMA sends me an email about the events that they put on, which are nearly all in Tokyo. Of course they are; if you live in Tokyo, you're never really sure if people have electricity or running water yet outside of Tokyo. And besides, everyone in Japan commutes into Tokyo every day, right?

Anyway, those events that aren't in Tokyo are in a place called Higashi Kurume. Which is technically Tokyo, but is a city in its own right at the north end of Tokyo near Saitama. I just looked that up, because I had never heard of it before getting all this JEMA spam about stuff going on there. Higashi Kurume. Higashi Kurume. What the heck's going on in Higashi Kurume?

At the CPI conference, I met a bunch of missionaries from Higashi Kurume, and I asked them. What is going on there? Is there a big revival happening? Coversely, is it a particularly difficult place to evangelise so we need lots of stuff going on there? And to a man, they all gave me the same answer.

"We're there because there's a good Christian school there."

A woman comes across a man crawling under a street lamp. "I've lost my car keys," he explains.
The woman tries to help the man find his keys. After a few minutes of searching, she asks "Where exactly did you drop them?"
"Down the street, next to my car."
Puzzled, she asks "Then why aren't you looking over there?"
"The light is better here."

I'm a visionary, big-picture kind of bloke. I like knowing where we're going and not caring about the details. In that sense, the missionary job is ideal for me - there's a very definite big picture. I know what mission in the large looks like: we want to see everyone in Japan given the opportunity to know about Jesus.

But the missionary job is actually a bit too open-ended for me and most people. You get to where you're going, and... then what? What do you do? How are you actually going to see everyone in Japan given that opportunity? You need some strategy in order to get to the big picture. My tutor at college gave us all a load of good advice about how to actually work things into your working week in order to get useful stuff done, or else it's very possible to end up frittering away your time. That's the skill of having mission in the large in mind, and then working out mission in the small.

And yet I have almost the opposite problem. I have a very full schedule. Today was unusually free, and so I felt a little of the emptiness - I did my accounts, paid some bills, did a bit of translation and a bit of exegesis. It's all things that need to be done, but none of it about giving everyone in Japan the opportunity to know about Jesus.

But most of the time, I'm very aware of mission in the small - I spend most of my week on church work, language study, pastor's meetings, preparing and giving sermons... In the same way as I've spend today, it's all useful stuff I'm sure, but I can't see it relating to the bigger goal. It's all a bit parochial, local, small-minded. I'm trying to do mission in the large, and I know about mission in the small, but what I need to understand is mission in the middle - where I fit in, and how my daily activity works towards that goal.

I'm starting to think about ways around this. I know that one of the things I can do here is to pass on the little I know about leadership to others. I need to think about ways to bring goodness to the poor and freedom to the oppressed, since those were two things Jesus talked about a surprising amount.

I also reckon that one of the things I'm good at - or at least, one of the things I do a lot - is think, and so I can easily see my job as helping people to think, whether it's about thinking about mission in Japan, or coming up with new areas for the church to experiment in, or working through with people the church and missionary structures they have in place and evaluating whether or not they're doing what they should be, or to find ways of encouraging, training and developing pastors and missionaries.

I often get so bogged down with details I can't see the big picture. And I often see so much of the big picture that I can't work out how it actually comes together. So what I need is a good sense of mission in the middle.

Update: as usual, the first thing that needs to change is my attitude. I implicitly stated above that doing local, small-minded parochial things is somehow deficient, that it isn't good enough for me. Well, it is. It does have value and if that's all I get to do for the rest of my life, then it should be enough.

I've heard many reasons why our work might not be effective: a "resistant" culture, inappropriate contextualisation, spiritual oppression... You can add some of your own, I'm sure.

But in the Biblical spirit of taking the log out of our own eyes before we start looking for beam in others, I'd like to humbly suggest some more personal reasons why our ministry may not be as effective as we'd hoped.

• Problems of personal integrity.
• Tiredness and burnout.
• Disunity and disagreement.
• Lack of love or concern for those we are reaching.
• Disobedience and residual sin.
• Insufficient time with God.

All the resources we have in our work, at bottom, are our character and our relationship with God. If those things are lacking, then we will not be effective. As Gilbert Arland put it, "When an archer misses the mark, he turns and looks for the fault within himself. Failure to hit the bull's eye is never the fault of the target. To improve your aim, improve yourself."

Damn, I missed it again! Yesterday was the feast day of St Nikolai Kasatkin, Enlightener of Japan, one of the most important unsung figures of Japanese missiology.

Unsung in our tradition, of course; within the Orthodox community he is very much sung:

O holy Saint Nicholas, the Enlightener of Japan,
You share the dignity and the throne of the Apostles:
You are a wise and faithful servant of Christ,
A temple chosen by the Divine Spirit,
A vessel overflowing with the love of Christ.
O hierarch equal to the Apostles,
Pray to the life-creating Trinity
For all your flock and for the whole world.

We don't tend to that sort of thing for our folk. But then, St Nikolai is a very special case. He has been called "the greatest missionary of the modern era"; a bishop of the Episcopalian church called him "one of the most outstanding Christian missionaries." But if you pick up a book on mission to Japan, you will be lucky to find a mention of him.

Let's give a quick summary of Nikolai's achievements before we look at why he's so important. If we remember that Nikolai arrived in Japan in 1860, then two quotes should suffice:

By 1900 the church had trained 376 Japanese clergy and 25,698 members.

Mark Mullins, Christianity Made in Japan

Indeed, there were never more than four foreigners in the work during the entire history of the Orthodox church in Japan.

Jim Stamoolis, An Examination of Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Missiology

Four missionaries, forty years, twenty five thousand converts, and a self-sustaining church fellowship. These days we are happy if four missionaries work for forty years to get twenty five converts. Perhaps the reason we don't talk about Nikolai so much is because we know what kind of position he puts us in.

Oh, and by the way, I was being a bit modest on Nikolai's behalf. When I said "twenty five thousand converts and a self-sustaining church fellowship", I meant twenty five thousand converts, a translation of the Bible into Japanese, along with a translation of all the Holy Liturgy and some other theological literature, a cathedral, a seminary, a library and at least six schools. All of which are still functioning today. Nikolai achieved in forty years what the entirety of the Protestant mission could not achieve after nearly two hundred.

You see, anyone who tells me that Japan is a "very hard country to reach" doesn't know their history. (That's OK, though; lots of people don't know their history.) We have bought into the idea that Japan is "resistant to the Gospel", and we have adjusted our expectations accordingly.

Now let's look at how St Nikolai achieved all this. (This is not a recipe, of course!)

First, he threw himself wholeheartedly into understanding the language and culture. When he was found reading non-Japanese books, his Archbishop rebuked him, and he resolved to only read Japanese literature. He got out into the community and listened to Buddhist and Shinto storytellers and preachers. He researched the history of Japan. He knew it better than most Japanese.

Second, he took the long view. He spent eight years researching the Japanese language and culture. His first convert came after four years of study. Taking the long view also means delegation. In 1869 - five years after the first convert! - he handed over his congregation to another missioner. Having established one congregation, he moved to Tokyo to set up another. This pattern of establishing, delegating and moving on marked his ministry.

Third, he understood the people. His first convert was a samurai called Sawabe. Takuma Sawabe was an ultra-nationalist - one of the kinds of people in the black minivans that we would shy away from these days - who regarded the Russian Consulate as symbolic of all of the problems of opening up the country to foreigners. When Sawabe came to the Consulate, sword drawn, ready to kill Nikolai, Nikolai knew to appeal to his samurai nature:

"Why are you angry at me?" Fr. Nicholas asked Sawabe.

"All you foreigners must die. You have come here to spy on our country and even worse, you are harming Japan with your preaching," answered Sawabe.

"But do you know what I preach?"

"No, I don'™t," he answered.

"Then how can you judge, much less condemn something you know nothing about? Is it just to defame something you do not know? First listen to me, and then judge. If what you hear is bad, then throw us out."

Sawabe did listen to him, and was persuaded through his words and through the Holy Spirit working in him. Nikolai knew how to make Sawabe listen. How many of us today can honestly say that we know how to make Japanese people listen to us and our message?

Fourth, he was committed to his people. This is a matter of integrity. He needed the Japanese people to know that he was on their side. Many missionaries take the option of relying on their home countries when things get tough, but Nikolai was absolutely sold out for Japan, and his congregation knew his love through his dedication to them. When Japan and Russia went to war, many of his own congregation urged him to go back home. (Remember that he came to Japan under the auspices of the Russian Consulate in Japan.) But he refused; he needed to serve and be with his people. At the same time, he found ways to minister to Russian prisoners of war in Japan.

Finally, he was quick to delegate, as we have already alluded to. When Paul Sawabe begun to believe, he brought three friends along to hear Nikolai's preaching. Nikolai left the four original believers to go and do their own discipleship, and one year later there were 12 baptised, and 25 of what we would now call "seekers". Fifteen years after this, the church was four thousand strong. To make this work would require yet further delegation, and so he began the process of ordaining Japanese clergy. By the time he came to celebrate fifty years of his mission, there were 43 clergy ordained and 121 lay preachers. And let's remember that five years after having a church of one, he passed it on and moved on to Tokyo. He knew that if he was going to reach the whole of Japan, he could not confine himself to one area for the whole of his missionary life.

He was a man who wanted to bring the Gospel to the whole of Japan. Within one lifetime, and with the help of up to three other missioners who mainly returned home exhausted, he built an entire communion of churches.

St Nikolai Kasatkin was by far the single most successful missionary in Japan, ever. Perhaps one day our histories of Japanese mission will reflect this.

Here is a parable.

A church pastor declares to his friend, a mission society leader, that the idea of "mission societies" is obstructive and non-Biblical. Always poaching our best people! Churches should be sending missionaries out directly!

"A great idea", his friend replies. "But... before you send Joe out to Elbonia, have you thought about preparing him for the Elbonian culture?" "Well, we have, but we don't really know anyone who knows all that much about it. So he'll just have to discover it himself when he gets there." "Well, I know a few people he can meet who can tell him a bit about it." "That's great! But, of course, we're still sending him out as a church."

"Of course, and I respect that," says the mission leader warmly. "Now, what will you do about visas, about residency requirements, about getting a local bank account?" "I hadn't really thought about that." "We can help with these things, you know." "That's very kind of you. But, of course, we're still sending him out as a church."

"Of course. Now, tell me, what will Joe be doing in Elbonia? How is he going to find things to be involved in? Where will he find encouragement and fellowship?" "Oh now, Joe is a very motivated guy. He'll find his feet just fine." "That's excellent. But you know, I know a few people out there he can hook up with, meet from time to time, discuss the need, swap ideas, that sort of thing." "Well, I'm sure he may well take you up on that. That would be great for him. But, of course, we're still sending him out as a church."

"Of course. And while we're at it, you know, we can help him find a good language school. Oh, and I know some people who've had similar experiences who can debrief him when he comes back." "That would be really helpful." says the pastor. "But, of course, we're still sending him out as a church."

"Of course", says the mission leader, with a smile.

The relationship between the church and mission agency is basically one of attitude. The attitude really ought to be that the mission agency is helping the church get its members involved in world mission. For some reason, it's become, in many cases, the church seeing the mission agencies as poaching their would-be missionaries and redirecting their loyalty away from the church. Agencies, now viewed with suspicion, find themselves having to go into churches with a more apologetic attitude.

The gap between the real aims of the agency and the churches' perception has increased over the past ten or twenty years. I don't really know why this is. I guess Bosch's observations about the similarly between denominations and mission agencies is perhaps part of the reason:

Without denying the merit there is in such a discussion I would like to suggest that, within the framework of the paradigm spawned by the Enlightenment, there was not much to choose between the organized church as bearer of mission and the mission societies.

The point is that, in Western Protestantism, the church was increasingly fractured into a great variety of denominations which, phenomenologically speaking, were not decisively different from missionary and other religious societies. Denominations, too, were organized on the voluntary principle of like-minded individual banding together. They were, in a sense, para-church organizations.

Not only that but when agencies take on the role of church planting, they plant churches in their own image, essentially - and often explictly - creating a new denomination. Perhaps part of the scepticism denominations have about mission agencies is due to the scepticism they have about other denominations, and the practice of "stealing sheep" in which they have indulged.

A short aside: In all my ponderings about the church, I keep coming back to the doctrine of adoption. It is not one we focus on. But I believe it should form the basis of a proper understanding of the Church. The fact that other Christians are our brothers and sisters, and nothing we can do can change that, forces us to put aside denominational and other barriers. "All one in Christ Jesus" is the basis of the Church, and everything else is just working that out in practice.

But coming back to our problem, mission agencies have not helped themselves by requiring high standards of commitment from "their" workers. The process I have had to go through in joining WEC is far, far more involved than the process of joining a church; it is probably more involved than the process of getting married, and, let's be blunt, claims similar levels of commitment. This is wrong. We are not "their" workers. We are primarily God's workers. We are not even on loan from the church to the mission agency. Our primary focus must remain the church. The agency has to relegate itself to a support role only.

And so, especially in new churches, there has been a complete rejection of the role of mission agencies, in favour of direct church-to-church mission. While they do, on the whole, tend to do mission - and their own workers - a grave misservice by turning them out ill-equipped, ill-educated and ill-prepared, encumbered by accountability and pastoral burdens, I do share some of their concerns. Mission agencies are not biblical. But, and this is a point completely missed by the churches, neither are denominations. (I know many of the new churches claim to be non-denominational. Sorry, but they are, whether they use the word or not, while they still maintain their "independence" and their denominational trappings. It's just a matter of semantics.)

I do believe, then, that in the world of church-to-church mission, the agency has the right to exist and function in a support role. And agencies will claim that it is precisely this support role that they have been playing all along! The agency has no right to be the legitimate bearer of mission. But again, neither has the denomination. That right belongs to God alone; we just follow along, trying to keep up.

As my parable was meant to illustrate, the difference between church-to-church mission, assisted by the mission agency, and agency-based mission is entirely one of perception. It's important for the mission agencies to reclaim this perception, to remind churches that their purpose is to provide them with much-needed support in launching their members into world mision. Perhaps the way to reclaim this is the "insidious" manner of the mission leader in our example. But it also requires a spirit of true humility on both sides and this understanding of brotherhood I mentioned earlier.

I'm actually very happy with the way WEC sees its responsibilities towards the church as an enabler and encourager of mission; the way it sees deputation as as way of giving to the church in terms of encouraging it to achieve its missionary calling, rather than expecting to receive from the church. But in many cases the fundamental problem of perception and attitude is still there, and to fix that will require not just humility, but also prayer.

While I'm in the business of publishing articles...

Here at college, and with others on the Internet, I occasionally have deep conversations about mission in Japan, what we're doing right and wrong, what we could be doing differently, and how the society is changing around us. Recently I decided to start writing some of these deep conversations down. The result was "Missiological Group Therapy", an invitation-only mailing list. I tend to post something every day or two out of my research, or out of something I've seen on the web. I'm hoping that over time it'll become an effective resource for people involved in mission in Japan.

Since the mailing list is a bit inaccessible, and the archives, well, suck, I've presented it as a group blog. (This involved some fun technological shenanigans too.) Share and enjoy!

We've just had open day weekend which meant I was pretty much rushed off my feet for the past week with preparation. I have some things I need to blog, but first, a rant.

The ideal of an indigenous church, we are told, is one that is "self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating". And we tried this, but it didn't work, so now we have to add two more conditions: self-theologising and, after Iguassu, self-missiologising. We are in the curious position where Christians are suggesting that the problems of the Church be solved by adding more of "self". I would have thought that less of "self" would be more a Christian solution.

Because the aim of all this "self" is to create a church which is self-sufficient; this ideal is not taken from the Bible, which stresses the importance of interdependence and self-in-relationship, but from an individualistic Western culture, which stresses independence and autonomy. By adding more and more "self"s to free the Church of Western influence, we are actually pushing in Western thinking through the back door.

If you go and create a church which is self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating, self-theologising, self-missiologising, self-sufficient, then congratulations! You are now in a position where the hand can say to the eye "I don't need you", and you have set the course for a thousand more church splits and divisions in the years to come.