Where Everybody's Crazy

It's been - and still is - a busy month. Much to report and not much time to report it. Meanwhile, I've been doing some research, and I've put together what I think is the best and fullest timeline of Vories' life and mission (5M PDF) available.

I've got loads of blog posts in the mental queue, it's a Friday night, and the cricket is washed out, so let's make a start...

I was asking someone the other day why Buddhist monks in Japan get married when the first premise of Buddhism is that you have to avoid attachment, and the first rule of the monk's code is that monks shouldn't have sex.

It was my opening gambit in a time-honoured evangelistic technique: take someone's deeply held beliefs, caricature them beyond recognition due to a superficial understanding of them, and then paint an overly-rosy picture of Christianity to show how my deeply held beliefs are better.

In other words, the same trick we pulled with Judaism, and it was wrong then as well. It goes something like this: we look at a religion with a lot of rules, then we ask why people don't live up to those rules, then we conclude - on their behalf - that it's because either (a) they're weak and/or (b) they're not meant to live up to a system of rules, and then produce Christianity, "a relationship, not a religion!" I've done this countless times.

But it's completely bogus. Jews don't follow the covenant in order to gain favour with God, they follow the covenant because they already have favour with God. That might sound a bit too unfair to be true, but that's grace for you. It's not fair.

As for the question about Buddhism, the answer is that, since a lot of temples ended up being owned by the monk's family, the monk needed a heir for the temple to survive. But isn't it against the rules? Sure, but if there's a good reason, the rules can be bent or broken. That might sound crazy to us, but that's just because deep down we're legalistic and so we expect everyone else to be. "You see," said my informant, "Buddhism isn't like Christianity."

This wasn't the turn the conversation was supposed to take. I was supposed to say "Christianity isn't like Buddhism", and then point out how Christianity frees us from all these onerous rules. But of course it's not true. Given that I'm working with a national church that has a Puritan streak a mile wide, (to give it some credit, this is at least the widest thing in Japanese church thinking) the list of things I must and mustn't do as a missionary has increased drastically since coming here. I mustn't drink alcohol in public. I must turn up for the 10:30am service every week, since that is the main service; the early service is not enough. (Have you noticed how the vast majority of Protestant churches have the main service at 10:30? You'd think it was Holy Writ, but it actually just dates back to the days when most people had jobs to do around the farm until that time in the morning. Now most people don't have farms, they could have the service any time they like but...)

Lest you get the wrong idea, I love the local church here and I don't begrudge it the rules it puts on me. I want to be part of the community, I play by the community's rules. That makes sense. But it does give the lie to the cheap debating point that Christianity is about a relationship, not about rules. I am reduced to trying to argue that at least our rules are better than your rules, and apologetically that one goes down like a brick parachute.

And with good reason. Because the rules we put on ourselves are not like the Buddhist rules. The Buddhist rules are supposed to free Buddhists from attachment - they develop those who live by them. The rules we put on ourselves in the more Puritan wing of the church are more concerned with how we look in front of other people. I can drink alcohol in private, but not in public, because I must be seen to be upright. (as it were) I must turn up at a certain service because that's where I'm expected to be seen. Since when, I wondered, did Christians judge each other based on external appearances?

The Bible has a word for those who are more concerned with external appearance than internal renewal: it is the word "hypocrite", and it is something that Jesus said an awful lot about, especially those who "load people down with burdens difficult to bear". As Dick Dowsett of OMF puts it, when writing about the scarcity of men in the Japanese church, the church needs to stop "creating man-made rules which exclude mainstream males." What do you do when the church becomes a barrier to mission rather than an agent of it?

You pray. What else can you do?

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.

Today I had one of those cup-of-coffee-with-agenda meetings with Kevin, who's sorting out the way WEC should be doing life-long learning and development. We kicked around a few ideas about how to mobilize people to become reflective practitioners of mission - that is, not just doing it, but thinking critically about what they're doing. One of the suggestions we came out with was a bit odd: every missionary should be encouraged to blog.

Now by every missionary, I of course mean, every missionary who can. If you're in Deepest Noelectricitia, then you're excused; if you're somewhere you shouldn't be and can't find a way of securely blogging anonymously, (your mission may be able to help with that, though) then you're excused. Otherwise, you're not excused.

Here's three reasons why you should blog:

• It's good for your mission. Talking about what you're doing and connecting with an audience generates exposure, gets the name of your mission around. As well increasing the general name-recognition value (I've taken to calling WEC "mission's worst kept secret" - people have heard of it, but it's still pretty much a secret) it also increases the Internet presence, and that's not a bad thing. I remember a while back the webmaster at All Nations was trawling through his logs and found that the majority of hits to his site came from this very blog. It's no use our communications guys coming up with lovely websites for the mission if nobody actually visits them.
• It's good for your supporters. As well as your regular prayer-letters, more frequent and "mundane" updates can help your supporters get an idea of what life is really like out there. Also, blogs generally provide a way for you to interact with them, and for them to pass comments on to you. If you believe that people like to keep in touch with what you're doing - tell them what you're doing!
• It's good for you. This is where my sneaky plan comes in. I want to get more missionaries thinking critically about what they're doing, sharing information about it with other missionaries, and eventually writing articles and conference papers and MA research papers about it. Encouraging people to write about their experiences in blogs is just my way of softening you, uh, them up. Reflecting on practice is the basis of missiological education. Every missionary should be a missiologist, just as "every Christian should be a theologian", (In the words of +Kallistos.) and so blogging will not only make you a better missiologist, it'll make you a better missionary. And by sharing your thoughts with the mission community at large, you provide them the opportunity both to learn from and to provide input to your situation, which can't be a bad thing. In the vast majority of cases, there are people who have already had to deal with what you're seeing, or who will have to deal with what you're seeing, and so, whether you can be of benefit to them or they to you, it's worth sharing.

Bonus reason for those in non-closed countries:

• It's good for your integrity. As you honestly lay bare what you're doing for anyone to see, you lay yourself open and accountable to the national community and to those who may not necessarily agree with you, and you allow them to challenge you. Removing any element of secrecy from your work can only be a good thing in terms of keeping you honest.

Now the good news is that, as time passes, the number of people coming onto the mission field already blogging will increase, and so this kind of thing will happen naturally. But even so, pour encourager les autres, I'd like to announce Plagnet WEC, a collation of all the WEC missionaries' blogs that I could find. If you're not on the blogroll and you should be, please contact me!

Or, more likely, start a blog, put a few posts in it, and then contact me.

I'm sorry that I only blog when I'm depressed. That doesn't mean that I'm often depressed, it just means that depressing things give me the energy to rant. I have three or four happier blog posts on the go but they require more research than a good old-fasioned rant. And I've been saving this one up for weeks...

• Jesus said, "Judge not, lest you be judged." We've often taken this to imply that it is forbidden for Christians to be judgemental. I know I come across as judgemental here from time to time, and I worry about that. But that's not what it says. It says, if you're judgemental, deal with the consequences. Welcome the consequences. Because judgement is convictive and corrective. It is forensic in the sense that it puts the light on areas that need improvement. Examine me, God, and know my heart; test me like metal, and know my mind. Tell me of any idolatrous ways in me, and guide me into everlasting ways. (Ps 139:23-24)
• Our current missions structure sucks. Denominational missions suck, because they introduce and reinforce division.
• But non-denominational missions suck, because they aren't. They may start off non-denominational, but soon they plant a church and some people put particular emphasis on gifts of the Holy Spirit, and some don't, and there's a disagreement about how to run church. So we formulate a policy. Then someone has a child; should it be baptised? In the interests of unity, we formulate a policy. Soon we have our own rules about how our churches run - a sort of weak theological soup, so bland that nobody is excited enough to disagree with it - and hey presto, we've got our own denomination.

  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.

  - David Bosch, Transforming Mission

• Church-to-church missions suck, because they ghettoise, and we only deal with people like us, and miss out on the rich diversity that characterises the Kingdom of God. Where there is not Greek nor Jew, circumcision or uncircumcision, foreigners, savages, slaves, free... but all of these, and in all of these, Christ. (Col 3:11)
• But independent missionaries suck, too, because they frequently lack accountability and oversight and authority, and we weren't ever meant to go this road alone. So I went to Jerusalem, according to a revelation, and set out the good news I preach among the Gentiles, privately, to those who had a good reputation, just in case I was running my race in vain. (Gal 2:2)
• Evangelical Christians, you piss me off. You use "evangelical" as a code-word for "real". This is sectarianism in the worst sense of the word "sect". Japan has 3% Christians, but only 0.5% Evangelical Christians. The other 2.5% are not Christian enough for you. They might have faith, but they don't have an "evangelical" faith. That is, not a real faith. Just being Christian is not enough. Is it enough for Christ? But someone comes preaching a different Jesus to the one we preached, and you receive a different spirit to the one you received before, and a different gospel than the one you accepted, and you put up with that, but I reckon that I'm not any worse than these "super-apostles" (2 Cor 11:4-5)
• Next week is the 489th anniversary of the failed Reformation. Was it of God? The aim of the Reformation was to reform, as the name implies, the Catholic Church. Instead it caused division, misunderstanding, and mindless, mindless factionalism. And yet the Catholic church is still one. Who won that one? As a reformation, I think it scored minus several million out of ten. And now I say to you, withdraw from these men and leave them alone, because if this will or this work is of man, it will break into pieces, but if it is from God, you will not be able to break it apart. (Acts 5:38-39a)
• Thankfully Protestantism is fundamentally self-limiting. If I know that the Church is divided into tens of thousands of sects on the basis of what they believe "the Word of God says", I will be a lot more cautious about what I declare that "the Word of God says". And I will look for a higher authority than myself, a magisterium about what the Word of God says. And where will I find one?
• That said, I've just had an argument with the director of my misssion about whether or not they should accept Catholics. He thinks they shouldn't. I thought they should, but now I agree with him. But for different reasons. He thinks they shouldn't accept Catholics because there's something wrong with the Catholic church. I think they shouldn't accept Catholics because there's something wrong with the mission. As evangelicals, they'd stop converting the damned heathen and spend all their time converting their co-workers. Christ indwells you, they say. The guiding principle of the mission is that we respect the other person because we respect Christ who indwells them. But of course, Christ only indwells them if they have an "Evangelical" faith. Of course.
• You see, ecumenicalism is where the rubber hits the road in Christian witness. Am I prepared to love and accept those who are in a different tribe to me? Multinationalism is easy, because the reality of Western hegemony in missions makes it easy to claim to be multinational even when you're not. Non-Western partners are sufficiently polite that they'll adapt to you anyway. But ecumenicalism? Shit, this is where that whole thing about loving your enemies comes into play. And basically, we can't do it.
• Speaking of Western hegemony, this whole thing about Christ indwelling you is wonderfully Western anyway. If Christ indwells me, it means that I, the emancipated individual of the Enlightenment Age, can do anything through the power of the Holy Spirit. In "Learning about Union with Christ", there is not a word about the Church. Why should there be? You have Christ - you can do it alone!
• Of course the position here is not that blatant. There is a move from the individual conception of union with Christ to what I call the "several" conception of union with Christ. Remember those tenancy agreements you had to sign when you were sharing a house? You were "jointly" and "severally" liable. A "several" concept of union with Christ says that each one of us has Christ indwelling us. This is closer than the individual conception, but still completely wrong. The Biblical and patristic understanding is that we are "jointly" indwelled. If Christians "severally" have the fullness of Christ in them, they shouldn't be able to disagree. But they do! The usual cop-out here is that one of them is broken; they're not hearing God properly, they're not "walking closely with God", or whatever. Why not blame the model instead? Maybe if you did some research, you'd find it owes more to the Western modernist philosophy than it does to Christianity.

  Through participation in the same Christ we all become one body, possessing the one Lord in ourselves.

  Athanasius, contra Arianos

You know, I depress myself sometimes. But then, I remember - it would be nice to be able to do this job with perfect people. But there aren't any. Not even me. And although I feel like I want to give up, love compels me. The Beatles said "All you need is love." That's a profoundly theological statement. St John would have been proud. Mission is broken, but I love my fellow missioners. The church is broken, but I love my fellow churchgoers. Christianity is broken, but I love my fellow Christians. And I love the Japanese, so I'm going to get out there and do the job. It's not perfect yet, but I can wait for that. Love compels me.

I've always found the Trinity an awkward doctrine. It offends my aesthetics, more than anything else - from a programmer's point of view, I don't like arbitrary numbers, or anything that violates the Zero-One-Infinity Rule. Heck, for a while they didn't know whether or not Sophia was a fourth hypostasis, and if you're going to allow three, why not allow four?

I suspect that many other missionaries have problems with it; I remember a church planting seminar we did at WEC, and the doctrine wasn't even considered as a useful thing to teach. But the idea of the Trinity is not that this is another way to understand God, but that it is His fundamental nature. You'd think that would be worth teaching, in that case. Leslie Newbiggin made an interesting point in The Open Secret:

It has been said that the question of the Trinity is the one theological question that has been really settled. It would, I think, be nearer to the truth to say that the Nicene formula has been so devoutly hallowed that it is effectively put out of circulation... The church continues to repeat the Trinitarian formula but - unless I am greatly mistaken - the ordinary Christian in the Western world who hears or read the word "God" does not immediately think of the Triune Being - Father, Son and Spirit. He thinks of a supreme monad.

The working concept of God for most ordinary Christians is - if one may venture a bold guess - shaped more by the combination of Greek philosophy and Islamic theology that was powerfully injected into the thought of Christendom at the beginning of the High Middle Ages than by the thought of the fathers of the first four centuries.

Part of the reason for this in mission is the desire to work within the frameworks of the local understanding of God - in most cultures, particularly in Africa where most mission work has been done, there is a monadic "High God", which missionaries equate with God the Father and work from there. It makes it easier, I admit. But not in India, where Newbiggin worked, or in Japan, where I will work.

Another reason, I suspect is the desire for simplicity and opacity: pretty much anyone can get the idea of "God", but when you get talking about one God and three persons, people start bugging out at you. No, the ice-water-steam analogy isn't useful. The Trinity is not three distinct "states" that God morphs between.

But there's some good news. Thanks in part to Newbiggin, there has been more of an interest in having the Trinity as a starting point for theology and missiology, rather than as an uncomfortable addition. So in Iguassu we have papers like "Rethinking Trinitarian Missiology". In the Declaration of that conference, it said:

We commit ourselves to a renewed emphasis on God-centered missiology. This invites a new study of the operation of the Trinity in the redemption of the human race and the whole of creation, as well as to understand the particular roles of Father, Son and Spirit in mission to this fallen world.

If a missiologist is someone who reflects critically on missionary activity, I've been acting as a meta-missiologist and reflecting critically on missiologist activity. I've been wondering why this is - why the renewed emphasis? Partly, I suppose as a necessary consequence of an expanded understanding of the missionary task. Where the Gospel is brought to countries outside the European-African worldview of a "High God", the ability to work within that framework is removed and a new mode of operation needs to be found.

But I think another reason is the old claim of the "uniqueness of Christianity". As we encounter and dialogue with people from more and varied religions, we realise that all those times we've said "Christianity is the only religion with property X", we've merely displayed our own ignorance. "Only religion based on self-sacrifice"? Try Mahayana Buddhism. "Only religion based on grace"? Ask a Sikh.

So we look at the Trinity, and fair enough, I expect we can reasonably confidently say that Christianity is the only religion which has one single God with three distinct modes of operation. But I don't think any of the other religions want one.

Oh, if only I'd found this earlier; a bunch of good books, including The Iguassu Dialogue, One World or Many, and Doing Member Care Well, all free to download. Some downright awful books in there too, but beggars can't be choosers.

Introduction to an essay I'm not planning to write, but which would be interesting anyway:

The cross-fertilization of metaphors between medical and military jargon has been well noted (Sontag 1978, Harrison 1996): commonly-recognised concepts such as "a surgical strike" or "combatting the invasion of disease" demonstrate the extent of the phenomenon.

A less studied area is the use of military metaphor in mission. (Of course it may be argued that "mission" itself is a military metaphor.) Fuller 2000 considered the effect of military metaphors on the public perception of Christian mission, but if we accept the hypothesis of linguistic determinism, we need to seriously assess the effect of the military metaphor on our own thinking about mission. To what extent does our own terminology contribute to a conscious or subconscious militarisation or mission?