on re-thinking mission (or the power of the non-native species)
About four years ago a good friend and former colleague of mine was in town and we were driving to the store. We drove past a large wooded field that was awash in verdant green leaves--the plight of many a field across the Southern United States--the sprawling made-in-Japan blanket of foliage known as Kudzu. No one living in the South needs any further explanation.
Kudzu is a vine that was introduced to the South in order to prevent the Dust Bowl conditions faced by farmers in the Midwest. It has no known predator, save goats, and has subsequently swallowed much of the greenspace of the Bible Belt at a growth rate of three feet per day. (see picture for six hour growth)
As my friend and I drive past he said loudly "Kudzu! It's amazing the power of the non-native species." I laughed at his almost-precocious choice of words, but my friend is prone to such Dickensian detail. The next words out of his mouth were "Have you heard about the Northern Snakehead? It's this fish that's destroying the Potomac River Basin. It comes from Asia and is an aggressive predator. It eats everything, but it has a lung, so it can breathe out of water. Some have been known to wriggle and flop over a mile to the next closest water source."
I was suddenly horrified. This toothy carnivorous little fish sounded like the piranha of the B-grade horror movies of my youth. To this day, I find myself riveted by any documentary that is Snakehead related, equal parts morbid fascination and mortal terror.
On NPR this weekend there was the tale of the Burmese python. Commonly held as an "exotic" pet in South Florida, the Burmese python can grow up to 25 feet in length--far greater than any personal terrarium. Apparently, whenever your Burmese python outgrows its tank--well, there's always the Everglades. Biologists have discovered that there is now a breeding population of Burmese pythons in the Everglades, even going so far as to recruit trained python hunters to identify and remove the non-native species. A few weeks ago at Lake Okeechobee one was found that measured 17 feet long and weighed over 200 pounds!
Clearly, I am as horrified/fascinated by the lurking Burmese python (the gators deterred me from taking the air-boat Everglades tour before, now there's a whole new danger). My fascination isn't just with the Burmese python, or for that matter the Northern Snakehead or the comparatively-more-innocuous Kudzu. It's genuinely with the idea of non-native species--of what doesn't quite look right in the picture/environment/ecosystem before me.
Much has been said by denominational leaders and missiologists about the contextualization of the gospel in missional efforts. Scholars and visionaries like David Bosch and Lesslie Newbigin rightly remind the Church that when the Gospel is carried by colonialism there is no hope of a people finding Christ in their midst--only the Western Jesus with all its cultural trappings.
I was first introduced to Bosch and Newbigin in a seminary class in which the professor recounted seeing a picture in the 70's of the pastor of a Baptist pastor in Africa and his newly constructed church building. The white-clapboard church, complete with bell and steeple could just have easily been found in a hundred towns across the rural South. In front of the church stood the proud Pastor in a solid white suit, face beaming. He had a new building that looked like nothing else in all of Africa. He thought he was getting a building, but what he got was a kind of evangelical colonialism that wouldn't translate to the people of his village.
In his magnum opus Transforming Mission Bosch says:
Mission is, quite simply, the participation of Christians in the liberating mission of Jesus, wagering on a future that verifiable experience seems to belief. It is good news of God's love, incarnated in the witness of a community, for the sake of the world.
A few years after that fateful seminary class I found myself listening to a friend and mentor who coordinates global mission for a mainline denomination. He recounted a story of being at an assembly when a pastor from Egypt stood up and passionately said/yelled "We do not need your people or your trips. we do not need your money or your missionaries. We need your churches!"
Those words have stayed with me for some time now. The arrogance of imperialistic mission, be it American or otherwise, is to presume that one is "taking" something somewhere--as if it were not there in the first place. Taking the cue from Paul on Mars Hill, some congregations have embraced a missiology that is more "tour guide" than conquistador--the goal isn't conversion, it's observation--pointing to the places where God is already at work and saying with a smile and a sense of genuine humility "See that right there? That's God working in and through us--irrespective of time or geography."
The same is true of "domestic" mission--my suburban church walking coolly into the center of the city to pass out sandwiches and water, caps and coats, does little more than momentarily assuage our collectively guilty conscience. But when "we" identify ourselves with the Body at Christ already at work in the indigenous community then we have set about the sacred task of enabling, supporting, and building up the body of Christ as a whole.
In a few weeks we will make our fourth trip to Bulgaria to partner with indigenous churches and missionaries to work among the Roma villages and the countless orphanages placed "at the end of geography". I will be preaching in a modest church in a Roma (Gypsy) village just outside the city limits. The church, along with a bathhouse across the street, were built five years ago through partnering churches in Texas and Arkansas.
When you sit among the open windows you sit on pews from Texas and the Netherlands. There are songs sung in Roma, Bulgarian and English. I will never the first time I sat there considering the depth of God's church. American Christianity suddenly seemed so small--merely one part of the Church playing a role in helping another part of God's church.
I am convinced that this is what it means to re-think mission--to find the work of the Church in all contexts and to support them and to help them grow into the fullness of Christ.
To swap recipes and pulpits, checks and materials.
To find the same wideness of God's mercy in the wideness of God's Kingdom.
To avoid the sin of becoming a non-native species that chokes out the grass-roots work of the indigenous community.
To partner and to labor faithfully to the whole Gospel--physical, social and spiritual--in God's backyard as we would in our own.
