Incarnation and mission

Warning: this post is long,rambling, and ranting.

In an essay in the book The Cross-Cultural Proces in Christian History, Andrew Walls disputes the conventional wisdom that Church History is the story of Christianity going from strength to strength. In fact, Christianity often has found itself in deep, deep water, only to survive by having the good sense to grab whatever lifeline was thrown to it from some distant shore.

Case in point: Christianity had essentially hit a dead end only a few years after Jesus' resurrection. If it hadn't been for some anonymous believers in Antioch who got a wild hair to preach the gospel to some Gentiles, Christianity likely would have died out as any number of apocalyptic first century Jewish sects did. Instead, Christianity uprooted itself from its Palestinian Jewish soil and flowered in Greco-Roman society. In a few centuries the Jewish Messiah had become one substance with the immutable God of the philosophers.

Examples abound. It was mighty convenient that when the dioceses once administered by Augustine, Athanasius and the Cappadocians were falling to the Muslims, Pope Gregory was commissioning a mission to the Angles and the Saxons, the new pagan overlords of Briton.

The same process is at work today. Secularism has displaced Christianity in Europe far more quickly than Islam ever did in North Africa and the Near East, yet Christianity has found a new lease on life in Africa. At the beginning of the last century, 90% of Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, 60% live in Africa, a monumental and lightning-quick shift in the religion's center of gravity with which no one yet has come to grips.

Walls makes a couple of points about this two-steps-forward, one-step-back narrative.

First, there's more to this history of Christian mission than a series of fortuitous escapes. The story is rooted in the incarnation. A religion founded on the event of Word made flesh is constrained to continually enflesh itself in particular contexts.

This enculturation imperative, Walls argues, makes Christianity more fragile than, say, Islam. With its one pilgrimage site and one sacred language bearing the final revelation of God, Islam is better suited than Christianity for cultural hegemony. But the logic of incarnation compels Christianity to continually dissolve and reconstitute itself in new cultural idioms rather than compel the cultures it encounters to submit to its static lordship.

I get the incarnation as enculturation mandate, but the more I think about the fact that each mission gain for Christianity comes on the heels of a disastrous loss, the more I think that Church History vindicates a Hindu rather than a Christian cosmology. It's as if the body of Christ must be re-incarnated until it finally gets it right. Maybe it will this time around in the African milieu.

Walls' global perspective allows him to be sanguine about Christianity's collapse in the West. As he sees it, the sad spectacle of English church buildings turned into night clubs is just evidence that the Lord found them wanting, so he removed their candlestick--all the way to Malawi where it's burning bright!

The culture shifted, and they didn't respond. They defied the logic of incarnation. Too bad for them.

But not too bad for Christianity. No one mourns the demise of the Knights Templar or Pachomian monasticism. And no one will mourn the Presbyterian Church USA or any contemporary manifestation of corporate Christian life should it pass from the scene. Christianity will be OK, with or without us.

Given that Christianity is struggling even on this side of the North Atlantic, it's worth asking, How has Christianity failed to enculturate itself in early 21st century America? I don't know what Walls' answer would be, but off the top of my head, I'd say that both Evangelical and Mainline Christians are wedded to the Christianity of a half-century ago. The Evangelicals have deifed the gender roles of the 1950s, while the Mainliners see their mission as prophet/priest to the culture and guardian of good taste. The problem is that gender is, in fact, plastic; pop culture has overthrown pop culture as the dominant culture; consequently, no one values our ministrations, either in the guise of prophet or priest.

Now that even the stodgiest churches have put together a praise and worship team for an 8:30 service in the basement, Mainliners are poised to minister to America, circa 1977. Meanwhile vast swaths of 21st century people and culture aren't even in the consciousness of either clergy or laity. And conservatives, who are more plugged into pop culture than their mainline brethren, are in the intellectually dishonest and uncomfortable place of telling their college-educated women that they can manage men at work but not at Church, and, by the way, everything you learned in college about biblical criticism or comparative religions is not only wrong but probably demonic.

The Church's cultural flat-footedness is extremely frustrating, and it's a primary reason why I'm school now and not in the pulpit. Congregations will fight you every step of the way, even over minor adjustments that would enable the institution to engage the culture a bit more effectively. I'm sure I could have done things more adroitly, but why does introducing a new hymn require advance work on par with arranging a summit meeting between heads of state?

It's not just the worship wars. It's our institutional life together. Consider Sunday School. Sunday School has fallen on hard times in many congregations, and no small of time and energy is spent either in self-flagellation or in flogging those responsible for this sorry state of affairs. But do you know how Sunday School began? It began in England out of concern for street urchins. English social reformers tried to rescue these kids from a future life of petty crime. They taught them to read and write by teaching them the Bible.

So if your Sunday School is withering, what you need to ask yourself is: does your neighborhood look like something out of a Dickens novel? If not, maybe Sunday School is a solution in search of a problem. So rather than beat a dead horse, why not do something else? Christians catechized their young FOR CENTURIES without Sunday School. Maybe you can too.

What would be a better format? Maybe it involves getting together at a different time or on a different day. Maybe it involves teaching the parents to teach their children at home. Maybe it involves an online component, which is becoming standard in higher education and in continuing education in the corporate world.

But we won't. And it's not just the laity's fault. We clergy are one-trick ponies. We know what we know, and we don't want to learn anything new.

I still remember an hour long (hour long!) discussion we had in a Committee on Preparation for Ministry meeting about whether or not to permit one of our prospective ministers to enroll in a hybrid theological education program. (I've already ranted about this.) Never mind that it was one of our denominational seminaries. Never mind that the seminary, of course, possessed the requisite accreditation. Never mind that the issue turned on a question of pedagogy, and CPM has no Book of Order mandate to inquire about pedagogy, only theology. It wasn't theological education as they had known it; so it must not be theological education.

Like I said, this is why I'm in school. Partly because I got tired of fighting. And partly because I didn't feel like I was equal to the task. Maybe it wasn't just their intransigence. Maybe it was my incompetence. I needed to learn more.

Timothy Richard, a Baptist missionary to China, thought that one problem with missionaries was that too many of them were pastors, not evangelists. They are different gifts of the Holy Spirit. I'm thinking out loud here, but if that's the case, then maybe we cannot look to existing congregations or their leadership to enculturate the gospel in 21st century America. Maybe we need a whole new cadre of missionaries, both called and equipped by God, well-supported, and unwilling to force the natives to wear the bras of gender inequality and/or chamber music.

Do such people exist? Do they have have benefactors? Is there anyone throwing us a lifeline, and if so, will we have the good sense to seize it?

Comments

[Scarlett Sams]

Extremely comprehensive! AMEN!

[Jonathan Marlowe]

Maybe we need missionaries to come from Africa to N. America. Of course, they would have to take the time to learn our culture first.

[Marvin]

I believe that South Korea leads the world in missionary exports. And they've only had a Christan presence for 100 years or so.

[Camassia]

I remember a pastor at the Pentecostal church I went to in L.A. saying that African missionaries were starting to turn up there. He didn't offer any statistics or anything though (hey, it was a sermon). Certainly there were a number of African churches in the area, which kept life interesting for their denominational cohorts. I recall a Mennonite who went to one of those meetings complaining about how the Africans were all into charismatics and uninterested in social justice.

I also met a guy whose parents were from India, but who grew up in Thailand because they were missionaries there. Evangelism is going in all sorts of directions these days.