The end of Christian mission
by Matthew Vaughan
While manning the Interserve stand at New Wine last summer I chatted to a lady who had glanced at our stand and wanted to know what we did. After I had given her the usual talk – 10/40 window, building the church, people for the hard places, all that sort of thing – I asked her if she would be interested in receiving Go magazine or getting more closely involved in our work. In response, she quickly declared “Oh no, I couldn’t do that – my church already sponsors an African child”. It rapidly became clear that, as far as she was concerned, her missionary responsibilities were entirely taken care of by dint of the fact that her church gave £15 a month to a child sponsorship agency.
Now, my point in highlighting this example is absolutely not to criticise the work of child sponsorship agencies, who all do an excellent work and transform the lives of millions of people. I highlight it to demonstrate that there is a belief, common among many Christians, that “mission” – by which I mean the taking of the gospel to all nations (cf. Matthew 28 19-20, Mark 16: 15) – is somehow a separate part of Christian life, and can be outsourced to a mission agency who take care of the details for you. If you pay £15 a month to a mission agency, you can sleep at night knowing that you’re doing all you can to support world mission.
Another part of this mindset is the unspoken belief, common in some areas, which maintains that mission is always done overseas. The general rule of thumb seems to be that the importance of mission work increases in proportion with the distance of that particular project from the home country of its workers. The more time that missionaries spend on a plane to get to their destination, the more urgent and impressive their work. If you work in the mountains of Afghanistan, you’re given attention and credit and plaudits, but if you work in Albania, or France, or – worst of all! – Britain, you’re not really doing mission at all. Evidence of this is plainly seen in the difficulty that home-based mission workers experience in raising financial support for their work. Donors seem happier to give to a project based thousands of miles away than to one based just down the road, irrespective of the actual worth of either project. If you’re not having to cope with warfare, corruption, language learning, kidnappings, and preferably being shot at from time to time, then you’re just not doing it properly.
The final part of this mindset is a belief that mission work is limited to certain careers. Thanks to the history of medical and educational work carried out by British missionaries during the time of the Empire – and please don’t imagine that I’m criticising it! – some people seem to think that you can only be a “missionary” (that word again…) if you’re stitching wounds together, or handing out paracetamol, or teaching people how to say “When does the next train for Birmingham leave?”. The existence of this belief is plainly proved by the hostile reaction that is often provoked whenever forward-thinking mission agencies talk about “business as mission”. Isn’t business evil? Why should Christians get involved in such an immoral work? Shouldn’t you be out doing some proper mission work instead?
The foundation for all these assumptions is, I think, the weight and magnetic effect of tradition; the tendency of the church to settle into patterns of behaviour for the simple reason that “it’s always been that way”. In 1908 the population of Britain was almost entirely white and Christian (nominally, at least). We didn’t need missionaries then, so we don’t need missionaries now. In Victorian times, missionaries opened schools and hospitals, so why should modern missionaries do anything else? Ever since the time of Paul mission work has been done by specialist missionaries, so why shouldn’t we continue to delegate our missionary responsibilities to special people who are better suited at it? For too long, many Christians – and I certainly include myself – seemed convinced that Christianity was somehow a tiered religion: that full-time ministers were somewhere near the top of the pile, missionaries (particularly ones working in places with unpronouncable names) were close to them, ordinary churchgoers were somewhere in the middle (the poorer ones, of course, being significantly superior to those who had the misfortune to possess wealth), and propping up the bottom of the pile were the barely-Christian wretches who worked full-time in secular jobs. I remember being astonished when I heard a sermon on how everyone could (and should) serve God in everything they do, whether they worked as a vicar or a vet. How could a vet be serving God? What a bizarre concept! Surely he or she was just saving up for a plane ticket to somewhere far away so they could work as a missionary. Essentially, this daft belief that I held was based on the notion that Christians worshipped on Sunday, and worked from Monday to Friday, and the two were so mutually exclusive that there was no possibility of crossover.
Times have changed since then, but not quite enough. One of the biggest changes in recent years has been the emergence of concepts like “business as mission”, the idea being that if Christians are gifted in business skills, the logical thing for them to do is to run a business on Christian principles, providing work for people who would otherwise be unemployed and enabling people to feed themselves, their families, and build a better future. Some Christians have created olive plantations to provide recovering drug addicts with a job; others have started textile design companies in India which employ women who would otherwise be destitute. Furthermore, Christians have been working in mission all over the world, including “home” countries. There are mission agencies which focus on Europe – and quite right too; anyone who sees modern Europe as a Christian continent is either living in denial or is actually blind. There are Christians from India working in England, thereby reversing the trend set during the days of the Raj. As the Western church continues to sink in a mire of postmodern uncertainty and post-colonial guilt, the church in places like China, Korea, south America, and Africa is growing rapidly. There are more Christians in individual Korean churches than in entire British cities, and Korean mission workers are going out in their thousands.
I would suggest that our whole model of Christian mission – namely, Western Christians working in certain types of career across Africa and Asia and south America – is far too limited, and far too outdated, to be valid any more. This model is based upon assumptions that are patently wrong: that Western countries have thriving churches; that non-Western countries don’t; that only certain types of work can accurately be classed as “mission”; and that Western countries are still strongly Christian and don’t need to receive “missionaries”. We need to do some serious thinking on this whole topic, unless we’re happy to continue with a situation which seems to think that UK-based mission is less important and that one can hand over a few quid each month to a mission agency and leave it up to them.
If our understanding of Christian mission has moved on from a situation where a few Western “missionaries” do “mission jobs” overseas, to one where “missionaries” from all over the world do the work for which they are gifted, in whichever countries need to hear about Jesus (i.e. all of them), what is the next step? I think it is this: that the whole concept of “Christian mission” as a separate activity, involving certain people (“missionaries”) who are supposedly more gifted in “mission”, needs to be quietly put to bed. Every Christian is called to be involved in mission, and every activity which sees Christians interacting with the world is, by definition, mission. Christians are called to be salt and light in every area of life. That means healthcare and education, and it also means business, journalism, sport, writing, art, music, office administration, street-sweeping, taxi driving, toilet cleaning, and emptying dustbins. The way we drive to work in the morning is mission, as is the way we drive home, and as is everything in between. Isn’t this what was meant in Colossians 3: 17 – “whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him”, and also in 1 Corinthians 10: 31: “Whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God”? If we reserve our pleasant Christian behaviour for church on a Sunday, we’re going to be accused of hypocrisy, and quite right too. The ideas that go hand-in-hand with this limited idea of “mission” need to be finished off as quickly as possible as well: concepts like “mission field” as a place where “mission” happens; “missionary” as a person who is called into mission; “mission work” as the special, sanctified stuff that occupies the waking hours of “missionaries”, and so on. If we need replacements, I would humbly suggest that “mission field” can be replaced by “everywhere”, “missionary” by “every Christian”, and “mission work” by “everything we do”.
I’m not saying that Christian mission is finished. How could I be? To the best of my knowledge Jesus hasn’t yet returned to this earth, so our work goes on. I’m saying that our lives need to be so filled and visibly transformed by the working of the Holy Spirit that even talking about a separate activity called “mission” is nonsensical. We won’t worship God in church on Sunday; we’ll worship him all week, wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, including the times when we come together with the rest of the body of Christ to praise our Creator. We won’t talk of people working “in mission”; we’ll talk about people just being salt and light wherever they happen to be in the world. We won’t talk about “missionaries” at all – or, if we do, we’ll talk about missionaries working in office jobs in Basildon, or in finance jobs in the City, or in street sweeping in Harrogate. This, I think, is the kind of mission that Jesus intended us to carry out. It may mean moving across the world, or it may not. It may mean changing career, or it may not. It may involve getting shot at every once in a while, or it may not. But it will always involve being good news to people around the world in any and every way.
Matt Vaughan works for the mission agency Interserve, editing their quarterly magazine “Go” and working as PA to the Director, Steve Bell. He is a keen writer, has been published in a range of Christian and secular publications, and also works with Muslims in his spare time.
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum