Monday 7 June 2010

What's happened to mission in today's church?

Yesterday morning, before church, I listened to a service of worship broadcast live from Edinburgh where a conference on world mission was taking place last week, marking the centenary of a major event that was the first milestone in the establishment of a global ecumenical movement. Archbishop John Sentamu preached. I was privileged to attend the 75th anniversary conference in Edinburgh when I worked for USPG, and a remarkable international event that was, in my recollection.

In 1910 few people attending were non-European or from churches of the third world, whether colonial or indigenous in nature. In 2010, by design, the conference membership reflected the composition of the church world wide more accurately. Today, Christianity is diversely multi-racial and multi-cultural, with white Europeans and North Americans a small minority in comparison to the growth in the numbers of the faithful elsewhere. The worship leader observed that Edinburgh churches today include four recently developed indigenous African Church congregations among their numbers. I reflected that the same was also true of Cardiff with 20% less population. Mission was spoken of rather obscurely as being 'from everywhere, to everywhere'. But that is true of migration in the era of globalisation and mass communication. Mission and migration have been linked since the outset.

Preparations for this conference have been going on for several years, and I took part in one of the prior consultations in Newport last autumn. Little publicity to the process and this major event seems to have been given, to my knowledge, by the main denominational communications channels including the Church in Wales. There doesn't seem to have been much of note in the Church Times or Church of England Newspaper. This weekend's Church Times carried a news article, but that was about the suspension of the conference director, rather than about the conference or its content. A full conference report is promised next week. 

Fortunately the conference website offers documentation, news reports and user generated content through social media, allowing for a measure of insight into the process, but how much attention is being shown by established denominations here? Why is this now of so little general interest to Christians? Is it because mission is considered 'too difficult' to tackle these days? Or because the church is  so pre-occupied by the possibilities of schism between liberals and conservatives? Or because white mainstream Europeans aren't all that interested in what non-white brothers and sisters in Christ in the world out of sight have to say?

Admittedly, some conservative third world churchmen in recent years have been vociferous (and in the eyes of many of us mistaken) in their trenchant criticism and intolerance of developments among white Western liberal Christians in their efforts to engage with contemporary society in mission, but these are not the only voices to be heard, in the effort to learn how we can live together with our diversity and difference. As the conference began, a 740 word 'Common Call' statement was issued on behalf of participants, a fruit of all the years of preparatory work. It's not obscure, nor is it an easy read, as it's densely packed and needs digesting for the amount it says about Christian identity and purpose, to serve as a shared set of convictions about today's call to mission for Christians of very different ideas and cultures. It has more to offer as a starting point than covenant proposals currently laboured over by the hierarchs of the Anglican Communion, ultimately designed to distinguish 'us' and 'them', whoever they may be.

Here's a link to the Common Call Statement in case it moves off the home page of the 2010 Conference website and becomes hard to find once the conference report is published. It's worth a few reads, to get us thinking over what Christian are supposed to be doing today.


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