DALLAS — It’s not reasonable to expect a three-day meeting in Texas to spit out all the answers to how the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) ought to approach world mission. But the folks gathered here for a consultation on world mission Jan. 16-18 did have some pretty clear ideas about what’s happening in the world that Presbyterians can’t ignore — changes sweeping the land, whether people have figured it out yet or not.
The bottom line: this is a time of tremendous change, in the PC(USA) and in the world. As Paul Pierson, a former missionary in Brazil and Portugal and senior professor of the history of mission and Latin American studies at Fuller Theological Seminary has written: “The changes in the worldwide church today are probably greater than those that took place during the sixteenth century Reformation. The transition today is analogous to the shift from the Jewish to the Gentile church in the first century.”
How the PC(USA) responds, how well it adapts to change and how quickly, may go a long way in determining what it has to contribute in a pluralistic world.
“I think we’re talking about something big” said Rick Ufford-Chase, a former General Assembly moderator and executive director of the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. “I think we’re talking about something that’s a 50-year shift” in how the denomination interacts with the world.
Bill Young, executive director of the Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship, described in a study paper for this meeting the denomination as being like “a smaller church in a changing neighborhood. … That small church has two choices — continue struggling until it dies, or make drastic changes to meet the new situation.”
This gathering in Dallas brought together people involved in Presbyterian mission work from many levels, from the grassroots to the denomination’s top leaders, Linda Valentine, executive director of the General Assembly Council, and Clifton Kirkpatrick, the PC(USA)’s stated clerk. And it was leavened by the perspectives of global partners who helped bring their ideas and observations from outside the snow-globe of the PC(USA).
Their conversation — steeped in decades of hands-on experience with international mission work, an appreciation of Presbyterian involvement through the decades, and the recognition that the PC(USA) no longer has the size and clout it once did — was both honest about the shortcomings and hopeful about the possibilities.
Here’s some of what they had to say.
Christianity shifts South. Asia, Africa, and Latin America have experienced tremendous church growth; an estimated two-thirds of active Christians today live in the southern hemisphere. “We as Westerners, who tend to think of ourselves as the center and pinnacle of Christianity, must exercise humility as we move forward in this new reality of being the minority,” Young said.
And more and more, mission work is initiated from those lands, with missionaries going forth from South Korea, Nigeria, Latin America, and elsewhere. In 1918, Young said, mainline churches sent more than 80 percent of the missionaries from North America, compared to less than 6 percent today.
“The great majority of missionaries from North America and from the majority world as well are from the more evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic groups,” including many based outside denominations, he said.
In that reality, “maybe we’re not the front-line” in mission, said Marilyn Borst, director of global ministry at Peachtree Church in Atlanta. “Maybe we’re the connectors.”
Mission goes local. Funding for mission through the General Assembly is declining. But “Presbyterians are involved in mission as much or more than ever,” said Scott Sunquist, an associate professor of world mission and evangelism at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Peachtree Church, for example, has a mission trip planned nearly every month this year and is involved with mission work in 27 countries. And even much smaller congregations routinely send members on short-term mission trips, often to Latin America, but to many other places as well.
That dynamic, while often reflecting real enthusiasm for and commitment to world mission at the local level, also has sparked conversation about whether enough resources are going to fund long-term Presbyterian missionaries or ongoing mission partnerships.
What role should the PC(USA)’s World Mission staff play in assisting those congregations? Some said they haven’t always been clear who on the national staff to contact and admitted frustration at what may seem like unresponsiveness or off-base priorities that has led some to turn their energies and their funding elsewhere.
But can the World Mission staff serve every Presbyterian or congregation that needs help, asked Tim Hart-Andersen, senior pastor of Westminster Church in Minneapolis. “You’ve got 11,000 congregations that might call you.”
Caring for the least. Hunter Farrell, director of World Mission for the PC(USA), said he agrees with Young that “the cow’s out of the barn” and localization of mission is a fact of life.
“That’s a great thing,” Farrell said. “Let’s get it out of the bottleneck” of the denominational bureaucracy. “I can’t answer any more e-mails a day.”
But Farrell said he also wants people to consider “what inequalities are generated by this massive system of decentralization.”
How does this trend towards mission at the grassroots “affect the widow, the orphan, and the sojourner?” he asked. “That’s what I’m hungering for in our conversation.”
Mission involves suffering. Sunquist has just finishing editing a book on the history of Presbyterian mission involvement since World War II, as well as writing a global history of Christianity. He said Christian mission always carried risk — in the early church, “imitating Christ unto death.”
But “today mission is closer to tourism than martyrdom, it is more domesticated than dangerous,” Sunquist said.
He added: “It is not our safe and carefully planned work, it is dangerous, often imperfectly organized, it can be frightening and it is a work of the unbridled Holy Spirit of the Living God. … As we restructure and restructure and reorganize our decreasing little kingdom, the Kingdom of God is arising as a magnificent and glorious city of the poor and oppressed.”
Some said they have heard from the PC(USA)’s international church partners that Christians from the affluent West need to find ways to share in the suffering and pain of those who live daily with the realities of hunger and illness and violence.
And maybe the PC(USA) should confess its own suffering and ask for help from its international partners, some suggested.
“If we’re a dying denomination, shouldn’t we send out an SOS to our partners?” asked Jim Milley, president of the Association of Presbyterian Mission Partners and an associate pastor at La Canada Church in California. Maybe it’s time, said Scott Weimer, senior pastor of North Avenue Church in Atlanta and an organizer of the Presbyterian Global Fellowship, to say, “We’re desperate,” and to ask Christians around the world for intercessory prayer.
Growing pluralism. Mission, both around the world and in the United States, increasingly takes place in a particular context — for example, with immigrant congregations in the United States or with people from other countries who mix Christianity with elements of their own culture. And often, Christianity exists side-by-side with other faiths.
Young quoted from an e-mail he received from Harold Kurtz, a long-time Presbyterian missionary, who wrote: “I believe we are still consulting about how to relate to our historic sister churches — churches patterned after the west for the most part — while God is doing a new thing.”
How do Presbyterians relate to Christians living out their faith in cultures that are animistic, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu, Kurtz asked. “It seems to me that we are still doing too much consulting about the backwaters of international mission and we need to move into the middle of the river where the flood waters of mission are raging,” he wrote. We need to find our way to where the real action is.”
How flat is the world? There was discussion of the concept advanced by author Thomas L. Friedman that “the world is flat” — leveled by access to travel, technology, direct communication.
For mission work, that flattening can have real impact. Young told of how, as a missionary in Ghana in the 1990s, he didn’t have a telephone in Kinshasa, and to send e-mail had to go into town, find someone with a phone, call Accra and hope that the university’s server had both electricity and telephone service that day.
Now, Presbyterian congregations have their own mission relationships with Christians all over the world — and routinely call people directly in Ghana on their cell phones.
But Milton Mejia, a pastor and former General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia, contends that the world actually isn’t flat for all people in all places — both in the Southern hemisphere and in the United States.
“I see that the world is flat only for a small group of people” in Colombia, Mejia said, speaking sometimes in English and sometimes through an interpreter. Even in the United States, he has met people who do not know how to use the Internet.
Mejia also challenged Presbyterians to think about what it means to send people to Latin America to work in mission.
“The journey is together,” in a relationship, he said. “Together we’re learning to build churches and to evangelize to those in our world who most suffer, who suffer violence.”
And “the work doesn’t finish when you leave Colombia. It’s really just beginning” when those Americans return to the United States, he said — and have opportunities to advocate change in U.S. public policy towards Latin America.
Setting priorities. There was discussion of how, with so many involved with mission work, decisions get made about where to put resources. The words “accountability” and “mutual responsibility” were used and there was discussion as well about how the denomination should respond to those who honestly feel called by God to work in mission, maybe in contexts that aren’t at the top of PC(USA)’s list.
The covenant the 60 participants at this meeting signed spoke of diverse approaches and collaboration, as well as “valuing long-term relationships, partnerships characterized by perseverance and long-term commitments which support and encourage global partners.”
This can be complicated territory.
Setri Nyomi, General Secretary of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, wrote in a study paper that “we have many countries in which there may be four, five, or six Reformed and Presbyterian churches, but which are not engaged in mission together and may not even share information” — a result of the history from which these churches emerged. And a congregation from Texas and one from New York may be working in a country in proximity to one another, but not communicating either, Nyomi wrote.
“How can we present the message of reconciliation which is at the heart of the good news if what is seen is the fragmentation?” he asked.
Sometimes U.S. church groups come to Latin America with money, and when they encounter a human need they say, “Here, take the money,” Mejia said. “It’s good to give, we appreciate that. But that way of giving is not helpful,” he said, because it doesn’t take place in context of a relationship.
At the same time, however, in the PC(USA) “we have had a culture of responding to (international church) partners as sort of a mantra,” said David Dawson, executive presbyter of Shenango Presbytery in Pennsylvania, which is involved in the Sudan Mission Network. “If you push that to the wall, respond to partners only,” that can leave out other work which also should be considered.
Joan Gray, moderator of the 217th General Assembly, who convened this consultation in response to a commissioner’s resolution, answered theologically. Mission, she said, is a response to what God is doing in the world.
“God is the initiator of mission, and Jesus was the first missionary,” she said. “I hear an arrogance in the way we talk about mission sometimes, as if we are the ones who are doing mission.”
But “if we are not doing it in the power of God somehow, we’re not doing mission. That’s my fear for us Presbyterians. Every group has a besetting sin. … Our besetting sin is arrogance, in thinking that we can do mission, and that if enough smart people get together we can figure this out.”
Instead “mission is done in the power of the Holy Spirit,” Gray said. “My critique is that a fair amount of what we do comes out of us, it accomplishes human goals and it crumbles. … (Mission) has to be God-powered, Spirit-led. And God can do more than we can ask or imagine.”
Note: The statement signed by participants at the mission consultation can be found on The Presbyterian Outlook Web site.
