Series
1-Introduction
2-The Post-Colonial Era and The Church
3-Toward A Post-Colonial Worldview
4-Post-Colonial Theology and Missions
5-A Case Study – Evangelism Explosion International

TOWARD A POST-COLONIAL BIBLICAL WORLDVIEW

Abraham Kupyer gave the Church a beautiful model for understanding the biblical worldview: a Creation-Rebellion-Rescue-Recreation paradigm. As the Western Church re-thinks how She should approach global missions in the 21st Century, She should use Kuypers paradigm to construct a post-colonial biblical worldview of global missions.

Through Creation, we see a creative God who pronounced His Creation good. While only two Humans are depicted in the Creation narrative, the sheer diversity of Beings within the created order, from fungus to maple tree and swan to whale, suggests Humanity would not escape the diversely, creative hand of Elohim, either. In fact, anyone can sense that tribal and national diversity are embedded within the very blueprint of the Human structure. Asian expressions of life are different from African expressions. European cultures differ from South American societies. Even within continents there are varying ways in which people live and breath through history. This embedded diversity within the fabric of Humanity exists within the Body of Christ, too. Rather than shun differing expressions, the Western Church should celebrate the variety of created Humanity within the Global Church. A post-colonial worldview of global missions begins with an embedded diversity in the Created Order. It begins by affirming and celebrating the Otherness found in Humanity and recognizes that this diversity is derived from the Triune Creator God who is Himself diverse in Persons, though one in essence. Traditionally, the West began with itself as the arbiter of what was good and proper, rather than Creation; Western global missions has assumed the primacy of the West resulting in excessive confidence, rather than starting with and appreciating the variety of Humanity in Creation. This must change if we are to restore the effects of rebellion within Creation and share His redemption.

While the Genesis narrative explains how we find our Being in the Creator God, it also explains why the world is so broken and disrupted. Though they were created to exist in an eternal relationship defined by mutual love with their Creator, free Humans chose to rebel instead. That rebellion plunged all of Creation into brokenness, resulting in what French lay theologian Jacques Ellul called, “The Great Rupture.” Primarily, our relationship with God ruptured, but our relationships with each other have, too. Not only do we not love God as we ought, we do not love other Humans as we were originally designed. Even though we were made for each other, made to live together and created to find our meaning and purpose not simply in ourselves but in one another, we find doing so is incredibly difficult.
Thus, almost every generation in every part of the globe has experienced for itself a Crusade, the Conquistadors, Trails of Tears, Holocaust, Rwanda, and Darfur; on every part of the globe The Great Rupture is evident in broken, oppressed Human relationships between tribes and nations. Additionally, Creation itself is broken, resulting in famine, massive earthquakes, tsunamis, and drought. No part of Creation’s original shalom has not been disrupted. As Paul writes, every corner and crevice of Creation groans in anticipation of Rescue. Thankfully, the Creator launched the greatest rescue operation known to man; through the death of God’s Son Jesus Christ, the consequences of Rebellion and evil powers are conquered and God’s rescue operation for the whole cosmos can be unrolled and put into dramatic operation.

Despite the Human Rebellion against the Creator, all was not without hope. For even at the beginning the Father intended to Rescue His Creation by sending His Son to restore Humans to relationship with Himself and the Other, while eventually restoring all Creation. Jesus is the Rescuer, the Victorious Obedient Substitute, who through His Redemptive Act rescues and restores Creation in this way: Through His Life, Jesus obeyed God perfectly after the First Adam did not, while demonstrating how we are to live as Humans; through His Death, Jesus paid the final penalty to God for Rebellion on behalf of all Humans through a final sacrifice, thus restoring Humans to relationship with God; through His Resurrection, Jesus defeated the Dark Powers to liberate all Humanity from Satan’s control and free us from the bondage of Evil and Sin. Through this Rescue operation, the Creator intended to Rescue and eventually Restore all of Humanity. Thus, in coming to Earth, Jesus intended to redeem all of Humanity through His Life, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension; His Redemptive Act is sufficient for all Humans and effective for everyone who will eventually embrace Jesus as Lord. And a post-colonial worldview of missions will realize that God is truly global and Jesus’ Redemptive Act is also global, allowing people from all tribes to bow before Jesus Christ and confess Him as Lord.

Furthermore, this Rescuer incarnated Himself as a Human among Humans; God the Son dwelt among us by embedding Himself in the world as a real Human. Like Jesus, the Western Church must embed Herself within particular global cultures by incarnationally living, eating, and working closely with its surrounding community to build strong links between Christians and not-yet-Christians. And like the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Western Church is called to bringing the full weight of the identity and mission of the Church as a community of adopted Sons and Daughters to bear upon global cultures in order to articulate the gospel and ethical implications of the Kingdom of God. While the identity and mission of the Church is as a discipling community, the Body of Christ is also an eschatological community that embodies the good news of Jesus Christ and Reign of God within particular contexts, just like Jesus. And as the Church we are called to join in with God’s Act of Recreation now.

The final ‘act’ of God’s Story and a post-colonial biblical worldview of global missions is Recreation. Through Jesus Christ, God is making all things new, a Recreation that began with Jesus’ announcement of the in-breaking of the Reign of God and continued with the commissioning and establishment of the Church. Just as God set apart a group of people (Israel) to be a blessing to the world around it by testifying to the one true God, He chose the Church to bear prophetic witness to the salvation and restoration found in the Reign of God through Christ; by way of choosing, calling and sending a particular people to be the bearer of blessing for all, God is uniting the whole cosmos through his plan of shalom restoration. A post-colonial worldview of missions will be centered on the articulation of the moral and ethical truths of this Reign to all nations by using it’s prophetic voice, while also influencing the tribes of the world in such a way that they pattern their lives and lifestyle after Jesus, to cause the nations to be pupils and disciples of the Son of God. As an eschatological community, the Church represents the values, authority and Way of the Reign of God by giving a foretaste of God’s ultimate act of Recreation while pointing people toward this better way of being Human and living together on Earth. Through a post-colonial worldview, Western global missions will truly be this community for the entire world, for the glory of God.

A post-colonial worldview of missions, then, affirms and celebrates the diversity of Creation in Humanity and the Other, grieves over the oppression and fractured relationships between and within the nations, embraces a furious love of God that extends to all tribes through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and lives embedded within these tribes as an eschatological community that offers Life in Jesus and represents the values, authority and Way of the Reign of God, giving a foretaste of what is to come. Because God is global, not simply Western, the Body of Christ must be global. And a worldview of global missions in an era of globalization must embrace and celebrate the Otherness of Creation by being post-colonial. Consequently, a post-colonial posture toward global missions will affect how the Western Church does both theology and missions.

Series
1-Introduction
2-The Post-Colonial Era and The Church
3-Toward A Post-Colonial Worldview
4-Post-Colonial Theology and Missions
5-A Case Study – Evangelism Explosion International

THE POST-COLONIAL ERA AND ECCLESIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

While post-modernism is the condition of the West, post-colonialism is the condition of the South and East; the West is grappling with an existence beyond the values and metaphysics of modernism, while Asia, South America and Africa are all dreaming of an existence outside and beyond their collective colonial history and colonizers. Most non-Westerners prefer to use the term post-colonialism to describe their struggle for identity in the aftermath of the colonial experience. Postmodernism deconstructs the dominant narratives as being simply one of many competing reality-defining stories, hence Jean-Fransçois Lyotard is incredulous towards metanarratives. Furthermore, Michael Foucault’s critique birthed the deep hermeneutic of suspicion of institutions that characterizes our postmodern culture. Consequently, any institution that attempts to control belief and behavior is viewed as repressive and domineering. In fact, there is a deep sense that institutions in and of themselves are structures of domination. Thus, postmodernism is an ally of sorts of post-colonialism; those who seek to come to terms with the experience of colonization and its long-term effects see in postmodernism not only the possibility of an alternative discourse that affirms and celebrates Otherness, but also a strategy for the deconstruction of the concept, authority, and assumed primacy of the category of ‘the West.’ In other words, just as postmodern thought disrobes the differing values and authorities within the West as simply one story over another, post-colonialism asserts that the West itself is one narrative among many, a narrative whose authority and primacy is no longer simply so. That the West does not exclusively define reality is a seismic development, indeed!

The reality of our post-colonial era has great implications for the Western Church. First, the Western Church must dissect the West as a category from the narrative of Jesus. In other words, Christian spirituality and God’s Redemptive Narrative can no longer be defined by Western values and sentiments. In his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paul Freire explains that there comes a time when the oppressed as divided, unauthentic beings develop their own pedagogy of liberation, a development that must be rooted in their own existential struggle for freedom, rather than in models presented to them for emulation from the oppressors. In other words, those who have been oppressed by the West in times past will not seek liberation from the West and its institutions, including Christianity. Rather, they will find freedom in their own indigenous examples. Whether those examples are renewed tribal spiritualists or alternative religions to Western Christianity, post-colonial sectors of the world will assert themselves against all things Western, which calls for indigenous discipleship.

After Jesus’ resurrection He commissioned His disciples as agents of His new Kingdom-movement to share the good news of the Kingdom. Interestingly, where you would expect Jesus to use the word “preach/proclaim” or “bear witness,” a slower, lower profile verb is used, an almost scholastic, schoolish word, “disciple.” This verb literally means, “to cause one to be a pupil or disciple,” which is the controlling word for the Church’s mission. In addition to dissecting the narrative of Jesus from the West, post-colonialism calls for solidarity through indigenization. Solidarity with the non-West requires that one entire the situation of those whom one is solidary; if what has characterized the global South and East is their subordination to the West, true solidarity with the post-colonial South and East means discipling them in the Way of Christ at their side in order to transform their objective reality. Thus, because the post-colonial condition requires hyper-indigenization, the Western Church would do well to begin bleeding Western categories from God’s Story, while also rethinking our concepts of the Other.

As the West rethinks its categories and pays closer attention to indigenization of God’s Redemptive Story, it must not fall into the trap of what Edward W. Said calls the “phenomenon of Orientalism.” According to Said, Orientalism is the notion that the categories “Orient” (which would be modern-day Asia, particularly China) and “Occident” are man-made categories that contributed to a European system of knowledge about the Orient, an idea of Europe that flowed from “a collective notion identifying ‘us’ Europeans as against all “those” non-Europeans.” Embedded within the idea of the Orient was an identity of European superiority in comparison to all the other non-European peoples and cultures, creating a hegemony of ideas and overriding the possibility that more independent, skeptical thinking people might have differing views. This facet of the colonial–post-colonial narrative struggle is intriguing for two reasons: it precludes Western Church theological dominance and hegemony, because the post-colonial struggle is precisely set against the type of Western identity that led to Orientalism; and more pragmatically it requires the West to revise nearly all of its categories for the global Other, realizing that they have been largely deduced through a foggy 18th century-esque romanticism that generated who and what was an Oriental, who or what was an Other.

While I hardly scratched the surface of everything post-colonial a few things should be clear: Otherness is celebrated and affirmed over against the West; Western institutions likeChristianity and the Church are skeptically viewed as extensions of colonial years gone by; solidarity with the global Other requires a radical indigenization as the formerly oppressed seek an identity and solutions apart from their oppressors, and embedded within their own forgotten narratives; and the Western phenomenon of Orientalism (or even Afrikanism) must give way to more nuanced, respectful categories of the non-Western Other. Obviously, our post-colonial global reality requires a drastic shift in Western global mission efforts. But before those efforts can shift, Western global missions as an entity needs to rethink the worldview underpinning those efforts.

Series
1-Introduction
2-The Post-Colonial Era and The Church
3-Toward A Post-Colonial Worldview
4-Post-Colonial Theology and Missions
5-A Case Study – Evangelism Explosion International

In the Fall of 2006, I had the opportunity to work for a national upscale department store after working for over four years on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.. Our store was located in one of the wealthiest and diverse counties in the country, resulting in a mosaic tapestry of tongues, tribes and religions. My department alone included six Muslims, an Orthodox Jew, a Sikh, a Buddhist, a few non-Western Christians and others who were spiritual, but non-religious. Ethiopia, Morocco, Somalia, Gabon, India, Afghanistan, Japan, Columbia and Pakistan were all represented, creating an amazing work environment and cross-cultural learning experience. It was in this context that a clash of national heritages occurred. One afternoon my Gabonian co-worker asked me, “Is your name African?” As a thoroughly white midwestern American (in the strictest WASPian sense of the description) I could not help but laugh out loud at his question! Obviously, my African co-worker got a kick out of it, too. He was curious about my family heritage, because he came from a part of the world where my ancestors were apart of something I could only touch and feel at movie length. You see, my last name, Bouma, is Dutch and the Dutch Empire used its naval and military might to colonize parts of western and southern Africa, including Gabon where my African friend was from. Through such trading companies as the Dutch East Indies Company and Dutch West Indies Company, the Kingdom of The Netherlands used its might to leverage trade in newly discovered lands outside of Europe. And it was through the Dutch West Indies Company that my family name spread from European to African. Thus began my introduction to the realities of colonialism.

Like me, most Westerners are incredibly removed from the colonial experience and its consequences. Though the hundreds of Native American reservations plagued by rampant alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide are mini-colonial dystopias in our very own backyard, Americans scarcely encounter the effects of colonialism. And though some commentators may attempt to paint the Bush Administration as colonialist militants wrapped in peace keeping garb, for all intents and purposes the Age of Colonialism is over. Through colonialism, European nations extended their sovereignty over territory beyond its borders, dominated the resources, labor and markets of the indigenous peoples of Asia, South America and Africa, and imposed socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered populations.
Though, nation states no longer overtly exploit other people groups in this sort of manner, the struggles of a post-colonial era are just beginning.

Within former European colonies and nations of the global South and East, there is a growing desire for self-assertion, self-expression and self-rule that was formerly gutted at the hands of White Europeans. Likewise, the West has been quick to make recompense for past imperialistic misdeeds and accommodate that self-assertion. In the United Nations, for instance, the developing world insisted in 1961 that a non-Western be elected Secretary General. As a result, U Thant from Burma (now Myanmar) served this global agency for a decade, while a Peruvian, Egyptian, Ghanan, and now South Korean have served the United Nations since 1982. In addition to this political paradigm shift, the world has seen economic ones, too. Globalization grants the South and East unprecedented opportunities to begin enjoying the luxuries and technologies the West has enjoyed for centuries. Nations like Brazil, China, India and even Kenya are now economically linked to the West and benefiting from that interconnectedness at unprecedented levels. So not only is the South and East asserting themselves like never before, and rightly so, the West has begun to value and incorporate the cultures of these non-Western nations into their ethos, rather than insisting they conform to Western sensibilities.

Despite the post-colonial shift in the secular West, however, the Church has been slow to incorporate this important global paradigm shift into Her interactions with the world, especially Her worldview of global missions. In light of the post-colonial condition, the time has come for the Western Church to shed Her colonialist impulses and embrace a post-colonial posture toward global mission enterprises. Particularly what’s called for is a worldview reorientation toward a post-colonial worldview of global missions. This blog series (based on a paper I wrote for a global missions class) seeks to make the case for such a worldview shift, arguing globalization begs a different posture by the Western Church toward the rest of the world. Such a worldview will inform how we do both theology and missions in the 21st century. To explain how a post-colonial worldview of missions would look in a global context, this paper will examine Evangelism Explosion International as a case study in light of this worldview. In the end, I hope the Western Church will begin to see how it should relate to the rest of the world, a relating that is post-colonial at its core.

“The global image of the US has significantly deteriorated over the past 12 months, as the chaos in Iraq has deepened. And in 18 of the countries that were involved in previous polls, the slide in America’s standing has steepened.” This was the verdict of a BBC article reporting on a BBC World Service Poll which found widespread discontent among most of the world population toward the United States of America. While the US government may think it is offering the world Pax Americana through particular foreign policy efforts, those policies are viewed with contempt by the rest of the world and have resulted in a crisis of confidence in the American government, diluting its ongoing ability to influence the world. Already its mass exportation of American culture has pricked the ire of many Arab nations, resulting in such events as the USS Cole Bombing, 9/11, and the Iraq insurgency. With so much discontent with America in general, it is no wonder that the American Church’s influence is also waning, especially when it comes to missions. Rightly or wrongly, Christianity is linked with the West and specifically the United States of America. And as America continues its pseudo-colonialist endeavors in the interest of ‘national security’, the American Church’s influence will continue to dwindle unless it embraces a post-colonial posture toward the emerging South and East. As the Western Church grapples with Her role in global missions, She must be post-colonial in theology and missions if She is to make a continued difference in the world for Jesus Christ.

TOWARD A POST-COLONIAL POSTURE

“Colonialism is the extension of a nation’s sovereignty over territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler colonies or administrative dependencies in which indigenous populations are directly ruled or displaced. Colonizing nations generally dominate the resources, labor, and markets of the colonial territory, and may also impose socio-cultural, religious and linguistic structures on the conquered population.” During the glory days of European colonialism, nation states ventured to distant places to wrest land, resources, and manpower from the ‘savage,’ all the while saving him from himself and his own damnation. These later religious efforts were based upon the ethnocentric belief that the Christian morals and European values of the colonizer were superior to those of the colonized, efforts which claimed the use of force was necessary to ‘help’ the colonized understand how superior those morals and values were. These Western Christians never seemed to question, however, whether they had received the God-given right to take the lands and resources of people in the non-Western world, nor did they seem to doubt whether their European culture was superior to the savages of the unknown world. An excessive confidence dominated the Western ethos, a confidence that has lived on to this day. The response to this attitude is post-colonialism, a condition which celebrates the Other, deconstructing the assumed authority and primacy of the West and insisting these voices of non-Westerners be given a seat at the table of worldwide discourse.

As I explained in my first essay of the course, previous and current missions tactics were and are often similar to 19th and 20th century colonial efforts; contemporary Western global missions efforts are often like crossing borders into enemy territory to settle and claim people for our kingdom, dominating all of the emotional, intellectual, and verbal capital in an effort to make the Other our own. Furthermore, we often insist that we hold the trump card to all things spiritual and theological, that our morals, spirituality, and theology are more superior to our fellow Southern and Eastern humans, ultimately thinking they have nothing to add to the conversation. In response, I suggested the Western Church needs to shift from colonial mission efforts to a model similar to economic sustainable development that is post-colonial. We are called to step into the cultures and languages and customs and lives of real people to show and tell them a better way of being human by showing them Jesus and telling them of God’s Kingdom Reign.

In the same way that those who are committed to sustainable economic development enter the lives of people groups indefinitely for the purpose of showing them a better, more sound way of growing food, filtering water, or organizing an economy, we are called to step into the lives of people indefinitely to show them a better way of being Human in Jesus and explain the significance of His death, burial, resurrection, and ascension. Just as sustainable development is about the individual (rather than the group thats doing the developing), efforts at reaching non-followers through global missions are about them and their life, not us and our church or group. In the same way sustainable development equips people to better grow food or better manage a local economy, Western global outreach must be about indigenously equipping the Other to follow Jesus and obey His teachings in their own context, while respecting their own spiritual heritage. Rather than colonize and conquer through outmoded mission tactics, the Western Church must develop people through discipleship by incorporating post-colonial attitudes that embrace the “otherness” of the Other, because this was at the heart of the mission Jesus which He gave His own disciples. While the world has shifted, the church and its agencies continue to act as if nothing has changed.
Doing Western mission in global context through a post-colonial posture will not only rethink missions, but will rethink (and begin with) theology, too.

POST-COLONIAL THEOLOGY

As America’s influence around the world wanes, so too the time of Western dominance in theology is over. No longer is there an “assumed primacy…of the West” in general, let alone specifically in the area of theology. In a post-colonial era where the voices of previously suppressed non-Western nations are exerting their influence on the world stage like never before, so too is the South and East beginning to come into their own in the theological discourse. Because the Western versions of Christianity that have prevailed for the last fifteen hundred years are no longer viewed as connecting with this time and place, the time is ripe for such emerging voices to enter the theological conversation. Thus, as the Western Church approaches global missions, it must unbundle the ‘package’ of the Jesus Story from Western Civilization and allow the Church in emerging global contexts to frame that Story in their own language.

For example, just listen to the voice of the Masai people in Kenya and Tanzania:

We believe in one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on earth…We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing that the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He was buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day he rose from the grace.

“The hyenas did not touch him.” What a wonderful way to express the resurrection of our Lord and communicate the majesty and glory of the Story of God using their own language! Notice what sort of language was not included: Trinity; sovereignty of God; election; determinism; the omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence of God; and other Western theological constructs. In other words, these African people crafted a theological credo that was contextual to their expression of faith in Jesus. The expression of faith in theology is never universal, anyway, but is in fact very particular; our dogmas and doctrines of God, of humanity, or Jesus, of sin, of salvation are firmly embedded in the Greco-Roman context of another time and in some ways have become meaningless in even our own postmodern Western context. Imagine, then, how those Western, Greco-Roman theologies and doctrines appear in an Asian or African context. The Aristotelian Unmoved Mover concept of God, which is shared by many contemporary Western Christians, just will not translate to the Masai people.

The Western Church, then, needs to contextualize the theology of Christian spirituality within other tribes, but She also must allow those tribes to inform the contemporary theological discussion. “Theology in a postcolonial context is a highly political affair. Postcolonial theologies will not settle for a position at the margins of their Western counterparts. Rather, they serreptitiously seek to turn the margin into the centre, thereby disrupting the serenity grounded on the assumption that Western formulations are self-evident.” And there is the rub: why must ‘Western formulations’ be entirely self-evident? I certainly understand and would agree that the Zeitgeist of God’s Story has helped formulate our theology and preserved truthful understandings of His Reality, but must they be the sine qua non of theological discourse? Why cannot the West learn from African Christological expressions? How could Asian understandings inform our understanding of pneumatology? Or why cannot the Western Church learn from the Eastern (Orthodox) Church’s understanding of worship and prayer? We’ve already recognized the Western understanding of the gospel has been too often truncated, shallow, thin, bland, anemic, privatized, personalized, polarized, and compromised. Perhaps our more globally integrated era will help further expose weaknesses in our thoroughly Platonic, Enlightenment theology.

But maybe that’s the fear: “Evangelical faith, which has hitherto been articulated and formulated in the stable idiom of Western rationalism that guaranteed its sameness, suddenly finds itself confronted with other idioms that disturb both the stability of classical formulations and the appeal of sameness. Will the evangelical faith break or stretch? Therein lies the question.” Many Western theologians, especially of the evangelical variety, will balk at the idea of making space for the theological voices of the global South and East, suggesting that our understanding of God is settled. That arrogance, however, will not only hinder global missions efforts, but will also keep the Western Church from growing in its understanding of God and living out its Reformation creed: “the church always reforming.” While the West certainly provides a tether to historical theological categories (e.g. Trinity and the dual nature of Christ), we must be able to learn as students from the global Church if we are to both contextualize God’s Story and partner with our overseas brothers and sisters in missions.

POST-COLONIAL MISSIONS

How exactly does missions look from a post-colonial posture? If we are to do missions in a postmodern context from a post-colonial perspective, we must first recognize that the Other does not need to conform to our Western morals, values, and customs. In fact, it might be best to encourage Muslim, Buddhist and Jewish seekers to not become members of the Christian religion at all given how closely Christianity is linked to the West. In his book, Generous Orthodoxy, Brian McLaren explains, “Although I don’t hope all Buddhists will become (cultural) Christians, I do hope all who feel so called will become Buddhist followers of Jesus; I believe they should be given that opportunity and invitation. I don’t hope all Jews or Hindus will become members of the Christian religion. But I do hope all who feel so called will become Jewish or Hindu followers of Jesus.” While this suggestion may seem radical and have a slightly universalist tinge to it, we need to understand that the words ‘Christian’ and ‘Christianity’ carry with them much baggage and Western, especially American, connotations. In the previous paragraph Brian affirms the need to become “humble followers of Jesus, whom I believe…to be the Son of God, the Lord of all, and the Savior of the world.” Missions outreach, then, must be rooted in the notion of “following Jesus” over against other religions, while permitting the Other to remain embedded in their cultural and spiritual traditions.

Rooting our post-colonial mission efforts in “following Jesus” as opposed to “becoming a Christian” is not only important to the Western Church’s efforts at global missions, it is also biblical. It’s called discipleship and, of course, finds its meaning in Jesus’ Great Commission and model of sustainable development. It means embedding ourselves in tribes of the Other, learning their customs and spiritual heritage, and committing to the long process of helping them become students of Jesus, rather than simply Christians. But as Dallas Willard wrote, “non-discipleship is the elephant in the church!” While the Western church is woefully inadequate at discipleship in its own Western context, global missions needs to shift to this more “sustainable development” model. Through this model Western global missions would include these elements: we must embed ourselves among the Other and first embody and demonstrate the Way of Jesus by being disciples ourselves before proclaiming the gospel of Jesus; we must consciously seek to make disciples, to bring others to the point where they are daily learning from Jesus and follow Him with their lives and lifestyle, instead of winning converts through evangelistic colonialist endeavors; like economic sustainable development, we must take the time to change whatever it is in their actual belief system that prevents them from placing their confidence in Jesus as Master of the Universe, while connecting their existing belief system to God’s Redemptive Story as found in Jesus; and finally, while we do not want to syncretize Jesus with Buddhism or Hinduism, we must allow space for the following of Jesus as Lord without embracing a Christianity that is rooted in the West nor American culture.

Finally, the Western Church needs to begin partnering with the Church of the global South and East to reach all nations with the good news of Jesus Christ. Ironically, already African nations are sending missions to North America. For example, the Anglican Church of Rwanda planted a church on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., Church of the Resurrection. Another movement within American Anglicanism, called the Convocation of Anglicans in North America, is a missionary effort from the Church of Nigeria to shepherd disaffected former Episcopal churches who have left the American Anglican communion over several biblical and ecclesiastical issues. These and other stories illustrate that the vital centers of missions are dispersed throughout the world today, and could be multiplied with deliberate Western Church partnerships. Such partnerships, however, must flow from a spirit of mutuality of authority and unity of purpose. Just as theology must shift from a Western centric posture to a global discourse, including the tribes at the margins of our world, so too must missions shift toward an arm-locking posture with our Asian, African, Indo-Philippino, and South American brothers and sisters as coequals for the sake and purpose of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

CONCLUSION

The authority and voice of the Western Church is dissipating, in no small reason due to the waning authority and power of the United States of America. In times past, America and Europe were the dominate sending organizations of missionaries to the global South and East, now the Two-Thirds world sends the majority of people on missions throughout the world, including to both Europe and America.
It is very encouraging to see our fellow African and Asian churches provide leadership to the global church and global mission efforts. But while I certainly applaud the missions efforts of my African, Asian, and South American brothers and sister who are owning the commission of Jesus to make disciples, there is still a place for the West to join in with these other churches in fulfilling the Great Commission. Gone are the days, though, when the West is the sole leader and authority on theology and missions. In our 21st century global context, we the West must make room for indigenous theological expressions of God’s Story and voices of leadership in missions. The West certainly can ground and tether the South and East to the historical development of theology and missions, but that once ultimate authority must give way to partnership. While the time for dominance of the Western Church maybe over, the time for quitting is not. The Southern and Eastern Church has much to learn from us as much as we do them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BBC News. ‘Listen More’ Is The World’s Message To US. Available from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6288933.stm. Retrieved 7 June 2008.

Donovan, Father Vincent J., Christianity Rediscovered. Orbis Books: Maryknoll, NY, 2005.

Engle, James F., and William A. Dyrness, Changing The Minds of Missions. InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, IL, 2000.

Mabiala, Kenzo. Evangelical Faith & (Postmodern) Others. Available from
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2001/iceman.shtml. Retrieved 7 June 2008.

McLaren, Brian, “Church Emerging: Or Why I Still Use The Word Postmodern But With Mixed Feelings,” Pages 142-151 in An Emergent Manifesto Of Hope. Edited by Doug Pagitt and Tony Jones. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007.

McLaren, Brian, A Generous Orthodoxy. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2004.

Pagitt, Doug. A Christianity Worth Believing. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, 2008.

Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation Inc. Updated 22 July 2004, 10:55 UTC. Encyclopedia on-line. Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonialism. Internet. Retrieved 7 June 2008.

Willard, Dallas, The Divine Conspiracy. HarperSanFrancisco: San Francisco, 1998.