MISSION HORIZONS EDITORIAL, JUNE 2005


BAD TIMES?


Now I know that farmers have had a genuinely difficult time with drought recently. But I still love the dry humour of the old Australian poem by John O'Brien in which farmers gather to chew straw and complain that things have never been so bad, because of drought.


They do it again when the drought turns to flood. And then when their crops grow beautifully thick they reckon the bush fires will be the worst they've ever had.


It concludes: "We'll all be rooned", said Hanrahan, "before the year is out".


Someone said to me recently that it must be discouraging teaching mission at a time when the tide is going out. Things are bad and getting worse, they seemed to be saying. "We'll all be rooned", is the pessimists' chorus.


If we're talking about organised Christianity in the West, they have a point. I don't need to rehearse the statistics of declining attendance and marginalisation of the church in Western society. We do indeed face a crisis.


Without denying these things, however, let's take a clue from the Chinese character for "crisis", which contains the elements for both danger and opportunity. What opportunities for mission in Western cultures are thrown up by the crisis?


Less nominal faith
The first is that cultural Christianity is on the wane. Centuries of nominal faith are coming to an end as there is no longer pressure to baptise, marry or be buried from a church just because everyone does it. I suspect Jesus, who kept confronting people with radical choices, would be glad not to have around his neck millions of people who said they followed him but did almost nothing about it. The intertwining of church and state has done a great deal of damage to the cause of following Jesus.


Reassessment
The second is that failure often causes us to reassess. It's not such a bad thing to stop and ask if the way we've been doing things is the right way. Are cathedrals, Sunday Schools, denominations and sermons the best way to live out our faith? Is faith primarily propositional or relational? If both, how are the two related? Old models are hard to challenge until they begin to crumble.


Experiment
The third opportunity is the freedom-no, the imperative-to experiment. When a paradigm loses its power to suffocate all alternatives, new ways emerge. At the moment I'm hearing of many alternative ways to be church, share faith and engage with the society around us. I suspect this time of transition will last for a while, so we need to urge each other to imagine wildly and experiment courageously. The radical figure of Jesus is re-emerging for many followers, and that's exciting.


Listening to the non-West
The fourth is the opportunity to listen to the non-Western world, where Christian faith is growing rapidly. It's hard for us in the West. It's not long since we thought we were bringing not only the gospel but also civilisation and wealth to the "new world". Why is Christian faith exploding in Asia, Africa and Latin America? Why is it usually both evangelistic and socially engaged? How does affluence suffocate faith? Without a crisis in the West, we may never have begun to listen to the non-Western world. Of course, it will need to be a critical as well as a sympathetic listening, discerning what applies to our own context.


Openness to faith
The fifth opportunity arises from the openness of postmodernism to a variety of viewpoints and the possibility of spiritual meaning. I well remember the chill winds of hard-edged modernism in my youth. It was hard going in my undergraduate days to even suggest there is a spiritual dimension in life. Now, when I stay in backpacker accommodation around the world, I can hardly get through a meal in the dining room without talking about faith with the young people I sit with. There is a hunger in Western culture. It may at times be gullible but it is genuine and open. It may not be for church but Jesus has a chance.


So I don't think "we'll all be rooned". I'm more with Charles Dickens. To paraphrase his opening words in The Tale of Two Cities: It is the worst of times and yet it is the best of times.


Ross Langmead