Introduction

Innovating Mission

Retrospect and Prospect in the Field of Missiology

Charles E. Van Engen

We gathered from the four corners of the globe to remember, celebrate and rethink together the significance of the past, present and future of mission theory and practice of the first fifty years of the Institute of Church Growth (ICG) / School of World Mission (SWM), now the School of Intercultural Studies (SIS), founded by Donald A. McGavran.1 With several hundred mission leaders and practitioners gathered for the event, recognized leaders in the field from around the globe offered short lectures reflecting on the innovations in missiology associated with Donald McGavran and his associates. The chapters of this book bring together their thoughts.

Having known Donald McGavran personally, I found the celebration to be inspiring, fun, stimulating and thought provoking. For me, it turned out to be a kind of back-to-the-future event. The reader will remember the film trilogy called Back to the Future. In the first episode (1985) of that sci-fi classic, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) must go back to 1955 in a plutonium-powered DeLorean car invented by eccentric scientist Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Traveling back in time, Marty must make sure his then teenage parents-to-be (Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson) meet and fall in love so he can get back to the future—or he will not exist. In addition, Marty must return to his own time and save the life of Doc Brown, who is a very important scientist for the future.2 As the reader will see in the chapters of this book, our gathering in Pasadena this past October was a similar kind of back-to-the-future experience during which we reconsidered some of the innovations stimulated by McGavran and his colleagues and we reflected on the significance of the past for missiological thought and practice in the future.

Back to 1965

Come with me back fifty years to the early 1960s in missiology. Huge changes had occurred in the world with significant impact on the prevailing concepts and action of Christian mission. Here are a few examples of the phenomenal global changes that had taken place prior to the 1960s.

• Two world wars had devastated the globe.
• The Korean War had divided that subcontinent.
• China had closed its doors to outside influence.
• The United Nations was born.
• The World Council of Churches was born.
• Over fifty new nations, for example, Indonesia, Japan, India and South Korea, were born or reconstituted in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
• Dictatorships were being re-evaluated and replaced in Latin America.
• Airplane travel was expanding around the globe.
• Radio, telephone and television were transforming communication all over the world.

Parallel to these changes, the way the Christian churches and their mission agencies thought about mission was undergoing significant scrutiny. Here are a few examples.

• National churches began to mature and assert themselves as active agents of their own destiny and directors of their own mission endeavors.
• Many folks expressed a strong anticolonial critique of the mission perspectives and actions of older European and North American churches.
• The anticolonial critique rose to the point of some mission leaders in Asia and Africa calling for a “moratorium” on sending missions from Europe and North America.
• At the same time, major “faith” mission sodalities were born, especially in North America.
• Simultaneously, the aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council meeting from 1962 to 1965 transformed the Roman Catholic Church’s view of Christian mission, among a host of other changes.
• Meanwhile, a strong ecumenical movement took shape in the birth and expansion of the World Council of Churches (WCC).
• Somewhat in response to what was happening in the WCC, evangelical Protestants expressed their view of mission, which eventually split evangelism and social action, a divide that Latin American Protestant missiologists decried.
• Pentecostal cross-cultural and international mission continued to grow, planting thousands of churches and forming hundreds of new denominations around the world.
• African-initiated churches with no historic ties to any Western missions continued to grow exponentially throughout Africa.

Such radical changes in contexts and concepts forced many mission thinkers to choose between the glass half empty and the glass half full. For many, the missiological glass was half empty. By the early 1960s much of the discussion surrounded the already declining churches in the West, the rise of so many competing creeds, the reality of so much disunity in the church, and the existence of so many churches and mission endeavors vying for position and status. All this produced a deep uncertainty and increasing concern over the authenticity of the church and the viability of Christian mission.

In the 1960s, there was deep pessimism and perplexity concerning the church’s mission. Some called it more a venture than ever. Others felt that its foundations had been shaken. Some called the discussion surrounding it a “great debate” while others felt that it belonged to an era long past and should suffer “euthanasia,” or at least be placed under a “moratorium.” Some felt the church should administer mission, but others believed the church itself was the problem. Some were convinced that mission should lead to a personal spiritual conversion, but others stressed that its motivations and goals should involve a life-and-death struggle against hunger, disease, poverty, racism and unjust sociopolitical and economic structures. Still others wanted to replace the whole idea of mission with such notions as interchurch aid or dialogue. Such feelings of uncertainty, coupled with strong appeals for support in mission, were nowhere more apparent and critical in the 1960s than in the discussion, critique and caricaturing of Donald McGavran and what became known as the church-growth movement, the central creating and forming initiative of the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary.3

McGavran and his associates were among those who saw the glass of missiological reflection as half full and affirmed that classic mission had been at the center of the church’s life throughout the centuries and especially in 1965, when they established the SWM. They recognized that mission endeavors had absorbed tremendous energy, people power and money. They admitted that in some cases mission was that part of the church’s life that had made it (wittingly or not) a partner in the worldwide expansion of Western influence. They admitted that mission was an enigmatic aspect of the church’s nature that exhibited sometimes the church’s vitality but sometimes its decadence. But they also reminded folks that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mission was seen clearly as the church’s primary task, one of its major contributions to world civilization. Yet these same more optimist folks felt the need in the early 1960s for tangible, concrete and clear criteria by which to judge the authenticity and effectiveness of mission. Amid the uncertainties of the day, they wanted to be able to recognize authentic Christian missionary expression. Into this controversy stepped Donald McGavran.

McGavran and his associates affirmed that it was God’s will that the church grow in all aspects, including in the numbers of believers, their spirituality and their impact on their surrounding cultures and contexts. McGavran emphasized that money, manpower and planning should be aimed at converting to Christ what at that time were estimated to be “the three billion.” Somewhat in reaction to his own experience and background in mission in India, McGavran stated that, where that was not happening, some “good things” were possibly being done but the true aim of mission was not being fulfilled. In speaking, teaching, writing and publishing, he told the world that the command of Jesus Christ to his disciples was to make more disciples and, as a result, to see the church grow. Thus McGavran and his associates believed, in opposition to those who believed the church to be at the sunset of mission, that the worldwide Christian church was at the sunrise of mission in the second half of the twentieth century.

What transformed these discussions into red-hot debate was the simultaneous rise of three major paradigms of mission that took shape in parallel, with few bridges and little overlap between them. In the late 1950s and early 1960s three major perspectives of missiology arose. Each spawned its own movement in mission. At the risk of oversimplification, let me offer a summary description of these views of mission.

(1) Due to the disastrous silence of the churches in Western Europe during the Third Reich and its genocide, especially regarding Jewish people, a missiology of relevance arose that some would call a missiology of the guilty conscience. With Dietrich Bonhoeffer as its main inspiration, this view of mission stressed the importance of socioeconomic and political action on the part of the church. Most strongly involving the older Protestant churches and mission agencies of Western Europe and North America associated...