K.I.S.S

Andrew, the Tall Skinny Kiwi blogger, who's currently in New Zealand at the moment, (at the Ngatiawa Contemplative Monastery as he calls it, though Ngatiawa Contemporary Monastery seems to be what they call it) wrote in a recent short post:

Praxis focuses on what they call the "emerging postmodern paradigm of mission". Which reminds me of David Bosch who suggested we were in the 'postmodern' paradigm, a term he wanted to replace with the word "ecumenical". As we all know, this never happened, probably due to his untimely death in 1992 and the reluctance of the evangelicals to embrace the "ecumenical" word, despite the fact that it occurs in the New Testament. But "the emerging postmodern paradigm of mission" would probably have his stamp of approval.

I'd hope that some other word or shorter phrase would eventually take off rather than 'emerging postmodern paradigm of mission' which quite honestly apart from being an awful mouthful doesn't tell us anything much. 'Ecumenical' now has a dated sound, and it lacks any sense of mission in it, as far as I can see.

I'm just reading Bosch's magnum opus, Transforming Mission, for the first time, after having sold it to innumerable customers over the years. It's quite some book and is full of good insights, particularly in relation to Matthew and Luke (by which you can guess that I'm probably not a very long way through it). Possibly Bosch would have used 'the emerging postmodern paradigm of mission' but he strikes me as a writer who's clearer than that, and I suspect he might have come up with something more useful. [Though I've just noticed that he uses 'paradigm' in the subtitle...!]

My sniping here isn't helped by the fact that 'postmodern' is a word without meaning, 'emerging' isn't much better, and 'paradigm' has been on my list of don't use words after I kept hearing it being overused in my office here in my first year (2008). Paradigm shift is a scientific term, primarily, which has become popular in other circles.

Note this paragraph from the Wikipedia article: In the later part of the 1990s, 'paradigm shift' emerged as a buzzword, popularized as marketing speak and appearing more frequently in print and publication. In his book, Mind The Gaffe, author Larry Trask advises readers to refrain from using it, and to use caution when reading anything that contains the phrase. It is referred to in several articles and books as abused and overused to the point of becoming meaningless.

I'll leave Bosch with the last word: Our mission has not life of its own: only in the hands of the sending God can it truly be called mission. Not least since the missionary initiative comes from God alone.

Christ and Mission

Christology is not a sufficient foundation for mission. With Jesus alone, we see mission, but not the engaged body; love, but no community, so says Len Hjalmarson in his latest Next Reformation post.

Is he right? He certainly gives plenty of good reasons why he should be right, and brings in various heavyweights such as David Bosch, Lesslie Newbigin, David Fitch, and Charles Ringma to back him up.

Hjalmarson isn't in any way denigrating Christ - he's expanding the limited picture of mission that many of us have, one that focuses all the attention on the minister and makes him the sole 'expert' in ministry/mission; that makes individual ethics more important than communal transformation; that sees a Jesus and Me approach to the Christian life as the norm.

Check out his post for his full argument.

Robert Jenson on mission

“We … need to face [the] fact often spoken of but rarely acted upon: that the West is now a mission field. We can no longer count on the culture doing half our work for us. On a mission field, the church has to do its own work, and that means first of all that it has to know what is not … in the culture, that it hopes to bring to it. Which is to say: it must know and cultivate its difference from that culture. All that talk a few years ago about the world setting the agenda, about seeing where God was at work in the world and jumping in to help etc, was the last gasp of the church’s establishment in the West, of its erstwhile ability to suppose that what the culture nurtured as good had to be congruent with the good the church had to bring…” (Pp. 29-30).

This quote comes from a chapter, What is a post-Christian?, the book, Strange New Word of the Gospel: RE-Evangelizing in the Postmodern World, edited by Carl Braaton and Robert Jenson, published Eerdmans, 2002.

Paul Fromont writes: it seems to me that Jenson is critiquing a church that has nothing distinctive to say (and embody) in relation to its host culture(s); a church that lacks distinctiveness and thus public prophetic voice. A distinctive church is one that embodies and offers an alternative. Is he, to rework a statement by another contributor to the collection of essays, saying that the gospel only emerges in comparison with what is not the gospel?

In an ealier post, Fromont also quotes David Bosch on a similar topic:
“…Evangelism means enlisting people for the reign of God, liberating them from themselves, their sins, and their entanglements, so that they will be free for God and neighbour…. To win people to Jesus is to win their allegiance to God's priorities. God wills …that within us, and through our ministry also in society around us, the "fullness of Christ" be re-created, the image of God be restored in our lives and relationships…”