Engaging Globalization (Mission in Global Community)

The Poor, Christian Mission, and Our Hyperconnected World

Myers, Bryant L., Sunquist, Scott W, Yong, Amos

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781493410262
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Christianity Today Book Award Winner Outreach Resource of the Year (Multicultural) ASM (American Society of Missiology) Book of the Year Award Globalization is speeding up our world, extending our relationships globally and bringing us closer together in positive and not-so-positive ways. The church and many Christians, however, remain largely unaware of its seductive power, resulting in a failure of vision for mission in today's world. This up-to-date resource by a veteran leader in global development work with World Vision orients readers to the history of globalization and to a Christian theological perspective on it, explores concrete realities by focusing on global poverty, and helps readers reimagine Christian mission in ways that announce the truly good news of Christ and God's kingdom. Diagrams and sidebars that incorporate the voices of global partners are included. This is the second book in a new series that reframes missiological themes and studies for students using/featuring the common theme of mission as partnership with Christians.

Section 1: Setting the Stage

1
Introduction and the Path Forward

We live in interesting times.

In the last twenty years, things have been changing with increasing speed in God’s world. Economically, the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) more than doubled to almost $78 trillion in spite of a number of recessions in major economies and the global recession of 2008–9.1 Twenty years ago, the world’s largest economies in terms of comparative purchasing power2 were the United States, Japan, and Germany; today they are China, the United States, and India. In the last twenty years, global trade increased from $2 trillion to over $18 trillion a year.3

This has brought some good news to the poor. The proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has been cut in half over this twenty-year period. Deaths of women giving birth have been reduced by almost half, as have deaths of children under the age of five. In developing countries, life expectancy increased by almost nine years. More children are in school, and the greatest increase is among girls.4

Technologically, the first website was launched in 1991, and seventeen years later Google indexed one trillion websites. Internet users reached three billion in 2015.5 In the last twenty years, we have witnessed the launch of Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and a host of new social media. The iPhone was launched in 2007, and four years later 1 billion people were using smart phones around the world and 4.6 billion people were using mobile phones. These and more technological innovations are available to this generation of adolescents and youth, which is the largest in history and represents almost one-third of the world’s population. These young people will have little memory of a world without smart phones, instant messaging, and the internet.

Since the beginning of time, people, plants, and animals have been going global. But it is only in the last two hundred years that going global was turbocharged by the ability of people to get connected and get closer to each other. As we will see later in more detail, the modern era of globalization began with the economic development of Britain in the beginning of the nineteenth century, followed by Europe, the United States, and Japan. This new form of globalization began sweeping the world after World War II and especially with the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. The drivers of globalization are deep and continuing changes in economics, technology, culture, and human self-understanding.

But there is more to globalization than just getting closer and better connected. It is changing us as individuals, not just our societies. We are meeting people previously too distant to know. Not so long ago, our neighbor usually looked like us or spoke our language; now our neighbor can be a Sudanese mother with a hungry child, or a Syrian girl fleeing the destruction of her home country. Their images and stories are readily available on our digital devices, and we are responding compassionately to these stories.

Yet there is a sense that we are letting globalization and its processes flow over us, unaware that we are being pulled into a new world. I am concerned that we as Christians are not asking the question “Are we and is the world becoming what God intends?” When we see the growth in global compassion, the answer is “maybe.” When we see the materialism, the patterns of consumption, and the increase in the abuse of the weak and the environment, the answer is far less clear. These are theological questions for God’s people. This leads me to my main point.

With the exception of some within the Christian academy who think we need to resist globalization, the larger Christian community seems to be ignoring globalization or fearing it. When was the last time you heard a sermon series, a Bible or book study, or a retreat topic focused on a Christian understanding and response to globalization? How many churches or denominations have globalization as a focus of their discipleship and mission strategy? I have been teaching a course on this topic at Fuller Theological Seminary for almost ten years, and every year I experience the surprise of students when they begin to engage—“We’ve had our heads down; there is so much about this we did not know. This has not been on our radar.” While Christians seem to be willing to use the technological tools of globalization for church and mission, there is little evidence that Christians and their churches are devoting much energy to understanding globalization, biblically assessing its values and promises to us, and preparing our people to respond.

I suspect there are three broad reasons for this. First, globalization as a topic seems too big and complicated, too involved with economics, technology, and politics. This is technical stuff best left to experts, and maybe it’s a bit worldly for our taste. Second, we Christians have been socialized into quietly accepting our relegation to the private realm of spiritual things, leaving the world of economics, politics, and technology to the West’s materialist and secular humanism. We no longer seem to believe that we are to be signs of the coming kingdom of God and that God has made us partners in God’s plan to redeem and restore creation. Third, in the aftermath of the passing of Christendom, we have lost our nerve a bit. We are not sure that we are worthy of a place at the public table when it comes to assessing and engaging the globalization of economics, finance, technology, and the like. We are not sure that we will be welcome and, worse, that we have anything of value to offer. We seem to have forgotten that the gospel is true and secular humanism is not.

But it was not always this way. While the traditional account of the emergence of a modern economy and a democratic state in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century is summarized as the coalescing of the new economics of Adam Smith with the Industrial Revolution and the development of modern science, there is more to the story, as we shall see later in this book. Christian theology provided much of the philosophical and values foundation for what emerged.6 Furthermore, it was churches and individual Christians who worked for protection of children and who cared for the poor in the era of rapid urbanization when people began working in factories unregulated by humane rules. The nineteenth century was the first century of modern economic and technological globalization, but it also came to be called the “humanitarian century”7 and the “age of benevolence”8 largely as a result of the work of Christians. The Christians of the nineteenth century had not yet learned that they needed to leave the public square to others.

We need to remember that Victorian evangelicals imagined redeeming the world, not just ruling it.9 Voluntary mission societies responded to British colonialism with a commitment to share the gospel—the whole gospel—humanizing the empire in some places and challenging its excesses in others. Missionaries were critical in promoting religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, most colonial reforms, and the rule of law, including legal protections for nonwhites.10

In addition, Victorian evangelicals launched the world’s first national advocacy campaign as a prophetic rebuke directed at the emerging British Empire. The slave trade could not be the backbone of the modern global economic system of the day for the simple reason that slavery was immoral. So were cultural practices such as female infanticide and suttee11 in India. Whatever the weaknesses or presumptions of cultural superiority, we must acknowledge that the launch of the modern era of globalization was accompanied and challenged by a Christian moral perspective. Christians in Britain and throughout the empire acted theologically and missionally.

And so the church and Christians today need to make a choice. Will we ignore globalization and remain closeted in the spiritual realm with our backs to the world? Will we resist globalization as some kind of second fall, as if God has been surprised by globalization and the staying power of capitalism? Or will we instead engage globalization as a mixture of God’s grace and human sin and question its promise of a particular kind of better human future by offering a more complete vision of human flourishing as understood from Scripture? Are we willing to call out and attempt to change the darker aspects of globalization? Will the church decide to engage globalization missionally and work to shape it ethically? Are we willing to fulfill our mission of making disciples of Christ who vote, consume, and volunteer in ways that correct the evil and enhance the good in globalization? Globalization is going to the ends of the earth with its version of good news. What are we doing?

We need the courage to act as if it were true that the kingdom of God is the only kingdom that will be left standing at the end of time. We need to act as if it were true that God is working now in human history toward that end. Furthermore, we need to act as God’s partners in this task for the simple reason that working through flawed human beings is the way God has chosen to act in the world. Walter Brueggemann reminds us that, in the Old Testament, God’s resolve always translates into human action.12 God met Moses at the burning bush and announced God’s resolve to free Israel from Egypt and then said to a surprised Moses, “I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt” (Exod. 3:10). This mode of God’s action also appears again in the Gospel of John. Jesus announced that he had come that the world might have life and have it in full, and then he told the disciples, “As the Father sent me, I am sending you. . . . Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:21–22). Acting theologically and missiologically in God’s world is our mission.

But we do not appear to have globalization—as a value system, as a collection of principalities and powers, as an offering of a better human future—in our sights. We need to be making ourselves aware of the missing parts of the globalization story. We need to be informing and forming ourselves about how to witness to the kingdom in the midst of today’s globalization in terms of how we consume, volunteer, and vote. Christians and the church need to contribute to the development of a moral ecology powerful enough to shape and correct globalization in favor of values that support both human dignity and human flourishing—kingdom values. Issues of idolatry and false promises need to be named and alternatives provided. Bottom line: The church needs to get back in the game. We have a God, a gospel, and a truth that a materialist and secular globalization simply cannot provide. It is to contribute to this call to action that I decided to write this book.

What Is Being Proposed?

The intent of this book is to introduce the subject of globalization to students, pastors, and church leaders, to invite them to go before God and seek their individual and collective callings to be faithful witnesses within the sprawling and complex world of twenty-first-century globalization. The book will end with an exploration of the possible missional roles of the church in today’s world of economic, technological, and social change. My proposal rests on four affirmations that I will explore in some depth.

First, globalization is an emergent, highly ambiguous global phenomenon of technological, economic, and social change that is now working itself out in history. Globalization’s underlying values and assumptions are modern, involving a material world with no transcendent dimension and with human beings as the sole actors in history. This world is a source of anxiety and distress since, as individuals and even as nations, we feel powerless in the midst of globalization’s increasingly rapid pace of change, its numerous contradictions, and its mixture of good and not so good outcomes. The future is unclear since all we know about globalization is what we learn by looking back at its history, and the past sheds little light on the future of emergent social systems. Looking forward leaves all of us with an uncomfortable sense of uncertainty—seemingly adrift in a world of rapid and unpredictable change.

Second, globalization has been good news to the poor, although not for all the poor and certainly not at all times in its history. Furthermore, globalization birthed a process whereby compassion became globalized in the form of an increasingly worldwide response to victims of wars and natural disasters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in the growing global poverty eradication efforts since the end of World War II. Although resting on the thin basis of secular human rights theory, the idea that all human beings are entitled to be able to stay alive and live a life worth living has become a normative global ethic. A shared concern for the poor is a point of potential...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Sidebars
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Section 1: Setting the Stage
• Section 2: Introducing Globalization
• Section 3: The Two Eras of Globalization
• Section 4: The Impact of Globalization
• Section 5: Globalization and the Poor
• Section 6: Globalization and the Church
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover