Whole and Reconciled

Gospel, Church, and Mission in a Fractured World

Tizon, Al

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493415526
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Outreach 2019 Resource of the Year (Cross-Cultural/Missional) The ministry of reconciliation is the new whole in holistic ministry. It must be if the Christian mission is to remain relevant in our increasingly fractured world. This book offers a fresh treatment of holistic ministry that takes the role of reconciliation seriously, rethinking the meaning of the gospel, the nature of the church, and the practice of mission in light of globalization, post-Christendom, and postcolonialism. It also includes theological and practical resources for effectively engaging in evangelism, compassion and justice, and reconciliation ministries. Includes a foreword by Ruth Padilla DeBorst and an afterword by RonaldJ. Sider.

Part 1
Whole World

Missiology and Culture

“What do you do?”

I can answer that question several ways: I am a professor, a denominational executive, a minister, a theologian. But to solicit the blankest of stares, I would say, “I am a missiologist.” It is a conversational nonstarter, and what a travesty! Scholars should be passionate about their field, and I certainly am about mine. Missiology explores the intersection of active faith and culture, and therefore provides invaluable resources to those who seek to understand the interaction between God, the active church, and the cultures of the world.

Admittedly, it is confessional; that is, it would be difficult to be a missiologist if one did not profess faith in Christ and Christ’s purposes in the world. I say this as a concession because missiology’s confessional nature has made it suspect as a legitimate academic discipline in some circles.1 But has not postmodernism debunked total academic objectivity, showing that every scholar of any discipline confesses something, that every scholar comes from a particular perspective? As an interdiscipline that sits at the intersection of theology and the social sciences, missiology assumes the essential missional nature of the church while maintaining high respect for the cultures and societies in which the gospel drama plays out.

In addition to missiology’s confessional nature as grounds for dismissal, some institutions have also found the historical missions-colonialism connection disturbing enough to question the ethics of mission at all and therefore also the inclusion of mission studies in the theological curriculum. Although to say that the church has simply colluded with colonizers oversimplifies the matter, history reveals enough missionary complicity in the colonial project that the church cannot escape the judgment of time.2 Furthermore, like a tormented ghost, the colonial spirit has refused to go away, continuing to this day, albeit in subtler ways, to haunt the way some groups continue to engage in mission.3 And if missiology keeps this spirit alive in any way, then I applaud the institutions that have eliminated the discipline from their course offerings.

If missiology, however, refers to the scholarly interdiscipline that affirms both the mission of the church and the value of culture, then it can potentially serve as an avenue for the healing of the nations from postcolonial trauma. It can provide resources in the service of reconciliation. Moreover, it can detect blind spots, prevent ill-advised alliances (with, say, neocolonizers and imperialists), and discern God’s activities in the midst of a people. It can help the church maintain the dignity of cultures while remaining true to the gospel. It can help the church do mission right!

Global Contextualization: An Essential Task for Missiology Today

Missiology has this potential because of its commitment to contextualization. As Dana Robert points out, “The language and practices of contextualization appeared as a way to move beyond the tired colonialist frameworks for mission theology.”4 Contrary to the notion that contextualization simply seeks to dress up the gospel in culturally appropriate clothing to draw people of that culture to Christ, it means negotiating the complex and delicate balance between revelation and context; for while the good news comes “from God” (that is, it does not come from within but by revelation), it is also culturally conditioned in both its delivery and its reception. How we work out this dialectic in specific cross-cultural situations defines the task of missiological contextualization.

As a missiological study, this book necessarily begins with the contextualization question, as part 1 takes on the “whole world.” It calls us to consider holistic mission anew in terms of reconciliation because the world pulsates with massive and rapid changes, the kinds that have created deeper, wider, and more violent rifts between peoples. These changes, rightly interpreted by way of the contextualization process, warrant rethinking the nature and practice of God’s whole mission in terms of reconciliation.

Keen contextualizers would likely raise a red flag at this point, for by definition contextualization refers to a localizing, particularizing process. So the thought of contextualizing the whole world sounds like a contradiction in terms. However, due to the forces of globalization that have caused the unprecedented convergence of cultures, economies, politics, and religions everywhere, the world has become an experientially smaller, more integrated place.5 A global culture has emerged, making it possible and necessary to apply the task of contextualization to the world as a whole.

An Understanding of “Whole World”

Part 1 seeks to understand several major global shifts that have massive implications for the church-in-mission. Chapter 1 takes on the phenomenon of globalization. If cultural and social interpreters have discerned correctly, then this global culture I speak of has primarily taken on the contours of the marketplace. An unprecedented coming together (some say a collision or clash) of cultures in the world marketplace, globalization offers both opportunity and challenge to the church-in-mission.

So does an overlapping set of “post realities.” Chapter 2 looks closely at a world that is no longer dominated by the Christian West, a reality that scholars have identified as a post-Christendom world. Whereas the Western church once shared the moral and political center of the globally dominant, cultural forces have begun to decenter it, relegating it to the margins, where, according to most post-Christendom scholars, the church is actually better positioned to be the prophetic people of God they were always meant to be. Furthermore, whereas the Christendom church took it upon itself to go out into all the world, mission today is now characterized by “from everywhere to everywhere,” as missionaries from non-Western lands feel increasingly called to bear witness to the gospel around the world, including post-Christian peoples of the West. Indeed, life in the post-Christendom era affects the church and its mission both within and outside Western culture.

If post-Christendom describes a reorientation of the church and the development of a polycentric mission, then postcolonialism—the subject of chapter 3—describes in part a global reality wherein the formerly colonized nations of the non-Western world have begun to lift up their voices, seeking justice and demanding new ways to do church and mission. In light of such postcolonial demands, is mission so hopelessly tied to historical colonialism that the church simply needs to fold up its tents and abandon the practice of mission altogether, or is there such a thing as a postcolonial missiology?

Part 1 seeks to understand these global changes, believing that they greatly affect the way in which we understand and practice the faith—that is, gospel, church, and mission—in a diversifying, globalizing, and fracturing world.

1. The academic objection to missiology is based on the assumption that true scholarship must be done dispassionately and “objectively.” Therefore, the requirement that a scholar commit to a particular religion in order to engage in the discipline of missiology makes it illegitimate. For more on this debate, as well as a creative way to do missiology that is both legitimately academic and confessional, see Jan A. B. Jongeneel, “Is Missiology an Academic Discipline?,” Transformation 15, no. 3 (1998): 27–32.

2. Elsewhere I interact with church historians such as Brian Stanley and others who make the case for a more sympathetic view of Christian missions as it relates to colonialism. It is true that a fuller historical picture would reveal altruistic motives in the work of missionaries alongside the blind motives that enabled them to take part in the colonial project. Nonetheless, in light of the lingering effects of colonialism in many countries today, I argue that anything less than resistance during that time makes the missionary enterprise as guilty as the rest. See F. Albert Tizon, “Remembering the Missionary Moratorium Debate: Toward a Missiology of Social Transformation in a Postcolonial Context,” Covenant Quarterly 62, no. 1 (February 2004): 13–34.

3. The work of postcolonial theologians and missiologists does not just consist of calling out the sins of the colonial past; it also detects the colonial spirit that still operates today. For an excellent volume on the postcolonial challenge, see Kay Higuera Smith, Jayachitra Lalitha, and L. Daniel Hawk, eds., Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations: Awakenings in Theology and Praxis (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2014).

4. Dana L. Robert, “Forty Years of the American Society of Missiology,” Missiology 42, no. 6 (January 2014): 13.

5. See Donald Hornsby’s “The Incredible Shrinking World,” Vision, February 2005, http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=167. This is a three-book review of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and Its Discontents, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1: Whole World
• Part 2: Whole Gospel
• Part 3: Whole Church
• Part 4: Whole Mission
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover