2 of 5

Christianity has never had a territorial center. Our center is the person of Christ, and wherever he is known, there is another potential center of faith and witness. So, as mission historian Andrew Walls has said, the emergence of genuine world Christianity and the ending of Western assumptions of heartland hegemony simply marks a return to normal Christianity, which looks much more like the New Testament than Christendom ever did.

With the growth of the multinational church, mission is becoming multidirectional. The U.S. remains the largest single contributor of Protestant cross-cultural missionaries. But which country is the second largest? Not a Western nation, but India. And it is possible that India has overtaken the States in the number of those involved in truly cross-cultural mission—both within and beyond India. There are many more Korean missionaries than British, and some Nigerian evangelical mission organizations are larger in personnel than most Western ones (while operating on budgets that are a fraction of their Western counterparts'). Already, 50 percent of all Protestant missionaries in the world come from non-Western countries, and the proportion is increasing annually. So you are as likely to meet a Brazilian missionary in North Africa as a British missionary in Brazil. Indeed, the ratio of Indian missionaries to Western missionaries in India today is probably 100 to 1. Mission today is from everywhere, to everywhere.

So another piece of unlearning we must do is breaking the habit of using the term mission field to refer to everywhere else in the world except our home country in the West. The language of home and mission field is still used by many churches and agencies, but it fundamentally misrepresents reality. Not only does it perpetuate a patronizing view of the rest of the world as always being on the receiving end of our missionary largesse, but it also fails to recognize the maturity of churches in many other lands.

Christianity probably reached India before it reached Britain. There was a flourishing church in Ethiopia a century before Patrick evangelized Ireland. There were churches in Eastern Europe centuries before Europeans reached the shores of North America. There have been large Christian communities in the Middle East for 2,000 years.

So it is discourteous (at best) and damaging (at worst) when Western mission activity ignores all such ancient expressions of the Christian tradition and lumps all lands abroad as the "mission field," in comfortable neglect of the fact that the rest of the world church sees the West as one of the toughest mission fields in the world today.

This is not, of course, to suggest that countries of ancient Christian churches need no evangelism, any more than we would exclude nominal Western Christians from the need to hear the true gospel. But the real mission boundary is not between "Christian countries" and "the mission field," but between faith and unbelief, and that is a boundary that runs through every land and, indeed, through every local street.

In this, too, we will be relearning the multidirectional nature of mission in the Book of Acts. Our preoccupation with concentric circles has obscured the more complex pattern of mission and movement that Luke shows us in Acts.

next page... |  2 of 5

share this page

January 2007, Vol. 51, No. 1