I’ve been wrestling with David Smith’s Mission after Christendom for several weeks. I hate it when books upset the apple cart of one’s thinking and reveal a core of rotten assumptions. I wish Smith was wrong, but I think he is right. I could unpack the pain caused by his "reimagining of what it means to be a Christian in the new world order", but I’ll opt for several positive "surprises." (I’ll use movement-building where David Smith speaks of mission.)
Surprise #1: We need to see movement-building as a learning experience in which the "teacher becomes a learner, the one in possession of divine revelation discovers new truth and he who seeks the salvation of others finds himself converted all over again." Smith uses Acts 9-10 as an example. It is Cornelius who is well-spoken of, awakening honestly to the truth of the gospel. But it is Peter–the apostle and missionary–who must discover new wide, embracing truth of the gospel. As Peter tells the story of Jesus, the Messiah, to a Gentile audience, he discovers for himself the fuller, universal implication of his own message–eventually announcing that Christ is "Lord of all"(10:36).
What would happen if we sought to learn from those we were called to reach? To become teachable to those we teach?
Surprise #2: We need to beware of our proselytization. God wants true converts/disciples not proselytes. Proselytization was in the NT a Jewish model of for the expansion of the religious community. The early Christ-followers set it aside in favor of a new model of movement building involving conversion. The former practice sought to guarantee that new adherents adopted the patterns of belief and behavior already established as normative with in the believing community–i.e. circumcision, obedience to the Mosaic Law. Early Christ-followers bypassed these cultural barriers and called people to turn toward Jesus Christ from within their own cultural identity. In other words, They could come to Christ without abandoning cultural identity. As a result, Christianity "from its inception is characterized by a cultural pluralism which permits the formation of churches (movements?) reflecting human diversity and grants recognition to the insights into the mystery of Christ derived from the experience of faith in Christ within those various contexts."
How many of our own cultural, evangelical, Western "patterns of belief and behavior" do we bring our movement-building efforts?
Surprise #3: We are at the end of Western-dominated movement-building. Missions needs to be conceived as "from everywhere to everywhere." A new global order now exists in which we must join missionaries from the global south and east, arm in arm, as equal partners in taking the gospel everywhere.
How much are we driven by a "found to lost" mentality in our movement-building efforts? What would change if we dropped the "unreached" assumption from our movement-building efforts?