VULNERABLE MISSION

VULNERABLE MISSION VIS-À-VIS MAINSTREAM MISSION AND MISSIOLOGY
This is a huge challenge, almost incomprehensibly different than our analytical ways.
I ran into it as I worked with oral thinkers in Lesotho a generation ago, and I tried to
explain it to my American supporters this way: “Teaching the Bible in Lesotho means
teaching parts of the Bible we don’t often read (like Hebrews) to teach truths we don’t
understand (like purification) to meet needs we don’t feel (like body-soul cleansing) by
using methods we don’t like (like memorization).”
Once I taught a two-day course on worldview at a YWAM training base in England
and included some of this material on thinking styles. At the end a Swedish student
commented, “Now I see not only why I felt lost for most of the six months I served in
Tanzania. I can see for the first time just how lost I really was!”
If missionaries among oral peoples tried from the beginning to shift to oral thinking, they
would find out much sooner “just how lost they really are.” Then they would slow down,
invest much less money and energy in poor (i.e., analytically based) mission strategies and
programs, and do much less damage before they started doing some good.
THE HUGE METHODOLOGICAL CHOICE FOR WESTERN
MISSIONS TODAY
If VM methods—local language, local resources, local thinking style—are so much better
than others, where are they working? It is a fair question. If Jim Harries has come
up with such a valuable theory, why has his own VM approach to theological training
not yet caught fire in Western Kenya, spread across Kenya and even to other countries?
Where’s the beef in the VM theory?
The answer is hiding in plain sight, and it is a lot bigger than Jim or any of the rest of us.
Arguably the three most fruitful mission movements in the entire twentieth century were
three that operated almost entirely on VM principles. (I realize these do not fit with Jim’s
definition of VM as an issue of Westerners working in the Majority World, but bear with
me.) The three movements are African indigenous churches, Chinese house churches,
and (to a lesser extent) the charismatic movement in Latin America. Mainstream mission
thinkers and leaders are fully aware of all three and generally admire them, yet they
seem not to have grasped the implications of their fruitfulness. Consider this:
The AICs [African Instituted Churches] have shown how much mission can be done for
free. It takes no money to retell the story of the calling of the founder or to tell people
about one’s own walk with God. It takes no money to pray for someone to be healed. It
takes no money to sing and dance or to write a new song that praises God. It takes no
money to receive dreams or prophetic revelations from God. It takes no money for each
member of a congregation to stand up and speak in a service. It takes no money to be freed
from alcoholism, wife-beating, jealousy and witchcraft. It takes no money to become an
honest, hard-working employee. 21
The massive success of VM is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. In our new
century in India, Mongolia, the Philippines, and across the Muslim World, things are
beginning to happen that look very similar to Africa 100 years ago and China 50 years
21 Thomas Oduro, et al., Mission in an African Way: A Practical Introduction to African Instituted Churches and Their
Sense of Mission, Marturia series (Wellington, South Africa: BybelMedia, 2008), 159–60.
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