CONCEPTS OF MISSION - Orbis Books

Mission in Contemporary Missiology 27
ation in the North, where Christianity is struggling anew to recapture its
pristine glory and to make itself understandable to a new generation. This
reality has recently assumed new attention in the writings of some missiologists.
Thus, as already indicated, the challenge rests on reading this new
development from the positive viewpoint of Christian expansion and not as
a displacement of one zone by the other. In addition to this, there is a noticeable
decrease in the number of missionaries from the North Atlantic churches
and a lack of truly missionary spirit. There is also a concern about the continuing
decline in vocations in these zones that were noted for their missionary
enterprise in the Third World countries in the last centuries (see Motte
and Lang 1982, 274). This factor has caused some authors to play down the
missionary urgency and to see the formation of new groups of lay persons as
mission volunteers ad tempus, just as in the social field, as a “sign of the
times.” But the question is: Should the consecrated missionary who before
worked all his life in missions leave the coast clear for the lay person who
commits himself for some years to a rather human task (see López-Gay 1993,
11).
Behind this reality, however, the good news is that the churches in the
global South are today witnessing a great increase in vocations and in the
number of new mission societies. Though apostolic workers in the young
churches are still a minority in proportion to the churches of the North
Atlantic, their increasing numbers are a reality of vitality and of clear growth.
Indeed, the vitality of the young churches is not only a question of numbers
(of workers), but above all of missionary spirit. The missionary spirit remains
active, especially when it is expressed in “missionary departures,” in missionaries
“sent out” to the nations. Also in this field, the young churches seem
to be particularly active (see Dinh Duc Dao 1993, 37-38). The continents of
Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which were often regarded as objects of
mission enterprise, are themselves sending out missionaries. This challenges
the older sister-churches of the North Atlantic to be disposed to receive and
accept missionaries from these young churches as equals and in the spirit of
Pius XII’s encyclical letter Fidei Donum (see nos. 128-139). Therefore,
notwithstanding the actual numerical crisis of missionaries in many churches
of the Northern Hemisphere, one can conclude that God wants and seeks
missionaries. Moreover, God provides the church in every age with the
needed manpower in the missions. Mission is God’s work.
However, the above realities, among others, inspired the so-called theory
of “moratorium” which was proposed by some theologians in the Third
World toward the end of the twentieth century. The theologians called for a
moratorium on foreign missionaries. This theory, which was proposed for
the first time in 1972 in Kenya and is still today the object of discussion in
some circles, was meant to create a kind of pause of about ten years, during
which the young churches were expected to discover their own identities and
develop their own specific character without the control or interference of
foreign missionaries. The theory, which forgets that the particular churches