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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 174 174 New Contexts for Mission the natural world but their formal studies often ignored what he called the “middle area” of spiritual forces like angels and demons. As C. S. Lewis noted in the introduction to his delightful Screwtape Letters, Westerners generally approach the idea of unseen spiritual forces in two ways. On the one hand, as Paul Hiebert noted, the worldview of many Westerners has no place for the unseen realm of spiritual beings and their power. Such Westerners have written off those spiritual forces as unimportant or else have not acknowledged them as real. The extreme rationalism of this approach ultimately strips Christianity of supernatural content, oxymoronically turning the faith into a secularizing force. The other extreme that Lewis mentioned is represented by books such as Engaging the Enemy, which urge Christians to learn about “territorial spirits” so that they can pray “against them.” 14 In some people’s minds, that way of talking about spiritual forces reduces Christianity to the level of magic and animism. AIDS/HIV Crisis Another contextual challenge facing Christianity today is the AIDS epidemic. Though the pandemic is worldwide, it has hit parts of sub-Saharan Africa hard with HIV prevalence rates of over 20 percent in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe and more than 15 percent in South Africa and Zambia. The results of such high infection rates pose tremendous challenges to the Church in Africa. As children have lost both parents to AIDS complications, millions of orphans have been created across Africa. This high profile problem is attracting money as churches and agencies scramble to help those in the hardest hit areas. Sadly, unless the outside funding for alleviating AIDS-related problems in Africa is used with great wisdom, it could spawn a fresh set of dependency issues. The challenge is thus not only to respond to the AIDS crisis but also how to do so without creating other long-term problems. Nominalism Another characteristic of today’s global mission context is the huge number of people who are Christian in name only. In Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism, Walter Brueggemann talked about the back-to-the-Torah movement under Ezra and Nehemiah in which “forgetters” in Israel were transformed into “rememberers.” Europe (eastern as well as western) and North and South America are populated by millions of nominal Christians who could be termed forgetters. That the Church faces a serious challenge in evangelizing these nominal Christians was pointed out when three major reports from the Consultation on World Evangelization held in Thailand focused on nominal adherents among Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. Many of the people la-
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 175 beled as nominal Christians in both Protestant and Roman Catholic areas of Europe think of themselves as post-Christian. They have not rejected Christianity; they see it as part of their heritage but they feel they have moved on beyond it. The Church is struggling to find ways to reevangelize countries like Denmark where more than 85 percent of the population claims to be Christian but church attendance sputters along between 1 percent and 4 percent. Postmodernity The coloring that postmodernity gives to the thinking of people around the world is another aspect of the context in which mission is done today. In postmodernity there is skepticism about concepts such as progress, objectivity, reason, certainty, personal identity, and grand narrative. Postmodernity is characterized by the feeling that all communication is shaped by cultural bias, myth, metaphor, and political content. Postmodernity, typified by parody, satire, and self-reference, sees society as dominated by a mass-media that has no originality. In much of postmodernity, meaning and experience can only be created by the individual and cannot be made objective by an author or narrator. Postmodernity and globalization have combined to produce a culturally pluralistic yet profoundly interconnected global society that lacks a dominant center of political power, communication, or intellectual production. The context produced by postmodernity will affect how evangelism and discipleship are done. Postmodernity will also shape how support for world mission must be generated. Some see in the postmodern fascination with story an opportunity for the Christian story to get a good hearing. Narrative theology, which grapples with the theological messages of the narratives of Scripture rather than attempting to do systematic theology, is a way of doing theology that should appeal to postmoderns. Exegeting the Culture New Contexts for Mission 175 175 Global population growth, urbanization, changes in other religions, the resurgence of animism and postmodernism are features of the context in which today’s Christian global mission is being done. The church growth movement fathered by Donald McGavran urges church leaders to study thoroughly the context in which they are ministering. Scholars sometimes discount the insights of church growth studies, saying that those are simply crass attempts to market the church. What they do not see is that church leaders must be exegeting the culture with the same dogged determination they use to exegete or understand Holy Scripture. It is a mistake to summarily dismiss the usefulness of the social sciences in understanding the context in which the Church must minister today. Mission leaders must be reading cultures and seeking to under-
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