discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 52 52 Doing Mission Together The Italian language has a wonderful idiom or figure of speech that says, fare un buco nell’acqua. In English that phrase means “to make a hole in water.” Imagine sticking a finger in a pool of water. In a manner of speaking, the finger will make a hole in the water. Of course, when that finger is taken out of the water, the hole is no longer there. That image is exactly the point the Italians make with that phrase. They use fare un buco nell’acqua to describe something or someone that is very visible at one point but then leaves no lasting results, no permanent mark. Through the centuries, Christian mission efforts have been much more than making holes in water. The local congregations in cities, towns, and villages around the globe are evidence of the widespread, long-lasting impact the missions enterprise has had. More Intensely Missionary The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to him, the more intensely missionary we become. 1 —Henry Martyn, missionary to India and Persia To answer the question of what those involved in mission have done to ensure permanency for the fruit of their ministries, one must take a look at the ways the world mission enterprise has been organized, how resources are gathered, and the eventual relationships of parent churches or mission agencies to their clusters of daughter and granddaughter churches. This chapter will lay a foundation for individualized study of mission structures to which the reader’s church is connected. The Case Study Appendix has an example of what such research can produce. The reason this chapter calls for individualized research is that Christian mission efforts have been done with a variety of structures and systems. The sending and supporting structures of various organizations have been diverse with all of them having positive features and all having their drawbacks. Many mission organizations have developed because of the slowness or reluctance of official church structures to respond to global mission challenges and opportunities. Thus, an in-depth study of a mission organization needs to look at the why as well as the how. Modality/Sodality Structures Two things contributed to William Carey being called the father of modern missions. One was his prolific letter and pamphlet writing in support of
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 53 Doing Mission Together 53 world mission outreach. The second was his development of a functional and reproducible structure for missionary deployment and support by believers. Carey at first tried to mobilize the existing structure of his denomination for world evangelism. When that did not happen, he and some friends organized a Baptist mission society focused on foreign missions. Carey’s missionary society found a place alongside the official structure of his church just as the Roman Catholic orders had, although Carey’s organization did not have the degree of denominational accountability that Roman Catholic orders have to their official church structure. Carey did not dream up this structure on his own. Justinian von Welz had proposed something similar more than a century earlier. It was, however, Carey that made it a working reality that could be replicated. The Protestant mission agencies begun in Europe and America as the result of William Carey’s influence were organized and operated in a variety of ways. Some agencies were nondenominational or interdenominational, such as the London Missionary Society organized by John Ryland just two years after Carey left for India. Some were denominational, such as the Church of England’s Church Missionary Society (CMS), whose founding in 1799 was inspired by Carey. Its missionaries included people like Alexander McKay (Africa) and Samuel Zwemer (Muslim world). Marcus Whitman, missionary to Native Americans, was one of the better-known missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, founded in 1810 also as a result of Carey’s inspiration. Well-known names like those are part of the universal Church’s mission history. In addition, every mission board will have key people who should be known by the supporters of that particular board. Ralph Winter has noted that specific mission-focused organizations like Carey’s have been present when the Church did its most aggressive global outreach. Winter gave the name sodality to such task-oriented groups of committed people focused on evangelizing the world. Sodalities focus on a limited set of goals and tasks within the larger framework of all that the church does. Winter used the word modality to refer to the larger, all-inclusive church organization that gathers nominal as well as committed members under the same umbrella. During those periods when global mission was left to the modality or larger group, cross-cultural outreach has usually waned. 2 The mission sodality is a structure that Roman Catholicism has also used. Protestants sometimes think of Roman Catholic orders as people living in isolated monasteries where they give themselves to prayer and meditation, with some even having taken a vow of silence. While there are a few cloistered religious orders, most Roman Catholic orders were started as mission arms. Indeed, it was the founding of those orders as missionary sodalities that launched the Western Church into aggressive global outreach. Two missionary orders,
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