discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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70 A Global Church
to the longing that believers have for seeing spiritual changes eventuate in social
changes. Today, groups like the International Justice Mission partner with
global church leaders to fight specific acts of injustice, release people from slavery,
rescue children from forced prostitution, and bring relief from the oppressive
brutality of the powerful.
Fears of Straying
The shift of Christianity’s numerical center of gravity southward and away
from Euro-America has unleashed what Harvey Cox called a “tidal wave of religious
change.” 19 One change has to do with control. For the last few centuries,
Westerners have dominated the Church’s theological thinking, strategic
planning, and missionary-sending in ways that made believers in the West start
thinking of themselves as the mother church. Now that Westerners are a minority
in the global church, some are worried that leaders from other parts of
the world will make changes in the beliefs and practices of their beloved
churches and organizations.
This fear of straying from orthodoxy is a topic Jenkins addressed in The
Next Christendom. He argued that Westerners have little reason to fear, noting
that majority world Christians tend to be more theologically conservative than
their counterparts in the West. Jenkins pointed out that Southern Hemisphere
delegates at some recent denominational gatherings were the ones who kept
their churches from straying from orthodoxy. 20 Forty years ago, in anticipation
of this, Paul Orjala wrote, “Some people are worried about the doctrine deteriorating
in the hands of the nationals.” Acknowledging that effective mission
work must include a theological education component, Orjala went on to say,
“There is more hope theologically for a newly literate mountain Indian in
Mexico with his Bible than for an over-sophisticated American pastor who has
a weak devotional life.” 21
Listening as Well as Telling
As the center of gravity of the Church moves away from the West to the
majority world and from the north to the south, Western church leaders must
learn to receive spiritual insights from wherever the fresh wind of God’s Spirit
is blowing. Christians in the West will be blessed if they will listen as well as
talk. Mission leaders must become sensitive to biases in their ways of thinking
and speaking and eliminate them. In their book Choosing a Future for U.S.
Missions, Paul McKaughan and Dellanna and William O’Brien said: