discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 8 8 Mission Fiction writers and movie producers have not often been kind when portraying Christian missionaries. Most missionary characters they dream up are bigoted, arrogant, and anthropologically challenged. Many of those fictional missionaries have been self-serving with very base motivations. For instance, one of W. Somerset Maugham’s more famous short stories was “Rain.” At the center of that story was a missionary who disintegrated morally while trying to convert a Pacific island prostitute. James Michener’s 1959 Hawaii weaves a tale that includes not-so-angelic 18th-century missionaries messing up the lives of charmingly simple islanders. Forty years later, a novel called The Poisonwood Bible was a Pulitzer prize runner-up and an Oprah Book Club selection. For that book author Barbara Kingsolver conceived a less-than-ideal missionary family living in the Congo. Nathan Price, the husband and father, is physically and emotionally abusive to his family. The strident and intransigent Rev. Price poorly represents the Lord he purports to serve. Peter Matthiessen’s 1965 book At Play in the Fields of the Lord is another example of a work that is very unflattering to missionaries. Matthiessen’s missionary characters were destructive to themselves as well as to the Amazonian tribe they went to evangelize. A similarly negative picture of missionaries was painted in 1966 by the movie Seven Women. That film plays on the conflicting inner desires of some American female missionaries in China. The stereotypes spawned by such fictional missionary figures have opened up Christian missionaries to withering criticism and even caused missiologist J. Herbert Kane to ask, “What happened to the halo?” as a chapter title of his Winds of Change in the Christian Mission. Fortunately, there is another side to this issue. Three films—Inn of the Sixth Happiness, The Mission, and End of the Spear 1 —based on true <strong>missions</strong> stories have been positive. Way on the opposite end of the spectrum from most fiction writers are those people for whom real-life missionaries are saintly folk living close to heaven. Such people who put missionaries up on pedestals find inspiration in missionary hero books such as The Missionary Hero of Kuruman, a biography of Robert Moffat and The Missionary Hero of the New Hebrides, the life story of John G. Paton. Such biographies have used glowing superlatives to describe those who have borne the label missionary. The Roman Catholics have gone even further than Protestants in their adulation of missionaries. Having conferred official sainthood on several missionaries, Roman Catholics have everyone referring to Saint Paul, Saint Boniface, Saint Anskar, Saint Francis Xavier, and Saint Isaac Jogues. Even Patrick, missionary to Ireland, was sainted by the Roman Catholics although his branch of Celtic Christianity was not under the authority of the Bishop of Rome.
245187 Disc Missions ins 9/6/07 1:04 PM Page 9 The Study of Mission How should believers respond to the caricatures—good and bad—of Christian missionaries and the fruits of their work? Between the extremes of withering criticism and uncritical adulation, where does the truth lie? Missiology One way to sift through both the muck and the fluff about missionaries is to use discernment grounded in good missiology. Though the word missiology is not in the average English speaker’s vocabulary, many will know that the suffix -ology means “language about” or “the study of.” Indeed, missiology is the study of, or conscious reflection upon, the practice of Christian mission. The first part of missiology comes from the Latin word mission, which means “sending out” or “assigned task” (thus, mission). Missio is a participle of the verb mittere, the Latin equivalent of apostello, a Greek verb meaning “to send” from which apostle comes. Based on this etymology, missiology can be said to be the study of sending. Because that definition may not communicate much to anyone other than a missiologist, it may help to think of missiology as “mission-ology.” I Wasn’t God’s First Choice I wasn’t God’s first choice for what I’ve done for China. There was somebody else. I don’t know who it was—God’s first choice. It must have been a man—a wonderful man. A well-educated man. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps he died. Perhaps he wasn’t willing . . . and God looked down . . . and saw Gladys Aylward. 2 —Gladys Aylward Mission 9 Missiology looks at more than missionary biographies. While expatriate missionaries are important players in world evangelization, they are only temporary agents seeking to accomplish some specific things. At the heart of missiology is reflection on the outreach, growth, and development of the Christian Church as it is planted and bears fruit in new cultural contexts. As a field of study, missiology draws on several other academic disciplines. As one might guess, missiology uses material from theology, biblical studies, and church history. It also gleans insights from communications theory, cultural anthropology, geography, linguistics, psychology, and sociology. These diverse threads of missiology’s fabric are reflected in <strong>missions</strong> courses taught at colleges and universities around the world: • Christian Theology and Religions in African Contexts • Communicating Christ in Animistic Contexts
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discovering missions - Southern Nazarene University

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