“Mission in Western Culture Project” - Report - From Payette Lake (2006) to Lusaka (2008)

Introduction

This Report is written following the 3rd MIWC planning meetings held in Lusaka, Zambia over six days at the Justo Mwale Theological College in the Chamba Valley, Lusaka.   These were God-given days for all of us in the Project. It was a turning point that refocused our vision and expanded the commitment of the people who came from twelve nations representing NA, the UK, Africa, Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

We met on the campus of the Justo Mwali Seminary situated along a dusty, dirt road beside a growing community of homes most of us would consider substandard.  We lived in small dormitories, each with desk and requisite candle for when the power went off.  The dorms formed two sides of a courtyard in which we ate in the winter sun.  On the third side stood the kitchen and showers, and on the other the Booth Center where we met.  

Our time was spent divided between meetings and off site visits.  We gathered from Australia, Kenya, Korea, Malawi, New Zealand, Nigeria, North America, South Africa, United Kingdom, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.  The consultation was something none of us anticipated.  God showed us things we would never have understood staying in our contexts and cultures.  In creating opportunities to cross boundaries, allowing those of us from the West to be the minority needing to listen attentively, we heard God in unexpected ways about the challenge of mission in the globalizing, multi-narrative worlds of late modernity.   To make sense of why we came to Africa we must go back to the beginning of the project.

Beginnings

In 2006, Allelon sponsored a gathering of missiologists, theologians and practitioners at Payette Lake, Idaho.  Most of those who attended were from the USA.  Others came from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom.  Our commonality was the life and work of Lesslie Newbigin.  Our conversation was framed by a question Newbigin asked twenty years earlier in Foolishness to the Greeks: “What is a missionary engagement with late modern, Western culture?” He was raising a fundamental challenge facing Christian life in the West.  Newbigin’s work generated an intellectual engagement of the Christian narrative with a modernity that was, itself, beginning to fundamentally question some of its basic understanding of the nature of truth and rationality.  What was clear was that the West was now a mission field.

Newbigin helped us to ask critical questions about what would be involved in a missionary engagement with our own culture.  Part of his contribution to this re-engagement was the insight that we must focus around questions of the relationship between the Biblical narratives and the cultural narratives of modernity.  For him the locus of engagement involved questions of how public narratives are formed and change, especially in relationship to the Biblical narrative.  He took both sides of this question with utter seriousness, both the narratives of modernity and the Biblical text, engaging them on their own terms, seeking to listen to the cultural narratives for what they were in themselves in order to hear, in a fresh way, the Biblical narratives in dialogue with this context.

Newbigin’s work caught the imagination of a new generation of missiologists.  A number of Gospel and Our Culture Networks (GOCN) sprung up in the UK, New Zealand and North America taking up Newbigin’s question in their own contexts.  A team in the North America GOCN wrote Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America.  It connected with a growing sense of dis-ease about the state of the church and shaped the imagination of a new generation of church leaders.  By the beginning of the new millennium GOCN seemed to lose its way. The missional conversation - for Newbigin an engagement with the Gospel and the cultures of the West - became just another term for the tactics of attractional church effectiveness.   

Why did Newbigin’s missiological insights and the promising developments of the GOCN lose their way?   Around 2005, in North America and the UK, some began to frame a response.  They believed Newbigin’s insights and his basic question remained the right ones.  Two things stood out in the midst of a series of reasons for this loss of focus.  First, Newbigin had remained attentive to a specific imagination about the sources and processes of cultural change in the modern West.  Out of his own shaping in 20th century rationality he directed his work around the conviction that the primary ways in which the Christian imagination would re-engage and transform Western culture would be as the best minds worked on the intellectual challenges of a post-critical modernity.  He sought to ask the question of how the Biblical narrative might again sit at the center of the cultural table in dialogue with the pluralized narratives of modernity.  Implicit in Newbigin’s methodology was the assumption that experts, intellectuals and elites are the primary drivers of this dialogue and of social transformation.  Without diminishing the importance of this intellectual work, several of us were wrestling with the awareness that cultural transformation involves more than this top-down process.  It involves a complex set of processes and interactions that are more about the narratives and tactics of ordinary people in their interactions than the strategies of elites or the analysis of experts.  We believed Newbigin’s question needed a new starting point.

Second, GOCNs focus and energy had shifted from questions of the relationship between the Biblical and cultural narratives to that of ecclesiology.  An unforeseen result was that the missional conversation became, almost exclusively, a conversation about the church.  This was not Newbigin’s intention. Ecclesiology had displaced his brilliant dialogue between the Biblical narratives and the culture(s) of modernity.  We suspected that when questions of the church (its nature, purpose and function) became the primary locus of the missional conversation, it turned the missional question into a series of tactical conversations for improving church effectiveness in a time of diminishing returns.

We were convinced that to address the question of a missionary encounter with our culture(s) required a different starting point.  It had to begin in, with, and under the narratives of ordinary people in their specific contexts.  It called for a deliberate turning aside from ecclesiology toward a renewed focus on the intersections of the Biblical narratives with the cultural narratives of ordinary people in their contexts.  We viewed ecclesiology as a secondary and derivative conversation rather than the primary lens through which to have the missional conversation.  This was especially the case in North America.  To test these assumptions and the potential of a research project into how we form leaders for a new kind of missional life in Western culture(s) we gathered at Payette Lake in Idaho in the summer of 06.

Payette Lake, Idaho 2006

At Payette Lake the conviction emerged that we were called to a mutually critical dialogue across with local churches where the narratives shaping people’s lives and their engagements with Scripture become primary clues to the nature of a missional life.  We agreed on elements that should shape the Project in each country:
1.    Partnering local churches to understand the contextual narratives.
2.    Designing methodologies for listening to and engaging these local narratives.
3.    Engaging them with the Biblical narratives.
4.    Seeking to discern and articulate common themes across the countries involved.
5.    Working with practitioners/leaders to reflect upon learning with researchers.
6.    Co-designing experiments in ministry contexts based upon 1-5.
7.    Reflecting upon experiments, design further experiments around the nature of mission-shaped leadership and the interface of Scripture.
8.    Developing training resources for local and parachurch leaders to assist in mission-shaped engagement the diverse contexts of western culture.

Key moments occurred at Payette Lake that required time to understand.  First, the turn to the ordinary narratives of people in their local contexts would require a research project not shaped by external researchers detached from the local narratives using local as sites for their own abstracted work.  It needed a method of mutually critical dialogue between researcher and local context.  Many of us did not understand the implications of this.  Several at Payette Lake, including Frederick Marias from South Africa and Steve Taylor from New Zealand, raised questions about method.  Frederick said the project required us to learn how to listen deeply to people in local contexts.  Steve cautioned us about the importance of designing in ways that privileged and attended to what was happening among the ordinary and local.  We would need time before we could grasp the nature of this work to which we committed ourselves.

Payette Lake invited us to attend, once more, to the local church and return the center of our work to the local church rather than the focus on denominationalism that had characterized the 20th century. Even here, we did not fully understand the implications or dynamics implicit in this return to the local church.  Few of us grasped the depth of the ecclesiocentric imagination shaping the thinking of the church in the West.  We hadn’t come to terms with the extent to which local churches, turned in on themselves, transformed ‘missional’ into another expression of church effectiveness.  All this lay ahead.  Payette Lake began the journey of asking from a new standpoint what it might mean for a missionary engagement with Western culture(s).  Between Payette Lake and Skamania (2007) Allelon developed a funding proposal and moved the conversation forward in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.