Darrell Whiteman: Contextualization, Relevance, and Biblical Fidelity in the Church and Mission

Today's post is by Dr. Darrell Whiteman, the leader of Global Development, an organization that seeks to "enable missionaries, pastors, and lay people to better distinguish the universal message of the gospel from their local interpretation and practice of living out the gospel within their communities."

As a young Free Methodist missionary in Central Africa (1969-1971) nearly 50 years ago, I wondered why the churches over there attempted to look so much like the churches back home. It seemed like they were almost “carbon copies” in worship, theology, polity, and ministry.

What’s wrong with this picture?
I couldn’t articulate why that made me so uncomfortable, but it didn’t seem right. Why should churches in Africa look so much like churches in the United States? Something was wrong, but I didn’t know why or what it was. The strategic goal seemed to be denominational extension more than advancing the Kingdom of God by joining Jesus in his mission.

I now realize years later that what was missing was contextualization—a term that didn’t even appear in missiological discourse until the early 1970s. Since then there has been a plethora of academic and missiological publishing on this important concept, even though in practice there is still a lack of contextualization in much mission activity today.

Ironically, long before his time, the provocative Methodist missionary to India and the world, E. Stanley Jones, understood the need for contextualization which he expressed eloquently in his classic book, The Christ of the Indian Road (1925).

Let me begin by discussing what contextualization is and why it is important and close with some suggestions about why it is relevant to the United Methodist Church and its global mission efforts today.

What is contextualization?
Contextualization is both a method and a perspective and relates to the challenge of connecting the gospel to culture. As a method it attempts to communicate and live out the gospel and to establish the church in ways that make sense to people within their local cultural context. In this way Christianity meets people’s deepest needs and penetrates their worldview, thus enabling them to follow Christ and remain within their own culture. Jesus may be the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow (Hebrews 13:8) but cultures are constantly changing and more rapidly than ever in the present era.

Advocating cultural change or conversion to Christ?
Much of the postcolonial critique of mission in the age of colonialism has come because too many missionaries too often confused following Jesus with adopting the cultural ways of the missionary while simultaneously condemning the culture of their converts. Perhaps without realizing it, they were advocating a kind of cultural conversion more than conversion to Christ within their own culture. They didn’t understand or appreciate the principle hammered out in the Jerusalem Council’s decision that Gentiles could become followers of Jesus without having to become culturally and religiously Jews, as recorded in Acts 15.

Will contextualization lead to syncretism?
Opposition to contextualization sometimes comes from those who fear it will lead to “watering down” the gospel and its requirements to become a follower of Jesus.

In reality, however, the opposite is true. Contextualization doesn’t take the sting out of the gospel, it intensifies it. Contextualization sharpens the focus and offence of the gospel, it does not dilute it. If the gospel doesn’t critique culture, then culture wins every time and the transforming power of the gospel is lost.

One way of looking at the relationships between the gospel and culture is as follows: The gospel affirms most of culture, critiques some of culture, and transforms all of culture. I take this to mean that converts can and should remain within their culture and follow Jesus (I Cor. 7:17-24), recognizing that there will be aspects of their culture that will undergo change because of their allegiance to Christ. Following Jesus will put disciples at odds with aspects of their culture in every society, whether ancient or modern. The gospel has always been offensive, (foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, I Cor. 1:23) so let’s be sure we offend people for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. Too much mission activity is so culturally offensive that people don’t experience the offensive of the gospel.

I think many people oppose contextualization because they don’t understand it and fear it will become the slippery slope that leads to syncretism—a mixture of biblical and non-biblical beliefs and practices. Actually, the opposite is true. Contextualization is the best hedge against syncretism because it sharpens the focus of the gospel.

How can the church be relevant to culture while remaining faithful to the Bible?
Contextualization is concerned with both cultural relevance and biblical fidelity. Good contextualization is both relevant to the cultural context and faithful to the biblical text, and this is not easy to do. It’s not easy because the cultural context is constantly changing, and it is also challenging because there are sometimes divergent interpretations of the meaning of the biblical text.

Nevertheless, without the effort of doing contextualization the church becomes stagnant and irrelevant. Because of the lack of contextualization Christianity is often perceived as a foreign religion by many in the Majority World and an irrelevant waste of time by some in the West. Many in the West are increasingly turned off to organized religion, i.e. the church, but are still interested in Jesus and his teaching.

Who is responsible for doing contextualization?
Contextualization must be done from inside the culture and community, not attempted by outsiders. It should always be done in community, not by distant desktop theologians. It benefits from knowing how to exegete the biblical text, but also how to discover the deeper underlying values and worldview of the cultural context. Skills in biblical exegesis and anthropological ethnography can help. And finally, it cannot be done adequately without the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Contextualization is important, because without it the church can drift into cultural irrelevance and/or wander away from biblical teaching. How do we maintain a balance between cultural relevance and biblical fidelity in an increasingly post-Christian and secularizing society in the West? It requires dialogue and respect for the other when there is a difference of opinion and often repentance when holding to our cherished position in a debate causes us to dehumanize the other or dismiss their perspective out of hand.

Is contextualization helpful in an increasingly divided church?
Could some of the divisions within the United Methodist Church today be less strident if all sides in the discussion understood and practiced contextualization in community and were led by the Holy Spirit? Would our mission efforts be more effective if we encouraged contextualization by followers of Jesus in other cultures and religions that are different from our own? Would we better understand that the Spirit of Christ in one person greets the Spirit of Christ in the other, and closes the distance between them? As we contemplate the importance and practice of contextualization today we may have to relinquish our need for certainty in exchange for our quest for understanding.

Missional Ecclesiology: Values: Habits of the Missional Heart

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

As indicated previously, I had the honor of preparing a document for the Commission on a Way Forward for use in developing their Missional Framework. This is the fifth and final post in a series explaining what I sent to the Commission and why. In these posts, I speak about my own writing and am not commenting on how the Commission used that writing or the final Missional Framework they developed.

The document I prepared is structured into three sections: a set of affirmations about mission, a set of affirmations about the church, and a set of values flowing from these two sets of affirmations. Especially in the original long version of my document, I attempted to draw connections between specific values and specific affirmations about mission and the church. In this post, I want to reflect on these values.

As noted in the introduction to this series, presenting the conclusions of my document as a set of values reflects my conviction that the issues facing The United Methodist Church are primarily matters of the heart, not of polity. Thus, I did not want to suggest specific polity formulations as part of a missional ecclesiology. Moreover, I did not know what directions the Commission’s work was going to go and wanted my offering to be useful in any instance.

Additionally, because of the breadth and diversity of God’s mission and the ever-changing forms it takes, I cannot pretend to know what arrangements would adequately enable the church to live into that mission. I am a straight, white, north American male living in the early 21st century. I am limited by that social and cultural location, and others will certainly have a different understanding of how best to organize as a church for the sake of God’s mission than I.

Hence, I instead wanted to highlight spiritual dispositions I thought could fit with a variety of ecclesiological arrangements and indeed would be necessary to focus on mission in any of them. I thought this focus on spiritual dispositions would also be a very Methodist approach, since the cultivation of proper spiritual dispositions was central to how Wesley understood sanctification.

I thought it essential to begin with faithfulness as a value, both our faithfulness to God and our faithfulness to our calling into God’s mission. Ideally, we do what we do as a church in mission because we are people of faith driven by our faith. If faith is not at the center of our efforts to be the church and to be in mission, then the rest is all for naught.

The next two values – humility and contextuality – emphasize our limits. Part of our faithfulness involves understanding that we are not God. We are humans, created by God, and our knowledge of God and God’s mission is always incomplete, limited, and partial. That is not a problem we can overcome; that is part of how God designed us as humans. Recognizing and accepting these limitations frees us for more faithful service in God’s mission.

The next two values – creativity and flexibility – fit with the theme that runs throughout the document of accepting change for the sake of being part of God’s mission. The distinction between creativity and flexibility, which is not clear in the shorter document, is intended to recognize that some Christians are innovators in mission, which is good, and other Christians must give those innovators some space in which to work if those innovations are to lead to successful new ministries.

The final two values – mutuality and generosity – are intended to further characterize how we relate to each other as fellow limited humans who are alike part of God’s church and God’s mission. I hope they convey some of the love that Jesus instructs us to show to each other as fellow Christians and to the whole world.

Indeed, this love is the reason why mission and the church exist – our acting out the love we have received from God through Christ, sharing it with the world, and inviting others to partake in God’s love in Christ. Whatever comes in the future of The United Methodist Church, may we continue to focus on and live out this love.

Given the spiritual nature of these values, I thought it appropriate to conclude the document with a prayer, which I offer here as a conclusion to this series as well: “We pray that these principles may guide us in a way forward that leads to deeper discipleship of Jesus Christ, more faithful service in the transformation of the world, and a more unified practice of being the church of Jesus Christ, sent by God and empowered by the Holy Spirit in mission for all the world. Amen.”

Recommended Reading: Methodist Mission Bicentennial Story Collection

Next year will be the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the first denomination-wide mission organization in American Methodism.

Among the ways in which this anniversary is being commemorated is a compilation of profiles of Methodists from around the world engaged in mission. This compilation includes short biographies of individual Methodists and descriptions of congregations and other institutions significantly involved in Methodist mission.

Currently, there are over 200 profiles included in the database, and new profiles continue to be added. The profiles come from a mix of stories submitted by individuals and existing academic, journalistic, and denominational publications. The majority are in English, though there are currently some Spanish-language profiles as well.

This resource is likely to be of interest to teachers and students of mission and/or Methodist history as the fall semester begins. The profiles can serve as a means of exploring mission according to various themes and locations, as well as a entry-level reference on the lives of specific missionaries.

The compilation can also be a means of sharing your own research. To submit a profile you have written to the database, visit http://methodistmission200.org/mission-stories/submit-your-story/.

Recommended Reading: 2018 Annual Conference Reports from the Central Conferences

I (David Scott) have written before on this blog (post 1 and post 2) about the challenges and inequalities that are involved in reporting annual conference proceedings from outside the US.

That's why I'm happy to see that the 2018 Annual Conference reports include reports from several annual conferences in the central conferences that weren't reporting just a couple of years ago.

Most European annual conferences have submitted reports for some time, but additional Congolese annual conferences are now submitting. These new reports from Africa are in addition to Liberia, which has submitted reports for some years. Reports from other West African and south and east African annual conferences are still not present.

Filipino annual conferences remain a big lacuna in the reports, as there are no reports from any of the annual conferences in the Philippines. Most Filipino annual conferences meet in the spring or early summer.

Missional Ecclesiology: Affirmations about Church: What Is the Methodist Way of Doing Church?

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

As indicated previously, I had the honor of preparing a document for the Commission on a Way Forward for use in developing their Missional Framework. This is the fourth post in a series explaining what I sent to the Commission and why. In these posts, I speak about my own writing and am not commenting on how the Commission used that writing or the final Missional Framework they developed.

The document I prepared is structured into three sections: a set of affirmations about mission, a set of affirmations about the church, and a set of values flowing from these two sets of affirmations. In this post, I want to reflect on the affirmations about the church.

Since the request from the Commission to me had been presented as a request for a “missional ecclesiology” (emphasis added), I felt compelled to reflect not only on the nature of mission but on the nature of the church. As I noted in the introduction to this series, given the recent release of Wonder, Love and Praise, I did not feel it necessary to reflect on the theological nature of the church (e.g., as rooted in grace) in my document. Instead, I decided to reflect on the nature of the church from the perspective of distinctive Methodist attitudes toward and practices of being the church.

I thought this section needed to begin with the observation, also emphasized in the “Preface” of the long version of my document, that Methodism is both a missional movement and a church (or several churches). Beginning with this observation serves to put the identified practices into missional perspective. Methodists practice church in these ways not for their own sakes, but for the sake of mission. This is historically true – John Wesley used missional effectiveness as his metric for evaluating most practices of the church – and it has been true at many other points throughout our history. The evolution of our polity is often driven by the evolution of our mission.

With this context in mind, I then presented what I thought were four practices of being the church that I thought characterized Methodism broadly across time, space, and specific denomination – connectionalism, conferencing, appointive ministry, and general superintendency.

These four are probably not the only such characteristics shared by Methodists broadly, but they seemed particularly important and/or relevant to mission. Each gets at what I see as core functions of a denomination – decision-making, clergy deployment, oversight, and shared ministry.

Thus, the choice of these four is also geared toward a view of the church as a denomination rather than the church as the local congregation. This focus on the denominational level is not meant to devalue the work of local congregations. There can be no denomination without local congregations. Nevertheless, I understood the Commission’s work as entailing making decisions regarding the denomination as a whole, including its local congregations. Moreover, the key Methodist concept of connectionalism works against focusing primarily on separate local congregations.

I called these four Methodist hallmarks “practices,” both as an acknowledgement of Methodism’s generally practical orientation to ecclesiology, and as a recognition that each of the four implied not only beliefs but more importantly a set of regular actions. Methodists don’t just believe in connectionalism; we also engage in actions and create structures to help us connect.

As noted in the “Preamble” of the original, long version of my work, the actions we have used to practice these four hallmarks have changed over the centuries of Methodism. Conferencing, for instance, is still essential, but quarterly conferences are not what they used to be. Thus, the ways in which we currently live out these four practices are not the only ways to do so, and it would be possible to do so in the future in different ways without abandoning our commitment to these practices. I believe recognizing that possibility of faithfulness amid change frees us for the future.

A final affirmation about the ecumenical nature of the church is also intended to free us in our thinking. Methodists have always been ecumenists. The United Methodist Church is not the One True Church outside of which is no salvation, and no one pretends it is. Indeed, The United Methodist Church is just one denomination within the larger stream of Methodism.

Denominations are useful as organizational structures, but they are not prescribed in the Bible, and we would do well to remember that our attachment to denominations or particular denominational structures, while it may reflect sincere belief and devotion, is separate from our attachment to Christ’s church and the kingdom of God. When we consider how to change our denomination, we are making changes to human structures, not divine ones. That is not to say that our decisions are not important, but that our human actions cannot alter divine truths. That knowledge, I hope, gives us a little more courage in how we proceed.

Recommended Reading: United Methodist Church-Methodist Church in Britain Concordat

A significant piece of Methodist ecumenism occurred recently. Leaders of The United Methodist Church and the Methodist Church in Britain met in London on Aug. 10-12, 2018, to reaffirm a concordat (ecumenical agreement) between the two denominations originally negotiated 50 years ago. This meeting included explorations of news ways for the two denominations to be in mission together going forward.

Methodist Church in Britain pre-meeting article on the concordat

United Methodist Church pre-meeting article on the concordat

United Methodist Church post-meeting article on the concordat

UMC Bishop Rosemarie Wenner's reflections on the meeting

Twitter posts on and pictures from the meeting (#Concordat50)

Lisa Beth White: The Hopefulness of Mission, or Why I’m Not Worried about the Future of the UMC

Today's post is by Rev. Lisa Beth White, founder of Sister of Hope Ministries, an organization that exists to equip and support short-term mission teams, churches and non-profit organizations with training, resources and evaluation tools with the aim of enabling the faithful practice of Christian mission. This piece is reposted with permission from the author's personal site.

I am a United Methodist. My denomination recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, remembering how it was formed by a union of The Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1968. This church has formed me as a disciple of Jesus Christ, has taught me grace, taught me how to sing grace, preach grace, and practice grace. I have given my life’s work to Christ through the United Methodist Church.

United Methodist Church’s Difficult Season
But the United Methodist Church is having a difficult season. To be honest, it’s been having a contentious season for about 40 years. If you are a United Methodist and you’re on social media, you are likely aware of our struggles. If not, let me try to summarize.

The issue is inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the life of the church. Our denomination has been in the news for holding clergy trials when pastors officiate same-gender weddings, even for their own children; for holding clergy trials and stripping clergy of their credentials when they admit their identity as an LGBTQ person; for having protests and debates at our quadrennial gatherings during which church legislation is considered. We’ve had study commissions, we’ve added language to our Book of Discipline (the text that holds our constitution, our Articles of Religion, our structure and order for ministry), we’ve argued and argued. Most recently, our last General Conference (that once every four year gathering) asked our Council of Bishops (all bishops, active and retired) to form a commission and advise the church how to move forward as a united denomination, despite our continuing and harsh disagreement over LGBTQ inclusion.

And so, the commission has held meetings, prayed and discussed our difficult season. In the end, they recommended three plans to the Council of Bishops – the Traditionalist Plan which would essentially maintain the status quo; the Connectional-Conference Plan, which would allow churches to affiliate with other churches that their perspectives align with, rather than our current geographic structure; and the One Church Plan, which allows decisions about ordaining LGBTQ persons to be made in local areas and removes all restrictive language from the Book of Discipline. The Bishops are recommending the One Church Plan to the special session of General Conference that will meet in February 2019. You can read articles here and here about this recommendation.

And So, Anxiety Reigns
Now, if you’re not United Methodist, this may all seem confusing and tedious. Methodists have a decision making process that isn’t simple. We don’t have a pope and cardinals to make decisions for us. We don’t have a simple majority rules vote. We hold our church buildings and land in trust for the church that will come after we are gone, so we understand that the brick and mortar in which we gather isn’t “ours” but God’s for the work of God’s people.

And it’s exactly at that point – God and the work of God’s people – in which I take great hope for the United Methodist Church.

In the midst of all the debates, clergy trials and commission reports, people have been getting very upset and anxious. At a recent pre-conference meeting (yes, a meeting before our annual meeting, it’s how we do things in the UMC) I heard such anxiety from the people gathered as they discussed what our future may look like. “If this happens, then…” or “if that happens, then…” The proposed resolutions we were voting on were contradictory, as people wanted to be ready for whatever comes next. If things don’t go according to their desire, they want to be able to split the denomination, to take possession of their buildings, to ensure their beliefs and not have to compromise or change.

Such anxiety. Near panic. Judgment and suspicion. The one thing we could agree on is that we disagree.

I was only able to attend the meeting because I had been visiting my parents. When I got back home, I found in my mail a letter from our Board of Pensions, which administers all clergy retirement accounts. The letter opens with “concerns” and “expressed worries…during this time of change.” The whole purpose of the letter was to reassure anxious clergy, who, as the meeting had made obvious, were still anxious.

They Will Know You Are My Disciples By Your Love
I am not anxious about the future of the church. No matter what happens in the United Methodist Church, I have faith in the work of the Holy Spirit to call people into partnership with God in mission. God is always at work in the world, reaching out in mission in, to, and for the world. The church is the Body of Christ, and God uses the church to share God’s grace and love with the world. No church split or union will change the mission of God.

In the book of Acts we read about the early church, and how the Spirit moved people to show love for their neighbors. Chapter 2:44-45 states that Christians were together, collecting funds so that if anyone had a need, it could be taken care of by the group. This care for others is reinforced in chapter 4:34-35, that there was not a single person in need among the believers because the people trusted the apostles to use their funds to care for everyone. By chapter six, the group of believers had grown so large that seven people had to be appointed to manage the funds for common care.

The disciples and the early church were not afraid to care for those who were on the margins. In Acts 8 we read the story of Philip and the Ethiopian treasury official. Despite being a eunuch and barred from entering the temple, he had traveled from Ethiopia to Jerusalem to worship. In his chariot as he rode home, he was reading Isaiah and Philip helped explain how this passage revealed the good news of Jesus Christ, unbothered by the fact that he was with a person who was considered impure. Immediately after this, we read in chapter 9 that Peter healed Tabitha, who ministered to widows in Joppa. Widows led a fragile existence, often on the margins, without the legal protection of spouse or family. In chapter 10, Peter shares the good news of the gospel with Cornelius, despite the fact that it was unlawful for him to visit the house of a Gentile.

These early practices of mission – care for those on the margins in the face of difficulty and/or legal restrictions continued in the early church. Takanori Inoue argues* that during a time of plagues and rampant disease in Roman cities, “Christians ministered as a transformative movement that arose in response to the misery, chaos, fear and brutality of life in the Roman Empire.” The basis for this ministry is love of God and love of neighbor “because it is God’s pleasure that they should share [God’s] generosity with all people.”

In Mission By Grace
The inspiration of the Holy Spirit moves us to love God more deeply and enables us to live out God’s love for and with our neighbors. This participation in God’s mission was a witness to the gospel by the early church – love made visible – and it continues in the church today. I know that people will continue to participate in mission practices – to go on short-term mission trips to offer disaster relief and recovery assistance, to make UMCOR kits to distribute around the world, to make meals to share with those who are food insecure in their communities, to volunteer in free clinics, to sit and listen with humble spirits and open hearts. I know this because people are moved by the Holy Spirit to live out the Great Commission and the Greatest Commandment with Great Compassion – and they will not stop loving their neighbors because our denomination is struggling.

We live out the call of Christ to go and make disciples, to love one another and to care for those on the margins because we have heard the call in our local communities. In our local churches we worship, pray and study together. In our local churches we learn about the needs of our neighbors near and far. In our local churches we invite each other to participate in mission practices. I choose to live in a posture of hope, knowing that ordinary United Methodists will continue to practice mission as a witness to the world of their faith in Christ. I choose to live in a posture of hope because the mission work of everyday United Methodists reveals the ongoing call of God through the gift of the Holy Spirit to live in love. I choose to live in a posture of hope because I trust in God’s unfailing grace.

* The Early Church's Approach to the Poor in Society and Its Significance to the Church's Social Engagement Today by Takanori Inoue. Quotes from pages 11-13.

Missional Ecclesiology: Affirmations about Mission: Viewing Our Place in Mission Rightly

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

As indicated previously, I had the honor of preparing a document for the Commission on a Way Forward for use in developing their Missional Framework. This is the third post in a series explaining what I sent to the Commission and why. In these posts, I speak about my own writing and am not commenting on how the Commission used that writing or the final Missional Framework they developed.

The document I prepared is structured into three sections: a set of affirmations about mission, a set of affirmations about the church, and a set of values flowing from these two sets of affirmations. In this post, I want to reflect on the affirmations about mission.

As I noted in the introduction to this series, these affirmations were not intended to reflect my own personal thoughts about mission but rather important pieces of consensus on mission United Methodists and others reached over the last half century. In particular, the six affirmations included in my original version, reduced to five in the condensed version, reflect important ways in which missiologists have sought to move past a colonialist model of mission.

At the height of the Western missionary movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mostly white missionaries went from the United States and other Western countries to mostly non-white countries, where they sought to convert the people there to Christianity and get them to adopt Western culture. This effort often was entangled with political colonialism and capitalist expansion. Such a model of mission has been rightly critiqued for its pride, harm, violence, and misunderstanding of the gospel.

Yet echoes of that model still persist in The United Methodist Church. We still too often think of mission as something that goes from the “haves,” who are more often than not well-to-do white Americans, to the “have-nots,” who are more often than not the poor, people of color, and/or non-Americans. Any decent missiological document, I thought, had to be based on some of the most significant mission theology pieces that have been used to deconstruct such a view of mission and instead construct a view of mission in which all Christians, regardless of who they are, have a part in God’s mission.

The first affirmation, about the missio Dei, is one that relativizes all human contributions to mission. The notion of the missio Dei, that mission belongs to God, undercuts human pretenses to control mission. In particular, it undercuts Western pretenses to control mission, since Western Christians have traditionally been the ones to control mission.

In my longer version, the second affirmation was about the role of the poor and marginal in mission. I cut that from the condensed version in an effort to save space, though I now regret that decision. If the goal is to see mission as something belonging to all Christians, then the affirmation that the poor and marginal have roles as agents of God’s mission is very important. I should have left this affirmation in, and I repent of not doing so.

The affirmations about the missional nature of the church and that mission is from everywhere to everywhere both get at this notion that all Christians regardless are part of mission. Since the church is missional, all Christians should be involved in God’s mission, regardless of background, role in the church, or any other factor. Since mission is from everywhere to everywhere, all Christians regardless of geographic location can be both agents in and recipients of mission.

At the same time that I wanted to emphasize the universality of participation in mission, I also wanted to stress the particularity and therefore diversity of ways in which mission is expressed. I see the two points as intertwined – since all Christians are called to be in mission, we must not expect mission to look exactly the same in all places. If we define just one type of mission as true mission, we run the risk of setting up new forms of inequity in mission.

The affirmation that mission is incarnational draws on a lot of the conversation about inculturation/contextualization in the missiological community. Although understandings of the relationship between gospel and culture vary, missiologists have definitively agreed that respecting cultures and contexts is an important aspect of mission done right and failure to do so was one of the most grievous sins of the colonial era of mission.

An affirmation about the distinctive gifts and graces given to Christians for mission both follows Paul’s writings on spiritual gifts and missiological discussions about the varieties of mission work. Whether one uses the Five Marks of Mission or some other scheme, it is clear that mission contains a broad range of activities. This acknowledgement allows Christians to find their place within mission. Thus, answering the call to mission is not about fitting into one particular box, but about identifying the places in which one’s God-given gifts and graces connect with the varieties of mission work.

The goal, then, of these affirmations, is that none would think about their relationship to mission either too highly or too lowly. One is not more important in mission because of one’s social location. At the same time, no one is excluded from mission because of their social location or other factors, and all have something to give in mission. May we all view our place in God’s mission rightly.

Recommended Reading: Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies

This week, dozens of Methodist scholars and leaders from around the world are in Oxford, England, for the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies. This conference, held once every five years, is a major event in the academic life of global Methodism.

The theme for this meeting is "“THY GRACE RESTORE, THY WORK REVIVE”: Revival, Reform, and Revolution in Global Methodism." A description of that theme is available on the webpage for this year's meeting.

The theme is interpreted in ten different "working groups," including ones on topics of interest to this blog such as mission and evangelism, history, and interreligious studies. Descriptions of how that theme is interpreted in each of these working groups are available here.

In addition, the Institute includes a number of keynote addresses for all participants. The names of presenters for these keynotes are available on the Institute schedule.

For those who are interested in more, about the Oxford Institute, archives of previous meetings are available on the website. Moreover, GBHEM just published a book containing papers from the previous Oxford Institute meeting in 2013.

Missional Ecclesiology: Preamble: Change and Continuity

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

As I indicated last week, I had the honor of preparing a document for the Commission on a Way Forward for use in developing their Missional Framework. This is the second of several posts explaining what I sent to the Commission and why. In these posts, I speak about my own writing and am not commenting on how the Commission used that writing or the final Missional Framework they developed.

In the original missional ecclesiology document I drafted, I included a long, historical “Preamble.” I had to remove this Preamble from the short version I sent to the Commission because of space constraints. Thus, this portion of my writing had little bearing on the work of the Commission, but I still wanted to share what was in this portion and why I included it.

The heart of this section is its third and fourth sentences: “Much has changed about how Methodists have understood mission and church over the last two plus centuries. Nevertheless, certain constants have persisted.” As a historian, I thought some historical perspective on this tension between continuity and change was useful background to the commission’s work.

Although I wrote the document to be neutral with regard to the three specific plans under discussion by the Commission, I did presume that it was the Commission’s job to recommend some sort of changes in the UMC. Therefore, I thought it would be useful to reflect theologically and historically on the nature of change within the life of denominations and its relationship to continuity.

As humans, we have a strong tendency toward presentism. We assume that the way things are is the way things have been and will continue to be. Yet historians know that is not true. Things used to be different, in some cases quite different. As British novelist L. P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” Knowing that the past was different frees us a little from our presentism.

And if we are able to recognize that the past was different, perhaps that will also free us to recognize that the future will be different as well, and in ways that are neither all good nor all bad. Just as the past contains a mix of good and bad relative to the present, so the future is likely to contain a mix of good and bad relative to the present. Knowing this allows us to face the future with less anxiety and a less totalizing and catastrophizing approach to the decisions we face as a denomination. Certainly, The United Methodist Church faces some potentially significant changes at this juncture of history, but change per se is nothing new for Methodism.

At the same time that there is value in recognizing the ways in which the past is different from the present, there is also value in trying to identify the continuities between the past and the present. We do not recreate Methodism completely anew every new day; instead, we reshape and refashion traditions we have inherited. What, then, are the hallmarks of these traditions? Amidst the change, what has remained the same about Methodism?

This question – What has remained the same about Methodism throughout its history? – and two related questions – What is true about Methodism in different geographic areas? And what is true about Methodism among different Methodist denominations? – were questions I grappled with as I sought to develop the “ecclesiology” part of this missional ecclesiology.

The answers I arrived at – Methodism is missional, ecumenical, connectional, conferencing, appointive, and episcopal – are in the “Affirmations about the Church” section of the document, and thus I will address them more fully in a future post. The “Preamble” gives a quick historical sketch of Methodism drawn around these foci, from its early days as a frontier revival movement to its current existence as a complex, multinational, corporately-structured church, showing the ways these hallmarks changed but also had continuity throughout the centuries of Methodism’s development.

Seeing how Methodism has been faithful to its understanding of how to be the church and has also continued to incorporate these hallmarks despite significant changes is again, I hope, freeing for future change. We have been able to remain faithful to our Methodist DNA despite changes, and therefore we can remain faithful to our Methodist DNA despite whatever future changes the Commission on a Way Forward or General Conference 2019 or other actors might decide upon. Change does not preclude faithfulness to our heritage.

Hence the conclusion to my “Preface”: “Amid this [present] change, faithful United Methodists continue to develop new understandings of mission, connectionalism, conferencing, appointive ministry, and general superintendency. We continue to be faithful to these Methodist principles, even as we seek to understand anew how they may best serve the church and the world.”

One of the themes that runs throughout the document and is introduced at the beginning of the “Preamble” is that Methodism is both a missional movement and a church. This dual identity introduces a variety of tensions and dynamics into Methodism, but one result of this duality is that change and continuity must both be part of who we are. If we do not change, we cease to be a missional movement; if we have no continuity with our past, we lose our sense of church. Both are necessary, and the tensions between the two are at their best a productive driving force in the development of Methodism. I hope they will be so in our current time.

Recommended listening: How to do short-term missions without long-term harm

Ministry Matters has posted a podcast from Youth Ministry Partners that interviews Jen Bradbury, youthworker and author of A Mission That Matters: How To Do Short-Term Missions Without Long-Term Harm. In it, she discusses youth-oriented short-term mission, including the evolution of short-term missions to a youth-focused endeavor, the associated shift of motives in short-term mission trips, the possibility of doing harm in short-term mission, and the importance of partnership. While most of the material in the podcast will be familiar to those already participating in the conversation around short-term mission, the podcast can be a useful introduction to those not previously familiar, especially those for whom a podcast would be a more accessible format than a book. The podcast is about 36 minutes long.

What are United Methodist views on homosexuality in the Philippines?

 Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

Recently, United Methodist Insight published a story about students at a United Methodist seminary in the Philippines participating in the Manila Pride March. The story includes pro-LGBT quotes from several United Methodist youth leaders.

For those who have a dichotomous view of regional opinions on homosexuality in The United Methodist Church, this story might be surprising or confusing. Often, the narrative in the UMC goes that northern and western Americans (and Europeans) are pro-gay marriage and gay ordination in the UMC, whereas southern Americans, Africans, and Asians (i.e., Filipinos) are anti-gay marriage and gay ordination. Yet there are reasons to be wary of overly simplistic narratives, including this one.

First, we should not assume that the conversations happening about homosexuality are the same in all places in the world. There are significant differences between countries where gay marriage is legal vs. countries where gay marriage is not legal vs. countries where homosexuality itself is a crime. There are differences between theology, marriage, ordination, membership, and acceptance in other aspects of the life of the church. These are all different conversations, and different countries are having (or not having) different conversations about homosexuality. Americans, however, tend to conflate this wide range of conversations into a binary pro/con conversation that mirrors our own experiences of the theological/culture wars in this country.

Second, as most Americans experience in their own areas, there are a range of opinions, even in supposed liberal or conservative areas of the US. There are conservative United Methodists in Oregon, and there are liberal United Methodists in Mississippi. Geography correlates with but does not determine one's views on homosexuality (or any other topic). We should not be surprised if the same is true elsewhere, including the Philippines.

Given these considerations, where then does The United Methodists Church in the Philippines stand on questions related to homosexuality?

A word about the context of the Philippines is in order. The Philippines as a whole actually has relatively accepting views on homosexuality, more so on average than the United States, according to a 2013 Pew Research Center study. Gay sex is not criminalized. Gay marriage, however, is not legal in the Philippines, though there is a case under consideration by the Filipino Supreme Court that could change that. The Philippines is facing a variety of justice-related challenges under the rule of current strongman president Rodrigo Duterte. While LGBTQIA+ Filipinos seek for greater rights, gay rights issues are only one of a variety of active rights struggles in the Philippines currently.

Filipino United Methodists exist as a small minority church within that context. The country is overwhelmingly Catholic, and United Methodists are a minority within the country's Protestant minority. Nevertheless, Filipino United Methodists have some good connections to the center of society in realms such as education, health, and social services. Thus, Filipino United Methodists also have a different sense of their relationship to the rest of society than American United Methodists, who, while recognizing America's religious diversity, retain some sense of when they were the country's largest denomination.

These two pieces of background set up a better understanding of Filipino United Methodist views on homosexuality. In short, Filipino United Methodists are, on the whole, opposed to gay ordination and gay marriage in the church, but a variety of opinions exist, and Filipinos do not see this issue as central to the church's identity.

As the article about the seminarian students clearly shows, there are Filipino United Methodists who are pro-LGBT inclusion in the church. Some might see the students in this article as a minority fringe in the church, but there are other indications that a variety of opinions exist. A United Methodist forum on LGBTQ issues held in 2016 gives some sense of the variety of opinions held by Filipino United Methodists. Retired Filipino Bishop Daniel Arichea has been public in his support for gay rights in the church, after his son came out as gay. As in the US, younger and more urban United Methodists tend to be more supportive of LGBTQ inclusion.

The majority of Filipino United Methodists do remain opposed to gay ordination and gay marriage in the church (though the latter is currently less pressing, since as noted, Filipino law does not allow for gay marriage). Nevertheless, Filipino colleagues have suggested that the division of opinion is perhaps somewhere in the 70/30 to 60/40 range of opposed/affirming.

What is just as important to note is that, whatever the exact percentage of opinions in various camps, this issue is not as salient in the Philippines as it is in the United States. In the United States, views on homosexuality are a litmus test in the culture wars and theological wars in the UMC. In the Philippines, this issue is one among many issues facing the church and the culture. It is not the most pressing, and it does not serve as a proxy for people's views on other political, social, and theological issues in the same way that it does in the US.

Moreover, given the denomination's role in Filipino society and overall Filipino views on sexuality, there are good reasons for even those opposed to homosexuality in the UMC in the Philippines to not make this opposition a central issue for the church. Minority religious groups in general pick and choose carefully what issues they want to challenge society on. Currently, the UMC is trying to challenge the Filipino government on a variety of other issues - extra-judicial killings and indigenous rights among them. Challenging prevailing social norms could reduce the support they need from people outside the UMC to make traction with the government on these other issues.

None of this is predicative of what Filipino delegates will do when they are in the global United Methodist context of General Conference 2019. As two recent UMNS stories ([1] and [2]) make clear, there are Filipino United Methodists supportive of the One Church Plan, and there are those supportive of the Traditional Plan. This is, however, a reminder to see all people and regions in the connection as complex, with a variety of objectives and views that cannot be quickly reduced to the objectives and views that people in our own contexts hold.

Missional Ecclesiology: Engaging the Commission on a Way Forward on mission

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Director of Mission Theology at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

As I mentioned in a post last week, I had the honor of being asked by the Commission on a Way Forward to assist them in developing a document on mission to guide their thinking and discernment in their work. To help readers engage in conversation about the Commission’s work around the issue of mission, I want to provide some reflections on my role in the development of their “Missional Framework.” In so doing, I will not speak about how the Commission members used and refined my contribution (most of which I do not know) but rather about the work I shared with them and what my intentions were in crafting it in the way I did. This post will be the first of several on this topic.

Late last year, I received an invitation to submit a document on “missional ecclesiology” to the Commission. I believe I was chosen for this assignment because of my role as Director of Mission Theology for Global Ministries. By the term “missional ecclesiology,” I assumed that the Commission was looking for a document that would comment theologically on mission but would also connect those comments in some way to reflections on the church (hence “ecclesiology”). Thus, in writing the document, I attempted to do three things:

My first objective was to share key highlights of ecumenical thinking about mission from the past half century. The document I prepared for the Commission contained a set of “affirmations” about mission that I sought to craft to reflect not my own personal thoughts about mission but rather important pieces of consensus on mission among United Methodists and others reached over the last half century. That is why I chose the term “affirmations.” These points are not doctrine, but they are widely affirmed by people other than just me. I am sure every missiologist would have her or his own list of most important insights, but I choose particular ones I felt most significant and most relevant to the task at hand.

My second objective was to give a description of the key ecclesiastical practices that have defined Methodism broadly over its history. Given the recent release of Wonder, Love and Praise, I did not feel it necessary to reflect on the theological nature of the church (e.g., as rooted in grace) in my document. That was perhaps a lacuna, but I preferred to let Wonder, Love and Praise speak to these issues and instead focus on key attitudes and practices that have given Methodism its distinctive flavor as a Christian tradition, as I felt less attention had been paid to such practices. Again, I called these points “affirmations” to indicate that these are not dogma but are widely adhered to within Methodism. It is worth noting that these attitudes and practices characterize Methodism broadly and not just United Methodism.

My third objective was to describe a set of values or spiritual dispositions that I hope flow from the first two objectives. In this regard, this set of values or attitudes are the pay-off of the document. Presenting the conclusions of my document as a set of values reflects my conviction that the issues facing The United Methodist Church are primarily matters of the heart, not of polity. Hence, I wanted to present attitudes of the heart that would help us live out our calling to mission. In crafting this section of the document, I was trying to be a bit more creative and not merely reflect consensus positions. I did try to draw connections from the first two lists to the list of values to show how I saw these values as logically related to the widely-held affirmations from the first two lists.

It is important to note that at the point at which I wrote the document, the Commission had released its midpoint update with thumbnail sketches of what became the three proposals now being sent to General Conference 2019. I did not consider it my job to comment on the merits of these three proposals, but rather to offer theological reflections on mission, which the Commission could use in their on-going discernment. Therefore, the documents were intended to be neutral regarding the main questions regarding sexuality and polity with which the Commission was grappling.

I completed an initial version of the document, which was about 2900 words. I was then asked to revise it down to 700 words. That was difficult for me, and I had to cut out a good deal, some of which I regret not leaving in. I delivered the 700-word version to the Commission (with a link to the longer version that I wasn’t able to let go of!), and they further revised this version to produce their own Missional Framework.

This project was undertaken in a lot of prayer, more than the amount of prayer I have used in any other professional undertaking. Nevertheless, I do not pretend to have accomplished any of my objectives perfectly, and I’m sure others would have taken a different approach than I did and set up different objectives for themselves. Moreover, as an individual, I could offer my gift to the Church, but it required the work of the Commission as a whole to discern how to transform my gift into something that reflected the Church more broadly. Having shared that gift with the Commission, I share it now with you readers, hoping it will spark more conversations about mission in The United Methodist Church.