Michael Prest considers a tricky question on mission
‘We want to work with you, not for you.’
This was the entirely understandable summary from three Indonesian mission agency leaders as they reflected on the interactions between their own organisations and those with an international structure.1
Speaking of such reasonable desires for mission partnership, Webster comments:
‘The answer does not lie in the patterns of dependence or independence, but in the recovery of that interdependence of the one spirit that marked the New Testament churches. In this basic spiritual unity and interdependence of the younger and older churches today lies the future of the church’s mission to the world.’2
Few would argue with these fundamental biblical principles. Yet many have struggled to see them applied. At a missionary conference under the slogan ‘Partnership in Obedience’, a visiting Indonesian pastor commented to a Dutch professor, ‘Yes, partnership for you, obedience for us.’3
… the Majority World now sends more workers than the West …
That such experiences persist is a cause for lament. That they do so when the Majority World now sends more workers than the West is a cause for serious reflection on the international mission agency model.4 What needs to change? What new models might we pursue? Ones that promote humility, not hubris; mutuality, not management; and collaboration, not control.
And how might Majority World agencies and churches encourage those of us in the West to ground our good intentions for mutual mission sending partnerships across the world church?
The challenges of the international model
For all the talk of polycentrism in mission circles today, in international mission organizations, it is often the multinational structure that persists. Internationalization strategies that added sending bases in other Western nations have in more recent years simply expanded to include countries across the Majority World.
‘The organisation may be international in personnel, but Western in organisation and structures.’
Whilst this ambition to widen mobilising reach has been well intentioned, such organisations are left grappling with the consequences of a centralised structure, leadership, language, culture, and decision making processes: ‘The organisation may be international in personnel, but Western in organisation and structures.’5
Kang-San Tan explores the consequences further, stating that ‘… there remains a huge risk that power is not decentralised.’6 He proposes a way forward that would necessitate Western mission leadership to be ‘radical rather than reformist, and willing to make intentional structural changes rather than engage in mission theories and rhetoric.’7
The key question is what might those changes look like? Further, are such radical changes possible in large international organisations where decision making can be slow, history hard to unpick, and the hold on control hard to let go of?
This article was written by UFM director Michael Prest and was originally published on lausanne.org
Read the rest of the article here.
UFM was privileged to be part of the 4th Lausanne conference in South Korea with several UFM staff and mission partners making up the 5,000-strong delegation.
Main photo: pixels.com
Endnotes
1. Michael Prest, ‘The West with the Rest? Exploring the Role of UFM Worldwide in the Sending of Overseas Cross-Cultural Missionaries from the Indonesian Church’ (MTh diss., University of Glasgow, 2022), 204–205.
2. Warren W. Webster, ‘The Nature of the Church and Unity in Mission,’ in New Horizons in World Missions, ed. David J. Hesselgrave (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1979), 247.
3. Stan Nussbaum, A Readers’ Guide to Transforming Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005), 120.
4. See, eg Steve (Heung Chan) Kim, ‘A Newer Missions Paradigm and the Growth of Missions from the Majority World,’ in Missions from the Majority World: Progress, Challenges and Case Studies, ed. Enoch Wan and Michael Pocock (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2009), 14.
5. Marty Shaw, Jr., ‘The Future of Kingdom Work in a Globalizing World,’ accessed 27 April 2024, https://www.lausanne. org/content/lop/globalization-gospelrethinking- mission-contemporary-worldlop-30.
6. Kang-San Tan, ‘Western Dominance in World Mission: A Time for Change? A Response from an Asian Perspective,’ CMF Thinking Mission Forum, 25 May 2011, accessed 14 April 2024, https://www.academia.edu/1988925/The_modern_ missionary_movement_an_era_of_ Western_dominance_was_it_all_bad_and_ where_do_we_go_from_here.
7. Tan, ‘Western Dominance.’