Mission as Withness

Introduction

The Covid-19 has challenged fundamental African Pentecostal missiological assumptions. Forcing us to raise important questions and critically reflect on them in the light of Christ’s incarnation. How should Pentecostals articulate God’s mission so that Christ can deeply incarnate in contemporary global experiences after Covid-19? What does it mean to participate or be agents of God’s mission in an ever-wounded or a perpetually present apocalyptic eventful world? How should Pentecostals translate God in the world spiralling through apocalypse-post-apocalypse? These questions should also be extended to the context of the missiology of religions. How can Pentecostals best translate the Gospel so that it expresses the truths of poly-ontological spiritualities of the majority in Africa?

In this article, I argue that the Church is pneumatologically intended toward the world. The promise of Jesus to be with the disciples is based on their participation as “my witnesses” (Mathew 28:19) in transforming the world “… to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Acts chapter two was witnessed by people from all over the world. God’s redemptive activity is universal in scope. David Bosch argues in Transforming Mission, “The life and work of the Christianity community are intimately bound up with the God’s cosmic-historical plan for the redemption of the world.” ¹ Missiology is an engaged prophetic scientific activity that seeks to understand and discern the challenges of times and how to pragmatically translate the mind of God (redemptive knowledge and wisdom) in the world (1Chronicles 12:32; Nehemiah 2). Missio Dei is an active imperative of translatability. ² I engage translatability as divine active capacity to infinitely culturally “Become Flesh” as a response to the struggles in creation. I argue that in an ever-wounded world, the Church has to shift the gear from mission as witness to mission as withness. In so doing, I hope to expand the idea of translatability, and how the Church can re-discover its missiological identity in an ever-wounded world. I will demonstrate how withness missiology is a radical exemplification of Christ’s incarnation as a critical model for flourishing engaged entanglement between God’s Church and God’s World.

Pentecostal Mission Impossible

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu argues, “the contemporary Pentecostal health-and-wealth gospel, although appeals to the Bible for theological legitimacy, also resonates very much with the African worldview. In the midst of the pandemic, however, the monolithic understanding of flourishing preached by some Pentecostals came unstuck.” ³ Prior to Covid-19, Pentecostalism had evolved into a mega-spiritual culture - “transcends national, ethnic, racial, and class boundaries.” ⁴ It is perceived as a key to the process of dismantling transnationality and globality and giving rise to trans-spatial, trans-time-ness, trans-denominational and trans-cultural imagination in which the historical past, present and eschatological future have increasingly collapsed into each other. Karla Poewe observes, “The genius of charismatic Christians … lies in taking this story [of the gospel] ‘literally and as a guide to practical action.’” ⁵ Poewe underlines:

In sum, charismatic Christianity is a global culture because it is experiential, idealistic, biblical, and oppositional. Being experiential, it is not tied to any specific doctrine or denomination. Being idealistic, it embraces the whole person and the whole world … Being biblical, it places the ‘Word’ above politicians, government, or any otherworldly authority. Being oppositional, it is always potentially in tension with the establishment, which includes church, government, university, ethnic, class, and racial structures … it has ‘no one system of theology, no one integrating doctrine, no particular type of polity, no one liturgy, no geographical homogeneity.’ ⁶

In The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion, Nimi Wariboko argues that Pentecostalism is not used “to neuter the impulse for freedom, liberation, and emancipation, nor to accent conforming to the deadening totality of the market or the logic of domination,” “it is about ardor, energy, force, or drive to move society forward toward justice.” ⁷ He underlines, “Pentecost is an intensification of the human capacity to act, the power of acting in certain ways; the reign of God is recognized as the sovereignty of decentering of the existence of other-regarding love with unformulatable boundaries.” ⁸

However, during the Covid-19 period it became evident that Pentecostal “forms of power invested in and acquired over the years did not anticipate the world-changing event of the COVID-19.” ⁹ The pursuit of power missiologies and theologies of dominion, possessing the land, taking over the nations, and prosperity idiom had radically reduced Pentecostalism to mystical locus for reproduction and perpetuation of capitalist economies. Asonzeh Ukah speaks of the Nigerian “pastorpreneur approach in which [pastors] use churches as an economic, financial, and entrepreneurial empire which are completely controlled by [the pastors and] their families.” ¹⁰ Pastorpreneurship or ‘gospreneurship’ as Lovemore Togarasei ¹¹ classifies the practice in Zimbabwe, is common in Africa because churches are not exposed to external auditing where the financial statements of churches can be evaluated and criticized if possible. ¹² Elsewhere, I have spoken of the raise of “Christocapitalist theology” a neoliberal capitalist theology that has commercialized the gospel and commodified the church in which Christ is clandestinely commodified into the capital good and the congregants as consumers of Christ. ¹³ Christocapitalism “has contributed to increasing the gap between the rich (the pastor) and the poor (congregants).” ¹⁴ As Asamoah-Gyadu observes in Ghana, “in most cases the only concrete evidence of the prosperity message are the lives of those who preach it themselves.” ¹⁵ Religion had become a performance of possessive individualism capitalism which were passionately pursued, some “attain it, sustain it, and become identified by it.” ¹⁶ In another place, Asamoah-Gyadu notes that during Covid-19, Pentecostalism with its missiology of prosperity, “the negative effects of the coronavirus on people proved a theologically challenging endeavor.” ¹⁷ He adds, “Pronouncing curses on evil or blaming Satan for it in human life has always been part of the means to achieve health and wealth for contemporary Pentecostals” ¹⁸ proved not only obsolete, but highly detrimental missiological approach in the world entrenched in apocalyptic challenges. The Covid-19 demonstrated the damage that is caused in the world when religion fails to developed life-centred transformative theologies and missiological imaginations.

Missio Dei in the Context of False Universalities

The challenge of spiralling through apocalypse-post-apocalypse has sometimes resulted in assuming various false universalities such as “‘We are all in this together!’” and yet, the powerful and rich still maintain their knee on the throats of the weak and powerless. Such false universalities of experience shaped pre-Covid-19 missiological approaches with their uncritical attribution of anthropomorphic attribute to the earth as mother, or using home metaphors ¹⁹ to refer to earth such as the common home or home of homes to the planet or common humanity and often diplomatically avoiding the elephant in the room. The questions of the past and current global politics, all consummated into the Covid-19 global horror which provoked all kinds of apocalyptic imaginations which quickly translated into superficial optimistic feelings and expectations for the dawn of a possible new world. ‘We are in it together’ – uncritical social media performance of secular resurrection in which a possible new global order was being envisaged to arise like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Covid-19. That for the first time in history, humanity was given an opportunity to construct a vision of the world “that values abundance over affluence, gratuity over greed, compassion over unfettered consumption, goods over commodities.” ²⁰ That Covid-19 was catalysing a global call to rethink the future in a world of increasing complexities, uncertainties, fragilities, and woundedness.

However, the feeling was short-lived as global necropolitics took a centre stage. Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as “the capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die;” ²¹ “to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” … “embodied as a power over mortality.” ²² In order to protect a deemed valuable person’s life, the perceived vulnerable person’s life must be terminated or strategically ignored. As Mbembe puts it, “The calculus of life passes through the death of the Other.” ²³ Covid-19 reinforced “social and racial inequalities by reminding us of our common belonging to the same biological species.” ²⁴ It contested bio-missiological politics that have ecclesiologically relied on the established patriarchal hierarchies of races, religions, geopolitical contexts, sexualities, genders, knowledge and being, as key to ongoing production, perpetuation and multiplication of vulnerabilities and various forms of deaths. If we agree with this assessment, we can also appreciate the fact that the very idea of Covid-19 marked by race, class, gender, and sociopolitical and geopolitical boundaries is an aspect of an ongoing necropolitical question that borders on not only who survived, how they survived, but also whether anyone really survived and even how the notion of Covid-19 and other pandemics differed for people in various categories of vulnerabilities. ²⁵ It was apparent that Covid-19 had become a space of struggle to define and determine who deserved to live and who did not; which countries were to receive severe restrictions or travel bans and which were to receive the first doses of the vaccination. We have to ask, “who has the power to produce an apocalypse and who can only hope to survive it, how this power come to certain hands and how it is (hopefully) constrained, whose survival takes precedence and whose survival is judged unnecessary, or worse dangerous, and how resources get shared or hoarded.” ²⁶ As already argued above, through the promotion of Christocapitalist theology and mere focus on otherworld spiritual power of prayer, rather than perceiving prayer as a concrete action, a form of political engagement, most Pentecostals have legitimised political powers as generated from the divine source. ²⁷ Hence, many contemporary politicians in Africa have leveraged and borrowed legitimacy from Pentecostalism. For example, the former president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma was made an honorary pastor of Independent Charismatic Churches in Durban. ²⁸ In Zambia, the first democratically elected president Frederick J. T. Chiluba associated himself with Pentecostalism, and the former president Edgar Lungu, and their political agendas were baptized by Pentecostalism. ²⁹ However, scholars have also demonstrated that new forms of prestige have made leaders of the Pentecostal churches in Africa analogous to elite politicians. ³⁰ There is a way in which Pentecostalism is no a mere legitimising instrument for political power, rather an alternative ideology in its own right. ³¹ As John McCauley argues, the competition in contemporary African political system has tended to occur “horizontally between rival elites, rather than between classes;” the more power a group’s leader has, the more the group is perceived as a threat. ³² Nevertheless, Pentecostalism’s domination missiologies have in many ways reproduced and perpetuated false universalities and supported dictators in some African countries. ³³

Two Apocalyptic Interpretations

Covid-19 demonstrated inadequacies of many pre-Covid-19 missiological imaginations. It became evident during the Covid-19 period that Pentecostal missiological approaches that had developed lacked anticipatory capacity to respond to perpetually present apocalyptic events. Hence, the pandemic became revealing, or wakening, not only for global injustice but for the Church’s inadequate translation of Christ in an ever-wounded, perpetually and deeply entrenched apocalyptic world. Covid-19 as an apocalyptic pandemic was interpreted in two ways:

A Withness Missiology

I am arguing that we need a Pentecostal withness apocalyptic missiology. This could be described as a ‘third way’ apocalyptic interpretative possibility– transcending both literal and nonliteral interpretive strategies to embrace a dialectical synthesis of creative residues of different possibilities into a new radical empathic translation of Christ in a perpetually present apocalyptic world. This missiology is “about doing things, about things that deeply affect the lives of numbers of people.” ⁵³ The entire Biblical revelation is climaxed in the idea of “God with us” – “they will call him Immanuel” (Mt 1:23). God does not only witness to the realities of the world. He experiences them. This is validated by “incarnation as translation”. As Andrew Walls argues, “When God in Christ became man (sic), Divinity was translated into humanity, as though humanity were a receptor language. Here is a clear statement of what would otherwise be veiled into obscurity or uncertainty, the statement, ‘this is what God is like,” ⁵⁴ this is how God interacts and transforms the world – God with the world. Walls further argues, “when Divinity translated into humanity he did not become a generalized humanity. He became a person in a particular place and time.” ⁵⁵ The Divinity does not engage the world as a universal or generalized reality, but rather, as the contextual force of transformation. The Divinity translates itself into the world in order to translate the world into its “likeness” or rather, for the world to have the capacity to translate “into the likeness of Christ” (2 Cor. 3:18).

I am suggesting a kind of symbolic perichoretic buntu-actionism in which the Divinity translated or transfigured into the “likeness of humanity” (Phil 2:7), and humanity is gradually translating or transfiguring into the likeness, the beauty and the glory of the Divinity (2 Cor. 3:18). This is the miracle of Missio Dei which Jesus urged the disciples to witness. The power of the Holy Spirit is the power for translation into withness with others. It is this withness that Jesus said, “you will be my witnesses” throughout the world that withness is a radical site of the transfiguration of reality (Acts 1:8). It is the capacity of the Divinity to infinitely and culturally translate into a contextual person in time, place and culture, or radically collapsing the boundaries between the Divinity and humanity/creation. Withness missiology merges witness and the idea of “God with Us”. Witness is realised in the withness. The disciples filled with the power of the Holy Spirit are translated into what Eboussi Boulaga calls “Christic models” that dynamically and empathically translate into the experiences of others. ⁵⁶ The withness is always about the redemption of the powerless and the marginalized. It is also a participatory process in which the marginalized and suffering are conceived as subjects in the withness of God. This was exemplified by Jesus in the phrase, ‘your faith has healed you’ (Mt. 9:22; Lk. 17:19; Mk. 3:34). This emphasis demonstrates that the marginalized and oppressed are subjects of God’s withness redemptive activity in the world. Withness is the capacity to harness Christ’s radical empathic power of translating engagement with the world. God redeems the world through withness and not from without or mere witnessing to injustice. God subverts injustice and re-enact primordial justice by being in radical solidarity with the world. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “I have come” or more precisely, ‘I translated or incarnated so that they might have life and have it in abundance’ (John 10:10).

Therefore, the prophetic withness of the Christian life is a divine imperative form of mission. Withness is a critical or radical relational commonality – a communicable attribute of God - God only acts in the world by being in and with creation - “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, italics added for emphasis). The birth of Jesus was a divine revelation of God’s radical relational commonality or withness with creation. God does not just witness injustice or human struggle, “God is with us”. That is the promise Jesus gave to the disciples: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20, italics added for emphasis). “The Spirit of truth … abides with you and will be in you” (John 14: 17-18, italics added for emphasis). God is always with us in the very actuality, factuality and concreteness of our lives through symbolic perichoretic ubuntu-action. The Church participates in the withness of God as the collective Christic withness in the world. It is both the second nature of Christ (humanity) and fluidly the redeeming nature of Christ (the divinity). Therefore, the Church engages the world as a community of redeemed, un-redeemed and redeeming; the healed, healing, unhealed and healer; or the healed, wounded, healing and healer and so on. The withness of the Church in the world is an obligation to maintain the equilibrium through radical mutual recognition of its woundedness and entanglement with the world it seeks to heal – ‘I am healed because we are healed’ (ubuntu). The Church is not always the wounded healer but also the wounded healed, and healing. Contrariwise, the world is not always the wounded, the healed or recipient of healing from the Church, but also, the wounded healer of the Church. This exemplifies the radically engaged entanglement that characterized the incarnation of Christ. The actual, authentic Church of Jesus Christ is always translating and being translated among the marginalized and wretched of the earth in order to enable them consciously participate in God’s nature and mission of transformation of their situations.

This view of God’s mission transcends ecclesiastical and interreligious imaginations through radical ongoing mutual translations or incarnations between the Church and the world to actualised radical empathy exemplified in the incarnation of Christ. The incarnational radical empathy is about recognising, or the ability to discern ‘the signs of the time’, the current apocalyptic events and constantly intertranslating into commonality with those experiencing them. Withness missiology is revolutionary missiology of empathic relational solidarity with the downtrodden, the wretched and the wounded planet.

The witness is an embodiment of the Good News, as the locus of concreteness of the Word as embodied in flesh. The witness becomes only the realisation of God’s mission through withness which takes place through the process of the incarnation in the context of struggle. Its historical and political stances are grounded in connectedness, co-passion, co-becoming and co-responsibility. This is a form of intertranslatability in which both those embodying sacred word (the witness) and the missionized as subjects of their experiences mutually recognise in each other the radical vulnerability, fragility and the mutual need for common redemption. The result is mutual partialization, vulnerability, fragilization, opening and kenoticizing or emptying into the third space of mutual subjectivity (withness). The withness translatability is an intertranslation-in-difference. The withness is the third space of radical co-eventing of translational transfiguration in encounters where the figurations of both the witness and the other, transfigure, that is, co-transformed and co-fade into the third space of becoming. It is kind of forming a third figuration.

This could be described as a secondary type of incarnational relationality or “a perichoretic relationship of mutual interpenetration and differentiated unity.” ⁵⁷ Catherine Keller describes this as “intercarnations” in which the Divinity of Christ through indwelling power of the Holy Spirit is constantly redistributed in the believers in Christ in an ongoing process of the divine becoming “all in all,” and in turn, they receive the power of the Holy Spirit to intercarnate. ⁵⁸ In the context of intercarnation, the Holy Spirit is the ‘sending’ force of multiplication of the active potentialities of incarnations, because the visions and the capacity to withness are distributed among people of all genders, ages and social categories “all flesh” (matter, physical), and perhaps, “all artificial life forms” (digital and techno-bodies) ⁵⁹ (cf. Joel 2). Intercarnations is a process of creating a third space of mutual inter-dwelling as multiplication and entanglement of becoming or actualisation of the beauty, perichoretic relationality, pluralistic ubuntu-dwelling and radical love in the Trinity. This is the kind of missional knowledge that the prophet Habakkuk in chapter two verses fourteen speaks of: “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” The withness as a radical site of struggle for the fullness of life involves maintaining the intricate balance between the intertranslated without confusion, division, or separation (Chalcedon), giving a radically twist in the idea of the Missio Dei – as the struggle for the fullness of life in which the divine and the human are fully engaged in the process of search for freedom and dignity. In this intercarnational missiology, there is no us or them, only withness of all things.

Conclusion

This article argues that in a wounded world which is being torn apart by negative forces, the Church has to shift the gear from mission as witness to mission as withness. The withness missiology I have argued for what might sound idealistic, but idealistically pragmatic because I believe it has the potential to contribute to rethinking the planetary struggle to keep our sinking lifeboat afloat as it spirals over the abyss from apocalypse-through-post-to-apocalypse. It can help in the process of re-discovering the theological and missiological meaning of life amid suffering and alternative ways of intercarnating into one another. As underlined above, the Church is pneumatologically intended toward the world. It is God’s missional praxis.