Abstract
As I listened to Steve Bevans’s gracious words, I thought of David Brooks’s distinction between “résumé” virtues versus “eulogy” virtues and wondered if I had wandered back from purgatory to attend my funeral. Many thanks to Steve, my friend and conversation partner for fifty-four years.
Second, I thank the American Society of Missiology, my professional home for thirty years, the space where I have been able to be myself, the locus of the men and women who have shaped my work for the Lord more than any other theological meeting ground.
And special thanks to my wife Linda whose tolerance for my habitual procrastination and willingness to read, make suggestions about, and proof what I write is love beyond measure and the foretaste of God’s infinite forbearance. Without her none of what you have honored me for tonight would have been possible.
Warmest and cordial thanks to the six thousand members of the Society of the Divine Word, one of the world’s most important and faithful mission societies, more than half of whose members today come from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. They taught me and continue to teach me that mission is first, last, and foremost an expression of a love of human being inspired by Christ. And that, while learning is useful in mission, the authenticity and character brought about by the Holy Spirit’s inner work on one’s soul are indispensable.
And a special word of appreciation to the hundreds of authors with whom I worked during twenty years at Orbis Books. In that number I include not just the three hundred or so whom I helped to publish. Equally important, perhaps more so, were the more than a thousand whose work we did not publish. Those decisions were often difficult and made more often because of extrinsic causes than reasons of quality. These manuscripts and their authors were an essential part of my growth.
Thanks also to my friends at Orbis and to the Maryknoll Fathers, Brothers, and Sisters who offered me a place to work for twenty years and all the richness they imparted to me as their colleague. I was not always an easy co-worker. My procrastination put premature grey hairs on several heads. And I kept being enthusiastic about manuscripts that our wonderful marketers knew had little to no chance of breaking even. Despite that, they kept listening and hoping that this time, I might be right.
I must also give voice to a certain anomaly. The one who stands before you is not altogether sure that missiology exists as a discipline, but it is among the self-identified missiologists of the ASM that I am most at home. When Steve and I took our first missiology courses in the SVD in the early 1960s, we and our classmates called missiology “holy water geography.” For Catholics in orders such as the Society of the Divine Word, learning about mission was a process more similar to osmosis than formal study. During our student years, Mass and other chapel devotions, for example, revolved around prayer for missionaries and those among whom they worked. That sort of prayer became a second nature. Dozens of times a day, I still silently pray, “May the darkness of sin and the night of unbelief vanish before the light of the Word and the Spirit of grace,” the prayer that most exercises in the SVD—from sports to classes to chapel—began or ended with. Teachers of subjects as diverse as English literature and chemistry had been “in the missions.” Indeed, our college English professor, Father John McDonagh, suffering from a bleeding ulcer, had half his stomach removed by a Protestant missionary doctor—with only some brandy for anesthesia—in China during World War II, where he was interned by the Japanese army. Other stories were not as gripping, but you get the idea how formation for mission occurred.
May I say a few words about the field of mission studies and doctoral-level work in theology and Christian history? First, I note that we have moved from the era when missionary work was imagined primarily as something done by white men and women . . . over there . . . among black people and brown people with skins of many shades of color. But have we as a Society fully grasped the implication that every sector of every culture needs the light of the Word and the Spirit of grace?
Second, and here I must insert a very important “however,” only a minority of the many of dissertations I read gave me the feeling that the writer was truly challenged to integrate his or her specific area of study—whether it be sociology and anthropology, theology, history or philosophy, issues stemming from interfaith encounter, conflict and dialogue—with a deeper sense that God’s Christ and Spirit are integral to the fullest dimensions of human flourishing as disciples.
I fear that we are better at initiating our students into the guilds of the academy than into agents of interchange among the secular and theological academy, on the one hand, and the church, on the other hand.
It has been recognized for many years that the word “university” is a misnomer and that “pluriversity” is a much more accurate word to describe the places academics inhabit, even in Christian institutions. Among these I include seminaries preparing men and women for leadership roles in the church. Curricula too often resemble more non-aggression pacts in which the various guilds negotiate with hostile powers to divide up the twelve, fifteen, or eighteen credit hours a student attempts to earn annually. The idea of unified curricula that bring together Scripture, theological, critical insights from anthropological and sociological studies, history, homiletics, catechetics, and so forth seems impossible to realize.
In 2013 Craig van Gelder’s presidential address illuminated the possibilities and dangers facing mission studies. This evening Greg Leffel has plumbed the depths of the countervailing vectors that constitute the forces driving society apart and together. In the context of those two addresses, I recognize that the ASM is committed to critical and constructive dialogue on the future of mission studies, and I am both humbled and delighted that the ASM has found me worthy to receive its lifetime achievement award.
May God grant us the grace to see the younger members of this Society respond to the challenges of ASM’s most recent presidents. May the ASM help the church achieve its vocation: making Christ manifest in the many “areopagi” that Pope Saint John Paul II identified in his 1990 encyclical, “The Mission of the Redeemer” (Redemptoris Missio §37, a long section that bears reading and rereading).
Whether missiology exists as a unified discipline, I am less than sure. But this Society must be dedicated to dialogue with all branches of knowledge as well as with the wisdom of ordinary men and women from the world’s streets, pathways, slums, families, and workplaces, in whom resides the wisdom gained from the same sort of wrestling with God that gave Israel its name in Genesis 32.