What we mean by public missiology

Public missiology for a new historical era

To summarize our proposal as plainly as we can, we present our conception of public missiology as:

We are rethinking mission from top to bottom in the light of its entanglement with public life. This does not mean that everything missiological must change, only that we need to identify the points at which missional theory and practice should change as necessary. Though we risk sounding embarrassingly radical our proposal is in fact rather modest—indeed our intentions are practical. Our proposal does not seek to diminish the missiological traditions of proclamation of the Gospel, reliance on Scripture, and witness, but rather seeks to add reflection on how these traditions can function in the contemporary public spheres. We simply point out that the world is changing—rapidly—and that missiology and missional practice must change with it.

Such world-historical change has happened many times before and mission has faithfully responded to it. Take for example, the 1952 International Missionary Council (IMC) meeting, in Willingen, Germany. It gathered to address the church in the “revolutionary situation” of the new postwar world order, confronting the “loss of China” and facing emerging postcolonial realities, competing cold war ideologies and alignments, cultural nationalisms, racial discrimination, and widespread poverty. In response, the IMC reconsidered the church’s world-relatedness by emphasizing the priority of the missio Dei, the church’s missionary nature, shalom, and a refreshed eschatological vision for the reign of God. Similarly, Vatican II opened the windows for the Roman Catholic Church’s fresh engagement with modernity a decade later.

The 1968 Uppsala assembly of the World Council of Churches attempted (controversially, even divisively) to come to terms with the 1960s cultural and social revolutions and sharpened mission’s ethical vision for peace, justice, and the integrity of creation. In 1968, liberation theology was formally recognized at Medellín, Columbia. At the same time, mission reflected upon the “cultural turn” and a deeper understanding of contextualization, inculturation, and practical anthropology in missiological thought and practice. Recognition of cultural people groups and mission as transformation followed soon after at Lausanne in 1974.

In and around 1989 the world changed again: the end of the cold war, the so-called “end of history,” the rise of globalization, neoliberalism, and multiculturalism. In this context David Bosch wrestled with new postmodern mission paradigms. Lesslie Newbigin struggled with the collapse of mission in the pluralistic West. From his struggle grew the Gospel in Our Culture Network’s “missional church” proposal. The period also saw the growth of international networks of public and political theologians, as well as world-Christian theologies.

Each of these fruitful innovations was made in response to substantial historical changes and crises. Now these innovations have matured and are incorporated into most every missiologist’s and mission leader’s work. Public missiology affirms them all—as well as affirming the spirit of ASM’s consensus on mission perhaps best expressed in the preface of each volume of our ASM Book Series published by Orbis Books:

By mission is meant the effort to effect passage over the boundary between faith in Jesus Christ and its absence. In this understanding of mission, the basic functions of Christian proclamation, dialogue, witness, service, worship, liberation, and nurture of are of special concern. (e.g., Shaw and Burrows, 2018)

Evangelization, church formation, and public proclamation across contexts remain at the center of our concerns.

Public missiology simply asks what next? Are we yet again at another historical inflection, at a time of sudden change? Does our present historical moment remind us of 1952? Or 1968? Or 1989? What conceptual shifts in our missional understanding and practices do we need to make—now—to ensure mission’s vitality for the next several decades or for the next half-century?

Mission confronts a world at a time of profound transformation and nearly stupefying cultural, social, political, economic, technological, and environmental change. A new historical era takes shape around us. We must learn to see it more clearly. This new reality no longer can be explained adequately in the modernist language of mass society, welfare-state liberalism, and universalist vision, or in the postmodernist language of cultural pluralism, localism, identity, neoliberalism, and the will to power. We enter a new era without a name other than to call it post-postmodern.

Our study group began its labors in North America. We recognize that our global vision is limited and blinkered by our western standpoint, and we invite others to round it out from other standpoints. In North America, however, our present missiological paradigms fail to arrest the loss of Christian witness, its public coherence, its generative public voice, its identity, and its integrity and credibility. Nor do our present paradigms adequately address the wider reality that throughout the world long-established and durable modes of public order along with their ideas, institutions, and governance are themselves fracturing as we risk sinking ever deeper into cultural, social, and political turmoil.

New, barely articulated, unstable, and untested modes of public order—especially nationalist and authoritarian modes—emerge in the shadow of looming and unprecedented ecological and technological crises. These crises threaten the future of the environment and of humanity itself. Managing them will stretch human ingenuity to the limit.

These crises are made worse by other trends that include the retreat of liberal democracy and human rights regimes; persistent economic inequality, insecurity, resentment, and anger; naked racism; food insecurity; mass migration; identity conflict; fading community life; and ecological devastation. The confident global order of 20 or 30 years ago collapses into de-globalization, ethnic and religious nationalism, authoritarianism, neo-imperialism, multipolar competition, and violence including war. Public missiology is centrally concerned with describing, interpreting, analyzing, and addressing this historically new missional context and its implications for missional practice.

What is at stake?

We believe that creating healthy, loving, just, and inclusive modes of public order in harmony with the Earth is humanity’s primary collective task. It is a fundamental human task that all people made in God’s image, followers of Jesus or not, were created for, a biblical task begun by tending a garden and—to complete the Bible’s narrative arc—that ends in the redeemed public life of the New Jerusalem. Creating healthy, humane public orders is a task within which mission operates, as Jesus said, like redemptive leaven as the collective human dough expands. Cultivating flourishing modes of public life, including the uplift and healing of individuals, of publics, and of the Earth—literally, the salvation on this side of eternity of the world that God so loves—lies at the very center of the missionary enterprise, which includes our evangelistic call to personal faith in Jesus Christ. Similar visions are affirmed in the 2013 World Council’s Commission on World Mission and Evangelism document Together towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (WCC, 2013), and in evangelism scholar Mark Teasdale’s recent Participating in Abundant Life: Holistic Salvation for a Secular Age (2022). Our object is to find and enhance abundant life (full salvation, individual and collective; personal and social holiness) everywhere as we walk together in the Holy Spirit who breathes new life into the world.

At stake in our present historical moment is the health of every public’s mode of life. Mission’s full soteriological influence—individually and collectively—begins within what Charles Taylor (2004) calls a public’s social imaginary. It begins, that is, within a public’s collective consciousness, spirituality, and the logics that define the mode of life upon which its public order is built. Only within this context can our evangelistic call to the Gospel of Jesus Christ be sensibly heard, and our just and life-giving cross-contextual missional and diaconal ministries—including church formation, discipleship, evangelism, humanitarian relief and development, and advocacy—find effective meaning.

A social imaginary is a public’s complete and total way of understanding and living in the world. It is created and recreated through routine, daily public interactions. Social imaginaries collectively organize our thoughts, ethics, politics, economies, social structures, power structures, laws, sensibilities, and our faith. They ground our thoughts and actions with meaning. They contextualize our emotions and reach into our everyday life decisions. Think of a social imaginary as a public’s natural metaphysics, its intuitive framework for translating reality into understanding—even if it might be incomplete, misleading, or even wrong.

Poor social imaginaries blind us. Well-constructed ones, on the other hand, liberate the collective public vision and creativity we need to imagine and to develop the new public habits, social relationships, civic practices, and missional and diaconal ministries needed to create new and thriving public modes of life. And crucially, new energies must be liberated as we encounter a new and difficult era. It is a post-postmodern, post-Christian (at least in the West), posthumanist, and transhumanist, and—if we are to believe Ronald Inglehart’s (2021) World Values Survey—a global post-religious era that none of us has ever seen, an era that deeply challenges mission’s redemptive possibilities. To this compounding crisis, mission must speak in a new language yet to be conceived and respond with new practices yet to be invented.

Why “public” as an object of analysis?

We propose the term “public” as the focal point of a new conceptual framework to help us better think about human populations; to grasp the dynamics of their emerging public modes of life in a new historical era; and to apply this understanding to mission. Our intention is a practical one. We wish to describe living populations more clearly than we have been able to in the past and more sensitively interpret their realities.

In historical retrospect, we can see that modernity framed its analysis around global and nation-state universals, development, and modernization, and grasped local realities and traditions only superficially. Postmodernism, in its reaction against modern universalisms left us seeing only fragments and conflicts. In response to both modernity and postmodernity as conceptual frames, public missiology considers the whole and the pieces, asks how they are mutually interconnected, and from this considers how new public orders emerge from their interaction. In other words, we are seeking better ways for missiologists to conceptualize and interpret human contexts in our emerging historical context.

More specifically, in light of our present historical juncture, we seek to resolve a crucial postmodern epistemological problem that currently bedevils theory and interpretation: its inability (or unwillingness) to grasp the world and its major subdivisions as wholes, indeed often castigating the “wholes” where they exist as merely oppressive powers. Postmodernity’s conceptual breakthrough was to expose and deconstruct the West’s world-dominating story, its hegemonic, imperial, universalist metanarrative. It did so, and for this we are grateful—and we are mindful that this has helped a modern generation of missiologists better conceive of local experience (Schreiter, 1985), contextualization and inculturation (Bevans, 2002). But in doing so postmodernism left us seeing the world in pieces—as micro-publics, disconnected local contexts, singular identities, people groups, each caught up in power games with the others—without grasping the regional and global structures, consciousness, and identities that bind all the pieces together for better or worse. We have learned to see trees not forests, too often the leaves but not even the trees. Ours is an “age of fracture” as historian Daniel Rodgers (2011) calls it; anthropologist Clifford Geertz (2000) called it a “world in pieces.”

We propose the concept “public,” as we will define it below, to bring into focus human realities that are often concealed behind other more ambiguous terms. For instance, the master concepts traditionally used to describe large-scale human groupings—concepts such as civilizations, societies, cultures, nations, states, peoples—remain ill-defined and often overlap in meaning (cf. Williams, 2015). Many of these can be used as synonyms for the others; so, it is not always clear what exactly these concepts do specify. We also share the common lament that in both academia and common parlance we have subdivided—indeed siloed—our work among the only disciplinary concepts available to us. We have in mind concepts such as society (meaning groups, structures, and systems), or culture (peoples, sensibilities, identities, and ideas—the preferred language of missiology), or politics (process and power), or economy (distribution of resources), or ecology (natural systems) (Repko, 2008; Wallerstein, 1996). Our point here is that we all struggle to provide a fully integrated, or holistic, vision of the whole of what we might call—for want of a better term—public life. This fragmented approach in turn makes it difficult to explain the complex sources of social change and the cross-cutting operations, intersections, ideologies, and manipulations of socioeconomic-political power that define the world we live in. Or as we might prefer to call them the “powers and principalities” that resist the Gospel. “Public,” as we conceive the term, provides a focal point for a fresh framing concept to investigate, describe, and analyze our complex modes of human life; to orchestrate holistic interdisciplinary projects to understand them; and to promote healthy, life-giving modes of public life.

How do we define the word “public”?

We comprehend “public” as the site of, and the entire space of, human-to-human and human-to-nonhuman (both ecological and technological) interaction, whether conceived of as local, national, or global spaces (cf. Hunsberger, 2005; Leffel, 2016).

To put it simply, Portuguese communications theorist Samuel Mateus (2011) defines “public” as that common space we enter—as individuals and as groups—each time we speak and act in the presence of others, that is, each time we “publish” ourselves to other people through our speech and actions. Whenever we interact with others it is a public event. No matter how insignificant our speech and actions may seem, they incrementally and subtly change the world we live in. Wherever two or three are gathered, we might say, there is a public. The more people gathered, the more complex the public. And there are now 8 billion of us publishing ourselves within the public whole. In the age of social media perhaps it is easier to understand this, and how such “self-publishing” changes public consciousness.

It has been said that “words make worlds.” We somewhat disagree and think that “words plus actions make worlds.” Public,” to say it in a rather technical way, is a complex and contested semiotic whole: a world of words, ideas, concepts, ideologies, habits, practices, and sensibilities that fill our minds and shape our actions. It is a symbolic and symbolically interactive space where human beings individually and corporately make sense of their world and organize it. “Public” is thus conceived of as an entire ecosystem of speech acts, practices, human agency, material processes (natural and technological), structures, ideas, identities, interests, competition, and cooperation. It sets out the wide, living context within which our churches engage with public life and develop their own expressions of Christian faith, and into which mission proclaims and demonstrates the Gospel.

Within this semiotic, self-publishing space of interaction humans continuously give rise to complex new forms of social structures, cultural consciousness, and relations to the natural world. There is no smoothly uniform public with a simple structure and a common meaning. Rather, it is an often-chaotic overlapping and intertwining of interests, identities, activities, and meanings. Missiologist Gregg Okesson (2020) calls this complexity an interwoven thickness and refers to the whole of it as a weaving or tapestry. Geertz (2000: 227), the anthropologist refers to it as the winding of a many-stranded rope that wraps together universal, historical, and local experience into a common whole. Public life is a continuous weaving together of complex interests and experiences, and to be examined as a thick description of public wholes. To grasp this thickness, as we analyze complex publics and interpret their meanings, requires us to weave together the entire range of human experience from the level of social, economic, political, cultural, diaconal, and routine daily practices, both personal and collective, secular and religious, through to the meta-level of human metaphysical and ontological consciousness.

Some anthropological theorists (e.g., DeLanda, 2019 [2006]; Rabinow, 2011; Tsing, 2015) suggest that we might reconsider our use of the term “culture” when thinking about public orders. Instead, they emphasize the process of emerging human orders and refer to them as collectively produced “assemblages” of nature, society, economics, politics, and sensibilities; living assemblages of the public whole that are constantly reassembled and reconfigured in new, dynamic forms—suggesting that “processes” and “assemblages” better capture the dynamics and forms of our emerging globalized and urbanized historical present than our traditional use of “culture.” From these assemblages the public collectively draws meaning in various ways, including a sense of the meaning of life, of faith, and of awareness of God.

At its core, “public” is defined as the space where humans collectively assemble their modes of existence by searching for and by creating desirable public orders. To one degree or another each of us and our communities are inwardly motivated to desire, assemble, and enjoy a healthy mode of public life, a secure life that works for us, to support us, and to offer us abundant life. Our churches no less so, indeed historically they often have been at the forefront of securing it.

What makes missiology public?

Missiology becomes public when mission is practiced on a two-way street. From one direction, as missioners we consider what the public and its complexity mean to us. From the other direction, we must consider what mission means to the public. In the same moment that we face the public and move towards it in mission, we experience the public gazing back at us. The public contextualizes, evaluates, and judges our every move. In this duality, mission gives but also receives. The public gives back its own interpretation of mission’s place within the public whole and as a participant in public life, and we must be attentive to it. Indications of this reflexivity are already suggested within the subfield called the anthropology of Christianity associated with Joel Robbins and others (SAQ, 2010).

We fully and sincerely believe that Christian mission benefits the public. But mission also benefits from the public’s own “mission,” if you will, back to us. In the interaction we learn from each other. With humility mission shares with the public in the common task of building a healthy public mode of life. We are co-constructors working together. We grasp mission as inevitably co-constructive, since mission is by definition a part of the public whole in the first place. As missioners we must see our efforts as co-construction, and not (as when we fall into bad habits) the imposition of values upon an unwilling public through political manipulation; not as prophetic judgment from a distance or from a secure pulpit; and (remembering Wesley) not the avoidance of public entanglement from within isolated communities of “authentic” faith. We can address the public fully and well, or we can address it partially and poorly—but we cannot not address the public because we are already fully entangled in it and the public will judge us for it positively or negatively.

Public missiology is pro-public. We propose a “public turn.” A turn toward and for the public’s well-being. In the process we will clarify Christian understanding of our public modes of life and the place of Christian mission within them. Public missiology recognizes that the church participates in and is enclosed within public life such that the health of the public, good or ill, is reflected in the health of the church. Thus, the church has a deep stake in the public’s flourishing.

By moving “public” to the center of missiological reflection and reconsidering the reciprocal interaction between “public” and “mission,” public missiology will—we hope, and this is our goal—encourage new directions of inquiry, fresh research programs, and innovative forms of practice related to mission within our emerging modes of public life. Only time will tell if these new directions of public missiological inquiry will bear fruit of consequence and practicality. But work is underway to find out if our proffered investment will yield a satisfying return.

Examples of published works to date in public missiology include Gregg Okesson’s (2020) award-winning (including the 2020 ASM Book of the Year) A Public Missiology: How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World, which provides guidance for churches to encounter, interpret, and engage in witness and service within complex publics. Charles Fensham’s forthcoming (2023) Mission as Penance: Essays on the Theology of Mission in a Canadian Context is set within a public missiology framework. Other topics have addressed the fundamentally public meaning of ekklesia and the public character of the church-in-mission (Hunsberger, 2005); “anxious tribalism,” the problem of witness among unstable and increasingly radicalized social identities (Hunt, 2016); global intercultural theology and the challenge of public discourse (Pieterse, 2017); witness in light of the ideological and structural powers of institutions and the “powers and principalities” (Fensham, 2022; Okesson, 2016); and clarifying the overlaps and tensions between public theology and public missiology (Fensham, 2017; Kim, 2017).

Other new directions focus upon the church generally—its inward life, structural organization, and ministries in support of its public vocation—and especially local congregations, their missionary nature, and the complications of their role in public witness (this is a natural extension of the “missional church” proposal; Guder, 1998). In the background lies the problem of the post-Enlightenment’s sequester of the church into the private sphere of “religion and culture” and the church’s subsequently ambiguous, awkward public voice today throughout the liberal West. In the American context public missiology must respond to J.D. Hunter’s (2010) excoriation of Protestantism’s overpoliticization and ignorance of effective theories of social change—a charge that has yet to be fully answered. Joseph Bottum’s (2014) reminder that American Protestantism once had a fertile and generative public voice, now long forgotten, highlights the church’s spiritual disconnection from contemporary public life (cf. Leffel, 2017: 43–45). Such political and spiritual tensions and lack of coherent public voice are also roiling many Christian colleges and universities.

Yet other new directions confront the future and our emerging historical world order. These include, for example, an assessment of the exhaustion of our current global order under the unprecedented conditions of climate change, population migrations, and rampant economic-technological development (AI and genetic technologies) and its demands for a missional response (Leffel, forthcoming 2024); emerging consciousness in a post-postmodern (“metamodern”) context and its potential openness (or hostility) to Christian witness (work in progress); and further refinement of social-theoretical frameworks common to missiology to enhance their effectiveness (Kenney, 2022).

Methodologically, we can begin to draw a picture of complex publics with available tools. Ethnography, thick description, critical social theory, and multi-variant quantitative analysis provide ready starting points. Catholic sociologist Margaret Archer’s (1995, 1996) realist social theory and concept of morphogenetic change is another valuable but underutilized approach. Our concerns stretch from the pragmatic and political to the phenomenological, hermeneutical, and philosophical. And these may take missiology into unfamiliar territory—such as, for example, Boston University School of Theology’s Robert Cummings Neville’s (2014) work on moral axiology, and Catholic philosopher William Desmond’s work on emerging post-postmodern metaphysics (Simpson, 2012).

Our work to date is just a start. We build upon earlier attempts (e.g., Leffel, 2007; Van Gelder and Zscheile, 2018) to explain how Christian faith is mobilized and moves and grows in public contexts. We recognize that turning theoretical approaches, analyses, and descriptions of historical contexts into effective prescriptions for shaping the methodologies and content of Gospel proclamation and the (potential) restructuring of the church-in-mission will take time. At the moment, our hope is to expand the circle of our conversation about public missiology. We present our proposal as an invitation to renew Christian initiative to engage our emerging and troubled post-postmodern public order in fresh ways and with intelligence, love, faith, and hope for the flourishing of all in the presence of God and together with one another.