Abstract
I have not found polymissiomath in the dictionary but if it were there, I would be awarding it to the author of this intriguing collection of essays woven into a spiral of missional enquiry designed to awaken us to the possibilities of God’s future. I would award it not for the breadth of topics covered, although these take us far beyond Scottish history and politics in Malawi to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Brexit and Xenophobia but rather for the sources quoted. On this journey into mission, Kenneth Ross invites us to come into conversation ( còmhradh in Scottish Gaelic ) with the predictable Bosch, Walls and Bevans but along the way we are invited to engage with Thomas L. Friedman, Jonathan Sacks and Pope Francis and then to gather an insight or two from Arundati Roy, 1 Richard Dawkins 2 and George Orwell, before being confronted and challenged by Zygmunt Bauman 3 and Yuval N. Harari. 4 It sounds like a ‘ragbag’ but it feels much more like a wonderful dinner party or rather a holy pilgrimage through some truly amazing topology.
Ross is a Scot, shaped, by years of ministry in Malawi, who has learnt how to integrate his ministry as a global missiologist and mission executive with local church ministry and personal reflection. This collection of essays is very Scottish, very African and very personal. It is eclectic and it does not cover all of the big issues in Christian mission today but it is guaranteed to make you stop and say ‘Yes, yes, yes’ just as often as you hesitantly say to yourself ‘No I can’t take that’. The threads that hold together this potpourri of conversations are threefold, the historically strong politico-religious relationship between Scotland and Malawi, a series of three recent mission statements 5 and a commitment to holistic and life-transforming Christian discipleship. Those three strands bind together what might otherwise have become a confusing collection of 25 diverse topics.
Mission as God’s Spiral of Renewal is organised into three related collections of essays. The first 10 chapters explore the contemporary rethinking of mission with the shadow of the 1910 Edinburgh missionary conference hanging over much of the discussion of partnership, wealth, HIV/AIDS, nationalism and migration. The second section (Chapters 11–16) focuses clearly on Scotland, its identity, historic contribution to world mission, independence and receptivity of ‘mission in reverse’. It is in this section that the Malawi-Scotland story becomes a powerful case study opening up difficult questions of patronage and cultural dominance but at the same time raising hopeful signs of interdependence, subsidiarity and growth through education and hospitality. The final section is the most challenging. In these closing chapters (Chapters 17–25) Malawi first takes centre stage, as we follow its road to nationhood, independence and sustainable development, before being joined again by Scotland and the global community of nations as together we face the hard issues of our times. The re-evangelisation of Europe and ‘the West’, the gospel for ‘liquid modernity’ and doing local theology are all addressed before the journey ends (not where you want it to) with Trump, Brexit and Discipleship. Or perhaps I should say, the journey now begins with Trump, Brexit and Discipleship?
A word of warning. I did not find the first few chapters to be the most stimulating. Good, solid and worth reading but nothing that sent me to bed worried or excited. Press on, the best is still to come. In fact if you want to get the flavour of the journey before you set out, read the last chapter first and then return to the beginning, wanting more. I also felt the book deserved a better title (the spiral concept, adopted from the South African missiologist Willem Saayman, is explained in the Introduction) and a publisher through whom it might find a wider exposure (although in this era of Amazon, this may not be quite so vital).
A key chapter for me in Ross’s first section is Chapter 7 “Christian Mission and the End of Poverty: Time for Eschatology” which begins with the excitement of the meeting of the G8 at Gleneagles in Scotland in 2005 and the MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign which ran at that time with a quarter of a million peaceful protestors gathered in Edinburgh. Being one of those who spent a day on the streets with my teenage nephew that day, I resonate with Ross’s enthusiasm for such a powerful and hopeful people’s movement, but it is his eschatological perspective which is more significant. Ross quotes Moltmann as saying, ‘The hearers of the promise become incongruous with the reality around them, as they strike out in hope towards the promised new future’ 6 and then goes on to assert that ‘Christian theology has had to grapple with such questions and has generated an eschatology which embodies both a fulfilment which is “in principle” already present and yet its fullness is still awaited’ (p. 105). He suggests that the contemporary struggle is an essential component of the theological process which will bring us to a true understanding of the ‘hope’ that is set before us. It is in struggling with the evils of poverty that we come closer to a clear vision of the reign of God in which poverty will be no more. In this context Ross recalls that Walter Wink reminds us that
Mahatma Gandhi spoke about ‘non-attachment to results’ as essential to the uphill struggle against entrenched evils. We must leave the outcome in the hands of God. Yet if we believe that God is the transforming power of justice in the world, we expect our invocation to make a difference. 7 (p. 110)
Ross continues,
The distance between what is achievable in history and that on which ultimate hope rests, opens up the space in which one may, one must, wholeheartedly participate in today’s struggle for justice while knowing that, whatever the outcome today, there will always be a further horizon calling one forward in the direction of God’s future. (p. 111)
The Scottish central section of the book contains two important historical chapters. The first (Chapter 12) looks at the life and ministry of “James Dougall 1893–1980: Architect of Post-War Scottish Foreign Mission Policy” a contemporary, and colleague, of the great General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society in London, Max Warren. Here Ross shows how in some ways Dougall acted as a precursor to both the bringing together of evangelism and social activism in the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 and the embracing by the wider evangelical community of the slogan ‘The whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world’. The Foreign Mission Committee report which Dougall edited for the 1957 Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Ross reminds us, contains the phrase, ‘Mission in the Biblical sense is the task of the whole Church to the whole life of the world’ (p. 181). Dougall’s central commitments were to evangelism with a social vision, education as the backbone of development, indigenisation and contextualisation, and to the primary place of the church in mission. In Chapter 13 Ross picks up some of these themes in his review “Edinburgh 1910 and the Scottish Experience of Serving in Mission 1950-2000”. Here he follows Andrew Walls in identifying three notable characteristics of Scottish mission, namely, its focus on the kingdom of God, the importance of the church in mission and a deep vein of strong theology.
The in-depth study, over several chapters, of the role of Scottish missionaries in the emergence of Malawi as an independent nation, in the final section of the book, is fascinating in its own right but my attention was particularly drawn to the four chapters (Chapters 22 to 25) which deal specifically with the challenge of mission in secular Europe. The first of these rehearses the challenges of mission in an alien, secular, post-Christendom culture and elicits hope through quoting David Smith, ‘It should be possible for churches possessing two centuries of accumulated experience and expertise in cross-cultural missionary endeavour to discover faithful and creative ways of ensuring that Christ becomes a living option for a generation shaped by postmodern culture’ 8 and glossing, with an allusion to Lamin Sanneh, 9 ‘Among the lessons learned from this experience would be the confidence that Christ is translatable’ (p. 352).
The last three chapters of the book are all very different but all challenging in their own ways. Chapter 23 is essentially a reading of the World Council of Churches document Together Towards Life (earlier reviewed in Chapter 10) in the context of ‘Liquid Modernity’. 10 This is followed in Chapter 24 by a description of an attempt to nurture a contemporary local, Scottish theology by a small group of Christians from different backgrounds meeting over a five-year period in Argyll, Scotland. Ross then comes, in chapter 25, face to face with Donald Trump and Brexit ending with just four pages on “Discipleship Today” and, in the final paragraph, Pope Francis’s encyclical ‘The Joy of the Gospel’. It is always good to end on a high note!
‘True Christian faith’, Ross assures us, ‘far from being a rallying point for hostility towards “others”, fosters a radical openness’. ‘The new centre found in Jesus Christ, writes Miroslav Volf, “opens the self up, makes it capable and willing to give itself for others and to receive others in itself”’ 11 (p. 412). This book certainly demands of the reader a willingness to open oneself to the ‘other’ and the ‘Other’.