Contemporary Ecumenical Missiology and the Renewal of Christian Theology

There is a symbiotic relationship between mission and theology. The one needs the other in order to fulfil its vocation. As Andrew Walls once explained,

The purpose of theology is to make or clarify Christian decisions. Theology is about choices; it is the attempt to think in a Christian way. And the need for choice and decision arise from specific settings in life. In this sense, the theological agenda is culturally induced; and the cross-cultural diffusion of Christian faith makes creative theological activity a necessity. ¹

There was a time when those with a mission at heart had little time for theology – there was too much to do! At its height, the Western missionary movement was much more activist than reflective. This has changed as the Western missionaries slowly realized that the coming of God's kingdom did not entirely depend on their frenetic activism. Instead, a theological understanding of the mission of God became the guiding light. As this article aims to show, contemporary ecumenical missiology is deeply theological in its approach. It therefore invites broader consideration of what its distinctive emphases might mean for the discipline of theology and the practice of theological education. The article engages particularly with two seminal statements of ecumenical missiology that have been produced during the early decades of the 21st century. The first is the World Council of Churches 2012 mission affirmation Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, only the second official statement on mission and evangelism from the WCC in its entire history. ² The other is the Arusha Call to Discipleship issued by the 2018 WCC World Mission Conference held at Arusha, Tanzania. ³ Reference will also be made to the more extended Arusha Conference Report, which elaborates on the themes that feature in the short 12-point Call. ⁴

Doing Theology With Life Itself at Stake

“Life” is a concept with great biblical and theological resonance. God is the creator of all life. Jesus promised abundant life. In the Creed, the Holy Spirit is called the giver of life. Yet it has seldom been the central, driving force in the production of Christian theology. Much more often, the central focus has been on the question of salvation: how as humans we can be rescued from bondage, how the lost can be found, and how we can be restored to the relationship with God for which we were created. When this is couched in terms of reconciliation, it extends from the vertical to the horizontal and addresses questions of relationships within the human community: how peace can replace conflict, how hatred can be turned into love, and how enemies can become friends. These questions have also been motivators for missions across the centuries. But in our century mission has had to engage a new horizon, which involves looking beyond the human community and its internal existential challenges to set it in the broader context of the future of life on earth. The ecological crisis now finding expression in rapid global warming has provoked fresh thinking about the mission. Might it also renew the concerns and the content of Christian theology? No longer can questions concerning the salvation and reconciliation of humans be abstracted from the earth that gives them life. ⁵

Together Towards Life poses a question that resets the dial not only for mission but also for theology:

We want to affirm our spiritual connection with creation, yet the reality is that the earth is being polluted and exploited. Consumerism triggers not limitless growth but rather endless exploitation of the earth's resources. Human greed is contributing to global warming and other forms of climate change. If this trend continues and earth is fatally damaged, what can we imagine salvation to be? ⁶

This question points towards a new register on which to assess issues of sin and redemption, one that extends its range beyond the human community to the entirety of the natural world in which it is set. As Together Towards Life trenchantly states: “Humanity cannot be saved alone while the rest of the created world perishes. Eco-justice cannot be separated from salvation, and salvation cannot come without a new humility that respects the needs of all life on earth.” ⁷ This sets a new agenda for theology, and it is an urgent one.

All the more so when the threat to life is compounded by the way in which the human community is organising itself. The 2018 WCC Arusha Call to Discipleship is framed by a recognition of, “death-dealing forces that are shaking the world order and inflicting suffering on many.” ⁸ It does not leave these forces anonymous but proceeds to name them quite explicitly:

We observed the shocking accumulation of wealth due to one global financial system, which enriches the few and impoverishes many (Isaiah 5:8). This is at the root of many of today's wars, conflicts, ecological devastation, and suffering (1 Timothy 6:10). ⁹

One crucial issue that needs to be firmly grasped theologically is the sinister interconnection between the exploitation of the earth's resources and the exclusionary dynamics of the prevailing global financial system. Climate scientist Bill McGuire has commented trenchantly on this:

Our climate is being destroyed by unadulterated, free-market capitalism – an ideology that simply cannot be sustained on a small planet with limited resources. It is a system that has no interest in the greater good and that rewards inordinate capital and the few that have it, rather than the majority who don’t. It cares nothing for the environment or biodiversity and doesn’t give a fig about the fate of future generations. In fact, it is exactly the wrong economic system to have in place at a time of global crisis. ¹²

A theological response will need to be characterized by both confidence and humility. At a time when the self-esteem of theologians has taken a battering as secular visions have pushed them out to the margins, there may be a need to regain confidence in what theology has to offer. The climate crisis is exposing the limits of human rationality left to itself, since many of its causes arise from the European (so-called) enlightenment. Can this be a time when theological perspectives can gain a hearing, even from those who had earlier dismissed them as irrelevant? Already in 1990, 34 internationally renowned scientists appealed for a theological response to the ecological crisis. In their “Open Letter to the Religious Community,” they stated that: “Efforts to safeguard and cherish the environment need to be infused with a vision of the sacred.” ¹⁴ The scientists had the humility to recognise that science by itself lacks the motivational power to change human behaviour. This has been borne out by subsequent developments as the science demonstrating the need for radical behavioural change has become ever more compelling but the response of the human community is ever more inadequate. The failure of political leadership on this issue presents an immense monument to human folly.

It is obvious to informed observers that, as Cynthia Moe-Lobeda explains,

… for ecological healing to begin, people of the high-consuming industrialized world must make radical changes in how we live in order to reduce our devastating impact on Earth's fragile biosphere and eco-systems. We must diminish vastly our greenhouse gas emissions, our consumption of the world's goods and our production of toxins and other wastes. ¹⁵

However, besides a recovery of confidence, theology will also need a distinct humility. This will not be a matter of the queen of sciences being restored to her throne. For it will require a shared effort on the part of many different players. For one thing, it will make no sense for Christian theology to engage the climate crisis in a way that excludes the contributions of other religions. This is the ultimate ecumenical issue that puts firmly in perspective not only the differences between different church traditions but also those between the different religions. ¹⁷ The required theology will also be profoundly interdisciplinary, only able to fulfil its role through deep engagement with a whole range of sciences. It is a time to “draw the circle wide,” as one of the anthems of the ecumenical movement would put it, but perhaps with a wider circle than ever before. Theology will need the humility to realize that, in the face of this crisis, it has much to learn from other intellectual disciplines. It will also need the confidence to mine its own sources and traditions, knowing that these are urgently needed to meet a crisis where life itself is at stake. Humility and confidence will need to go together as theologians rethink, inter alia, the theology of God, theological cosmology, theological anthropology, soteriology, hamartiology and eschatology. ¹⁸

In his Moderatorial address to the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism meeting in March 2021, Metropolitan Geevarghese Mar Coorilos recalled the statement of the WCC Canberra Assembly, held in 1991:

A reconciled and renewed creation is the goal of the church's mission. The vision of God uniting all things in Christ is the driving force of its life sharing. Sharing also means we work to overcome economic disparities and social antagonisms between classes, castes, races, sexes, and cultures…while unity and mission are inseparable, we do not need to achieve visible unity of the churches before we address the needs of the world together. ¹⁹

Who Does Theology?

Among the academic guilds, there is one for theologians. Like their peers in other academic disciplines, they have gone through years of training, acquired a specialist vocabulary and become familiar with the key reference points that frame theological discussion. As their scholarly work becomes more elaborate and sophisticated, they commonly concentrate their engagement among a relatively small circle of fellow scholars who have developed similar specialist interests. While some theologians actively seek to bring their work to bear on the life of church and society, it is widely understood that they occupy an intellectual environment that is restricted to specialists. Institutional structures have been developed to support the pursuit of theology – University faculties, independent colleges, academic appointments, conferences, journals and publishers. When people think of theologians, they think of scholars active within these structures. When society understood itself in Christian terms, it could be regarded as being among its pillars. With the secular turn of modern times, however, they have come increasingly under question. Theology as a discipline has been reduced in scale and pushed towards the periphery of the academic world. This might be a polite way of phasing it out. But is there another possibility – that it could find renewal precisely on the periphery? Here contemporary ecumenical missiology might have some relevant experience to offer.

Like theologians, missionaries are often viewed through a stereotypical lens. They are understood to be the Europeans and Americans who, fired by religious zeal and confident of their superiority, set about introducing Christianity to African and Asian communities where it had not been known before. Postcolonial consciousness has made most contemporary Europeans and Americans acutely uncomfortable about this episode, which they believe belongs firmly in the past. Many are unaware that, in the meantime, there has been a radical rethinking of the meaning of mission and of what is involved in being an agent of mission. Recent ecumenical thinking has discerned that mission usually works not by a supposedly powerful centre reaching out to the supposedly benighted periphery but rather the other way around. It is a matter of “mission from the margins.” ²¹

Together Towards Life sets this in the context of the “changing landscapes” of world Christianity. ²² It is no longer possible to think in terms of mission in terms of geographical expansion from a Christian centre to far-off “unreached territories.” ²³ In fact, today the majority of Christians are found in the global South and East. There is more to this than an alteration in geography. It has prompted a complete rethink of the meaning of mission:

Mission has been understood as a movement taking place from the centre to the periphery, and from the privileged to the marginalized of society. Now people at the margins are claiming their key role as agents of mission and affirming mission as transformation. ²⁴

The critical question in focus here is that of agency: who are the agents who make mission happen? A radical answer is being offered, subverting the assumption that the powerful and the well-resourced are best placed to be the agents of mission. As Together Towards Life states:

People on the margins have agency, and can often see what, from the centre, is out of view. People on the margins, living in vulnerable conditions, often know what exclusionary forces are threatening their survival and can best discern the urgency of their struggles. ²⁵

Theology, whether voluntarily or not, finds itself increasingly pushed to the margins, both in the academic world and the wider society. For those with the study of theology at heart, this might seem like an experience of loss, but what if it turns out to be a fresh opportunity? The “who” question might prove to be critical here. As mission has been reinvented by new thinking about agency, might the same be applicable to theology? Here the pioneers of liberation and contextual theology have already been at work. With his conception of theology as a critical reflection on praxis, Gustavo Gutierrez pointed to a new kind of agency in theological production. He proposed that the theology of liberation, “offers us not so much a new theme for reflection as a new way to do theology.” ²⁸ As he explained,

It is to reflect with a view to action which transforms the present. But it does not mean doing this from an armchair; rather it means sinking roots where the pulse of history is beating at this moment and illuminating history with the Word of the Lord of history, who irreversibly committed himself to the present moment of humankind to carry it to its fulfilment. ²⁹

The agent of theology, on this view, is not the one serenely reflecting from the comfort of an armchair. Rather it is the one who is immersed in the experience of the people, in their struggle for justice. This kind of theology “rises only at sundown” ³⁰ because during the day it is too busy addressing the crises of the hour in solidarity with the people. “This is a theology,” wrote Gutierrez, “which does not stop with reflecting on the world, but rather tries to be part of the process through which the world is transformed.” ³¹

This points us towards a new kind of agency in theology where the theologians are not only highly trained specialists who are comfortably situated in the academic citadels of the world's powerful nations. No less important, perhaps more important, are those with little academic training who are deeply involved as faithful people in the real-life struggles through which injustice is combatted and the kingdom of God comes. Robert Schreiter drew our attention to the “small Christian communities” that have been relating their life of faith to the struggles of their everyday lives in often difficult situations. ³² “Understanding the role of the community in the development of theology,” suggested Schreiter,

shows how the poor become subjects of their own history. It allows us to understand the special preference of the God of Israel, the God of Jesus Christ, has had for the poor in their understanding of the Good News. Through the activity of these communities of the poor on virtually every continent, the whole Christian church has been profoundly enriched. ³³

This is not to say that the academically trained professional theologian has become redundant. It is to say, however, that they need to do their work out of a vital connection with the experience of the community of faith. As Schreiter explains, “The theologian cannot create a theology in isolation from the community's experience; but the community has need of the theologian's knowledge to ground its own experience within the Christian traditions of faith.” ³⁴ Theologians, instead of doing theology from comfortable positions of power, need to find a vital connection with communities on the margins. They need to become, in the language of Antonio Gramsci, “organic intellectuals.” ³⁵ Thinking in such new ways about who does theology opens up exciting possibilities for the renewal of theology.

Spirituality, Discipleship and Transformation

It also means that the mode of doing theology might need to be rethought. Critical voices from the Global South question how far theology as a discipline has become trapped in rational categories when it needs to be nourished by other dimensions of human life and experience. Malawian theologian Augustine Musopole, for example, expressed his concern that theology has become,

a technical and specialized scholarly undertaking modelled after mathematics and the sciences. Its character is the logical coherence of the system around some arbitrary organizing principle, and not the reality of Jesus in people's lives which was at the centre of New Testament Christianity and which gave rise to Christian theology in the first place. ³⁶

One is the pneumatological turn in missiological thinking that has come with the twenty-first century. Together Towards Life is the first comprehensive mission statement to be framed in terms of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit. It goes so far as to say, “Life in the Holy Spirit is the essence of mission, the core of why we do what we do and how we live our lives.” ³⁷ This leads to a distinctly theological understanding of mission:

… by the Spirit we participate in the mission of love that is at the heart of the life of the Trinity. This results in Christian witness which unceasingly proclaims the salvific power of God through Jesus Christ and constantly affirms God's dynamic involvement, through the Holy Spirit, in the whole created world. ³⁸

Several streams have flown together to place the Holy Spirit in the foreground of ecumenical missiological thinking. Though they might at first appear to be at opposite ends of the ecclesial spectrum, both Eastern Orthodox and Pentecostal Christians bring a strong theology of the Holy Spirit to ecumenical life. A further contribution is brought by the many communities in the Global South that are alert to life's spiritual dimension and cherish the power of the Holy Spirit. It is an emphasis that chimes also in the Global North where many are disillusioned with institutional religion but seeking spiritual authenticity. Just as mission has been re-energized by this renewed focus on the Holy Spirit, might it also hold promise for theology? Gustavo Gutierrez pointed out that,

In the early centuries of the church, what we now term as theology was closely linked to the spiritual life. It was essentially a meditation on the Bible geared toward spiritual growth … The spiritual function of theology, so important in the early centuries and later regarded as parenthetical, constitutes, nevertheless, a permanent dimension of theology. ³⁹

The Arusha World Mission Conference of 2018 was shaped by the insights of Together Towards Life but gave them fresh coherence and further impetus with its emphasis on transforming discipleship. This was a response to a growing consensus across different ecclesial traditions that the time had come for renewed attention to Christ's call to us to follow him, to become his disciples. Bringing together the two core Christian concepts of “mission” and “discipleship” proved to be timely and fruitful. ⁴¹ Pope Francis captured the point when he said that, “Every Christian is a missionary to the extent that he or she has encountered the love of God in Christ Jesus: we no longer say that we are ‘disciples’ and ‘missionaries,’ but rather that we are always ‘missionary disciples.’” ⁴² The Arusha conference took up this connection and sought to elucidate the meaning of mission in terms of discipleship. Hence the Arusha Call opens by stating that, “We are called by our baptism to transforming discipleship: a Christ-connected way of life in a world where many face despair, rejection, loneliness and worthlessness.” ⁴³

The potency of the concept of discipleship in contemporary ecumenical missiology derives, at least in part, from its capacity to bring together piety and prophecy, inward spiritual life and outward witness that engages today's most painful and pressing public issues. As the Arusha Report explained,

… discipleship is an invitation both to a relationship and to a vocation. A relationship that is humble, vulnerable, and mutual, and finds itself growing in following Christ, in Christ's own ways; in finding God at work in situations of strife and struggle; and in empowering people to resist and transform structures and cultures in the name of the triune God. It is, therefore, a vocation of collaborating with God for the transformation of the world. ⁴⁴

What then of the vocation of theology? Contemporary ecumenical missiology has a twofold proposal to offer, even if the two have often been seen as polar opposites. On the one hand, it calls for cultivation of the inward spiritual life, a prioritising of piety. This takes effect in a life of discipleship. The answer proposed by the Arusha conference to the cry of today's world was not a formula, not a philosophy, not a programme of action. Rather, it was a “way of life.” ⁴⁶ Neither institutional authority nor feats of intellectual prowess are likely to prove convincing in today's context. The Arusha conference perceived that it is a living out of the life to which Christ calls us that might cut through. Theology too may need to recover its integral connection with the spirituality and discipleship of the people of God.

On the other hand, this is not about a retreat into the inward life that means withdrawing from engagement with issues of justice and freedom in the wider society and the wider world. Hence the language being used is that of transforming discipleship. The transformation is inward as there is a life of faith to be lived. But it is also outward as Jesus' disciples are sent, as he was, to engage with the most painful and ugly realities that face us in the world of our time. Disciples who are themselves being transformed become agents of transformation in situations of poverty, injustice, conflict and turmoil. This double dynamic can also have profound implications for the business of doing theology. Not only does the discipline of theology need to be informed by the transformation taking place as discipleship takes effect, it needs to become an active part of the process. The kind of theology that is needed is that which can both nourish the inward life of faith and empower a transformative engagement with the social, political and economic issues of the day.

Education and Formation

If the above-mentioned “hints” to theology from contemporary ecumenical missiology have any validity, they need to be applied when it comes to theological education and formation. This is not a time for complacency. Those undergoing theological education are already alert to the fact that life itself is at stake. They expect and need a formation that equips them to face a crisis like no other. The frame of reference within which they form their theological mind cannot be a narrow one. It needs to extend as wide as the whole creation and into every dimension of the current climate crisis. This means it needs to be collaborative and interdisciplinary, cultivating a broad frame of reference rather than any narrow speciality. There is a need to “draw the circle wide” and engage with as diverse a range of partners as possible. In today's context, learning to do theology means learning to participate in a big conversation where there are many contributors whose insights are needed for the integrity of the theological task.

There is also a need for theological education to be alert to the social positions of those who are involved. Regardless of the social background of the aspiring theologian, their work needs to be grounded in solidarity with the marginalized. No longer can theology be regarded as simply a matter of acquiring book knowledge. It has to be regarded as a matter of being formed as an “organic intellectual.” It is through the genuine experience of belonging to marginalized communities that authentic theological insights will take shape. This may involve considerable discomfort, but good theology will not be done by those who are comfortable. Rather than valuing detachment from contemporary struggles, it will promote involvement in them. The spirituality of the people will be a stimulus and a source for theology; to become an effective theologian will mean sharing in it. The life of discipleship will become the raw material for doing theology; it will need to be extensively explored by those undergoing theological formation. In these ways, contemporary ecumenical missiology can offer some pointers that might help to promote the renewal of theology and the reshaping of theological education.