Abstract
Western world mission initiatives since World War II have become captive to a dominant emphasis on socioeconomic amelioration. The Poverty Captivity of Mission departs from the economically multivalent mission patterns of Jesus, early Christian communities, and the medieval church. It typically recapitulates assumptions of Western and white superiority embedded in colonial emphases on “civilizing” mission. Strategies for its liberation include learning from the Majority World, reaching middle and elite classes as well as the poor, developing relationships of companionship and friendship, and employing asset-based community development.
Keywords
In an introductory mission course at a seminary some years ago, I opened the first class session by asking students to share their mission experiences. Almost all the students had firsthand international mission experience, which had taken the common contemporary form of participating in short-term mission trips to Africa, Asia, or Latin America—all on errands of socioeconomic amelioration in the Majority World.
But there were outliers, two students who the previous summer had been part of a team that went to Scotland. The trip was substantially an exposure trip to experience the Church of Scotland, which is Presbyterian. At the same time, the venture was termed a mission trip, and here is where the students described themselves as floundering. The trip was hard for them because it challenged their assumptions and jumbled their categories about what global cross-cultural mission is. As two white people in a fairly white Scottish city, the visit challenged their assumption that mission is from white people to people of color. Moreover, they weren’t automatically assigned to a homeless shelter or to a preschool for disadvantaged children, so the experience of these two middle-class US Americans in a Scottish middle-class city challenged their assumption that mission consists in socioeconomic amelioration for the poor, the poor who are black or brown. It challenged the widespread assumption that mission is from the West to the Rest. 1
In a similar vein, Mano Rumalshah, bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Peshawar in the Church of Pakistan and former head of United Society Partners in the Gospel, the British Anglican mission society, spoke about what he called “a deep pain” in his heart. “When we are reaching ‘down’ to people who are poor, who are of a lower class and who have little social influence, we call it ‘mission.’” he said. “When we go to people of our own status and class, or who are above us in economic and social status, we call it something else—‘friendship evangelism,’ ‘inter-church relations,’ ‘fraternal work,’ or something like that.” 2
Assumptions of Western mission work
Rumalshah’s comment and the students’ experience illustrate assumptions that are endemic in the pews and mission committees of North American church denominations, especially those of the “mainline” conciliar type—Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and the like. Mission is seen almost exclusively through the lens of economic, medical, or educational need.
This phenomenon illustrates the urgency of the theme of the 2019 annual meeting of the American Society of Missiology (ASM): “Lifestyles of the Rich and Faithful: Stewardship, Simplicity, and Mission.” The context of the theme, the conference organizers said, was globalization’s widening gap between the rich and the poor and the need for Christian mission to overcome the manifestations of economic inequality inherent in Euro-American mission during the colonial era as mission today seeks to live out an ethos of friendship and partnership.
The problem the conference sought to address is deeper than we may think. It is not only that some intercultural mission takes place amid economic inequality and that we need to address the problems that arise in such mission. It is rather that for many in North American churches, mission itself means that the relatively affluent are reaching out to the relatively poor, whether in their own communities, elsewhere in their own country, or in societies in other parts of the world. If they are not doing something for the poor, it is not mission, but something else. If they are reaching the poor in some way, then they are on mission. The associated vocabulary is familiar and ubiquitous as Christians speak of reaching out to “the needy,” “the marginalized,” and “those less fortunate than ourselves.”
The theme of the ASM conference actually replicated the problem as it stated: “In order to achieve genuine equality in friendships and ministry partnerships across cultures, power dynamics, wealth and poverty, personal lifestyles, authority structures, etc. are issues to which we must attend. Otherwise, the missionary community–host church relationship falls to default colonial patterns of inequality that do not reflect the kingdom of God.” 3 Thus the articulation of the conference theme itself assumed the rich-to-poor paradigm of mission, even as it invited ideas about how to mitigate the distorting and damaging effects of economic inequality.
What is often termed “the modern missionary movement” coincided with the prosperity and power of Europe and North America relative to many societies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania, so that missionaries from Europe and North America were indeed the relatively affluent going out to the relatively poor. A major difference between then and now, however, is that the initial impetus of Western mission beginning in the sixteenth century was evangelization as missionaries shared the gospel of God as revealed in Christ Jesus. Closely related to evangelization was church planting and the nurture of new Christian communities. Socioeconomic amelioration of conditions quickly followed as missionaries perceived various needs, hence the enormous investments in education, health care, agriculture, and justice initiatives that addressed such issues as slavery and women’s oppression. It is well known that these initiatives were often subsumed under the theme of so-called civilization, supported by colonial power, and buttressed by attitudes of racial and cultural superiority. The fact remains, however, that mission in the colonial era had at least three dimensions—evangelization, church nurture, and socioeconomic amelioration.
Today, by contrast, mission for many conciliar Christians in North America means just one thing: socioeconomic amelioration. Since the mid-twentieth century, many now view evangelization and church planting as the province only of indigenous churches, not missionaries from outside, and many disparage these activities in any case as religiously chauvinistic and culturally imperial. So today many short-term teams of youth and other parishioners undertake projects such as painting a school or building a home. More expert teams conduct medical clinics, drill wells, or undertake other projects that build infrastructure. Longer-term missionaries contribute to education, health care, agriculture, economics, church administration, and ministerial education. 4 Some emphases are more justice-oriented, such as land reform, rights of women and children, due process for stranded migrants, and liberation from human trafficking. Agencies and missionaries often draw inspiration from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Yet, whether it’s band-aid mission, so-called development mission, or justice mission, a common premise is that mission means reaching out to those whose socioeconomic conditions are poorer than one’s own. Books such as When Helping Hurts are salutary correctives, 5 but their premise is that poverty alleviation is the overall impetus of mission.
When mission is thus understood, we should not be surprised that missioners see themselves as the givers and the missionized as the receivers of the givers’ skills, expertise, money, and social capital. This premise is so endemic in Euro-American mission today that I term it the Poverty Captivity of Mission in the churches. People’s conception of mission is captive to the paradigm of the affluent reaching out to the poor, the poor being regarded as hampered by societal conditions that need the economic and structural correctives available from European and American societies. Often the attitudes of superiority and assumptions of resourcefulness underlying so-called development mission, including “sustainable development,” are indistinguishable from the assumptions that underlay missionaries’ vision of so-called civilizing mission during the colonial period. 6 Short-term mission teams who claim to be better than their benighted colonial mission forebears sometimes recapitulate in three weeks the well-known colonial mistakes of the last three hundred years. The Poverty Captivity of Mission aids and abets such expressions of neocolonialism and white privilege.
The Black Lives Matter movement, which has become global, especially since 2020, has renewed sensitivity to implicit racial bias, systemic racism, and what has been called “the white gaze,” the assumption that a white viewpoint is normative and that people of color are accountable to it. The Poverty Captivity of Mission in the churches often grows out of white people’s assumptions of cultural sophistication and superior expertise, assumptions that are rooted in white privilege and notions of white racial superiority.
Traditions of economically multivalent mission
Clearly, there is strong biblical warrant for mission with the poor in the Torah, in the Prophets, in the teaching of Jesus, and in the letters of Paul and James. 7 Liberation theology has gone further and made a strong case for God’s “preferential option for the poor.” 8 Jesus’s own socioeconomic status is debatable: Was he a peasant, or was he an artisan? What was the socioeconomic implication of his being called rabbi? Was he poverty- stricken, or was he a voluntary mendicant? Whatever the case, it is clear that he had a special identification with and concern for the poor. The beatitudes for the poor and woes for the rich, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the condemnation of economic predation, and the parable of the sheep and the goats are just a few examples. 9
Keeping faith with the biblical and dominical mandates of compassion and justice for the poor is not only a matter of practical missional obedience. The parable of the sheep and the goats suggests that reaching out to the poor and all who suffer offers a near-sacramental encounter with Christ himself, and a focus on the poor has been an important hallmark of mission spirituality. Well-known exemplars include Francis of Assisi in Italy, Charles de Foucauld in Algeria, Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and Ernesto Cardenal in Latin America. Less well known but notable were Murray and Mary Rogers and the ascetic Jyotiniketan Community in their successive sojourns in India, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Ontario, and Oxford between 1953 and 2006. 10
It is equally clear, however, that in his missional lifestyle, Jesus also reached out horizontally to those in his own socioeconomic stratum and up to those above his own stratum. Examples include his interactions with Zacchaeus, Matthew, and other tax collectors; the affluent women of Galilee who provided for him; the household of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus; as well as Simon the Pharisee, Jairus the synagogue patron, the Roman centurion whose servant Jesus healed, and Sanhedrin members Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. 11 The fact that a number of the more affluent people whom Jesus reached are named rather than anonymous indicates that early Christian tradition considered the upward economic and class reach of Jesus to be noteworthy. The blind beggar Bartimaeus is the one destitute person who is named in the gospels (Mark 10:46–52). With the exception of Matthew, Jesus’s named twelve male disciples and several female disciples appear to have been from the working class. Jesus’s ministry was, in short, socioeconomically multivalent and not exclusively directed to the poor.
Likewise, the socioeconomic diversity of Christian communities in the New Testament indicates that such missionaries as Peter, Paul, Barnabas, Priscilla and Aquila, and Apollos reached both the poor of the Hellenistic world and their own economic peers in the artisan class. 12 Although in his gospel Luke emphasizes Jesus’s identification with the poor, this note is missing in Luke’s missional narrative in Acts, which generally depicts the early missionaries functioning with people of their own social level. They also reached upward toward the rich and those of high standing and political power. 13
The missional patterns of the early centuries of the Jesus movement were similar—artisans, traders, and soldiers shared the gospel with their socioeconomic peers throughout the Roman Empire and were so effective that Constantine’s affirmation of Christianity in 313 was as much a ratification of a powerful movement as it was an innovation.
The socioeconomic profile of medieval monasticism for mission was mixed in that monks and nuns took a vow of poverty, but through royal and noble patronage their monasteries and convents quickly became wealthy and sometimes oppressive economic players, even while they provided peasants with opportunities for subsistence farming amid the societal dissolution that followed the breakup of the Roman Empire. Equipped by their multiclass experience at home, monk-missionaries bore witness to multiple economic strata when they went to other societies—to peasants, yes, but also to economic elites and royalty. Examples include Augustine with King Aethelberht in Canterbury in the seventh century, Boniface among the Frankish rulers in the eighth, Cyril and Methodius with the king of Moravia in the ninth, Matteo Ricci in the imperial court of China in the sixteenth, and Roberto de Nobili among the Hindu Brahmans of South India in the seventeenth.
The history highlights how distinctive the last four hundred years in Europe and North America have been in linking mission initiative to programs of socioeconomic beneficence. Moreover, since the mid-twentieth century the Euro-American conciliar churches have narrowed the content of mission to socioeconomic amelioration so exclusively that mission is now captive to the wealth-poverty paradigm in the minds of many ordinary Christians. This narrow vision is foreign to the missional practices of Jesus, the earliest Christian communities, and the medieval church.
It is also inconsistent with the churches’ own life in their home societies in Europe and North America. Local mission is often interpreted broadly to include virtually everything the church does, including maintaining congregations, many of which are mostly middle-class and some of which are distinctly wealthy. Why is the mission of worship and pastoral care among the wealthy in the suburbs of, say, Philadelphia or Los Angeles, legitimate and important, whereas mission in other countries focuses only on the poor?
The coinciding of the modern missionary movement with the economic and military might of Western nations exposed the movement to frequent and often justified charges of complicity with colonial authorities and with cultural imperialism. Nevertheless, under the sway of mission’s captivity to the wealth-poverty paradigm, contemporary Western Christians who echo that critique often fall unwittingly into colonial mind-sets and practices. As long as that paradigm holds sway, it is unlikely that efforts to renovate missional attitudes and patterns will be transformative.
Strategies of liberation
So how might we extricate ourselves from this missional cul-de-sac? I suggest five strategies for liberating mission from its captivity to the wealth-poverty paradigm.
First, we must challenge ourselves to broaden our intercultural missional outreach to include the middle classes and the affluent in other societies. Not only the favelas but also the office workers and entrepreneurs of São Paolo. Not only the so-called high-density suburbs of Johannesburg and Harare but also the rising black managers and the remaining white Africans. Not only the lower castes and stranded migrants of Asia but also the commercial elites of Bangalore, Kuala Lumpur, and Seoul. And not only the Majority World but equally Britain and Western Europe, and not only their pockets of poverty, but the comfortable areas of London and Paris, Barcelona and Milan. 14 It is now a truism that the missioner receives as much as or more than the host in the mission encounter, and this is as true of encounters with elites as it is of encounters with the poor.
I am not at all suggesting that we diminish our engagement with the poor, which must be a major missional priority amid the economic disparities of the twenty-first century. Rather, I am urging us to add engagement with the educational, professional, and economic middle classes and elites in other societies. Only by forcibly broadening the scope of Western mission initiative can we break the shackles of what is now a centuries-old mentality that assumes God is calling us mainly to play Lady Bountiful with those who have few resources or none. Obviously, this change would cost more money, but what does it say about us that we go mainly where exchange rates make mission relatively cheap for us?
Second, broadening our outreach to those socioeconomically parallel with us and above us would force us to engage more deeply with the breadth of God’s mission than we do when we indulge only our reflex for socioeconomic amelioration. In the new and unaccustomed environments of, say, office blocks in Tokyo or coffee shops in Berlin, we, like the two seminarians in Scotland, might find ourselves floundering. Like them, we would need to reroot ourselves in our Christian identity, listen deeply to the people around us, and discern more authentically how God might be inviting us into mission. It would be presumptuous to predict how the invitation might emerge, but I wonder: Might we be moved to work with people in developing ethical and vocational bearings? Might we feel called to reconciliation, which is, after all, the ultimate direction of God’s mission, for “in Christ God was reconciling the world to God . . . and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Cor 5:19)? Might we experience a renewed call to evangelism, which the Episcopal Church today defines appealingly as a “spiritual practice,” through which “we seek, name and celebrate Jesus’ loving presence in the stories of all people—then invite everyone to MORE.” 15 Might we feel called to address isolation and alienation and to work with people to build community? Might we feel called to catalyze creation care and climate justice more urgently? The humility and gospel authenticity that such a venture might engender would have a profound effect on our other more customary socioeconomic mission work.
Third, major Christian denominations have been conscientious in articulating the major elements they discern for faithfulness in God’s mission. The Anglican Communion and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America list gospel witness and proclamation first in their mission vision and, second, nurturing the vitality of the church. Alleviating human suffering is their third priority. Justice and reconciliation are their fourth priority, while the Anglicans close out their Five Marks of Mission with concern for creation care The range of missional activity from evangelism through racial reconciliation to climate justice can be included in the United Methodist Church statement, “The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world,” and the church’s news feed confirms that expectation. The 2018/19 consultation of Presbyterian World Mission with its global partners gathered reflections around the three foci of reconciliation, evangelism, and poverty, in that order. 16 Thus the Poverty Captivity of Mission eclipses the full missional vision that the churches themselves have articulated for their work both at home and abroad. The denominations’ broad and multifaceted mission vision can and should be a resource for encouraging agencies, congregations, synods, presbyteries, and dioceses to be similarly broad and multifaceted in their mission outreach.
Fourth, there are mission activists in the Majority World from whom we can learn about reaching out to multiple economic strata. The Indian Missionary Society and the Friends Missionary Prayer Band, both based in South India, have 500 and close to 1,000 missionaries, respectively, who work with socioeconomic peers elsewhere in India, chiefly in the north. 17 Korea now fields the second largest number of international missionaries, after the United States, and Korean mission leaders are becoming more self-missiologizing, as well as self-theologizing, as they seek to develop beyond Western models of mission. Africa may also provide models for mission that are not captive to the wealth-poverty paradigm of mission. 18
Fifth and finally, we need to appropriate more fully the emphases on companionship and friendship in mission that have been coming to the fore over the last several decades. A multidenominational consensus has developed that mission must begin not with analyzing, planning, and providing, but with meeting, listening, and relating—not doing, but being; not prescribing, but discovering; not instructing, but celebrating. Especially striking has been the emphasis on companionship and accompaniment in mission as replacements for partnership in mission, which often emphasized projects pursued on a business model. The ELCA has developed accompaniment most fully as its mission modality, while Anglicans have stressed the cognate concept of companionship. 19 Lutherans have companion synods, Anglicans companion dioceses, and Presbyterians companion presbyteries, terminology useful for expressing our aspirations.
Likewise, recognizing genuine friendship as a mark of authentic missional relationship can help liberate mission work from the wealth-poverty captivity. It is difficult, after all, for friendship to survive a relationship characterized by a one-directional traffic in beneficence from giver to receiver. As he inveighed against racism and paternalism in Western missionary practice at the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah, later the first Indian Anglican bishop, pleaded, “Through all the ages to come the Indian Church will rise up in gratitude to attest the heroism and self-denying labours of the missionary body. You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us FRIENDS!” 20 His plea is equally relevant today. Friendship’s four essential ingredients are desire, affection, mutuality, and peership. 21 While the first two are easy to come by, the Poverty Captivity of Mission is incompatible with the latter two. A useful self-scrutinizing question for Western mission practitioners in relation to our mission companions is, “Are we truly friends?”
A helpful current model for how mission companionship can work in situations of need and suffering is ABCD: Asset-Based Community Development. The premise of ABCD is that every “needy” or “disadvantaged” community has, in fact, much of what it needs within itself. Missional outsiders come not to initiate a “project” but to help the community to identify its material resources and gifts of skill and initiative and then to catalyze the mobilization of those assets. ABCD resolutely rejects the assumption that the outside missioner knows best and has the best; instead, it works with the conviction that the community itself knows best and has the best. 22
The Poverty Captivity of Mission is stubbornly entrenched in the churches, making us today perhaps more colonial than the colonials. Mission can be liberated from it only with a radical shift of perspective and initiative. For that, an equally radical humility will be required.
Footnotes
Notes
Author biography