504 - The Foreign Missionary Today

The Foreign Missionary Today
By Douglas Webster

THERE is general agreement that the Church must be involved in mission; this has become part of the jargon of ecumenical talk. It is by no means always clear what is meant by mission, and there is very considerable confusion about the function of the missionary. Much of this confusion arises from the fact that a missionary is usually a foreigner, sent from one country to another from one culture to another, and from one Church to another. Is the foreign missionary only a temporary expedient, to be replaced as soon as possible by nationals, or is there something of permanent value in the "foreignness" of the missionary?

Looking back into the past we can trace three main patterns in the role of the foreign missionary: the pioneer, the manager, the specialist. The pioneer had the field to himself. He had enormous physical difficulties, as the merest acquaintance with the life of a Henry Martyn or a David Livingstone shows. There were dangers and handicaps, but spiritually the pioneer was free. His only limits, once he was in, were the bounds of his own energy and the will of God. He could virtually do what he liked. He could be an individualist and a dictator. There was no red tape and there were few other people to be considered or consulted. For certain temperaments this was an ideal and inviting situation and an enviable opportunity. In this form, however, such a pioneering opportunity exists nowhere today. This type of pioneering is out. That is why the majority of the great missionary biographies of the past are dangerously misleading in missionary education today. In so far as they inspire, they are good; but if they create a desire to imitate, they are fatal.

The managerial phase was an inevitable sequel; it underlines the success of the pioneers. Schools, colleges, and hospitals were founded, and where there are large institutions there must be managers. Many missionaries who went out to teach or to heal during this present century soon found themselves doing far less than they, would wish in these spheres; willingly or unwillingly they were

505 - The Foreign Missionary Today

saddled with a managerial job, spending much of their time behind an office-desk, running a large institution or a network of schools or driving round in a car inspecting them. There was no one else to do this; it fell to the foreign missionary. Their apparent love for administration was misunderstood by the African and the Asian. All too easily as the system grew more complex and the hierarchy (ecclesiastical, medical, or educational) grew more extensive, the missionary withdrew only upwards into a position of higher status and increasing power. Looking at this, the national came to think that the reward of faithful service was a graduation from pastoral and personal and evangelistic work to administrative responsibility. The ambition of many African pastors is to be promoted from pastoral work altogether and to be like, or better still to succeed, the missionary manager. The managerial phase, though belonging to a past era, still continues. In some places it must continue; elsewhere it ought gradually to end; nowhere should it be regarded as permanent.

There has also been the specialist. More and more, as nationals have acquired competence and skill in many fields, various jobs formerly done by missionaries have been handed over, and rightly so. For example, instead of a missionary being a nurse, plain and simple, she has had to be a nursing sister or a sister tutor. Instead of teaching in a primary school (or its equivalent) the missionary has been required to teach specialist subjects in a secondary school or to, do teacher training. The Church has needed experts in social and welfare work, in training the ministry in theological seminaries, in developing youth and Sunday School work, etc. Thus missionaries have been given new opportunities for pioneering: pioneering in race relations, in preventive medicine, in educational experiments, in various forms of research. A new pioneering age has opened up; it seems likely to continue. The spiritual opportunities are enormous for the right kind of specialist with the right spiritual qualities.

But it looks as if the missionary of tomorrow will have to fulfil a fourth role, different from any of these: that of guide, philosopher, and friend. Less and less will he have a status in any kind of hierarchy in Church or state; less and less will he have a leading or dominant voice in public; more and more will he depend on his own moral and spiritual influence and authority; more and more will he have to be an expert in right relationships, devoid of all awkward

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individualism. To take an illustration from rugby football, he will be the scrum half and the back rather than among the forwards or three-quarters. But he will still be in the team and in the game.

I

If we ask why this change must come about, the answer can be found in giving full weight to two relatively new factors in the modern situation. First, there is the general anti-white and anti-West mood which pervades all Asia and most of Africa. Its political focus is nationalism; its spiritual focus, some newly roused non-Christian system. Even within the Church itself this mood can be a powerful emotion. The white man's word is no longer his bond. To be white can no longer be regarded as an unqualified advantage in most areas of the world where foreign missionaries are called to work. A missionary in charge of a big town parish in Pakistan tells how, if he does not please one of the groups in his church, a whispering campaign sooner or later begins, and "out with the foreigner" becomes the slogan. To underestimate the strength of, this feeling is gravely to misunderstand the Christian mission as it is today.

The second factor to be taken fully into account is the self- consciousness of the Younger Churches. Unsatisfactory though this: description may be, the fact remains that they are younger, and so far no one has found a more suitable title. Adolescents are self-conscious and they do very easily, and often wrongly, suspect the, motives of adults who interfere with them. Most of the Younger Churches are no longer trusting children but self-conscious and sometimes suspicious adolescents wanting desperately to be grown-up, but not quite able to pull it off. In this situation the very presence of the missionary can be aggravating and can stir up bitterness and resentment, particularly if he is in a position of power and authority over nationals. For that reason some of the most perceptive missionaries are eager to shed all vestiges of power onto the shoulders of nationals, wherever possible, and to withdraw either sideways or downwards, working alongside nationals in partnership or under them in loyalty. Both these forms of witness are of immense importance and they are needed on a much larger scale.

Naturally all this creates a number of special problems for the foreign missionary in many places. First, there is the temptation

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of disillusionment. In practice it is very difficult to combine the managerial role, forced on many missionaries in some shape or other, with spiritual and evangelistic work. Not impossible, but very difficult. Some young missionaries find that the missionary vocation is not what they expected it to be. They ask whether they would not have had a greater opportunity for spiritual work if they had stayed at home. Some of them also ask whether much of this kind of work could not be done equally well and acceptably by someone who though a Christian was not a missionary. There are scores of jobs for Christians overseas, but not all these jobs need be done by missionaries, especially if we think of the missionary as having special responsibility for the evangelistic outreach of the Church and its spiritual growth.

A second problem is the acquiring of a right balance of sensitiveness. Unless the missionary is sufficiently sensitive to be vulnerable and to feel the full pain of human life and the weakness of the Church, he is not likely to be very effective. "He who suffers most has most to give." But if he feels the squalor and the poverty and the sin and the evil too acutely and is unable to keep casting the burden upon the Lord, he will not retain either his sanity or his faith. Again, coming into a situation from outside, one is often able to see and assess certain things more clearly than those who have been long familiar with them. The role of the missionary must be to ask questions about the ends and purposes of things which may have been blindly accepted from the past. Part of his value is to bring into a situation a new angle, a new background of experience, a new critical faculty as well as a new charity. Never to question ends is to become a dead end. All the ends of Church and mission need constant questioning. But always to be questioning them is to become a nuisance and to lose one's capacity to help. A right balance is not easily come by. All this serves to underline the crucial importance of missionary training in addition to professional training before Christian men and women are let loose as missionaries in some of the most delicate and explosive situations in the world.

A third problem is that of insecurity. This does not arise merely out of local or international politics, for that must be expected. But for many missionaries with an ear to the ground there is the uncertainty whether even the Church still wants them, whether they

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have been imposed and forced upon a reluctantly receiving Church, and whether they are doing a job which an Asian or an African might now do. Fully aware of these difficulties an experienced missionary from India writes about the kind of young missionary the Indian Church wants. "He must not be an individualist or, in the old sense, a pioneer. He must come in the spirit of saying to the Indian Church, 'What do you -want me to do?' rather than 'Here is something which I want to do for you; will you let me do it? He must be ready always to take second place and often see Indians less qualified than himself set above him; but he must not refuse office and responsibility when it comes to him at the call of the Indian Church. He must come for life and not in the spirit of a trial marriage, and that in spite of the fact that political conditions might at some time make life service impossible." Insecurity vulnerability, disillusionment: this is what the modern missionary lets himself in for.

II

Has he then any significant role still to play? Before answering this with too swift a negative, we should consider the threefold significance of the foreign missionary and ask whether this significance is not of some permanent value so long as the Church lasts.

1. The foreign missionary is a symbol. He symbolizes and in his very person reminds people that the Christian Gospel and the Christian Church belong to an international and a supernatural order. There can be a Church of a nation, but there can never be a nationalist Church. Our Western Churches are for the most part far too national. Every Church needs for its health foreigners in its midst. But no Church can ultimately fulfil its function in the life of a particular nation if it is permanently led by foreigners. The danger of the foreign missionary in the Younger Churches only exists in so far as he continues to lead them or to rule them longer than is necessary. The value of the foreign missionary in Africa, or Asia is that he acts as a reminder that no Church can live to itself or be insular. The most important thing we can do is to hasten the day when in Africa and Asia "foreign" no longer means "Western." That is why there is such incalculable gain in doing everything possible to encourage spiritual traffic between the Younger

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Churches, especially between the two continents of Africa and Asia. All the evidence shows that the advantages are immense.

But there is more to it than this. By being foreign the missionary bears witness to a fundamental theological truth. Jesus is always a foreigner. He is as much a foreigner to Britain and America as to Asia and Africa. He is a foreigner inasmuch as he is a Jew, a wandering Jew, seeking a home wherever people welcome and shelter him. He is yet more a foreigner because he is divine, a man from outside, from outer space. He came down into this world from outside it. His origin is alien. The only people who could claim Jesus as a national rejected him for not being a nationalist, and in that rejection their own nationalism came to an end in little more than a generation. No Church can have a national Christ, and the supreme symbolic role of the foreign missionary is to bear witness to this by his very foreignness and difference. The Gospel always comes from outside. It is revealed, not evolved.

2. The foreign missionary is a challenge. At his best he is a challenge to the highest. The way of the world, which has captured so much of the Church, is to climb, to be a go-getter on the up and up, to seek for status, wealth, importance, recognition. Jesus renounced all this. The foreign missionary has renounced it too. He has voluntarily embraced a lower standard of living, in some cases even poverty, in a way that few Africans have begun to understand. Those who do understand often regard the missionary as a fool. That is some measure of the extent to which the West has already conquered Africa. But this kind of folly is needed as a corrective, a challenge and a check to all the corroding materialism that we of the West have implanted upon the rest of the world. The value of there being a few people, serving a Church, with absolutely nothing to gain for themselves, is very great indeed and beyond all exaggerating. St. Paul did this. He was misunderstood for doing so; but in doing it he set a missionary pattern for all time.

The missionary is also a challenge to evangelism. In one place after another only the missionary is concerned with evangelism. This may be far from ideal, but it is true. The pastors and teachers and catechists are for the most part too busy with the machinery of the Church; even those with an evangelistic longing are often not free to fulfil it. In many countries where the welfare state is developing, schools and hospitals are becoming the responsibility

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of government; generous medical and educational grants are avai…able. But no government will pay for evangelists. Only the Church will pay for this. It remains true therefore that the greatest gift the Church in the West can make to a Younger Church is the gift of one who, in addition to being professionally trained and spiritually qualified, is able to look on people with the eyes of the compassionate Christ and so to "do the work of an evangelist." A missionary in a rural area of India writes: "A village worker, doctor or nurse, must be first and foremost an evangelist. If she has only her professional abilities to offer she will soon become discouraged and defeated in the face of the apathy, indifference and ignorance." Evangelism includes service but it is more than service. The missionary who has been gripped by the thrill of evangelism knows the power of the Gospel to convert and redeem men, whatever their state. With such a Gospel lie can accept no lesser goal. When others give up, he goes on.

3. The foreign missionary is a mediator. "As the Father has sent me, even so send I you." Jesus trained his disciples to be mediators from the earliest days. At the feeding of the five thousand, he "blessed and broke and gave the loaves to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds." As time went on they had to learn to mediate more than bread. So the missionary in his own life and service is a representative person, mediating the love, the care, the intercession, of one Church for another. The highest inter-Church aid is in terms of persons, not money. And just as Jesus represented and mediated God to men when he was on earth-and got crucified for doing so-the Church, and in a special sense. the missionary, represents and mediates Christ in various situations across the world. In so far as this representation and mediation are genuine, in many of these situations the mission will lead directly but inevitably into the passion. "The Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister" (there is the mission) "and to give his life a ransom for many" (there is the passion). In a world such as ours the eventual outcome of an accepted mission is a re-enacted passion. Just to be in some of these places, where people starve and suffer, where Christians quarrel endlessly and go to law against each other, where the spiritual level of the Church is at an all-time low, where hardly a soul is attempting any evangelism, where even the clergy are sometimes corrupt as well as ignorant, where the least.

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spark of spiritual inspiration or initiative is criticized or quenched-just to be there, loving, serving, caring, praying, is to be in a place of crucifixion and to learn something of the meaning of our Lord's Cross, not out of a book but by sharing it. Possibly the highest and most worthwhile role of the foreign missionary today is to be in that kind of place, enduring that kind of ministry and passion, and going through with it to the end, which though bitter may also be glorious.

The missionary can personalize the mission and the passion. Mission and passion can never be separated. They have belonged together since a Hebrew poet in exile composed the great Songs of the Servant. Today the missionary may be called to represent the divine and always foreign Christ not only in his mission but also in his passion. Not many missionaries in the modern world are romping home with success. In many places they are re-discovering that their function is not to be little lords, as once upon a time, but little servants, insecure, vulnerable, acutely hurt, often despised and unheeded, just as Jesus was. But that is why they are there, not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give their life in whatever way the Lord shall ordain and accept. And already some of these foreign missionaries, who have learned in their own situation something of the passion of Jesus, are beginning to discover what can be known only on the other side of Calvary-the power of the Resurrection and the meaning of Pentecost.