Theology Today - Vol 40, No. 3 - October 1983 - ARTICLE

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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 pioneers had the field to themselves. They had enormous physical difficulties, as the merest acquaintance with the life of Henry Martyn or David Livingstone shows. There were dangers and handicaps, but spiritually pioneers were free. Their only limits, once they were in, were the bounds of their own energy and the will of God. They could virtually do what they liked. They could be individualists and dictators. 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

Douglas Webster is Canon Residentiary and Chancellor of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. As Professor of Mission at the Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham and a member of the staff of the Church Missionary Society of the Church of England, Canon Webster has had unusual firsthand experience of Christian missions in many countries and especially in Africa and Asia. He is the author of numerous works on missions, such as And Who Is My Neighbor? (1955), Listen to the Wind (1958), Not Ashamed (1970), Unchanging Mission (1966), and Yes to Mission (1966). This article, somewhat revised and with an added Postcript, first appeared in THEOLOGY TODAY in the January 1960 issue (Vol. XVI, No. 4, pp. 504-511).

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soon found themselves doing far less than they would wish in these spheres; willingly or unwillingly they were 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 mas 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, 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 missionaries of tomorrow will have to fulfill a fourth role, different from any of these: that of guide, philosopher, and friend. Less and less will they have a status in any kind of hierarchy in church or state; less and less will they have a leading or dominant voice in public; more and more will they depend on their own moral and spiritual influence and authority; more and more will they have to be experts in right relationships, devoid of all awkward individualism.

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

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be regarded as an unqualified advantage in most areas of the world were 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. Adolescents are self-conscious and they 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 when 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 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 missionaries are sufficiently sensitive to be vulnerable and to feel the full pain of human life and the weakness of the church, they are not likely to be very effective. "He who suffers most has most to give." But if missionaries feel the squalor and the poverty and the sin and the evil too acutely and are unable to keep casting the burden upon the Lord, they will not retain either their sanity or their 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, to bring

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into a situation a new angle, a new background of experience, a new critical faculty as well as 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 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 modern missionaries let themselves in for.

III

Has the missionary 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. The figure of the missionary 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 fulfill its function in the life of a particular nation if it is permanently led by foreigners.

The danger of foreign missionaries in the younger churches only exists in so far as they continue to lead or to rule longer than is necessary. The value of foreign missionaries in Africa or Asia is that they act as reminders 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

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"foreign" no longer means "Western." That is why there is such incalculable gain in doing everything possible to encourage spiritual traffic between the younger 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 unashamed foreignness and difference. The Gospel always comes from outside. It is revealed, not evolved.

(2) The foreign missionary is a challenge. 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. Foreign missionaries have renounced it, too. They have 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. 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 fulfill it. In many countries where the welfare state is developing, schools and hospitals are becoming the responsibility of government; generous medical and educational grants are available. 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

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area of Indian 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.

(3) The foreign missionary is a mediator. "As the Father has sent me, even so send I you." Jesus trained 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 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 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 reenacted 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 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 mission but also in passion. Not many missionaries in the modern world are romping home with success. In many places they are rediscovering 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

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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.

A POSTSCRIPT

So much has changed since 1960. Africa then was only just emerging from the colonial era; now its many exciting countries are independent. The Second Vatican Council has had its enormous impact on and beyond the Roman Catholic Church. The World Council of Churches has held three great Assemblies: New Delhi 1961, Uppsala 1968, Nairobi 1975; the 1983 Vancouver Assembly, its sixth, will have met when this note is published.

Many of those bodies which I called younger churches in 1960 are now totally independent and have their own membership and voice in the WCC. Their leadership is almost entirely indigenous. Some over the years proposed a moratorium on foreign missionaries, but most countries and churches invite and welcome them still. There have been the Brandt Report (North-South), the Arab oil crisis, and the increasing selfconsciousness of the third world. The churches of that third world are much more vocal and much larger, for many of them have grown numerically while the churches of the West have often declined-in influence as well as members.

The entry of the Pentecostal churches into ecumenical circles and the spread of the Charismatic movement within mainstream Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, in all six continents, have switched on new sets of lights and had profound effects on personal relations, socially, culturally, racially.

Latin American has come into much greater prominence since 1960 and Liberation Theology has echoed round the world. There has been Black Theology from the USA and from South Africa. Less angry but equally emphatic has been the theology coming out of East and West Africa. From India and Japan have come new and compelling theological insights, profound and moving. Neither the West nor the foreign missionary can any longer claim a monopoloy of theological thinking or originality. The churches of the third world are producing their own theologians, and they make their voices heard at international assemblies and conferences. Their leaders are no longer foreign or missionaries. Indeed many third world churches are themselves sending missionaries to neighboring countries and to other continents. One of the best-known of these, Kosuke Koyama, the author of three deservedly popular books, was born in Japan. He worked as a missionary in Thailand and later taught theology in Singapore and, more recently, in New Zealand.

Among quite ordinary Christians there is much more inter-continental travel. I recall an occasion in the 1970s when I happened to be in Nazareth one Sunday morning. I worshipped in a congregation of Arab Christians led by an Arab pastor. After the service, I met a group of

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visitors who had come from a kibbutz a few miles away. They were attending a course on kindergarten teaching sponsored by the government of Israel. One of them was a Christian woman from Sierra Leone who had brought with her to church a young teacher from Thailand, a Buddhist. I found it exciting to think that a Buddhist Thai teacher was first introduced to Christian worship by an African friend from Sierra Leone in an Arab congregation in Israel.

One of the greatest changes in this last quarter of a century has been the new recognition of religious pluralism. In Britain, for example, there are now one and a half million Muslims, some 400,000 Hindus, and some 200,000 Sikhs. Leicester has a larger population of Hindus than any city outside India. Equally startling figures can be given for other parts of Western Europe. The Chinese diaspora is now universal. All this focuses attention in a new way on the relation of Christianity to other faiths. A spate of books, conference reports, and commissions of various churches, inspired by both the Vatican and the WCC, are now wrestling with the fundamental theological issues raised by this situation of inter-religion. We are still only at the beginning. Here the contribution of the foreign (but no longer exclusively the Western) missionary can be of immense significance. Many have been engaging in fascinating experiments with dialogue. It is a long-term and uphill task, requiring real scholarship and rare sensitivity.

A decade or more of massacres in Uganda and Southeast Asia, the revolution in Iran, and the various guerrilla movements in Central America, all underline the qualities of courage and calm needed by foreign missionaries as they stand by their fellow-Christians in all these unsettled areas. It is their presence alongside that counts and their willingness to remain, whatever the conditions, so long as the local church wants them. Missionaries must be a guest group at the disposal of the church they have been called to serve. In some circumstances it is advisable or desirable for them to withdraw for a time, to go back as soon as doors reopen. Their functions change with local needs. Their symbolic value as reminders that the church is truly international and multi-racial continues still-as powerful as ever.