My New Year got off to a good start
with a book that gave me a valuable insight into where we are as Columbans
today. The book’s title is Concepts of Mission and what attracted me was
that its author, a Nigerian priest, is professor of missiology at the Urban
University in Rome. With his qualifications he is well placed to provide definitive
statements on missionary issues.
The author, Fr Francis Oborji,
begins by acknowledging that mission is in crisis today and goes on to try to
unravel the reasons why. His first chapter alone should have satisfied me. In
it the author spells out in detail his reasons for stating, AThe development in mission theology
after Vatican ll has brought to the fore the importance
of safeguarding the validity of mission ad gentes.@
Drawing on John Paul ll=s
Redemptoris Missio, he explains: “The expression (mission ad gentes),
when properly used, describes the mission of the church directed to >peoples, groups and socio-cultural
contexts in which Christ and his Gospel are not known, or which lack Christian
communities sufficiently mature=
(RM 34). Mission ad gentes is the effort of evangelization directed to
people or groups who do not yet believe in Christ, who are far from Christ, in
whom the church has not yet taken root and whose culture has not yet been
influenced by the gospel.@
He proceeds to distinguish it from
evangelization in general, pastoral activity at home or abroad and
re-evangelization or the new evangelization.
I went on to read his chapters on
mission as conversion, as church planting and growth, as adaptation and
inculturation, as dialogue, as Missio Dei
and as service in God’s reign. The section on Missio Dei held my attention. When I delved more into it, bits of a
jigsaw that that troubled me for years began to come together and make sense. I
began to see where the confusion about our identity and role originated.
According to Professor Oborji, the
idea of Missio Dei as the basis for mission emerged from the writings of
Karl Barth as developed at the mission meeting in Willingen (Germany) in 1952. At
that time, the world was recovering from the shock of thousands of missionaries
being expelled from China. Some thought that this indicated an end to church planting
and was a wake-up call to get involved in the great issues of the time,
political and economical. God is the author of all movements seeking peace and
justice (shalom or the Kingdom), including mission. The church, they
said, is only an instrument of God=s
work so maybe it was time to move beyond a focus on institution to participate in
God-inspired world-bettering movements.
This concept of God being active
outside the church had the positive effect of encouraging a more open approach
to other religions and an appreciation of the secular. However, since 1972 it also
led to a split in Protestant missionary circles between those working to
establish churches and those moving beyond church concerns to getting involved
in the great issues of the day. Among Catholics influenced by this thinking was
the theologian Ludwig Rutti who does not accept conversion to the faith or to
the church as any part of the goal of mission. It must also be said that this radical
reading of Missio Dei never caught on
among the majority of Catholic or Protestant missionaries.
Exactly fifty years later, in
August 2002, another meeting was held at Willingen to review the situation. The
positive aspects of Missio Dei theory were again acknowledged: the fact
that mission comes from God and not the church, and that there is need for the
church to escape from self-engrossment by taking the side of the weak in the
social and political issues of the day. However, the shortcoming of some Missio
Dei thinking had also become apparent. By accentuating the role of God the
creator, it downplayed the importance of Christ the Son and the Holy Spirit. It
did nothing to help clarify the distinction between the Kingdom of God and
human actions, between Christian faith and the value of other religions,
between the unity of the church and the need for inculturation and between God=s particular activity in the Church and
God=s overall activity in creation.
Thinking over this, I began to understand
a major shift that has changed Columban identity. It was something I first
experienced at the General Assembly of 1982, without understanding the
background. The context in which it emerged was the call for solidarity with
the oppressed. I was in the committee given the task of drawing up a statement
on the Society=s
commitment to solidarity and I completely agreed with the concept. I was also
at home with the idea of a Trinitarian or Missio
Dei approach to mission although I was not conscious of its more radical
interpretation and it was never openly mentioned. However in our group
discussions I felt there was something missing, something I knew to be
important from my almost twenty years in Korea.
It is only now, looking back, that
I can put words on it: it was the lack of interest by many of my fellow-committee
members in topics such as inculturation, dialogue or better ways of expressing,
sharing and practicing the wider Christian message. I have been critical of the
Church in my time (and still am occasionally) but I still see it as an integral
part of life for followers of Christ and the Kingdom. Believers need to gather
in communities to support each other, expand their understanding of scripture
and to work with others for the Kingdom. Eventually communities evolve into a
church (or churches).
Since then, radical Missio Dei thinking has found a place in
our Society, mainly in our formation and lay mission programs. To a large
degree it now determines where our younger members want to go, what they are
qualified to do and how they see their future.
How did this version of Missio Dei come to influence our decision
making process? My view is that, after Vatican ll, there
was a reluctance in the Society to take up the radical implications of the
council for the motivation and practice of mission. For instance, even though
we are officially an ad gentes
mission Society, when was the last time a General Assembly, or other Columban gathering,
grappled with any of the topics listed in Fr Oborji’s book: the challenges of direct
evangelization, church development, inculturation, dialogue and witness?
A vacuum was created after Vatican
ll and a minority view seeped in to dominate key decisions in areas in which
the majority of members had little interest or say, but were of major
consequence. It happened quietly, probably unconsciously. No one noted that we
had taken a new direction, it just happened.
So what can we do about it now?
We must begin by becoming a Society
that is no longer afraid to publicly and formally address the issues that
challenge us, beginning with the question: What does it mean to be an ad gentes Society today? Reading and
discussing Professor Oborji’s book would be a good starting point to reach
agreement on terminology and clarify the key issues.
We also need to ensure that all
future assessments of our formation and lay mission programs be done by qualified
people outside the current programs, with the participation of all interested
members. In-house reviews tend to build on present trends rather than correct
them.
Finally, all present members should be reassured that efforts to
re-focus on ad gentes mission 
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