On Mission

In Barbara Kingsolver’s disturbing novel The Poisonwood Bible, a zealous Baptist minister sets out from North America, dragging his wife and four daughters to the Congo on a mission to save the unenlightened souls of Africa. The five women narrate the story. From the outset, the five women offer different perspectives and betray different attitudes to the eccentricities of the impulsive missionary. Some are acquiescent, others enthusiastic, others adopt a perspective of wry and somewhat cynical detachment.

The story unfolds with a catalogue of disasters. The fundamentalist missionary plants a garden, to provide food for his family and to instruct the Congolese in simple agricultural principles. But while the plants grow, they bear no fruit – because there are no suitable pollinators in the local environment. The local residents are horrified by the minister’s insistence on baptism. The villagers will never agree to being dunked in the river because crocodiles were lurking there. And because the missionary has not quite developed a proper command of the local language, he imagines that at the moment he has just proclaimed that Jesus is Lord, what in fact the villagers have heard is that Jesus is a species of a local plant that is highly poisonous. 

As the story unfolds, the women are shaken by these events. They realise that they have been put in harm’s way because of the arrogance of the missionary’s attitude towards the culture and traditions of the people he was seeking to serve. Again and again he fails to read the room.

The story ends in tragedy as one of the daughters loses her life, bitten by a snake. At that point the mother, who until then had been passive and acquiescent, decides to leave in order to find a refuge and a place of safety. 

Of course the story alerts to one of the curious tensions around the history of Christian mission. While there are examples of missionaries not only respecting and helping to preserve local languages and cultures, there are also examples of situations where missionaries have not only despised aspects of a local culture, but actively sought to destroy them. The story is a complex one – when combined with the legacy of colonialism, the complexity of its legacy only deepens. In some cultures, particularly those affected by colonialism, ‘mission is not an innocent word’.

Of course, often when Christians think about mission, we tend to think about mission in terms of preaching the gospel in places and among people who have not yet heard the gospel, or in situations where the Christian Church has not been firmly established numerically or structurally. We can see how the gospel reading today might encourage us to think like that. Jesus appoints ‘seventy others’ and sends them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go. When Luke refers to the sending out of the 70, that’s a kind of code. It points back to the Book of Genesis, where in Chapter 10, all the nations of the earth are written out -  there are 70 of them.  So the sending out of the 70 is a prefiguring of the kind of missionary work described in the Acts of the Apostles and which Luke himself was engaged in, the mission to all the nations of the earth. For Luke, every single person is included in God’s offer of salvation.

But recent writing and reflection about mission has served to broaden our understanding of what this might mean. I have recently read a book about mission by a Roman Catholic priest called Stephen Bevans. He notes that while the criterion of geography is still a valid indicator of the frontiers towards which missionary activity might be directed, there are new frontiers in our societies that demand our attention – the consequences of urbanization, youth culture, the impact of migration, the world of communications and the arts, working for justice and peace, commitment to the rights of minorities, the rights of women and children, the protection of creation, as well as developments in scientific research and international relations. Bevans is inviting us to see that mission is not simply something that happens over there. Mission happens when we bear witness to the love of God. And we are invited to bear witness to the love of God in the face of vast and rapid cultural and societal changes. So how can we find the kind of language which may resonate with our culture? How can we find the words to give authentic expression to the hope which is within us? 

In the Anglican Communion, the missionary work of the church is often described in terms of the five marks of mission: to tell the good news, to teach new believers, to tend to human need by loving service, to transform the unjust structures of society, and to treasure and safeguard the integrity of creation. We find ourselves engaging with a complex world, wrestling with issues of climate change, mass migration, issues of human identity, and the advent of artificial intelligence. The mission of the church lies in responding to all these things, responding to the whole of human experience in all its complexity and beauty.

But Luke tells us something else. Note the accent on ‘hospitality’ in this story. The seventy are sent out in pairs and yet they are dependant not upon each other but upon the hospitality of strangers. Luke speaks again and again about hospitality. Think of the story of Zacchaeus, the tax collector who offers hospitality, and who in turn is drawn into God’s hospitality: ‘Today salvation has come to this house, for Zacchaeus too is a son of Abraham’. Zacchaeus is no longer marginalized or rejected. Or think of the hospitality offered by the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus. They entreat their unknown guest to join them for a meal, and then they discover who he is when they recognize him in the breaking of the bread. For Luke, the mission of the church begins and ends with hospitality. And that is why hospitality remains such a vital part of our ministry as the University Church, whether it is welcoming visitors from across the world, or offering a home for people who have experienced rejection elsewhere, or providing a space for conversations to happen, bringing the academy and the church into a conversation of mutual learning and exploration. This is the ministry to which we are called. And any Church engaged in this kind of ministry is a Church whose doors are open. This is a place of hospitality, but it is also a place where we must learn to engage with and understand the modern world in all its complexity. Unlike that imagined Baptist missionary, we need to learn how to read the room. 

We gather in this place week by week. Each of us is offered strength for the journey. Each of us is invited to receive this sacrament of the Eucharist. Each of us is offered an honoured place at Christ’s table. And whether I come to the altar tired or doubtful or sad or just messed up, or whether I come to it bursting with joy and energy, it is the same constant Christ who gives himself into my life to draw me more fully into his. And here I discover the joy of the gospel, the God whose heart is always open, the God who is always ready to offer hospitality.