Public Missiology , livre ebook

Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2020 by Gregg Okesson
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4934-2238-8
Scripture quotations are from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
The appendix to this book is used with permission from the Public Missiology Working Group.
Dedication
To the villages of Selare and Pahi in north-central Tanzania, and to my students at Scott Theological College in Machakos, Kenya:
You have led me on a journey deeper into the public nature of witness, and for that I am deeply grateful.
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Dedication v
Preface ix
Introduction 1
Part 1: Public Witness 15
1. Why Congregational Witness? 17
2. What Publics? Where Publics? 39
3. The Missio Dei— a Thick, Public Story 65
4. What Is Public Missiology? 95
5. Thick Congregational Witness 117
Part 2: Congregations and Public Witness 145
6. How to Study Congregations 147
7. Thick Doxology and Witness to Land—Africa Brotherhood Church, Machakos, Kenya 179
8. Thick Place and Witness to Montreal—St. Jax Anglican Church, Montreal 199
9. Thick Identity and Witness to All Nations—Bethel World Outreach Church, Nashville 223
Conclusion: How Local Churches Witness in a Complex World 245
Appendix: Public Missiology: A Brief Introduction by The Public Missiology Working Group 257
Bibliography 262
Index 273
Back Cover 277
Preface
T he seeds of this book germinated in 1998 within a couple of remote villages in north-central Tanzania. Until my family moved there, I had never really considered the nature of public witness. Like most Westerners, I thought of witness primarily as a personal enterprise, something one does with individuals. Of course, as a missiologist I had studied contextual theology and knew, at least conceptually, that the gospel moves into public spaces, but nothing in my education prepared me for what I would face. In the villages, I encountered a “thickness” to the public realm that defied any simplistic answers. In a classroom we could discuss the different realms of public life, such as ethnicity, clan, economics, and politics, but in the villages each of these intermingled with the others like the dust devils that skip and dance across the arid Maasai Steppe.
We moved to Tanzania to plant churches, but I quickly realized one could not do evangelism, nor discipleship, nor ecclesiology of any kind, without taking seriously the public realities surrounding the people. And the publics we encountered in the villages were not just a matter of academic deliberation but were something we experienced with our bodies, such as with malnutrition or disease. My family struggled with malaria, worms, tuberculosis, and other sicknesses along with daily challenges of nutrition. Early on I sought simple solutions to what I thought were relatively simple problems, only to realize that one of the reasons the publics were so virulent was due to the ways they interpenetrated one another, or to their thickness. I eventually began asking myself, How does church planting relate to poverty, or evangelism to health, or religion to development? I did not have good answers to those queries, but the questions lingered with me and resulted in this book.
After living in the village two years, my family moved to Kenya, where I taught theology and mission at Scott Theological College in Machakos for a decade. My students deepened this public trajectory through their questions in the classroom, along with sharing with me their lives and ministries outside in public spaces. During that time I also began studying local congregations. In the beginning I did it as part of my PhD studies. But I then realized something equally as dramatic as what I had learned in the villages: the thickness of the public realm was countered by a different kind of thickness found in congregations. At first I only saw the slightest glimmers of thickness within churches, but the more I studied them, I came to realize that all local congregations are filled with movements. I liken the thickness of local congregations to the delicate movements of diverse threads that weave in and out within the liturgy and sacraments of the church, and then outside into public spaces, and back inside again, in a never-ending knitting of dense fabric.
Of course, not all local congregations are thick. And not all churches are thick in the same way. However, instead of spending an entire book bemoaning the introversion or thinness of a local congregation, I have chosen to take a different course: to show how missiology helps us witness through movement, which I have likened to the threads of a dense fabric, and how local congregations do so within and for their surrounding publics.
As I have reflected on those years in Africa, I have come to see that many Western Christians, and especially those from my “tribe” (called evangelicals), love to approach complex, thick problems with simplistic, thin solutions. Some of this arises from our socioreligious background emanating from the Enlightenment, where our knee-jerk reaction is to retreat from the public realm altogether or attempt to solve complex social challenges with simplistic, individual answers (e.g., “if only poor people would work harder”). Hence, we eagerly rally around political leaders who reinforce our ideological positions (and may even attend our churches). Our reticence to talk about public witness also proceeds from our theological heritage of using Christology and soteriology to solve only individual, spiritual issues (such as sin management or where one will spend eternity) but not the redemption of public life. As Christians we do not possess a robust heritage of embracing complexity, or what I am calling “thickness.” Our understandings of salvation tend to go no further than the individual. Thus it is not surprising that the thinness of our faith does little to interpenetrate the thickness of the public realm, and that is as true for the context of large cities in North America as it was for my villages in Tanzania.
In this book I seek to accomplish three related goals. First, I want us to see complexity, or thickness, not as the enemy of the church but as our greatest ally. Second, I hope to demonstrate how thickness arises from different movements, and why missiology is so critical in highlighting various movements within the missio Dei to redeem the fullness of God’s world. Finally, I desire to show how congregations possess their own thickness, arising from different movements of thread, and how they use that weave of movement to witness to the public realm around the church.
———
Let me acknowledge a group of key dialogue partners who helped shape my early ruminations on this book. They are members of a working group on public missiology within the American Society of Missiology (ASM): George Hunsberger, Gregory Leffel, Charles Fensham, Robert Hunt, Hendrik Pieterse, and Bill Kenney. Hunsberger initially championed these discussions on public missiology with his presidential address at the ASM annual meeting in 2005. The subject was then picked up by Leffel during the 2016 ASM meetings. Since that time, our working group, led by Leffel, has been presenting papers, dialoguing, and attempting to parse what we mean by public missiology. This book is my attempt to do so and should in no manner reflect the consensus opinion of the working group. But I would be remiss to neglect their valuable influence.
Let me also identify some key individuals who have contributed to this book. I want to thank bishops Timothy Ndambuki of the Africa Brotherhood Church and Rice Broocks of the Bethel churches. The latter read chapter 9 and gave me helpful feedback. I am also grateful for the ethnographic papers written by my DMin students, Delvin Pikes, David Houston, and Steve Murrell, for their insights into Bethel World Outreach Church. I am also appreciative of Graham Singh, who read iterations of chapter 8, along with Michael Rynkiewich and Steve Ybarrola, who offered helpful feedback on chapters 2 and 6, respectively. Finally, I am grateful for George Hunsberger who read an early version of this manuscript and provided insightful comments. I accept full responsibility for any gaps or wayward thinking, but each of these individuals made the book better than it would have been without their valuable input.
I am also grateful for the administration at Asbury Theological Seminary for a sabbatical in which to write and for allowing me to travel internationally. This book was written not only in Wilmore, Kentucky, where I currently live, but also in São Paulo, Brazil; Montreal, Canada; Manchester, England; Nairobi, Kenya; Kampala, Uganda; Hyderabad, India; Antalya, Turkey; Panama City, Panama; and Tallinn, Estonia, along with many other locations in the United States. Each of these cities afforded not only a desk and chair in which to write but a context in which to further reflect on public missiology and the local congregation. I trust this book is “thicker” as a result of the locations in which I have enjoyed time learning.
Finally, I am grateful for Jim Kinney’s patience with my early thoughts as well as his wisdom in guiding this book to completion. I am equally appreciative to the entire team at Baker A