Missional Missionaries
As a college student thirty-five some-odd years ago, I talked with a secular friend who spoke harshly about missionaries. He said something akin to, “They go to people who need bread and try to feed them the Bible.” I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, so I didn’t argue with him.
Fast-forward to earlier this evening, where I attended Yale Divinity School’s Parks-King Lecture with Harvard Divinity School’s new dean, Marla Frederick. Dean Frederick used the term “missionary” to describe white people who traveled to the US South before and during the Civil Rights movement to found what we now know as Historically Black Colleges and Universities. I almost wanted to stop her to ask her to exegete the term, “missionary,” a word that’s had me working so hard as a leader at Andover Newton Seminary. Our school has a long history of sending missionaries around the world, and today’s students and scholars wrestle mightily with that heritage.
The term “missionary” brings to mind a number of assumptions and stereotypes. My college friend thought of missionaries as those who impose Christianity on the vulnerable. Even more secular people might associate the term with a conventional sexual position. I imagine that the negative associations some carry about missionaries overlap with negative associations with institutions as a whole. True: missionaries founded schools and churches. True: institutions create containers that carry a lot of good, but they also hold and reinforce a lot of bad.
As I finish out this series of essays on a recent travel seminar I co-led to visit with our institution’s historic mission partners in Hawai‘i, I don’t seek to reclaim the “missionary” as a household word. I’ve become more comfortable with the term “missional” as a descriptor of my definition of Christian ministry. It’s the term I seek to pass along to our students at Andover Newton Seminary at YDS.
Alan Roxburgh is the minister-scholar who introduced me to the idea of missional ministry. He described missional ministry as the practice of getting out into the community, learning about what God is doing, and becoming a partner with God in making more good happen. Missional approaches resemble those of community organizers, whose first step is listening. A missional congregation is one where worship isn’t about the community taking care of itself. Rather, liturgy — which literally means “the work of the people” — recharges the servant of Christ’s batteries.
A missional church never worries about whether what it has to offer is relevant, as its activities are responsive to the community’s needs. In an emergent, liminal season, a missional approach saves congregations from obsessively straining to recapture the past or rushing ahead aimlessly into an unknown future. Is a missional, emergent leader a missionary with a different title? Well, yes, but a new title might be necessary due to baggage limits on life’s airlines.
The missionaries Andover and Yale sent to Hawai‘i in 1819 under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission were in their early 20s. They were idealistic, on-fire for Jesus, kids. They got on ships with one-way tickets in-hand. Tonight, Dean Frederick described missionaries who traveled to the US South and built HBCUs as… brave. She marveled over the “faith commitment [required] to go into hostile territories.”
Missionaries created institutions, and those institutions did good and harm alike. They became containers for the inter-generational transmission of mission. Without missionaries, we wouldn’t have institutions from which to critique missionaries’ work. Missionaries modeled for today’s missional leaders what I want our students to learn today. Those who are called to serve Jesus need to get outside of their/our comfortable corners, listen to what people need, and walk shoulder-to-shoulder together with them toward what God is calling us all to be.
