Urbana and the Changing Role of Missions
The following article is based on a message shared at a National Service Center chapel service by Jim Tebbe. If you would like to skip the article and listen to Jim on your mp3 player, go to InterVarsity’s audio resources page and download the message.
I have just returned from the 11th Mission Korea conference, which was attended by about five thousand students. Mission Korea began in South Korea 20 years ago, modeled after our Urbana conferences and held every two years.
It was a great chance to meet students and other people who are leaders in missions and discover developments in missions in Korea. I spoke several times in seminars connected with Mission Korea and on Sunday preached in two churches including a church co-pastored by Chul Ho Han, the leader of Mission Korea and a former General Secretary of Korean InterVarsity. It was packed with young people, with a lot of energy and in that sense was very different from other Korean churches that I’ve visited.
Prior to the service I met with the Senior Pastor and Chul Ho. I was introduced with the statement, “his father was a missionary in Pakistan and he is a missionary who has also worked in Pakistan.” This son following father in work is very important in Korean culture. The Senior Pastor asked me, “How is missionary work in Pakistan different today than it was when your father was a missionary?”
I had never been asked that question before. With this article I would like to address the changing nature of missions and the place of the “West” in the world today.
In the Missions Department we try to read a book together every quarter and this quarter we are reading and discussing To the Golden Shore, by Courtney Anderson, on the life of Adoniram Judson. Written in 1956, it is the best mission biography that I have read. Judson’s ministry grew out of a student movement. There is so much in missions that has been begun by students, including the Haystack Prayer Meeting in this country. We believe in students, we know that students are the future. And yet it will never happen again like it happened to Adoniram Judson. That is not the world today.
Proliferating Missions Conferences
One of the differences in the world today is events like Mission Korea. It’s huge and it’s growing. The energy in Korea for missions is enormous. They have 18,000 missionaries and they want to triple that number by 2025.
Between Urbana 2003 and Urbana 2006 we counted six different spin-off missions conferences that we knew of around the world. Now, between Urbana 2006 and Urbana 2009 I’m aware of 21 missions conferences. And there are more than that. At our staff conference we collected money for a missions conference in Rwanda for French-speaking African nations. Just last February I was surprised to hear that there is a Taiwanese Urbana that has had ten conferences.
I recently received an email from a woman in Malaysia, asking for resources to help run a missions conference in her country in September 2009. That was not counted in the 21. At Mission Korea they had a track to help people learn how to run missions conferences in other places. A portion of the Urbana offering always goes towards these other conferences. Lindsay Brown, former General Secretary for IFES, has commented that he thinks that when the history of Urbana is written, its greatest accomplishment will be the conferences that it’s spawned in the rest of the world where young people from other nations are being mobilized for missions.
At Mission Korea there was a Student Mission Mobilization Roundtable. People who were involved in mobilizing students for missions were getting together and talking about what more they can do. I talked with a Filipino gentleman a few years back who wanted to train in missions 10,000 Filipinos who were going out to other countries as paid help. There’s the Back to Jerusalem Movement from Chinese churches. There’s also the Asian Evangelical Alliance, with a huge emphasis on church and mission. My wife and I attended their conference just before I joined InterVarsity.
Better Theology of Mission
There is much happening in the rest of the world. But another reality we have to deal with is that we, in the west, are hated by the rest of the world. You can read more about that in the InterVarsity Press book Why the Rest Hates the West, by Meic Pearse. I just read a humorous statement by one newspaper columnist about our oil policy, “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us most.” We can’t avoid the image America has in the world today.
The top Urbana questions for the western church is, “Do we have a place and if so, what is it?” Just because we do things here in the west in a certain way, does not mean it is right or good. The world is littered with the results of bad mission practice. There’s lots of good that’s come from mission, but I dare to say that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent with little to show. A friend of mine, a German who used to write poetry in English, German and Urdu once said to me: “Good mission theology does not guarantee good mission practice. But no mission theology does guarantee bad mission practice.”
Theology isn’t complicated, it’s just careful reflection and understanding from the Word of God and applying it appropriately. Christopher J. H. Wright, who has succeeded John Stott as the director of the Langham Parthership International, attended our last Urbana. In his InterVarsity Press book, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, he makes the point that the mission of God is clear from the beginning of the Bible right through to the very end. It’s not an optional extra.
Christy Wilson, the founder of Urbana and director of InterVarsity’s first missions conference in 1948, said, “People that are not missionary minded soon become a mission field.” When we lose our vision for the world and start looking in on ourselves, something is lost. When I see the energy for missions in the rest of the world, it’s very encouraging. They don’t have a fraction of the resources that we have but they care about what’s happening in the rest of the world.
God’s mission is for all humanity. Part of that mission is for the conversion and salvation of people, as well as discipleship and the building up of the church. And it’s also such things as the care of creation and dealing with systemic injustice. In Scripture there are many pointers about this, not least in John 1-4, the scriptures we will be looking at for Urbana 09. We know we are to be involved, but how?
David Bosch, a great South African missiologist who died tragically in an automobile accident, defined the difference between Mission and Missions. Mission, God’s Mission, is perfect and unchanging. It’s recorded in Scripture. Missions is the human activity that engages in God’s Mission.
The Role of Urbana
When and how do we make appropriate changes in missions to be better aligned with God’s Mission? That brings us to the role of Urbana. Urbana changes lives. We’ve seen it again and again. Urbana 09 will be successful if it is an eye-opening, life-transforming, commitment-producing call to join God’s Mission.
Urbana is aimed at helping participants see:
- the Mission of God as revealed in Scripture
- the world for which God is concerned
- the unreached in their world
Urbana is helping participants live
- in right relationship with God
- with Jesus as Lord
- as missional Christians
Urbana is helping participants commit
- to witness – in word and deed
- to serve others
- to cross-cultural and global missions
But how do they go and what do they do when they go? I believe that God is preparing each generation to do his work in the world. He has chosen to work through his church. In that we can trust in him; we can trust him for this next student generation. And what is it that this student generation has to offer? What is it that is unique and that God is using.
I believe that it lies in what people are calling “Incarnational Ministry.” There is a movement among students where they are willing to live simply and sacrificially in difficult places and circumstances. Scott Bessenecker has picked this up in his book, The New Friars. This is a concern for justice and for what’s happening in the world. This is a gift.
Exercising Power Benevolently
Coming back to that Korean pastor’s question about the difference between my father’s generation and what is happening now, my response is that my father was the least power-grabbing man I know on the face of this earth. If there’s a line, he’ll always end up on the back of it. He’s the only person I knew who paid the radio tax in Pakistan. He had a radio in the house, so every year he would go down to the post office. They would get out the book and write that he had paid the ten rupees tax. And the name on the line above would be his name from the year before.
But he was a person who had power. He was the president of a college. That college educated the top people of Pakistan. Pervez Musharraf, up until recently president of Pakistan, was educated at that college. He had, whether he wanted it or not, enormous power. And he exercised it benevolently.
Now, one of the reasons that the West is hated, is because of power. People are afraid of the West coming in and exercising power. They don’t want the West to exercise power. The dynamics of what we do changes dramatically. The generation to come, that wants to live and minister incarnationally, is the right kind of approach in today’s world related to missions.
In a recent Lausanne discussion group we looked at issues effecting evangelization and one of the issues we discussed was ‘incarnational ministry’. One of the other people said we are using the term incorrectly. We cannot do incarnational ministry. That is only done by Jesus. He’s the one who came and lived on earth, died and rose from the dead. We’re not doing that. But what we can do is be like John the Baptist in John chapter three.
We can live alongside of people and point to Jesus. The most important thing we can do in missions today is to be unseen, pointing people to Jesus. In that sense John actually is a more appropriate model for us to follow than perhaps even Jesus.
The dislike of the West is directly related to the power we convey. How do we give up power in ministry? So many times our goal in missions is to make a difference. What goes along with making a difference? Power. If we had power we could change things. Well, we can change things even if we don’t have power. Let me give an example.
The Dalai Lama’s palace dominates the city of Lhasa in Tibet. Nearby is the Jokhang Temple. People come from all over Tibet to pray at Jokhang Temple. There are prayer wheels all around the temple. The square in front of the temple is a cloud of smoke from all of the incense that is burning. Inside the lamas are playing drums and cymbals, singing and chanting, with yak butter candles burning.
Richard Twiss, a native American evangelist, was in Lhasa for a cultural program at the University of Tibet. He was dressed in his native American clothing, and they took him into the temple where the drums were playing. He said, “We play drums in our culture too. Can we play the drums?” The lamas stepped back. Richard and his friend sat down, played the drums and they sang “Jesus is Lord.”
When, in the history of Tibetan Buddhism, have the words “Jesus is Lord,” ever been sung in the Jokhang Temple? How did that happen? It happened because he was seen as a person who did not convey power. Indians are seen as a people who have been persecuted by the Americans. He comes in as a powerless person and as a powerless person is able to convey a message that you would not normally hear.
We can’t all do that but there are other ways we can be powerless and still have an impact. That’s why Jesus said, “be as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.” He was asking us to be powerless as we step out into missions.