Impending Transformation: Mission Structures for a New Century

Abstract

T he relationship between mission structures and theol That is, they should be able to express institutionally genuine ogy is complex. Mission structures are a kind of "theol insights that theology has discovered in the abstract. Long expe ogy on four wheels," enfleshed demonstrations of a theoretical rience of the church in mission warns us, however, that validity orientation to the world. As such, they are contingent and sec in a purely theological sense is never the only issue. To be truly ondary, depending upon theology to suggest their proximate suitable, mission structures must also be culturally appropriate uses and ultimate purposes. They are also vulnerable to critique and right for their age. in a way that theology is not, because they are concrete. Mission Thanks to David Bosch, it is now commonplace in missiology structures necessarily entail the application of human institu to speak of this generation as the beginning in earnest of a new tional forms. Structures devised for mission will thus always be age in the history of humankind. Intellectually, this is a time of susceptible to the same faults and distortions that beset their transition, in which the West seems to be passing from the secular counterparts.certainties of Enlightenment thinking into an extended period of Though limited in these ways, mission structures are never cultural crisis. Geopolitically, the customary ways by which the theless crucial. They are windows that allow one to peer closely world's nation-states have related to one another have been at the underpinnings of a given theology of mission. They make knocked hard by a realignment of the superpowers. Economi manifest the actual direction one's missiological thinking is cally, new patterns of global capitalism have emerged with the likely to run in practice. In fact, mission structures can lay bare power to affect for good or ill (or both) the life of virtually every assumptions about human nature and one's understanding of person on the planet. God's purposes with such clarity that words may no longer be Perhaps the most fundamental shift to have occurred in the able to cover them up. Mission structures are critical tools, late twentieth century revolves around the issue of cultural therefore, not least because without them no theory of mission identity. Conventional boundaries of language and distance are has a chance of everbecoming more than unincarnated mutterings, rapidly collapsing, throwing traditional notions of social reality words without effect in a world that expects action.into disarray. It is not only that a globalized economy is reaching Andrew Walls has shrewdly observed that the structural into and tying together the fates of far-flung communities. Nor is mainstay of modern Protestant missions, the voluntary associa it just a matter of one particular language, English, positioning tion or mission society, got its start just as missiology entered into itself to become the next millennium's lingua franca. There is also an entirely new theological phase. From ...