'Mission Field Europe'

Last month I helped lead a conference in Germany entitled: 'Mission Field Europe?!' I have been asked to share some of the insights gained, so here goes! One impressive lecture was given by Sandra Gintere of the Luther Theological Academy in Riga, who had just finished her PhD on missiology at Concordia Theological Seminary. Given the conservative reputation of both academies, there was no surprise that the starting point was Biblical: The Great Commission (Mt. 28), God's desire for everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2), and the injunction in 1 Pet. 3: "always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you."

What some did not expect was that Dr Gintere understands these passages to mean that we (the churches) have the responsibility of providing 'intelligible reasons' why people should bother to listen to the Gospel. We therefore need to study 'shifting cultural paradigms', 'post-modernism', 'meta-narratives', and more besides, and read significant writers including Jean-François Lyotard, Bishop Leslie Newbiggen, Donald McGavran, Rick Warren, Christopher Schwarz, and Wolfhart Pannenberg.

In his article How To Think About Secularism Pannenberg says: "Missionary proclamation was once understood as bringing the truth to others, and was therefore both legitimate and extremely important. For many today, the missionary enterprise is a matter of imposing our personal preferences and culturally conditioned prejudices upon others, and is therefore not only illegitimate but morally offensive." (The whole article is available at: http://gospel-culture.org.uk/Choice%20articles.htm.) For Sandra Gintere, this does not mean we have to give up mission, but we have to develop new ways of doing mission that are not 'morally offensive' to the vast majority of those we are trying to reach.

I cannot reproduce a full lecture here, and nor did Dr Gintere suggest that there are easy answers, but I will list a few of her thoughts that may not be what we would automatically expect from a 'Bible Belt' theologian.

Research shows that, of people who join a church, less than 10% are reached by the pastor(s), less than 10% have found their own way, and over 80% have been brought in through another church member. Therefore the key to growth lies with the laity not the trained clergy. People in the West are thirsty for God, but we lack a deep spirituality from which they can drink. Contemporary values are based on plurality and relativity, and only individuals or groups (rather than ideas) have value. Therefore effective mission is less likely to occur in proclamation than in shared or observed experience, so a Holy Communion service is far more likely to communicate the Gospel than a so-called Gospel Service.

Whether we agree with all of this, she does raise serious questions which we should attempt to answer in our church community.

Yours in Christ,

Richard Pamplin