Can There Be Innovation in Mission?
August 2017
I’ve been reflecting quite a bit lately on the the idea of “Christian mission” in the world, and what it means. We intuitively understand the idea of Christianity being a “missionary” faith - we have the final commands of Jesus, the narratives of the early church in the book of Acts, and the missionary history of the Church all the way until the present age. Yet, it seems that the current globalized century marks a significant challenge for the continued vibrancy of Christian mission as an enterprise.
I believe strongly in the uniqueness of the Church, its good news, and its social vision. But it can often feel like the church defaults to a position of defending, conserving, and protecting its message, rather than creatively sharing it and building institutions that embody its particular imagination. This instinct is stronger in a secular age, in which the values of Christianity are seen as dangerous to “propagate” (while the missionary zeal of in-group social values continues unchecked).
This feels backwards to me, and the call for creative innovation, communication, art, communities, and institution-building seems more important than ever, in order to bear a credible and plausible witness to the goodness of the Gospel in the public square in a time when Christianity has become alien. Yet I’ve had a number of conversations with Christians in multiple professional sectors that all question the legitimacy or practical opportunity of “Christian mission” in the 21st century, and see danger where I see opportunity. I think there are a number of reasons for this, some good, some bad - which I want to work through.
Missions in Historical Perspective
A few things are worth highlighting here about the history of the expansion of the church. One is that it the seasons of church-as-minority and of church-as-majority are two very different modes, in terms of official social sanction and legitimacy, and in terms of missionary vibrancy. The early church was on mission as a minority, trying to creatively (and often at great cost) advocate for the faith in the public square. With church-as-majority (the “Christendom” mode), there was sanction, resources, and an official mandate to expand, as faith was connected to empire and imperialistic territory goals. Often these two modes have been conflated, for better or worse, as missionaries with Godly ideals were sent and deployed as emissaries on behalf of kingdoms and empires.
Another important point to highlight is that the frontiers of mission have always driven innovation out of necessity. One only has to look at the pioneering work in anthropology and linguistics that missionaries have contributed in the previous two centuries, during the age of exploration into jungles and deserts. When mission is pushed up against a frontier, it is forced to innovate in order to creatively pursue its mandate. I would actually argue that part of the essential missionary identity is to be creatively solution-oriented.
The most important point of reflection is that Christian mission, social mission, and education have historically been highly linked. One only has to think of the Christian foundations of the university model in Europe during the middle ages, or the missionary-driven development of endless hospitals, clinics, schools, orphanages, and more throughout the 20th century around the globe. The social sector, especially in the global south, was often pioneered by missionaries before modernity.
Emergence of the “Social Impact” Sector
Today, however, much of the innovative energy toward solving educational and social problems at home and abroad has been centralized in the emerging social impact sector - by this, I mean the ever-growing number and popularity of organizations with some sort of social impact built into their organizational mandate and model.
These groups can be for-profit or nonprofit, it doesn’t matter (and indeed, in the social sector these organizational types blur closer together than ever), but the mandate to generate an organizational outcome that “does good” gives common space to almost any cause under the sun, from education to nature conservation to poverty alleviation and more.
This has prompted the development of massive ecosystems of social entrepreneurship, investing and grant-making, talent development, idea generation, technological innovation, branded storytelling, and more. One can build an entire career in the social impact sector, make significant money in the social impact sector, and make a “difference in the world” in the social impact sector. What else is left?
What’s Left for “Mission?”
The challenge, of course, is that the social impact sector is limited and constrained by the implicit values of the Davos-and-TED-talk global elite, which means that any social impact goal that doesn’t contain within its “telos” a common vision of the future with these gate-keepers and taste-makers doesn’t have legitimacy (and is often seen as dangerous, because it’s counter-cultural to their vision), and doesn’t get to participate in the ecosystem of capital, talent, and legitimacy. Organizations with an explicitly Christian vision no longer fit inside of the circle. (1)
This means that there is publicly no longer any broader social function for the church. It may exist to give people a place to exercise their private faith if they so choose, or to make people “feel good” in a social setting, but it dare not attempt to influence the shape of the world in public. The work of saving and fixing and caring for the world has been shouldered by the social impact sector, and the Church is (generally) no longer welcome at the highest levels. Christians are welcome to partner in social impact work, so long as their Christian identity doesn’t become overly visible, or cause them to derail the agenda. Increasingly, Christians will be allowed to participate in the social impact sector, but won't get to lead out of explicitly Christian values - and thus, being a Christian in this sector will require the same missional responsibilities as being a Christian in government or business - private faith, and public excellence, professionalism, talent, integrity, credibility, etc.
This means that the only missionary activities left (exclusively) to the church are the explicitly spiritual ones - telling people the message of Jesus, inviting them to follow Jesus, helping people with spiritual needs, and building communities of Jesus-followers that bear witness to the Kingdom of God. This is what's left for the church today - evangelism, discipleship, spiritual formation, and church planting.
What Innovation Might Look Like
So, if Christian mission today is being “privatized” into evangelism, discipleship, spiritual formation, and church planting, and if it should anticipate running into challenge and criticism when it gets too close to the public square, how then should the church respond? How can it remain faithful to its missionary mandate as a Creative Minority?
I think this is where our reflections on contextualization are so important. The essential missionary task of the “privatized” church is to conduct its spiritual tasks in such a way that those spiritual tasks resonate with clarity, credibility, plausibility, and power to any non-Christian who cares to observe. The most important discipline for the missionary church in the secular world is to learn how to contextualize the story and community of Jesus in such a culturally-in-tune way that it becomes beautiful and sensible again.
This is, in many ways, a return to the mode of the early church, when the new faith was strange and small, but was known for its radical community and way of life, and shocked the world with its ethics, and slowly but surely grew in credibility as the social structures and social imagination of the Roman Empire began to crumble.
So, my contention is basically that “innovation” in the context of Christian Mission is synonymous with the task of practical “contextualization” - which means findings new ways to actively conduct evangelism, discipleship, spiritual formation, and church planting, that produce resonance, credibility, and plausibility within the current constructs of secular culture.
Scalability?
The church-as-minority doesn’t have the same access to institutions of scale that the church-as-majority typically commands. Scale is a function of power, of distribution, of reach, of access. There are, of course, still a number of Christian institutions that have wide reach and large scale, but they are mostly, in my opinion, not doing well. Denominations are a great example of this. You don’t see nearly as many “new entrants” into Christian mission work that are building scalable organizations. The ecosystem doesn’t exist. Christians with entrepreneurial energy and macro-ambition to do good are going to the social sector, because that's where the resources are.
So, in light of that, there are a few practical opportunities in the coming years for scalability within Christian mission:
First, don’t worry about scale and just focus on localized optimums. The zeitgeist of returning to the “boutique” and the “local” is actually helpful here, because Christians and new churches can learn how to focus on their neighbors and neighborhoods again. The best way to develop a new product or social service is to be “incarnational,” and to use empathy and proximity to see what is broken and how to fix it. There is no substitute for this, and the most innovative and contextual approaches to mission in the future are going to be the ones that are the most “local” in the hardest to reach places.
Second is the intelligent deployment of technology. Technology in any sector lowers the barriers to entry for content, for people, and for organizations. The opportunity of technology for the church is the globalization of the best content and the best approaches to discipleship, formation, and church planting. Amazon has every Christian book available, YouVersion has put the Bible onto billions of smartphones, and anyone in the world can start a podcast, a blog, a webinar, or a training course. This is an under-leveraged opportunity for the church. The danger, here, of course is the whole-sale adoption of someone else’s content and ministry concept, at the expense of local contextualization. It requires balance and discernment.
Building a Missions 2.0 Ecosystem
The final opportunity for scalable innovation in mission is the development of new macro-communities of practice - a new ecosystem. New networks, new communities, and new “guilds,” so to speak, of missionaries and pastors and church leaders and donors, who aggregate the best insights and models and resources, to popularize them to the masses quickly and clearly. This is called “reverse innovation” - taking the best tools and ideas from the local, bringing them all to the global, and re-distributing them back to the local where they are most needed. This is the opportunity of a connected world, and we are starting to see early examples of this - discipleship models pioneered in Africa, now being used by churches in Orange County, for example. We need more of this, but it requires storytelling, platforms, networks, and connectors.
To do this will require new entrepreneurial ventures (including, but not limited to church planting), new types of funding that measure legitimate missional outcomes, talented people with incentives to lead and build and stay in ministry, and new gatherings and platforms and media to tell the stories and connect the people. Some of this exists, but not nearly at a level that is commensurate with the size of the global challenge, and not nearly in a way that promotes a truly global conversation.
Innovation in mission, then, is the embrace of our Church’s spiritual calling, the mandate to re-contextualize everything for the local, and the responsibility to build scalable ecosystems and institutions that can fund and deploy the best practices from the Church everywhere, for the Church everywhere.
Have thoughts or responses? Let me know.
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(1) As a caveat, this is more true in the post-Christian west than it is in the Global South. Many of the institutions that drive social support in parts of Africa, Latin America, etc., are still explicitly Christian, and run into conflict when the grants they depend on begin to come with more and more values-driven strings attached from the funding institutions of the western world.