Global Missions Needs The Tools of Design

The world today is changing quickly, and a number of broad social and economic trends are putting new pressures on the Church in all parts of the world. The Church — broadly defined as the now-global covenant people of God, are sent out to proclaim and testify to the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth. This is the church’s mission. The current challenge of that mission is the extent to which that world is now changing. Global trend-acceleration raises new questions, and puts new pressures on how the Church might live out its mission, in all contexts, faithfully and effectively today.

THE WORLD IS CHANGING QUICKLY TODAY

Demographics + Urbanization — A few highlights on global macro-trends. First, the world is undergoing one of the most significant demographic shifts in history. World population grew from 2 billion to 7 billion in just over 100 years. Half of all of humanity is under 25 years of age. Urbanization is perhaps the most noteworthy trend: Wide industrialization and consumer markets, and the move towards a post-industrial knowledge economy, drive the growth of cities. The world recently shifted from being predominantly rural to predominantly urban for the first time in history. A majority of those people moving from rural areas to urban ones were in China alone, the largest migration of people in history. Almost 50% of the growth of the world’s population in the next 30 years will be in 5countries — Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia, and India, and most of that will be urban. In countries with high degrees of income inequality and without a robust middle class, urbanization has been most pronounced. This most often leads to the elite and the poor in the same urban environment, often right next to one another.

Culture + Secularization. Globally, while religion is on the rise, the secularization of the formerly-Christian western world has been noteworthy as well. The decline of Christianity in Europe has been well documented, and the trends in North America are lagging, but parallel. The broader movement towards pluralistic and secular macro-paradigms in the West has forced churches to rethink their most basic assumptions about theology, culture, and mission. In the global south, the trend has been the growth of Christianity, predominantly charismatic, in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, prompting new missional questions arising from a young, “emerging” church.

Technology — Underneath the explosion of urbanization and the emergence of a global secular mono-culture is increasing total access to affordable personal technology devices. This has democratized access to information, and facilitated the creative means of content production by anyone, creating a new online pseudo-meritocracy in the field of ideas. This has driven the rapid expansion of (some) cultural trends, given rise to a “technological culture” that crosses borders, and allowed the formation of technologically-mediated relationships and networks, strengthening the ability of niche interest groups to find and relate to each other. Information is now for the masses, and the stakes have never been higher for those people and corporations who dominate the most popular information channels.

PRESSURE ON THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH

This puts pressure on the effective witness of the now-global church, as it bears witness to the Kingdom of God in an astounding range of situational contexts that are simultaneously merging into some global trends, and also diversifying into an infinite number of localized sub-cultures. For example, in large cities, there is increasingly a fundamental cultural similarity, mediated by technology and travel, which creates a global “urban” reality, separate from the suburban or rural communities outside their very cities.

In light of cities (with its drive toward elitism and class inequality), secularization (with its hegemonic materialist worldview, promising fulfillment), and technology (with its drive toward individualized access to everything), the church, especially in the West, faces real challenges. There is the challenge of decreased plausibility and credibility in the face of secularization, materialism, and humanist ethics. Churches are increasingly replaced by other personalized forms of community and spirituality, based on affinity, geography, workplace, or ideology. In places where Christian commitment is relatively high, people remain squeezed for margin, with the added pressure of the academic, social, technological, and economic commitments required to keep up in a rapidly evolving economy.

With the growth of the global church of the last century, mission is increasingly multi-directional (not just from the “west to the rest,”) and in the West, there is increasingly a turn back to local mission. Rather than investing in and expanding mission and ministry to the rest of the world, we see the re-emergence of Europe and North America as a “new mission field” itself.

These trends, and a crowded “marketplace” options, demand answers if the church is to sustain its witness. Churches and ministries responding to yesterday’s cultural conditions and answering yesterdays spiritual questions will be unable to find the resonance they desire. The good news of Jesus hasn’t lost its power, but in many cases it has lost its clarity. New forms of intelligent, thoughtful ministry contextualization are needed, to connect the power of the Gospel to the plurality of unique and rapidly changing contexts the church finds herself in globally.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNING MISSION. ARE WE DESIGNING WELL?

My fundamental assertion is that “every Christian has a contextualized missiology, whether they realize it or not.” Said differently — we are all designing ministry, we just might not think of it that way. The question this assertion begs is whether one’s missiology is contextualized effectively, and under what conditions. I’ll spend the rest of this paper exploring the dimensions to that question, and then construct a design-based framework for a more adaptive contextualization.

Words like “contextualization” and “missiology” have often been seen as the realm of overseas missionaries, but in the new global reality, there is no difference between contextualizing “over there” and contextualizing “here.” Anyone who is doing the work of the Church, either professionally, or as a lay leader, or in a para-church organizational context, is “doing ministry,” and has a particular missional framework, philosophy, and set of practices that they have developed, often implicitly or without much reflection. Missional contextualization is often implicit and assumed, based on existing assumptions about people, culture, philosophy, theology, economics, and more. Even further, contextualized mission in practice is rarely reflected on, evaluated, or realigned in order to strive for outcomes, fruitfulness, and revival. If a local ministry is deemed theologically or biblically “faithful,” or more likely, is operating at its maximum capacity with no room to breathe, it is rarely responsible for further reflection on its missiological assumptions. We keep working hard, and give the rest to God.

Yet in this climate, contextualizing mission effectively for a rapidly changing world is more important than ever, and is an essential question of stewardship. Jesus demonstrates a highly contextualized ministry through his incarnation into the Jewish world, and the apostles carried out the Great Commission with cultural contextualization at the very core of their early mission activity (seen at Pentecost, and beyond). Good contextualization can unleash spiritual power and revival, and connect the invitation of the Gospel to people’s hearts without rocks or weeds in the way. Good contextualization matters, and sharing the tools and frameworks of good contextualization for the entire church is important to make it faithful, fruitful, and adaptive at all levels.

DESIGN THINKING CAN HELP MISSION ADAPT WELL

Of course, churches and ministries aren’t the only communities finding themselves disrupted, which means there are other analogues we can evaluate for their responses. Businesses, the social sector, and the public sector all have their own complex challenges that they must navigate in order to remain viable in their context. Every organization has to figure out its own version of “good contextualization” in order to keep customers, serve people, stay sustainable, and accomplish their mission in an uncertain future.

Out of those sectors has come a number of problem solving methods for rapid innovation, designed to help organizations solve human problems and deliver services and value to people in rapid, feasible, sustainable ways as the world changes. The need and demand for “adaptive” and “agile” organizational leadership has been a remarkable growth trend in the business world and beyond.

The most popular paradigm for developing competencies for organizational agility in the face of complex problems has been the emergence of Design Thinking. This approach takes the collaborative and exploratory methodology of designers, and applies their process outside of the traditional domains of domain. Instead of visual arts or technological engineering, it is now applied to products, services, and systems for organizations. Design Thinking is a flexible framework that draws its insights primarily from the observation tools from the social sciences (sharing this step with missiology), but provides a wider lens for re-framing problems, generating solutions, identifying stakeholder constraints, and testing by trial and error. Most relevant for mission is the fact that design thinking is ostensibly focused on first meeting real human needs, and fundamentally building solutions on a foundation of deep empathy.

Design Thinking gives a more comprehensive methodology for contextualized mission.

So, my assertion is that Design Thinking contributes a methodology for a more adaptive missional contextualization process today.

Design thinking is fundamentally contextual and people-focused, which keeps it anchored in some of the core philosophical constraints of missiology, but provides a language, a method, and a toolbox for unpacking cultural realities, uncovering latent solutions and possibilities, and creating a cycle of feedback, evaluation, and learning that can help churches and and ministries remain agile and flexible in changing environments, without forcing them to compromise their identity, calling, theology, or core message. Design thinking is a rich methodology for developing theologically faithful expressions of highly contextual, adaptable mission.

Unpacking what that looks like is the point of the Mission / Design publication, so there is more to come.