The Southgate Fellowship: Glaring Omission

The statement of TSF covers a range of different missiological issues throughout its 100 affirmations and denials. Denial 62b, for example, covers the menace of prosperity theology, and rightly, is situated in the section on eschatology and the tension of living in the already and not yet.

Many of the pet methods of contemporary missiology are dealt with. In one denial, 85c, 'golden keys' and 'persons of peace' are dismissed if viewed as ‘elusive, mysterious or secret interpretive formula,’ something I have dealt with before on this blog. 

One wonders, however, how close to the ground the fellowship are keeping their ears, or how well served they are by their advisors.

In some areas they seem to be out of touch. This is suggested in the following affirmation:

15a) We affirm that if God were to use extraordinary means today (e.g. miraculous events, dreams or visions), that these occurrences should be interpreted providentially either as pre-evangelistic praeparatio, uncommon tools in God’s hand for sovereignly drawing people to himself, or as divinely purposed tools for hardening unbelievers in their unbelief. (my emphasis)

Why are such phenomena considered uncommon when evidence reported in the literature suggests that they are, in some contexts, frequently encountered? Surely such an eminent cohort of scholars and reflective practitioners know this? I am left puzzled.

The glaring omission of TSF, however, is that there is no statement on spiritual warfare. For much of the world church, battle with the demonic realm is the primary lens through which everything else is viewed. 

In Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History, Prof Brian Stanley argues that neo-Pentecostal teaching has had such a profound effect on the spirituality of substantial parts of African Christianity that it has “reordered the entire architecture of Christian doctrine around the motif of spiritual warfare.” My experience tells me that it is also massively significant in parts of Asia.

Clearly by framing the statement in the manner they have, the TSF would not hold such a perspective. So why do they not provide a critique? 

TSF asserts that they worked with the “valuable guidance of nationals and missionaries from all over the world.” Which leads one to wonder who those people are. If they do not even bring up the questions that are exercising their national brothers and sisters, what is the value of their contribution? I fear all the advice does is give a cosmetic multi-cultural gloss to a fundamentally North Atlantic project.

In his important book on Asian theology, Mangoes or Bananas, Bishop Hwa Yung laments the lack of engagement in this area of ministry in the literature and attributes this to the influence of the Enlightenment and dualism on Asian theological writings. Hwa argues that, “Western theologies are the products of the histories, cultures and realities of the West. They cannot, therefore, adequately address the existential realities of the rest of the world because these differ so much from those of the West.”

Quite so. But this is his answer: if “Asian theology is to be truly contextual, it must … necessarily involve the practice of ‘power encounters’ in the healing and exorcism ministries.”

Not so, in my mind. In fact, I disagree profoundly with Hwa’s solution (though this is not the place for me to provide my workings). I suspect the framers of the TSF statement would agree with me. So, I think they have squandered a significant opportunity to say so.

The late missionary anthropologist, Paul Hiebert, noted that Westerners often have a blind spot in the area of spiritual warfare, with their tendency to distinguish ‘high religion,’ with its strongly conceptual and institutionalized character, and ‘folk religion,’ related to magic, astrology and the spirits (itself, I would argue, a deeply problematic construct). The consequence is that the missionary-planted church in the non-Western world is often poorly equipped to deal with folk beliefs and practices, a phenomenon Hiebert calls the ‘flaw of the excluded middle.’

TSF has demonstrated in short measure that that they do not intend to address that flaw, greatly weakening the value of their project.

Reformed Cross-Cultural Naïveté

I have recently been thinking about a serious problem in the reformed movement and conservative evangelicalism more broadly. It is actually not a new problem but an old one. The novelty factor, it seems to me, is that it is affecting some reformed ministries quite spectacularly. It is not just an American problem. We in Britain can be just as guilty. The problem is this: we have become negligent of our duty to be cross-culturally aware. We think we can do cross-cultural ministry without a single hour of training in intercultural communication. We send our pastors off to Ouagadougou to do pastor training without giving them any lessons in contextualization. We fund the translation of our finest books into Telugu without first seeking to understand how the Telugu mind works. And we set up seminaries in Burma without the slightest crumb of knowledge of how Karen or Kachin tribes people best learn. Shame on us.

How did we get this way? Here are six possible reasons:

1.      We think it is enough to emphasize human universals: we are all made in God’s image; we are all sinners; Jesus is the only hope for all people. Those are all true. But it is not enough. The commission of the Lord Jesus was to make disciples of all nations (Matt 28:19). Put that way, he meant that discreet nations rather than the general mass of humanity, have significance. It does an injustice to the Lord to neglect that by only emphasizing the universals and ignoring the particulars.

2.      We have not mined the riches of our theological heritage. So we have an undeveloped theology of human creativity. The biblical doctrine of creation tells us that humans were given a mandate to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen 1:27-28), creating culture from the stuff of creation. That includes language and customs, art, music, architecture. So the rich diversity of the manifold peoples of the earth is something God designed. Reformed people should know this. It has been a significant element in a robust Reformed theology since Calvin. We should recognize that diversity. But we don’t. Or won’t. I am not sure which.

3.      We assume that, because truth is one there is only one biblically permissible worldview. This is false because worldview is, in fact, formed out of an interplay between one’s heart commitments and the environment in which one works out one’s salvation (Phil 2:12). So the world’s peoples look at the world differently from each other. They perceive time differently. They perceive space differently. They are more or less field-dependent, more or less collective, communicate in more or less indirect ways. Which means that the straightforward declaration of the truth is not as straightforward as we may like to imagine.

4.      We assume that to teach the Bible all you need is to study the Bible. This is false because the communication of a message involves both a source and a receptor. In order for communication to be effective there has to be attention to the receptor as well as the message and the source. So we mustn’t take a sermon that we preached in Birmingham and preach it the same way in Bangalore. But you say there is only one Bible. Indeed, but when you take that Bible and you create a message you enculturate that message in your culture. That means it is no longer just the Bible. It is the Bible in your cultural idiom.

5.      Personal confidence is confused for godly conviction. It is good to have strong doctrinal convictions. The problem is, though, we often confuse a strong doctrinal commitment for godly conviction rather that what it really is, ungodly self-confidence. We are naïve about ourselves. Whereas those we disagree with must be foolish and self-deceived we are not. We are triumphalistic, not humble. We assume we must be right on all our finer points of doctrine because we are right about the basics. Or because so and so celebrity pastor says it is. Where is the godly self doubt that should lead us to question ourselves? We have fallen into the Corinthian pit of self-deception (1 Cor 3:18).

6.      We forget we are in a spiritual battle and that the enemy of our souls has a vested interest in the failure of our ministry. That failure can be accomplished in many ways. One way is by fooling us that we don’t need to pay attention to local matters, that what is good for Manchester is also good for Maputo. Another way is by lulling us into a false sense of our own effectiveness leading us to think we can do this with professional ease. So we don’t pray like we should.

So how should be fix this problem? We need to remind ourselves that we might not be right about everything after all. We need to get down on our knees and examine our hearts and repent of the pride that leads us to such hubris. We need to get a biblical view of the particular, take the trouble to give heed to it, and be more modest about the expectations we have of anything we do cross-culturally, especially if we don’t make the in-depth, long-term investment in language and cultural acquisition that is every bit as serious as our biblical and theological learning. I fear the reformed triumphalism of recent years is every bit as ugly as the charismatic triumphalism of a generation ago. May God have mercy on us.

Ortiz on Mission to the City

In past blog posts I have reviewed Conn and Ortiz's major work on ministry to the city, Urban Mission. The first half of the book was largely, it would seem, the work of Harvie Conn before he died. The second half of the book, parts 4-6, seem, however, to have been written by Manuel Ortiz. His writing style is quite different and though he brings to the study a different and welcome perspective these chapters don't rise to the heights of the previous ones. Nevertheless there are plenty of useful insights that I would like to share with you.

In part 4 'Developing Urban Church Growth Eyes' Ortiz tackles the Social Sciences, ethnographic and demographic studies and their usefulness for mission in the city. Social science is the application of scientific methods to human behaviour. It is the opinion of the author, and I would agree, that social sciences can make mission more effective. It is good stewardship to learn about a community before engaging it with the gospel. But sometimes missiologists have used social sciences simplistically and uncritically. Ortiz gives an example of this in Vergil Gerber’s God’s Way to Keep a Church Going and Growing: A Manual for Evangelism/Church Growth (Glendale, Calif.: Regal, 1973), which he nevertheless describes as otherwise helpful (260). 

In part 5, 'Promoting Kingdom Signs in the City', Ortiz tackles 'reachable people groups', shalom & transformation, and spiritual warfare, all from the urban perspective.

The authors discuss the difficulties with defining people groups especially in the present urban context. Two common uses of the term 'people group' are explored: 

1. McGavran's technical definition: “a tribe, a caste, or any homogeneous unit where marriage and intimate life take place only with the society” (1970:296). 
2. Schreck and Barrett's ‘particularistic’ definition: “a significantly large sociological grouping of individuals who perceive themselves to have common affinity for one another. From the viewpoint of evangelization this is the largest possible group within which the gospel can spread without encountering barriers of understanding or acceptance’ (1987:7)” (314).

I would argue that the first approach, though helpful as far as it can go, suffers from a fundamental problem. It relies far too heavily on a scientific positivist approach. Clearly according to the first approach everyone has to be part of one or another group exclusively. But this does not reflect the situation as it is on the ground. Ethnic and linguistic groups, social groups and societal groups do not often have cut and dried boundaries. They are fuzzy and may even be arranged on a spectrum. The particularistic approach seeks to overcome this problem by introducing the crucial subjective element, resulting in a single individual often being a member of multiple groups. This approach has been criticised for making it difficult to enumerate people groups because of the problem of overlapping. Ortiz’s response is that this is only one way of viewing peoples and that the two approaches should be seen as complementary (316). I think more needs to be done by way of critique of people group sociology and its application to mission. 

Chapter 19, 'Spiritual Warfare in the City', leaves much to be desired. Ortiz cites numerous authors from across the evangelical spectrum but fails to engage with them critically. There is so much nonsense written on this subject that critical engagement is vital if we are to understand spiritual warfare. Instead, after quoting Linthicum, Wagner, and Peretti he suggests that “it is for the reader to search out any difficulties in matters of exegesis and interpretation” (370-71)! Indeed but it is vital that authors like Ortiz get their hands dirty too.

The final part of the book is on Leadership and Discipleship for the Urban Church in which Ortiz writes helpfully, on mentoring and theological education.