The Southgate Fellowship: Conceptualising Our Priorities

TSF engages with the thorny issue of how to define and delineate the mission of the church. Rightly, they emphasise the need for people to put their faith in Christ:

67a) We affirm that people have needs of all kinds, but that every person’s greatest need is for faith in Christ and repentance from sin to the glory of God in Christ Jesus.

So proclamation of the gospel is paramount.

But mercy ministry is also important. Many have tried to conceptualize the relationship of mercy ministry with the ministry of proclamation.

TSF’s position is thus:

74a) We affirm that to separate mercy ministry and ministry of the Word is to be out of accord with Christ’s commission. 

74b) We deny that either form of ministry is an isolated or exclusive priority. 

74c) We affirm that in the church’s mission to the world, it is biblically informed wisdom which will recommend the order and leading priority of Word or deed for each occasion.

That encapsulates well my own view which has been argued best by Tim Chester in Good News to the Poor.

What place does the incarnation have in the theology of ministry to the poor?

TSF includes a good set of affirmations and denials on the incarnation of Christ (§§40-42). I think their prime concern here is that a maximal doctrine of incarnation has often been used to underpin various forms of liberation theology.

It seems to me, however, that the statement goes too far in this denial:

42c) We deny that the sui generis incarnation of the eternal Son of God offers a proper analogy for construing contextualisation as ‘incarnational’.

They argue, rightly of course, that it is logically impossible for those who already have flesh to be enfleshed and go on to argue that the “use of 'incarnational' to describe Jesus as a model effectively undermines the sui generis character of God becoming flesh in Christ.”

But that ain't necessarily so.

The incarnation of the eternal Son of God is indeed sui generis (of its own kind).

However, if we accept and preach that, which we must, then any comparison of his incarnation and that of the intercultural communicator is, by definition, understood analogically. So, when Paul instructs the Corinthian believers to “Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1) surely no one argues that Paul was hoping to give his life a sacrifice of atonement. Rather, he could follow Christ’s example by having “the same mindset as Christ” in his humility (Phil 2:5-11).

So, an incarnational approach to intercultural ministry is one of foregoing one’s rights, of clothing oneself with humility.

Far too much cross-cultural ministry goes on without any serious attempt to identify with the host community; more so today than ever before because of the ease of travel. I have a sneaking suspicion that people who argue against the incarnation of the Son of God having any bearing on contextualization do so because they do not want to spend the long time necessary to embody the gospel in that host community. I hope that is not the case, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is.

Perhaps, in God’s providence, the coronavirus pandemic will deter short-term, low-commitment, shallow ministry among underserved communities.

My prayer is that it doesn’t also deter long-term, high-commitment, in-depth ministry. Because it is chiefly through such gospel communicators, sharing their lives and not just their words, that people come to see the beauty of Jesus. I don’t really care if the word incarnational is used for this sort of ministry or not, so long as it happens.

The Southgate Fellowship: Fighting Old Battles

The third in a series of reflections. Part one is here and part two here.

Sometimes the Southgate Fellowship statement seems to belong to another era.

What exactly are is TSF arguing with here? 

79c) We deny that a younger church has no theological, financial or moral obligation to the sending church.

Can we really frame relationships between churches in terms of ‘sending’ and ‘younger’? That may have been the reality of church and mission in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when many churches in the traditional ‘fields’ began with some sort of relationship to a missionary or mission society. The agency brokered the relationship of the new churches with their supporting churches back home. Control of those new churches was assumed to belong to the missionaries, who were themselves accountable to the mission board back home.

It took a great deal of heart searching and argument to free many churches in the global South from foreign control. In fact, it was only with the end of the colonial era that many churches became autonomous. Sadly, this process was often slow, begrudging and acrimonious, so that indigenous alternatives were sought outside of all relationship with brothers and sisters in other countries. 

In recent decades the vast majority of church planting in the global South has been carried out by local evangelists. Everything is about relationships. Formal transactional partnerships are alien. The idea that churches that have shared resources might have no obligations to one another would be considered bizarre.

So why the denial?

It comes over as naïve and anachronistic.

Furthermore, one wonders whether the implications of some sections of the statement have really been thought through.

There is a proper recognition that the primary locus for mission is the local church. Parachurch agencies have their place but must not usurp the authority of the local church. I have argued for this myself. 

So primary oversight of cross-cultural ministry must not be in the hands of denominational agencies or parachurch organizations:

75a) We affirm that visible churches bear the primary responsibility for the theological, moral, and ministry-method oversight of missionaries.
75b) We affirm that the visible church has the primary responsibility to recruit, mobilise, and send individual church members into mission.
75c) We deny that denominational agencies and parachurch organisations should have the primary theological, moral, and ministry-method oversight of missionaries.

Strangely, however, considering the majority of the council teach in theological colleges, no specific mention is made of them. Does the visible church have primary oversight over their work in these parachurch organizations or is that oversight exercised by others? How does primary oversight work out at Westminster or Oak Hill? Perhaps a measure of autonomy for parachurch agencies is allowable after all.

The lack of any acknowledgement that there might be an issue here causes one to pause and ask whether the ground reality is rather more messy than the formal statement. In the interest of candour, this should be more transparent.

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.

The Southgate Fellowship

The Southgate Fellowship is a group of theologians, missiologists and reflective practitioners who are concerned at the state of missions in the contemporary evangelical world. A few days ago, the group, which has been meeting together over the past four years, launched a new web site.

Council members of The Southgate Fellowship are drawn from the USA, UK, and France. 

They belong to a number of denominations, but all are committed to Reformed theology; the Council is co-chaired by David Garner of Westminster Theological Seminary and Dan Strange of Oak Hill College, two heavyweight systematic theologians from Reformed institutions.

All council members take an active interest in cross-cultural ministry with a few having experience of work among Muslims. Some have ministry experience outside their homeland, though it is not clear that this includes substantial personal intercultural interaction.

I have met half of the council and was a supervisor of Bill Nikides’s uncompleted doctoral research. My review article of Dan Strange’s book on the subject is available here.

The council has been helped by a number of external advisors, though these are not named.

TSF has already been endorsed by dozens of well-known conservative evangelical leaders in church, seminary and mission, including Don Carson, Ligon Duncan, Kevin DeYoung, Michael Horton, Bill Edgar, Richard Pratt, Garry Williams, Paul Wells, Ray Porter, and Steve Smith, as well as lesser-known pastors and leaders in various other parts of the world.

You are given the opportunity to add your endorsement. I will not be doing this and will try over the next few blog posts to explain why.

For now, though, allow me to make some general comments.

It is the conviction of TSF that

due to a convergence of forces in contemporary theology and the global church, many in the study and practice of world mission have strayed methodologically from the sure foundation of Scripture; they functionally deny the categorical uniqueness of the Christian faith, and impose non-biblical and even anti-biblical interpretive grids upon people, religions, culture, and the work of mission.

The core project of the TSF, therefore, is a statement consisting of 100 pithy affirmations and denials that seek to outline where the points of contention are and provide a biblical critique. The statement is ordered in a systematic theological framework, is well presented and is easily accessible using the format of drop-down section headings.

For the most part, the statement is readable. But not always. In places it is even clunky:

79c) We deny that a younger church has no theological, financial or moral obligation to the sending church.

Why the double negative?

I understand that a statement of this nature needs to be terse. It is already long (nearly 10,000 words) but at times the degree of abstraction tends to opacity. For example, I am not really sure to what this is referring:

58b) We deny that in terms of redemptive history or for the sake of mission method, these last days offer direct parallel to or unqualified analogy to those prior to the coming of Christ.

That may be just my ignorance.

Proof reading missed out this incomplete sentence: 

Whilst individuals, groups and societies may see themselves as a-religious and describe themselves as such (whether atheistic, disinterested, secular or other).

These are minor concerns. Over the next few days I plan to engage with the statement in more significant ways.

Living Together during the Pandemic

Living together in close proximity for a while can be stressful. Even if you are a family.

Partly as a result of the pandemic, there are six of us in our household now: five adults and a teenager. So it is like a holiday. Except it isn't: four are preparing for exams of one kind or another and the rest of us have plenty to do.

Last evening we talked over dinner and came up with a plan:

1. All meals will be eaten together. That means that everyone has to get up by 7.30am. Easier for some!
2. We have divided up the chores between us with everyone's tasks on the whiteboard.
3. Family devotions continue during breakfast.
4. There will be a daily family walk, weather permitting, with optional participation. We also recognise that some might want to walk by themselves sometimes.
5. The hours between breakfast and our evening meal are generally for work. The evenings are more flexible.
6. We will try to get involved in whatever our churches are doing online.
7. Whatever money would have been spent on food at university, now goes into the family kitty.
8. We will let our elderly neighbours know they can call on us for help.

How are you organising your family life?

Focussing

This is the last in a series on strategy for Wales. See the others from 17th January onwards starting with this.

A strategic approach to the re-evangelisation of Wales must be an exercise in ministry triage: just as paramedics arriving on the scene of a critical incident need to quickly assess their priorities, who it is that needs immediate treatment, so we need to think critically about our programmes and approaches. I think two groups, in particular, could do with more focus:

a)    Men

It seems to me that the evangelical church has for too long spent too much energy prioritising the wrong people. It has often been observed that an approach that focusses on children and women often ends there too. If men are led to Christ, however, women and children often follow. We need to be looking to reach whole families. And in order to do that we may need to cast a critical eye over our programmes with a view to asking how men are going to be reached. Furthermore, when, in God’s mercy, he draws women and children to himself what plan do we have in place to bridge over to the family leaders? If this is not happening, perhaps we need to scrap some activities and replace them with others that are more focussed on the men.

b)    Ethnic minorities

A rather different matter is that of how we approach the evangelization of ethnic minority groups, whether they be Iranians in Swansea, Somalis in Cardiff, or Nepalis in Cwmbran. It is true that the great emphasis of the New Testament is that, in Christ, previously antagonistic groups have become one (John 17:20-23; Eph 2:11-22). And the church must work hard to reflect that reality. But the Lord Jesus also made it clear that the church must make disciples of all nations (Matt 28:19). We do not have to define that in any kind of anachronistic overly sociological manner for that to lose its significance. The fact is, we have not been very good at reaching out to minority communities in the UK. This is especially so, I believe, for those groups that are traditionally Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist.

I suggest that for some communities a focussed outreach is the only way we can overcome the social and cultural stigma that is attached to the prospect of becoming a follower of Christ. That is not to say that a church plant among, say, South Asian British Muslims needs to remain isolated from other churches. But it is an acknowledgement that we do not expect that such people are required to become like us when they turn to Christ. There is more than one way to express unity in the body of Christ.

Resourcing

We often seem to think that a lack of resources is the biggest obstacle to the fulfilment of our vision. I disagree. The biggest obstacle is spiritual lethargy. We need to cry out for the Lord to warm up our churches, and us, so that we are willing to free up time, energy, and money for the work of the gospel. 

On a practical level, how do we find funding for worthwhile projects? I mentioned earlier the great work done by social entrepreneurs. In the developing world such businesses are often funded through microfinance set-ups. A fund is created that makes small loans to individuals and groups for small-scale businesses. The community is much more invested in such a scheme than is typically the case in Western bank-based, individualistic lending.

Are there businesspeople in our churches who can establish such a scheme in order to help church members in some of our poorer communities set up small-scale businesses that bring employment and other benefits to those communities? Is this something that Stewardship would get behind? I suggest that we all look out for competent people in our church leadership who will run with this vision. Such a person would be a networker who can connect visions and skills with resources.

In addition, it seems to me that there are two areas of our churches’ giving in which a bit of critical thinking may be fruitful:

a)    Short-Term Mission

Churches in Wales have encouraged members to get involved in Short-Term Mission (STM) for decades. STMs can be a blessing in three ways:

·      people in difficult situations can be helped directly by the assistance of energetic short-termers;

·      the short-termers get the reward of doing something useful;

·      their churches can benefit from the renewed enthusiasm brought back home and cross-fertilisation of ideas.

But STMs can also have negative consequences:

·      they can be a humungous drain on resources. Darren Carlson writing from the US perspective reports that in 2005 the cost of STMs was a whopping $2.4 billion, more money than the GDP of more than 20 countries; it is a lot less in the UK but still substantial;

·      significant concerns have been raised (in the secular world as well as in missions) about visiting short-term volunteers. Sometimes dubbed ‘voluntourism’, this has been roundly criticised as a selfish effort to get an experience of life in another country without sufficient concern for the long-term effects it has on the host community. Imagine the emotional effect on an orphan of having a new adult come and play with you every week.

One friend from India recently expressed his dismay that people are going from Wales to serve the poor in places like his home country, when, in his opinion there are poorer people here in Wales! Should we think twice about sending young people overseas when there are great needs here in Wales? If someone wants to serve overseas but not at home, it may indicate that their inspiration comes more from Instagram than from the Spirit. STM in the UK (with EMW camps, UBM beach missions for example) automatically avoids many of the issues associated with STM overseas.

While we must not drop a global vision, we must continue to encourage people to consider service at home as well as in far-flung places.

b)     Partnership

Paul commends the Philippians for their partnership in the gospel (Phil 1:6). That included the giving of gifts (Phil 4:10-19) and the sharing of personnel (Phil 2:19-30). Clearly partnership between churches and other ministries is a gospel priority that leads to a synergistic outcome.

Many of our churches in Wales are involved in partnerships with churches and organisations in other places. Often that will involve financial giving to persecuted Christians, disaster relief, orphanages, etc. We are sending a lot of money overseas but what do we do to ensure that is not misused?

I have seen financial gifts bring great blessing to many: girls saved from traffickers needing a safe house to stay in and training in a skill to become independent; literature bought with foreign funds and donated to a book shop to be sold and provide an income for the bookshop owner and his family; small gifts to help someone start a business when he could not access credit from a bank. Money can be a tremendous blessing when it is used carefully.

On the other hand, there is a massive problem of fraud and UK churches can sometimes be very credulous. According to David Barrett and Todd Johnson $50,000,000,000 of ecclesiastical fraud is estimated to take place annually (latest stats I have are from 2006). That is equivalent to the entire GDP of the world’s 44 poorer nations combined! Such a statistic should make us very cautious about giving money to projects and people that we have little relationship with. I have personal experience of many horror stories of financial abuse from my time in Asia.

Just recently I challenged the organization Mission India about false statements they make on their publicity. Organizations like this lack integrity but are supported by many of our churches and church members, sucking the Lord’s money into dubious projects. We need to regularly review our giving to try to ensure that best practice is being applied and we are not allowing corrupt people and poorly conceived projects to drain our resources. Let us take a long hard look to see if we can free up money for gospel work in Wales.

Furthermore, we could be more open to develop partnerships with those from outside Wales who want to minister here. The right kind of people are needed. Can we draw up a profile of the need and send out a Macedonian call across the world? This is challenging without a doubt. We may need to be more open to change, which is never easy. But the right kind of partnership has great potential – e.g. Grace Baptist Partnership in London and SE.

Here are three principles for partnership:

      i.         Partnership can include both tangible and intangible exchange: the sharing of money and personnel must be matched by prayer, and love, and expressions of concern (Phil 1:3-11; 2:19-30; 4:10-19).

     ii.         Partnership thrives on mutual respect and love. Neo-colonial paternalism is not welcome even if it comes from countries previously considered as developing countries – the Macedonian call was to ‘come over and help us’ not ‘come over and take over our institutions’. We must be careful not to be wowed by big churches and big budgets. Using a business model to shape a partnership is worldly. Partnership must be relational, not transactional. 

    iii.         Partnership grows as trust grows. Trust is something that is formed over time. But it can be broken in a moment. The key here is attitude: cross-cultural partnership thrives on relationship. If we have the right attitude, mistakes in cross-cultural communication will be overcome. So, it demands constant self-examination to ensure we are not undermining gospel relationships in any way. And when we sin, we need to be quick to confess. Our willingness to pursue the healing of past rifts is a measure of our readiness to build gospel partnerships in the future. If they have any wisdom, brothers and sisters from other countries, or even England, will examine the health of existing partnerships before committing themselves to new ones.

The local church is of course the Lord’s vehicle for gospel expansion. But local churches must think twice before they try to forge partnerships with churches in far-flung places without help from culture brokers – people with knowledge and experience of both places. I lost count of the number of naïve British churches who desired to forge relationships with churches and leaders in Nepal. It always seemed to me to be a function of a little-kingdom-building mentality that wanted to show partnerships off as pins on maps in exotic places. They are playing Risk with the kingdom of God.

A way to avoid slipping up here is to recognise that the Lord in his providence has already given us expert bicultural bridges in the form of mission agencies. So, if you want to build a connection with a church in Japan, you involve people who have on-the-ground experience, who understand the situation and can interpret it to you.

I think we have not tapped into these existing networks to anything like their potential. There are Americans, Nigerians, Chinese, and Indians who want to do cross-cultural ministry in Europe. Organisations such as UFM, OM, and SIM are well-placed to facilitate our partnerships with brothers and sisters in other countries. Let’s seek wisdom from the Lord to use the relationships that already exist to develop new opportunities.

In conclusion, may I reiterate what I said at the beginning: our greatest need is not strategies and talk fests on reaching Wales but a genuine work of God by his Spirit. So, we must never substitute planning for prayer. The Lord has said he will build his church. He calls us to work with him. We must always be sensitive to the Spirit’s leading and be ready to drop our plans when he gives us an unplanned opportunity. May the Lord give us sensitivity and wisdom as we seek to lead our churches in the great work of the kingdom.