Mission in the 21st Century

Ed Andrew Walls & Cathy Ross
Darton, Longman & Todd 2008 £14.95


The Five Marks of Mission came out of the Anglican Consultative Council in 1984, or more accurately 1990 when “safeguarding creation” was added to the other four, but they have since been accepted in many churches as a way of setting out God’s holistic or ‘integrated’ mission. From the Lausanne Convention to the Roman Catholic adoption of “evangelisation”, there is broad ecumenical agreement that the conflict between evangelism and activism, between pastoral care and advocacy, is past. All are part of what God is doing in the world today, and all are where God is calling the Church to become involved.

Another change is equally significant. Globalisation challenges those British churches which are still imbued with an understanding of mission which is about “us” sending good things to “them”, and where we once sent missionaries through Missionary Societies we now send Aid through development charities. The continuing disparity of economic resources often blinds us to the fact that the fulcrum of the world church is no longer here in Europe. That doesn’t mean that we need a reverse missionary movement, nor does it sanction those who might want to create a new Christendom based in Africa or wherever, but it does mean that mission is now the activity of a global church in which we need to learn new ways of understanding and supporting each other.

This book is a most welcome contribution to that task. It begins by taking each of the five marks of mission in turn, and we hear voices from all around the world expanding them in first a more theological and then a more practical way. For example, for the first ‘Mark’ of Proclaiming the Good News of the Kingdom, Ken Gnanakan from India stresses the importance of context for both the New Testament and today, while Zac Niringiye from Uganda criticises the “miracle-working fêtes and prosperity-Gospel marketing ventures” which can pass for evangelism in some parts of Africa.

Writing on the second Mark – to teach, baptise and nurture new believers - Emmanuel Egbunu from Nigeria shows how the communal nature of African society has more in common with the first Christian communities that the more individualistic style of much Western Christianity. But Melba Maggay from the Philippines sees how the third Mark – to respond to human need by loving service - calls on people from the Two Third worlds to break free from both “the stranglehold of nature and ancestral spirits” and traditional hierarchies and systems which preserve power and keep people poor.

There are strong pieces on the fourth mark of transforming unjust structures, and some criticism of those churches in the south who it is said know little of the God of justice and the building of a discipleship community committed to it. The whole church has been slow to take up the final mark about creation, but Dave Bookless provides a comprehensive commentary from the perspective of his work with A Rocha UK.

The second half of the book contains essays of various quality, but the chapter on “Migration and Mission” by Jehu J Hanciles is an important reminder of how migration – from Europe to the colonies, and now (for example) from the Caribbean and West Africa to England – has played a major rôle in the spread of the Gospel and the development of the Church. As Rowan Williams says in his foreword, the global economy of our age is by no means a benign thing, but it does open up all kinds of opportunities to become a really global church.