Academic Articles

In 2010, Wycliffe College introduced into its M.Div program a so-called “pioneer stream.” The advertising cited the writings of missiologist Lesslie Newbigin, and his call to the church in the West to rise to the challenge of a post-Christendom world, and then concluded:

The kind of leadership that was required for established, healthy churches in a Christendom setting is radically different from what is needed in a post-Christian, postmodern setting where churches may not even exist. The church now needs not only visionary, mission-minded pastors, but also pioneers, entrepreneurs, and missionaries who can take the Gospel to cultures and subcultures in North America where Christ is not represented, and found new Christian communities.

So far, some fifteen students have been involved in the stream to a greater or lesser extent.

I want to address two questions today. Firstly, a theoretical or theological question: What exactly is a pioneer, and how do pioneers relate to our understanding of church? Is it a concept with any theological traction? And then the second question: what does a pioneer look like in practice? The first part is a kind of preliminary apologia for the idea of pioneering ministry, and the latter a case study.

1.  How does the idea of pioneering ministry relate to our understanding of church?

Many of you will be aware of the 2004 Church of England report to General Synod called Mission Shaped Church, which was unanimously adopted, and which has shaped developments in the Church of England ever since in quite radical ways. One of the innovative recommendations of the report was:

The Ministry Division of the Archbishops’ Council should actively seek to encourage the identification, selection and training of pioneer church planters, for both lay and ordained ministries. . . . Patterns of training should be appropriate to the skills, gifting and experience of those being trained.[1]

Several points are worth noting here: pioneering is equated with church planting, pioneering is an “equal opportunity” ministry for lay and ordained; and there should be specialized training for these pioneers.

So what is this about? Is this just another “flavor of the month” fad which wise leaders will ignore because it will disappear as quickly as it arrived? What I want to attempt is not a theology of pioneering, and not even a Bible study on pioneering: it is more an attempt to stake out a theological field, and say, I think this is the area in which we need to dig in order to figure this out.

So where to begin? We begin with God—of course!—and with the activity of God in the world we have learned to call the missio dei. Here is how Jurgen Moltmann explains the missio dei and the church:

Mission is not primarily an activity of the church, but an attribute of God. God is a missionary God. It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfill in the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church. There is church because there is mission, not vice versa.[2]

So how do pioneer ministries relate to the missio dei? All ministry begins in the ministry of Jesus Christ and flows from the ministry of Jesus Christ, and pioneering is no exception. Let’s begin with scripture. The term pioneer occurs in the NT several times: the Greek word is archegos, which is variously translated originator, author, founder and pioneer[3] and is always applied to Jesus Christ: “God exalted [Jesus] at his right hand as Leader and Savior” (Acts 5:30-31); “you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead” (Acts 3:14-15); “It was fitting that God . . . in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings” (Hebrews 2:10); and (perhaps the best-known):

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses . . . let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. (Hebrews 12:1-2)

There is another related word, however, which is applied to Jesus and to his followers, and that is the term “apostle.” Jesus is only called an “apostle” once (in Hebrews),[4] but in the Gospel of John the idea of being sent (which is the meaning of the Greek word apostello) is central: Jesus is described as being sent by the Father no less than forty times.[5] Then, at the end of the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples, “As the Father sent me, so I am sending you” (John 20:21): for John, this is the point at which the disciples become “the apostles,” sent by Jesus as he was sent by the Father.

The question has dogged Christian history, however, whether the twelve are the only ones legitimately called “apostles.” Most agree that the twelve have a unique role as apostles: as John Stott puts it, they were “a very small and distinctive group . . . personally chosen and authorized by Jesus, and had to be eyewitnesses of the risen Lord.” He adds, “in this sense there are no apostles today.”[6]

But there are other senses. For example, Stott also says, “The verb apostello means to ‘send,’ and all Christian people are sent into the world as Christ’s ambassadors and witnesses, to share in the apostolic mission of the whole church.”[7] In between these two meanings (the twelve and all Christians) is a third sense. Michael Griffiths cites New Testament scholar John Goldingay as pointing out that the word ‘apostle’ is ‘etymologically equivalent to missionary,’ and that ‘apostles are perhaps the pioneer missionary evangelists through whom Christian communities are founded.’ Griffiths adds, “It does not seem biblically necessary to deny the continuing existence of apostles in this secondary sense of pioneer church-planting missionaries.”[8] It is interesting to note that in both Catholic and Protestant tradition, this is the way the term is popularly used: St Francis Xavier, “apostle of the Indies and Japan,” William Carey, “apostle to India,” and so on.[9]

The term “apostle” in this sense was little used during the centuries of Christendom, and it was not a ministry that was recovered by the mainline Protestant Reformers. Indeed, most scholars agree that the Reformation lacked any significant missionary impulse. [10] Unfortunately, missiology is not just an optional extra, like heated seats in your car. Ignoring mission is more like leaving the chili powder out of your chili recipe: everything is affected and the chili is just not the same thing.

So, for example, the Reformation’s understanding of ministry is different because of the absence of missiology. Case in point: the Reformers do not consider the possibility of apostles as “pioneer missionary evangelists.” Lutheran theologians, for example, believed that the Great Commission of Matthew 28 had been fulfilled by the Twelve, and was no longer the church’s responsibility. Calvin similarly sees apostolic ministry as having come to an end. In his commentary on Ephesians 4, he writes:

[O]f the offices which Paul enumerates [apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher], only the last two [pastor and teacher] are perpetual. For God adorned His Church with apostles, evangelists and prophets, only for a time . . . But without pastors and [teachers] there can be no government of the church.[11]

For him, the main issue is whether pastor and teacher constitute one gift or two.

Newbigin summarizes the effects of this lack of missiology like this:

[T]he period in which our thinking about the Church received its main features [that is, the Protestant Reformation] was the period in which Christianity had practically ceased to be a missionary religion. . . . It was in this period, when the dimension of the ends of the earth had ceased to exist as a practical reality in the minds of [Protestant] Christians, that the main patterns of churchmanship were formed. The congregation was not a staging post for world mission but a gathering place for the faithful of a town or village. The ministry was not understood in terms of mission but in terms of guardianship of those already in the fold.[12]

As a result, whatever the reasons for this blind spot[13], it remains the fact that Reformation ecclesiology does not help us much with thinking about mission or apostolic ministries or pioneer church planting.

However, among those who have picked up Newbigin’s challenge to the church has been a group calling itself the Gospel and Our Culture Network.[14] Their most significant contribution to the conversation is a book called Missional Church (1998). In one chapter, the authors tackle this specific issue of the need for a renewal of apostolic ministries as crucial to rediscovering our missional calling:

Pastoral gifts are important, but in the current setting of the North American church, the apostolic gifts need to be called forth and equipped. While Ephesians 4 outlines a series of leadership gifts [apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher], the contemporary church focuses most of its energy on identifying, training and credentialing that limited section of those gifts related to the pastor-teacher. This indicates the levels at which the model of the settled parish culture continues to prevail. In the marginalized, missional setting that lies ahead for the church in North America, this pastor-teacher model is insufficient.[15]

All this is what lies behind the decision of the Wycliffe College, following the lead of the Church of England and its theological colleges, to introduce the pioneer stream to the M.Div program, not instead of training leaders for existing congregations, but alongside them. I am happy that we are not trying to introduce the term “apostolic,” because it would sound pretentious and presumptuous, even elitist. But if we understand apostles in this sense to be “pioneer missionary evangelists through whom Christian communities are founded,”[16] then technically it is what we are seeking to do.

That’s the first question. But then we ask what exactly is this unfamiliar animal called the pioneer minister? The second part of this paper addresses this question:

2. What does a pioneer look like?

Here I want to draw on my work on Vincent Donovan, and particularly his letters. Donovan lived from 1926 till 2000. For sixteen years, from 1957 till 1973, he was a Roman Catholic missionary in Northern Tanzania, and for two of those years (1966-1968) worked among the Maasai. He belonged to a missionary order, the Order of the Holy Ghost, begun in the 19^th century and more commonly these days called the Spiritans. In 1973, he returned to the US, and in 1978 wrote a book about his experiences called Christianity Rediscovered (Orbis Books, 1978, 2003), which has become something of a classic in missiology, cited in works as diverse as Adrian Hastings’ A History of African Christianity, 1950-1975 (1979), George Sumner’s The First and the Last (2004), Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder’s Constants in Context (2004), the Church of England’s Mission-Shaped Church report (2004), Brian McLaren’s Generous Orthodoxy (2004), and Dorothy Hodgson’s The Church of Women (2005).

Let me suggest six characteristics I see in Donovan which I think may be fairly said to be typical of those with this apostolic charism of pioneering.

(1) Pioneers are restless at knowing that people have not heard the Gospel

I suspect this is the basic motivation for pioneers. You see it clearly in the Apostle Paul:

I make it my ambition to proclaim the good news, not where Christ has already been named, so that I do not build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, “Those who have never been told of him shall see, and those who have never heard of him shall understand.” (Romans 15:20-21)

Most Christians who see themselves as communicators of the Gospel spend their time preaching to those who have already heard the name of Christ, and are content to do so. Paul is different: so is Donovan. In June 1960, he writes:

I personally am responsible for preaching the gospel to seventy-thousand Arusha tribesmen, and further up the line, together with another priest, I am responsible for doing the same to fifty-thousand Meru tribesmen. That’s 120,000 people on the conscience of Reverend Vincent J. Donovan of Winston Street, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. . . . Perhaps you understand that it is not easy to get on a personal first-name relationship with all of my parishioners, especially since some of their names are so difficult, that it develops an extra muscle in your tongue if you pronounce them often. (June 1960)

Notice how he starts: “I personally am responsible for preaching the gospel.” There is already a Catholic church among the Meru with thirty-one members, and some would be satisfied to minister to them—but not a pioneer. Here is one of his clearest statements of why:

For a big group of people in our own diocese [the Meru] whose tribal ground covered an unbelievably large land area, the gospel was an unknown quantity. They had never heard it. . . . How I longed to go to them! (April 1963, emphasis original)

Donovan, like the Apostle Paul, is a pioneer in the sense that he has a deep yearning to go to those who have never heard the gospel. This is the deepest desire of his heart.

This is why, as he looks at the church’s deployment of its resources around the world, it grieves him that:

out of the forty-thousand missionaries of the world . . . less than one thousand of them [are] assigned to evangelize the four-fifths of the world that is pagan. . . . scarcely eighteen percent of the world . . . has heard of Christ, nearly two thousand years after the Resurrection. (July 1970)

As a result, the conviction grew on him during his early years in Tanzania that, for him at least, other ministries had to be secondary. Early on, he is proud of the fact that missionaries need to be generalists. He (and the great majority were men) needs to be “pastor, principal of school, architect, mason, carpenter, painter, plumber, mechanic, judge, doctor, cook, employer, administrator, accountant, diplomat, explorer, lawyer, beggar, [and] priest” (August 1959). But by 1965, he is bemoaning the fact that “many of the priests and other missionaries who were working in East Africa were doing everything but teaching religion. And you know, that is actually why they came to Africa—to teach religion—or ‘to preach the Gospel,’ as it says in the Bible.” (April 1965) In December of that year, he writes, “I have been involved in many kinds of work out here, building, transporting, medical, social, educational, and searching out new sections where the church has never entered.” Then he adds a very revealing note: “but it was in catechetical work that I truly felt I was closest to the heart of the matter.” It’s the work of evangelizing those who have never heard the Gospel that engages him most fully.

This impulse leads to a second characteristic of pioneers:

(2) Pioneers are more centrifugal in their ministry than centripetal

Here’s how he summarized one stage of his work:

Most of my time is not spent around the little mission church, but outside the mission. Most of my work is not with the Christians, but with Pagans and [Muslims]. It is an entirely different atmosphere, and calls for entirely different methods. (June 1960)

Later on, thanks to the influence of Anglican missiologist Roland Allen, he begins to understand the Apostle Paul’s method of missionary work, and contrasts it with what other missionaries have been doing for decades, and you will notice his use of the terms centrifugal and centripetal:

Paul . . . neither built nor established a mission [meaning a “mission compound”]. He himself was the mission, he and his companions, a mobile mission, a temporary mission in any one place, a team in motion or movement towards the establishment, not of a mission, but of an indigenous church. Paul founded churches. We found missions. . . . In the latter case, it is no longer a centrifugal force reaching out forever as far as it can. It becomes instead centripetal, attracting everything to itself. Instead of symbolizing movement towards another thing (in this case, church [that is, a new congregation]), it becomes instead, itself, the end of the line. . . . The word missionary is really a misnomer in this context. The command to go out and preach the gospel has become subtly transformed into “Stay here; take care of what you have. Let others come to you.” Missionary movement comes to a dead stop. (July 1970)

Of course, as soon as you decide to “go” and get involved with “the other,” questions arise. We know how to relate to those who are similar to ourselves. Derek Warlock, former Bishop of Liverpool, once defined culture as “the way we do things round here.” When we meet “the other,” we find they “do things” differently, all the way from a different language to a different understanding of God, and we are faced with the question of how to communicate the Gospel in this different culture. As a result, pioneers by the very nature of their calling are faced immediately and urgently with what we call for short “Gospel and culture” questions—rather more than those of us for whom church is our normal environment.

It is clear that the Apostle Paul wrestled with this question:

Woe to me if I do not proclaim the gospel! . . . [T]hough I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. . . . To those outside the law I became as one outside the law . . . so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, [why?] that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings. (1 Corinthians 9:16-23)

This leads me to suggest another characteristic of pioneers:

(3) Pioneers seek to sit light to their own culture

I don’t know if Donovan ever encountered the writings of twentieth century Sri Lankan missiologist D. T. Niles (1908-1970), but he would certainly have sympathized with Niles’ advice:

When the missionaries came to our lands they brought not only the seed of the gospel, but their own plant of Christianity, flowerpot included. So . . . what we have to do is break the flowerpot, take out the seed of the gospel, sow it in our own cultural soil, and let our own version of Christianity grow.[17]

Donovan’s Order was sensitive to this issue from the beginning. Their founder, Francis Libermann (1802–1852), had advised them, for example:

Put off Europe, its customs, its spirit. . . . Become Negroes to the Negroes, in order to form them as they should be, not in the fashion of Europe, but allow them to keep what is peculiar to them.[18]

Having said that, however, Donovan and some of his colleagues were dissatisfied with the way the Order was living out its charism in the late 1950’s. In an early letter, Donovan notes, without comment:

Several [Spiritan missionaries] have built their own houses; one of which could have come out of the pages of “Better Homes and Gardens” at half the professional price. One of them . . . without any training whatsoever, designed himself a beautiful, magnificent Gothic Cathedral—and has almost completed it.[19] (August 1 1959)

A Western flowerpot was governing the shape of the African plant. Some of the dissatisfaction had to do with the Diocese of Moshi, where Donovan was first placed. Although it was under African leadership by this time[20], the church there had taken on a particularly European coloring, at least in Donovan’s eyes. They were, he reports, “Western in education, western in dress, western in the Christian names they bear, the churches they worship in, and the hymns they sing” (October 1967). Libermann had explicitly warned against imitating “the fashion of Europe,” so no wonder Donovan and his colleagues were dissatisfied. However, in 1963, a new diocese, the Diocese of Arusha, was carved out of the growing Diocese of Moshi, a Spiritan bishop (Dennis Durning) was appointed, and most of the Spiritan missionaries were transferred there. This gave them scope to put into practice their convictions about enculturation.

By 1965, Donovan has begun to use the phrase “naked Christianity”—that is, Christianity without any cultural trappings. He comes close to Niles’ analogy by saying, “I had to plant the seed in the Masai[21] culture, and let it grow wild.”[22] He says the goal of the Spiritans is:

to examine our religion itself, strip it of all the accidentals that have accrued to it throughout the years and centuries; see if we could get back to a kind of naked Christianity. People have a tendency to cling to accidentals and forget essentials. We wouldn’t give our people a chance to cling to accidentals, because we wouldn’t teach any. (June 1965)

Most these days, I think, would agree with David Bosch, who says, “There never was a ‘pure’ message, supracultural and suprahistorical. It [is] impossible to penetrate to a residue of Christian faith that was not, in a sense, already interpretation.”[23] Newbigin suggests that to try and separate what is cultural in our understanding of the faith from what is “authentic” is “like pretending to move a bus while you are sitting on it.”[24] It cannot be done. The closest we can come, he suggests, is through studying scripture with people of other cultures and learning to respect their perspectives and thus question our own—as might happen, for example, at an international conference.

In Christianity Rediscovered, Donovan actually describes how this happened for him: for example, in his work among the Maasai, he assumed that candidates for baptism would be examined and baptized one by one—whereas the Maasai assumed that whole villages would be baptised together as communities. Donovan could have insisted that his way was the right way, but was sensitive enough to realise the Maasai were right and he was wrong: whole villages were baptised.[25]

Even though it is impossible to distinguish “naked Christianity,” yet the awareness that all of us have cultural biases in interpreting the Gospel, and the willingness to accept correction from someone of another culture, is crucial for our spiritual health—and especially for those who are pioneers.

Fourthly, if pioneers want to take the Gospel to those who have never heard it, and are sensitized to cultural differences, then a major characteristic will be that:

(4) Pioneers have a desire to translate the Gospel

Not long after he arrived in Tanzania, Donovan was struck by the fact that many of the hymns the African Catholics sang were Swahili words set to “Alsatian, French and German” tunes. The most Westernized of the tribes, the Chagga, seemed to be satisfied with this, but the Maasai were not: he writes, “They do not like Swahili . . . And they do not understand or like European melodies.” So Donovan began to collect Maasai tunes, and set the words of the Mass (Latin, of course!) to those tunes. The result was dramatic:

After the Mass, the Masai . . . in the blankets and skins came to me with tears in their eyes, to thank me for bringing to them, in a way they understood, the message of God and the worship of God.

The mark of a pioneer is not just that he or she does this, but that they find joy in doing it: “Would you think me strange if I told you that that day there were tears in my eyes, too—if I told you that there is nothing—nothing quite like missionary work?” (Aug 9, 1960) Not surprisingly, he adds, “I became half Masai myself” (July 1960).

It’s an interesting historical footnote that around this time he asked his bishop for permission to do the whole of the high mass in the Maasai language. The bishop, a Chagga by the name of Kilasara, had no choice but to say no but, Donovan comments, “I was told such permission will be granted at the Ecumenical Council soon to be held.” (August 9 1960) That “Ecumenical Council” was what came to be known as the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), at which the Spiritans and their concerns were well represented.

This passion for translation is actually one way that a pioneer safeguards against imposing his or her own culture. Lamin Sanneh is an African teaching at Yale, who has written extensively on the effect of translation. He puts it this way:

[T]he gospel is potentially capable of transcending the cultural inhibitions of the translator and taking root in fresh soil [the seed image again!], a piece of transplanting that will in time come to challenge the presuppositions of the translator [—precisely what happened with Donovan’s revolution about communal baptisms] . . . When one translates, it is like pulling the trigger of a loaded gun: the translator cannot recall the speeding bullet.[26]

Perhaps it is obvious by now, but the fifth characteristic is worth spelling out:

(5) Pioneers are willing to take on a challenge

The desire to share the Gospel with those who have never heard it means that pioneers are prepared to make sacrifices. On two occasions, Donovan’s bishop asked him to take on a pioneering challenge. The first was in 1961, when Bishop Kilasara sent a message asking Donovan to leave the Senior Seminary in Kibosho, which he had been directing, and to go to Usa River to begin a mission among the Meru tribe. Donovan writes:

The Meru! They stretched out from the south east corner ofMountMerudown into the plains far below. I remembered hearing back in 1958 that in the whole Meru tribe, there were only eleven Catholics. I asked the vicar general if he knew how many Catholics there were in the tribe now. He said according to the latest statistics there were now thirty-one. Thirty-one Catholics in a tribe of fifty-thousand! They were one of the most stubborn tribes we had ever come in contact with, rejecting every advance we ever made towards them. The vicar general was smiling. (April 1963)

Most of us would not be excited at such a challenge. Donovan is different. His immediate response? “Mission to the Meru! Mission to the Meru! My heart began to sing” (April 1963).

For a pioneer like Donovan, the challenge of a pioneering assignment like this is precisely what gives him joy.

Five years later, his bishop (now the Spiritan Bishop Durning) wanted him to apply the missionary strategy that he had developed among the Maasai to another tribe, the Sonjo, and again Donovan rose to the challenge:

The Sonjo! The Sonjo are a tribe more primitive than the Masai, mysterious in their origins . . . almost completely impervious to any outside influence. . . . Because of [this], they can be an extremely difficult people with which to work. . . . Of course, this is what I had been dreaming of, what I had been saying we not only can do but must do—evangelize one tribe after the other, and move on, never settling down, never letting the word mission be changed from the active, moving, dynamic thing that it is supposed to be into a static, settled down, comfortable, turned-in, institutional, end-of-the-line type thing that it usually becomes. . . . I took the job—and a stiff drink the bishop offered me. (September 1968)

In light of the first five characteristics, I do not think the final one will come as a surprise:

(6) Pioneers are often considered trouble-makers

Donovan himself does not seem to have been labeled this way, but this is because he was a part of a missionary Order. But the Order itself was often considered a thorn in the flesh by the national church of Tanzania. When the new Diocese of Arusha was created in 1963, for some it was seen as a way to accommodate (and perhaps isolate) the ethos of the Spiritans, who were regarded as uncomfortably radical. Donovan comments on what happened at national church gatherings:

We in Arusha . . . are pretty far out on a limb in many things. . . . Opinions and thoughts from Arusha always caused much commotion, and were inevitably received with much suspicion and fear.

One thorny issue concerned the possibility of ordaining married men. As Donovan worked among the Maasai, he was very struck by how natural leaders emerge from the community—and he would like to have ordained them.[27] But, of course, in the Catholic system, they would first of all had to do seven years theological training, and be committed to celibacy. Even if the churches could wait that long, by the time they came back, how far would they be able to relate to their own people? Donovan describes arguing the case at a national conference:

[T]he hostility from the local clergy of other Dioceses and from Bishops towards the idea of married priests was incredible, we almost thought insurmountable. After a year of meetings, discussions etc., the change in mentality is just as remarkable. I think everyone agrees that something must be done and although everyone is not yet prepared to go as far as we want to go, they are at least willing at last to discuss the problem. (Dec 30, 1969)

Usually it is an individual pioneer who is a thorn in the flesh for the institutional church. What is amusing here is that it is a whole pioneering diocese (not to mention its bishop) that creates a problem for the national church. One correspondent told me that other Tanzanian bishops tried for twenty years to get Durning to resign: in fact, he lasted 23 years!

Conclusion

You will not be surprised to know that I think we need to do more to nurture pioneers and pioneer ministries. Strangely enough, the two Christian traditions that have taken this kind of ministry seriously are the so-called evangelical denominations on the one hand, and the Roman Catholics on the other. It seems to have been harder for Protestant mainline denominations—Anglican, United and Lutheran, for example—to read the signs of the times and act accordingly. Maybe we had more invested in Christendom than either of the other groups, and are still in denial about its death!

If I am right, then there are three fronts we need to work on: firstly, developing a fuller theology of pioneer ministries and an understanding of how it relates to our missiology and our ecclesiology; secondly, looking for models—starting with the Apostle Paul, but including those like Vincent Donovan, who have exercised the charism of pioneering ministry over the centuries and who have much to teach us; and thirdly, we need to work on finding ways to identify, cultivate and deploy those who have the potential for this kind of ministry.

But let me give the last word to Vincent Donovan:

An inward-turned Christianity is a dangerous counterfeit, an alluring masquerade—is no Christianity at all. . . . Christianity must be a force that moves outwards. A Christian, in his community or out of it, must, like Christ, be essentially a “man for others.”[28] Not for himself. And the Christian community is basically in existence for others. That is the whole meaning of a Christian community. . . . Christ did not say, “Be good and the world will come to you.” He said, “Go out to all the world.”  (May 1970)

Let us be imitators of Vincent Donovan as he was of the Apostle Paul, as he was of Christ. To the glory of God.

Lecture given on the occasion of John Bowen’s promotion to ful professor

January 11, 2012

In 1984, Haddon Robinson, then President of Denver Seminary, gave an address on the topic, “The Evangelist and the Theologian.”[1] He observed that evangelism and scholarship have generally been estranged during the past two hundred years, to the detriment of both. Yet, Robinson argued, the church needs both “scholarly evangelists” and “evangelistic scholars.” He pointed to examples of those who had integrated the scholarly and the evangelistic modes of ministry, such as the Apostle Paul, Augustine, Jerome, John Calvin, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, William Carey and Francis Schaeffer.

In this article, I will assume that the ministry of evangelism is necessary to the life and health of the church. I will merely suggest at this point that the roots of evangelism are deep in the ministry of Jesus and the model of the apostolic church. It seems to me also that the lasting influence of scholar-evangelists like those on Robinson’s list speaks of its importance. Yet, with such distinguished forebears, it might be asked why the church no longer seems to produce leaders who are both scholarly and evangelistic. In broad strokes, Robinson lays the blame at the feet of the university-based seminary:

Theologians in the seminaries often belittled evangelism… Many in the churches, on the other hand, reacted against seminaries and scholarship.[2]

The issue thus raised rhetorically has been discussed by others in more scholarly fashion. David Kelsey has helpfully summarized the ongoing debate about the nature of theological education in his 1993 book, Between Athens and Berlin.[3] Kelsey contrasts two visions of theological education. The “Athens” model, which goes back to ancient Greece, and which was effortlessly adopted by the early church, stresses “schooling as ‘character formation’.” [4] In Christian terms, it is an education “whose goal is knowledge of God and, correlatively, forming persons’ souls to be holy.”[5] “Berlin,” on the other hand, stands for a type of theological education pioneered by Schleiermacher at the University of Berlin in the early nineteenth century. Here, theology had to justify its existence in a secular Enlightenment, research-oriented university, and it did so by arguing that theology trains people in one of the professions needed by society—the church, which exists alongside medicine and the law.[6]

Charles Wood, in his 1985 discussion of theological education, Vision and Discernment, contends that the shape of theology has been determined ever since by the demands and expectations of “Berlin.” [7] Schleiermacher’s shaping of theological education into three streams, historical theology (which included the Bible), philosophical theology (which included systematic theology), and practical theology (which included the social sciences), thus located “the ‘theological’ character and unity of these disciplines neither in their method nor in their subject matter per se, but in their orientation to a particular purpose”—that purpose being to serve the wider culture.[8]

Not surprisingly, the teaching of evangelism has no place in the Berlin model. William Abraham offers a useful definition of evangelism as “that set of intentional activities which is governed by the goal of initiating people into the kingdom of God.”

[9] This goal, however, is antithetical to the goal of objectivity which is fundamental to the Berlin model. Abraham states the problem thus:

Evangelism is seen as a sectarian issue that requires the kind of prior faith commitments that are out of place in a serious academic environment.[10]

The teaching of evangelism and indeed the practice of evangelism exist more comfortably in an Athens environment where faith commitments are understood as fundamental to life and learning. Thus teaching and training in evangelism, while generally absent from seminary curricula, were common in the Bible colleges which sprang up in the late nineteenth century specifically to provide a preparation for ministry which was free of the constraints on faith imposed by university-based seminaries. [11]

Three developments in the past fifty years have, however, brought about a new opportunity for evangelism and scholarship to grow together again. First, churches have awoken to the ways in which the marriage of church and state under Christendom hampered the integrity of its witness. Second, there has been a move towards seeing the natural locus of evangelism as the life of the local congregation. And, third, there has been an openness to consider the philosophical underpinnings of the whole theological–educational venture. I will touch briefly on the first two of these, and then look in more detail at the latter.

The End of Christendom 

The adoption of the Christian faith by the emperor Constantine in the year 313 is generally regarded as a turning point in the relationship of the church to the state. Thus began the project known as Christendom which, while it had many strengths, is widely agreed to have led to the weakening of the distinctive message and values of the Gospel. John Stackhouse comments that “All Bible schools shared the same basic qualities: concern for correct doctrine, a Bible-centered curriculum, and practical training—especially in evangelism.” He also gives a vivid example of how Bible colleges perceived seminaries to be destructive to faith (pp. 80-81). Hauerwas and William Willimon are typical of writers on this subject in pointing out that the church in the world of Christendom was:

a church that had ceased to ask itself the right questions as it went about congratulating itself for transforming the world, not noticing that in fact the world had tamed the church.[12]

Rodney Clapp illustrates the relationship of church to world in Christendom like this:

For the better part of recorded history, the church has been the sponsor of western civilization. Like gym-shoe manufacturers who win the right to advertise their wares with the world’s most famous athletes, the church has coveted its association with Western civilization.[13]

The church, he suggests, has been the chaplain on the ship of the state, offering religious services but with no influence over the direction or running of the ship; the captain has been on the bridge with the real power, deciding the direction of the vessel. Thus when Schleiermacher needed to justify the teaching of theology in the modern university, he had to do it in terms that the largely secular university understood: theology prepares pastors who will serve the needs of the state. The chaplain provides religious services, regardless of which direction the ship travels.

Now, however, Christendom is at an end. Hauerwas and Willimon suggest (somewhat tongue in cheek) that it happened in 1963, on a Sunday when the Fox Theater in Greensville SC opened its doors on a Sunday, and went head to head with the church.[14] Or, to return to Clapp’s metaphor, the captain has decided that the chaplain is no longer needed. The question for the chaplain, of course, is: what now? The answer coming from many quarters is an optimistic one. Hauerwas and Willimon are again typical:

The demise of the Constantinian world view…is not a death to lament. The decline of the old, Constantinian synthesis means that…Christians are at last free to be faithful in a way that makes being a Christian today an exciting adventure.[15]

Finally the church can recover its true calling, and can be captain of her own ship—or, rather, follow the direction of Christ, her true captain. This new freedom has many implications which will take some years to think through. One area in which rethinking has already begun is the shape of theological education.

What does a theological education look like which is shaped by the nature of theology itself, indeed by the shape of Christian faith itself, rather than by external and—many would now agree—inappropriate criteria? What should congregational leadership look like in a church whose purpose is mission to an alien world rather than chaplaincy to a semi-pagan state? I would contend that the door is now open for a reconsideration of the  place of evangelism in the enterprise of theological education. It was hardly appropriate in a Christendom seminary: in a post-Christendom model, however, it can take on the role and significance it has within the faith itself.

The Church as Evangelizing Community 

In recent years, thinking and writing about evangelism has moved away from an emphasis on the gifted individual evangelist and has begun to explore the role of the congregation as the place where healthy evangelism is most likely to happen.[16]  It has become popular to say that people often belong before they believe, in the sense that, for many, becoming part of a Christian community often precedes actual profession of Christian faith by months or even years.

There are at least two reasons for this shift. One  is pragmatic, a dissatisfaction with  forms of evangelism taking place away from the community of the church, such as crusades or television preaching, which may produce “decisions for Christ” but do not always produce baptized, committed members of Christian communities. If, however, the community is the place where the evangelism happens, then converts are already involved in a community of disciples by the time they find themselves believing. Thus congregationally-based evangelism is more likely to nurture long-term disciples than event-oriented evangelism.

The second reason for the shift from individual to communal is, I believe, more philosophical—the postmodern contention that truth is discovered in community. As an illustration, Stanley Grenz paraphrases postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty thus:

Everything one can say about truth or rationality is embedded in the understanding and concepts unique to the society in which one lives… [I]t is impossible for us to rise above human communities.[17]

This point of view, though coming from a secular philosopher, should resonate for Christians. After all, most people do not come to believe in Christ through hearing abstract propositions in a relational vacuum. Christianity believes in a Word which became flesh: we come to believe because we get involved with the person of the living Christ. Thus evangelism happens best (though by no means exclusively: God is sovereign, after all), when we have the opportunity to be with other people who are seeking to know and live God’s truth, and who discuss it in concrete rather than theoretical ways. When the Word is made flesh again in the community of Christ’s people, people discover God’s reality there.  

How is this change connected to theological education? If churches are to become this kind of evangelizing communities, it is their pastors who will lead them to become so, and pastors are (in most denominations) trained in seminaries. Thus, if seminaries do not train their future pastors in evangelism, it is unlikely that the congregations they lead will ever develop a ministry of evangelism. Harold Percy speaks passionately to this issue of appropriate leadership for congregations:

Transformational leaders have a clear conviction that God can and will work through their congregation to change lives, and that their congregation of people can be used by God to help change the world. Such vision begins with a clear vision of the evangelizing community and what that community might look like in its particular setting and circumstances.[18]

I hope it is not unfair to suggest that seminaries by and large do not produce this kind of “transformational leader” who can help a congregation become an evangelizing community. One way they might do so is by introducing the teaching of evangelism into the formation of future pastors.

A New Model for Theological Education 

Of course, the need for training in evangelism could be addressed simply by hiring adjunct faculty to teach courses on evangelism. Many seminaries in Canada do just that. If, however, evangelism is to be an integral part of the seminary curriculum, rather than an optional appendix, a new model of theological education will have a more lasting effect.

Charles Wood offers just such a paradigm. After reviewing how theological study has been understood historically, Wood proposes that “Christian theology may be defined as a critical enquiry into the validity of Christian witness.”[19] To some, the idea of “witness” is inescapably a freighted term, redolent of revival meetings and street-corner evangelists. Wood’s understanding of “witness,” however, is more theological and nuanced: “Christian witness” is meant here in a comprehensive sense, roughly equivalent to a similarly broad sense of “Christian tradition,” that is, one embracing both the activity of bearing witness (or handing on the tradition) and the substance of what is borne or handed on. The role of theology in relation to witness is thus: an attempt to bring witness to reflection, and to ask about its validity—its faithfulness, its truth, its aptness to its circumstances…an exercise in self criticism, aimed at enabling those so engaged to bear more adequate witness… As such, theology is an aspect of the continuing repentance to which the church and all its members are called.[20]

The heart of theological education, then, is to reflect on the work of witness, the Bible’s own witness to the work of God in history, the church’s witness to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and the practices of the church as in some measure bearing witness to God’s work in the lives of communities and individuals. Wood argues that this “witness” can be considered according to three criteria—historical, philosophical and practical—and proposes that theological study be divided into three main disciplines according to these criteria:

1. Historical. This discipline would look at the history of God’s people, in biblical times and in church history, and ask such questions as:

a. Is a particular instance of historical witness genuine and faithful in its presentation of Christian tradition?

b. How far is it true to the church’s mandate to be a witness to God’s work in Christ?

Wood proposes that this theological discipline should take over the name “historical theology,” and use the tools of historical research to consider the whole of Christian tradition. Study of the Bible would be included under this rubric.

2. Philosophical. This discipline would consider such questions as:

a. What is witness?

b. What may be known about God?

c. In what sense may Jesus be said to be the “Son of God”?

d. Is any given example of Christian witness meaningful and true?

To describe this discipline, Wood proposes to co-opt the term “philosophical theology.”

3. Practical. This discipline would look at questions of Christian witness in human society, and ask such questions as:

a. How did Jesus’ witness impact the society of his day?
b. How did the apostles take the gospel to the Gentile world?
c. How do cross-cultural missions operate today?

It may also be asked whether Christian witness is, in any given circumstance, appropriate. Is it a fitting enactment of witness for the cultural context in which it is performed? This field of study Wood terms “practical theology.” It would use the scholarly tools of the human sciences, such as sociology, psychology and anthropology, in considering questions such as these.

Wood’s paradigm is helpful as we think about training in evangelism because of the privileged position he gives to the concept of “witness,” which is, after all, a central component in all evangelism. Indeed, he suggests that the aim of studying theology is “enabling those so engaged to bear more adequate witness.”[21] It is true that Wood makes “witness” mean “everything the church is and does as the church”[22]—whether liturgical worship or social service, professional ministry or political involvement—and in a sense he is right to do so since any authentically churchly activity inevitably bears witness to the reality of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, in the New Testament the word “martyria” (witness) refers most frequently to evangelistic witness. For example, of thirty uses of the word “martyria” in the Johannine writings, twenty-seven of them are dominated by the specific sense of “evangelistic witness to the nature and significance of Christ.”[23] Thus any system of theological education which puts the concept of witness at the centre is by implication opening the door to the subject of evangelism.

If Wood’s model of theological education were to be adopted, seminary work would come to include significant theological reflection on evangelism, not as an academic embarrassment, or a cultural aberration from the true task of theology, but as a basic aspect of witness, theology’s fundamental driving force. The three main components of theological education, in Wood’s vision—historical, philosophical and practical—could readily be applied to the subject of evangelism:

1. In studying the historical aspect of witness, for instance, theology would ask:

a. How is evangelism carried out in Scripture?

b. How does Jesus himself bear witness to the Kingdom?

c. How has the church through the centuries followed the evangelistic mandate?

d. What makes Christian evangelism authentic?

e. How has the Church’s evangelism been faithful to the witness of the apostles and of Jesus himself?

2. Within the discipline of philosophical theology, questions would be asked of evangelism:

a. In what sense is the message as proclaimed true?

b. Is it legitimate for the Gospel to claim what it claims?

c. Is it coherent and meaningful?

3. Under the rubric of what Wood calls practical theology, students would ask questions such as:

a. What is an appropriate way to express the Gospel to this person or group, in this culture, at this time?

b. What does evangelistic preaching look like in this culture?

c. What is the place of the catechumenate today?

d. What can I learn from practising evangelists?

e. What can Christians in the West learn from evangelists in other cultures?

If Wood’s model were to be adopted, and the door was thus opened to the teaching of evangelism in seminaries, the benefit would be at least two-fold. On the one hand, the teaching of evangelism would greatly benefit pastors as they prepare for congregational leadership, which in a post-Christendom world must include a sharply-defined sense of mission.

On the other hand, this model would also serve to bring the resources of theology to bear on evangelism. An evangelism that was informed by history, philosophy and social sciences (to name Wood’s three disciplines) would be a very different phenomenon from that which we presently experience—richer, broader, more historically aware, more culturally sensitive, more theologically nuanced—indeed, to use Wood’s own criteria, more faithful, true and appropriate. Then the church would be faced with the exciting prospect of a new generation of scholarly evangelists and evangelistic scholars.

Two Examples 

Is this more than a theoretical ideal? Two contemporary evangelists illustrate the possibility of evangelism and theological education enriching one another: the late Terry Winter and Michael Green. Unfortunately, their experience does not shed light on the systemic question of the place of evangelism in theological education, nor can they be taken as examples of how Wood’s paradigm might work. The two are simply ad hoc instances of people in the world of theological education who had a passion for evangelism and found pragmatic ways for the two to work together. Nevertheless, their example is encouraging: these two worlds are not necessarily antithetical to one another.

Terry Winter (1942–1998) was an independent evangelist of Plymouth Brethren background, based in British Columbia. He had his own television show which was seen across Canada on Vision TV. Winter had a B.A. from the University of British Columbia and a Doctorate in Pastoral Theology (a predecessor of the D.Min.) from Fuller Seminary.

Canon Dr. Michael Green, a New Testament scholar, has been Principal of St. John’s Theological College, Nottingham, England, and Professor of Evangelism at Regent College, Vancouver. He is currently Professor of Evangelism at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford. Of his many books, perhaps the best-known are Evangelism in the Early Church and I Believe in the Holy Spirit. [24] Green has M.A.s in Classics and Theology, and a B.D. from Cambridge, an honorary D.D. from the University of Toronto, and a Lambeth D.D.[25]

In interviews I conducted for my Doctor of Ministry thesis,[26] Winter was one of the very few evangelists with whom I spoke who thought that his seminary experience had actually enhanced his evangelistic ministry. During doctoral studies at Fuller Seminary, he had in Paul Jewett a sympathetic supervisor who saw beyond the modernist dichotomy between evangelism and scholarship. In a taped interview, Winter states:

I happened to like systematic theology, so I did my doctorate in systematic theology and evangelism… My Professor, Paul Jewett, [said,] “Terry, we want you to be a better evangelist, so let’s study systematic theology with an evangelistic application. We need more systematic theologians who are evangelists or evangelists who are systematic theologians.”[27]

For Jewett and Winter, healthy evangelism needed good theology. Indeed, the subjects at the heart of the evangelist’s message—sin, the person of Christ, atonement, salvation, repentance, faith, discipleship—are among the most profoundly theological topics anywhere. As Robinson argues:

What does it mean “to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ”? …Take that Biblical assertion apart and you are working with theology… Only if we understand the gospel ourselves can we hope to make it clear to others… Theology clarifies our thought, sets what Christians believe in contrast with false doctrine, and helps us make the message clear to outsiders.[28]

I am persuaded that an evangelist trained in systematic theology is likely to be a better evangelist.

Michael Green has been a pioneer in the teaching of evangelism in seminaries. In his role as seminary principal and professor of evangelism, he has always made it a practice to engage students in “real-life” evangelistic opportunities. Like Jewett, he does not see a necessary distinction between the teaching of evangelism and the teaching of more traditional academic subjects. Indeed, he described to me how, when he first went to teach at St. John’s College:

I started to do [evangelistic] missions, and…would take students off on those. When I became Principal, I’d take them off in term time and, boy! they were good at their Hebrew verbs when they got back because their motivation was so high.[29]

He continued this model of education when he was Professor of Evangelism at Regent College in the 1980s, combining classroom teaching with church-based or city-wide missions, where students would form Green’s team, and participate in speaking, testifying and other evangelistic activities.

The testimonies of Green (as teacher) and Winter (as student) suggest that seminary education and training in evangelism can in fact go hand in hand, even though neither Green nor Winter was working in an institution where evangelism had been formally integrated into the curriculum in the way Wood recommends.

Conclusion 

For two hundred years, evangelism and scholarship have had little to do with one another. Yet the church in a post-Constantinian, postmodern world is not only in urgent need of scholarly evangelists, but is in a unique position to nurture them. Charles Wood’s proposal for a witness centred model of theological education, while radical, would give a more appropriate place to the teaching of evangelism in seminaries. Terry Winter and Michael Green, on the other hand, show that theology and evangelism can go hand in hand at the practical level. If seminaries pursue this integration, the church may once again produce scholarly evangelists and evangelistic scholars, and be the healthier for it.

McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry 6 (2003-2005) 

[1] Haddon W. Robinson, “The Theologian and the Evangelist,” The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 28.1 (March 1985), 3-8.

[2] Robinson, “The Theologian and the Evangelist,” 3.

[3] David Kelsey, Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).

[4] Ibid., 6.

[5] Ibid., 11.

[6] Ibid., 17-18.

[7] Charles M. Wood, Vision and Discernment: An Orientation in Theological Study (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985).

[8] Ibid., 11-12.

[9] William J. Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 95.

[10] Ibid., 5.

[11] John G. Stackhouse, Canadian Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century: An Introduction to its Character (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 75.

[12] Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 41.

[13] Rodney Clapp, A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post- Christian Society (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 17.

[14] Hauerwas and Willimon, 15.

[15] Ibid., 18.

[16] See, e.g., Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism; Walter Brueggemann, Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993); Michael Green, Evangelism through the Local Church (Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990),George G. Hunter, The Celtic Way of Evangelism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999); Sally Morgenthaler, Worship Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995); Harold J. Percy, Good News People (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1996); and John P. Bowen, Evangelism for “Normal” People ( Minneapolis: Augsburg–Fortress Press, 2002).
[17] Stanley J. Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism ( Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 156-57.

[18] Percy, 82.

[19] Wood, 21.

[20] Ibid., 24.

[21] Ibid., 38.

[22] Ibid., 38.

[23] H. Strathmann, “mavrtu”, ktl.,” TDNT IV, 500

[24] Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church (Crowborough, UK: Highland Books, 1970); idem, I Believe in the Holy Spirit ( London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975).

[25] A British B.D. is the equivalent of a North American M.Div. A “Lambeth D.D.” is the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It is the equivalent of an Oxford D.D., and is considered the equivalent of an earned doctorate.

[26] John P. Bowen, “Teaching Proclamation: A Model for Training Evangelistic Preachers”, unpublished D.Min. thesis, McMaster Divinity College, Hamilton, ON, 1996.

[27] Terry Winter, telephone interview with author, tape recording, May 15, 1996.

[28] Robinson, 6-7.

[29] Michael Green, interview with author, tape recording, Hamilton, ON, August 18, 1996.