As we continue to seek the best ways to join in God’s mission, we welcomed two advocates of indigenous Christians to the CMS offices. They asked lots of thought provoking questions…

“I shall come as a stranger with everything to learn again.”

John V Taylor, former general secretary of CMS

For more than 150 years CMS and SAMS people in mission have walked alongside indigenous people groups in Latin America. As we continue to do so, we are getting valuable guidance from Jocabed Solano and Drew Jennings-Grisham of Memoria Indígena (Indigenous Memory).

During a recent session with them at CMS in Oxford, we were reminded how much we have to learn – and unlearn – when it comes to mission within indigenous communities.

Missing stories

Jocabed is from the Guna people in what is now Panama and is the director of Memoria Indígena. She also coordinates the Latin American Theological Fraternity’s “Identity, Indigeneity, Interculturality” group.

She is a second generation Christian and as a child she remembers hearing about missionaries: “During Sunday school, the teacher asked ‘Who wants to be a missionary?’ and all the children put their hands up.”

Yet as she got older she wondered, why is there no history recorded about indigenous missionaries? Or women? Why are the stories of indigenous Christianity missing?

She is now committed to creating space where these stories can be found and told – to “fertilise” the theology of the global church with indigenous insights.

“We want to create a space where indigenous people can say, yes my history is important. And encourage the writing and recording of the indigenous experience, not just writing but preserving our orality.

“Churches should be listening more to what God is doing in different contexts. It’s impossible to talk about mission and justice without hearing indigenous views.”

Expanding our vocabulary

Epistemicide is defined as the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of particular ways of knowing.

Indigenous peoples in Latin America are contending with epistemicide as western industries and influences erode their way of life.

Jocabed says, “The local education today is very much western, there is a loss of language, culture, identity, knowledge about plants and the land…. All of this comes from epistemicide.”

This is a double tragedy: not only for the indigenous people seeing so much knowledge and tradition disappear, but also because this knowledge could be vital and valuable for the rest of the world, particularly regarding issues such as climate change.

“We have 72 words for earth,” Jocabed points out, and yet few people in power turn to indigenous peoples for climate change remedies.

Indigenous communities can also offer a valid critique of capitalist systems and show another way.

“We are working to preserve indigenous identity. When you look at Revelation 7:9, which speaks of a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne…. You have to ask what does this mean when indigenous communities disappear?”

Listening hard

According to Jocabed and her colleague Drew, among indigenous peoples, “There is much respect for British missionary allies who have done incredible work over the years. But there is still more work to be done in decolonising these relationships.” However much westerners want to empower local leaders, they are still usually the ones with the financial power.

A good place to start is listening to stories, asking tough questions and listening to the responses together.

Drew shared one story of visiting a community in northern Bolivia in the Amazon, travelling several days up river in a canoe. There he met an indigenous pastor in his 70s, who had been one of the original members of a church founded by North American missionaries.

“I asked him to describe his church, and he started drawing in the dirt, a picture of a big canoe with a bunch of people in it and at the back, there was a man standing and steering with a motor. He said, ‘This canoe represents our church and our work is to navigate upstream against current of the world, and invite more people into the canoe.’ He then said, ‘The man in the back is the missionary.’

“He then drew another canoe, with a man in the back, paddling without a motor. He said, ‘When the missionary was here we were flying upstream and then one day the missionary left and took the motor with him. The motor is economic power, connections, education, resources…. When he left everyone had grown used to the motor and nobody knew how to paddle. Everyone sits in the boat and I am the man in the back and everyone expects me to paddle.’”

How does the church at large begin healing and reconciliation in the light of this story? How do we walk in a good and healthy way with indigenous communities?

Drew told another story from an indigenous group in Colombia. “One elder told my friend: ‘The missionaries came and said that God was everywhere, all powerful, all knowing… If this is true, God was already here before they got here and we already had a relationship with the Creator…. People came to our home and we offered them hospitality, as we are open to learning new ideas. But after all we listened to, they never showed any interest in what we had to say.’”

More tough questions

So the question, Drew said, is how can we make space for dialogue and the Holy Spirit to work?

How can we come alongside our indigenous friends with posture of humility?

How can we see the indigenous face of God? Not just to glean tidbits of culture to fit our Western models but to understand that God wants to show us more of Jesus through indigenous people?

Drew said, “Lots of mission organisations talk about partnership and interculturality and working side by side. We have change our discourse but we still need to do work in decolonising the logic in our theology and mission practices.”

Jocabed added: “I’m sure in your library we’ll see histories of CMS. What would it be like to rewrite those books from the perspective of communities who were objects of mission?”

That was just one of many deep questions that need to be asked as we journey together, such as:

• How free to indigenous communities feel to critique mission organisations?
• Are we really willing and able to listen to critique?
• Are we willing to let indigenous people set the parameters for our relationship?

Ultimately, are we really ready, in those famous words of John V Taylor, to be strangers, with everything to learn again?

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The post Indigenous Memory and Mission appeared first on Church Mission Society (CMS).

CMS mission principles

Mission is a complex word and mission itself has a complicated past. The following is a summary of the beliefs that currently guide us in our work. As a frequently-questioning, constantly-learning community, CMS prayerfully revisits these principles from time to time as we continue to rediscover God’s mission together.

1. We believe God calls us into God’s mission.

Our understanding of mission begins with the recognition that God is a God of mission. Mission is God’s nature and God’s activity.

Mission finds its starting point in our discernment of God’s activity in the world.

We prayerfully attend to context and seek to discern God’s leading within it. We begin with a posture of listening to the Spirit, to the Scriptures, to the body of Christ in that place or space, to culture, seeking the signs that point towards the presence and activity of God.

Mission, at its heart, is sharing Jesus.

This sharing of Jesus is a commitment of the whole of life. We rejoice in sharing Christ not only as we speak of him but also as we seek to model our lives on him, as we become the good news that we proclaim. This desire to be like Jesus, to follow where he has led, involves a sacrificial following, a costly discipleship. Mission is a mutual activity, a global sharing, interchange, friendship and partnership. In encountering Christ in others, together we discover the reality of the Christ we share.

Mission is contextual.

People need to discover who Jesus is and what it means to follow him from within their own language, culture and context. Through that shared discovery together we obtain a deeper understanding of who Jesus is.

Mission is transformative.

From our founding CMS has been rooted in a wider movement convinced about the power and agency of the gospel to transform individuals, communities and social structures and the responsibility of Christians to participate in that work.

Mission bears witness to the good news of the Kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.

From Jesus’ life and ministry we see that the good news he announced embraced healing, forgiveness, deliverance, the freeing of captives, the releasing of debts. He proclaims that in him God’s sovereign reign of justice and righteousness, Israel’s longed-for Shalom, is realised. He lives out that good news, befriending those at the margins of society, the untouchable, the unclean, the unwanted and despised. Jesus is the very good news that he proclaims and his actions of healing, cleansing, releasing and forgiving point to the Kingdom that he brings.

Mission anticipates God’s redemption of all creation

The God who makes himself known in Christ does so out of love for the cosmos (John 3:16), for the whole of creation. The gospel is good news for all that God has declared to be good. Mission calls us into the right care and stewardship of the world God has made.

2. Our calling is to mission at the margins and at the cultural edges.

We are called to work in spaces (geographical or contextual) where Jesus is not followed.

We look beyond our comfort zone, where there is a healthy Christian presence, and we identify people in today’s world who are in other places or spaces without such a presence. These mission contexts can be geographical or cultural spaces, where the name of Jesus is rarely heard and where Christians struggle to be.

We want to call others in the body of Christ into these spaces.

We don’t leave the Church behind; instead we call it to its edges and encourage other members of the body of Christ to come with us and join us in God’s work of making new disciples.

Taking culture seriously leads to creative and imaginative mission methods.

We “come as a stranger with everything to learn again.” (John V Taylor) We listen and learn, not as heroes, but wondering what God will do. We work in partnership with local people to discern how best to translate the good news of Jesus across cultures and make new disciples.

Entering these spaces may come at some cost but brings the joy of obedience.

Joining in God’s mission is both costly and life-giving. It involves following Jesus to uncomfortable places: contexts that are unfamiliar and risky and where we might face misunderstanding, hostility and rejection. Yet Jesus is with us as we go on this journey of deeper discipleship and knowing we are not alone brings joy.

3. We are called to be good news as well as bring good news, so our message and behaviour have to match.

We are committed to a posture of humility, before God and in connecting with people in different mission contexts.

So much of mission is about listening and learning to God and each other.

We listen to and celebrate culture, and raise questions from an outside perspective.

We have a prophetic call to bring a fresh perspective, yet this must be rooted in a commitment to genuine relationship and an openness to being questioned or challenged ourselves.

We walk alongside and learn from those more familiar with context.

Mission is done through people. We engage in dynamic conversations, sharing ideas and learning together with our partners. Through these connections, we hope to enable communities to experience the good news in authentic, culturally appropriate and innovative ways.

We recognise that the nature of our relationships will change as we step back, enabling local leaders to take work forward.

We seek to raise up innovative mission practitioners and facilitate, support and empower them in contextually appropriate ways – be that through training or other resourcing – to lead sustainable mission movements.

4. We do mission in partnership, in community and in networks.

We have a priority to work with mission movements.

As CMS has developed over the years we have done so in partnership with churches, mission movements and other diverse groups of Christians in the UK and around the world. We have done so in the belief that God has called us into these relationships, as we connect with those who best know local contexts.

We are committed to mutual dependency at an institutional and programmatic level.

We are committed to engaging in partnerships of equals in our relationships with other organisations, receiving insight and challenge from our Christian sisters and brothers from around the world.

We recognise a calling to be prophetic in the church as a critical member and friend.

We want to help the church around the world to witness and minister in new spaces, and to encourage Christians to cross cultural boundaries for the sake of the Kingdom. We aspire to simultaneously be part of the church, to call the church together in mission, and re-imagine the future of the church.

We affirm our Anglican identity but work within the wider body of Christ.

Because of our roots in the Church of England evangelical revival, we have a particular relationship and responsibility to the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. We relate within and beyond the Anglican Communion to catalyse mission. In some places our heritage is strongly connected to Anglicanism and in others it is not. We are committed to working ecumenically.

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