The World Has Always Been Pluralistic
The world has always been pluralistic. Only now we are finally realizing it and encountering it. There has always been a diversity of thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and practices, many of them conflicting. However, moving off of the little house on our quaint prairie, we begin encountering more than simply the holy huddle we are raised in. Moving beyond our immediate family and friends and community, we enter states and nations and a world, full of states and nations, full of diverse people with diverse thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and practices.
This pluralism has always existed. Only when you live in that little house on the picturesque prairie, communication starts and stops in a limited way, whereas today communication is seemingly endless. One tweet can cross the Atlantic faster than Amelia Earhart could ever dream (and without the fear of becoming lost in the Bermuda Triangle). We no longer need eighty days to go around the world; instead we can accomplish the task in a mere eighty seconds.
We have become a truly global (and globalized) village. Whether we like it or not, our “neighbors” from Iran and Ireland and Mexico and Mumbai and Tibet and Timbuktu and Kigali and Kalamazoo are all raising our children. We often know our Facebook friends across the country better than we know the person who lives across the street. And these diverse voices and elimination of vast differences truly creates a whole new world.
We have always lived in a pluralistic world. Our vacuums of society have been destroyed, allowing us to read about it, watch it, and travel around the globe to encounter it, oddly enough, all possible from the comfort of our own home. We have crossed the “ends of the earth” and realized that they keep going, providing a perpetual starting line rather than the legendary finish line we were told they would be. The response, however, is not always to value and appreciate the unique particularities that emerge from each diverse and distinct context. Sometimes – and sadly too often – we universalize one particular into every context, regardless of how or if or should it even fit, creating a new imperialism.
Particular and Universal: The New Imperialism
There is nothing new about this new imperialism. It is the same mantra of every empire, converting the masses to its way of thinking and acting and being. From Caesars to Czars, the face of the ruler has been imposed and imprinted on bills and billboards, dictating not only the economic capital but also the ergonomic understanding of a culture.
Today it emerges, not with the rise of one nation to rule them all, but a global capitalism, an economic globalization that Richard Bauckham calls the sixth great universal order. “This cultural universalism,” says Bauckham, “is the cultural counterpart of imperialism. Globalism is the new imperialism.”
This “new imperialism” is the transposition of one particular as a universal for all. The movement throughout human history has always been from the particular to the universal. However, when this is done with little to no care or respect for the distinct and diverse particularities of the other, assuming that one can universalize their own particularities on whatever context they come across they do violence and injustice to the other. Economic globalism is the new imperialism, the coco-colanization of the world, taking our particular and imposing it on every universal nook and cranny.
The church assumes that its local expression and understanding of Jesus must be made universal for all. Missiologist Leslie Newbigin reminds us, “There is not one Christian interpretation of Jesus: there are many different ones, shaped by different cultures. The church itself is a changing reality, and its confessions of the faith have changed and will continue to change.” We too often forget that “God is both particular and universal.” And too often we try and make our particular God universal for everyone. We work to turn “your Jesus” into an exact, assembly line replica of “my Jesus,” who, coincidently, happens to look a lot like me.
What is the church to do when it finds itself co-opted by the metanarrative of capitalism? What becomes of the mission of God when it finds itself a part of the mission to make a buck? Because this is the world the church finds herself in, where “I’ll buy that” refers not only to a purchase of goods but simply agreeing with someone. While we live in a postmodern and postcolonial world, suspicious of all particular narratives that claim themselves as universally powerful and imposing, we too easily buy in to the global capitalism of the world around us. We are simultaneously suspicious of all metanarratives while seemingly unconsciously buying into one. The ideology of globalization, “while purporting to benefit all, serves the interest of the rich and powerful.” And too often our church finds itself as members of this omnipotent one percent.
In such a diverse and always-has-been pluralistic context, the church must renounce coercion and reclaim story, experience, and witness.
What Kind of Mission: Invitation, Witness, Experience, Story, and Coercion
Crusades, whether led by the sword or the organ, leading to a conversion with a blade at your throat or giving in after another time through Just As I Am, are the prominent image of the church’s expression of mission. We have evidence that demands a verdict and we will make sure the world gets it, one tract at a time.
This is coercion. And “coercion contradicts the nature of truth.” In a world of “my truth is bigger than yours,” such coercive attempts at conversion are met with suspicion, rightfully identified as a colonial and universal imposition of one particularity for all. Drink this kool-aid and then build a white church with a steeple so your Jesus can look just like me and mine.
Bauckham reminds us, however that “witness is non-coercive. It has no power but the convincingness of the truth to which it witnesses.” Instead of coercion, the church’s mission ought to be one of invitation. When Mother Theresa was asked what it was she was doing in Calcutta and why she was doing it, she often responded with a simple, “Come and see.” This “come and see” posture is radically opposed to one that attempts to coerce, convert, and manipulate until you, your faith, and your culture emulate me and mine. Coercion forces one particular on another while invitation allows for difference and diversity between all our particularities.
It is this posture of invitation and witness that inspired Pete Rollins and the Ikon community from Belfast, Ireland to form their evangelism team. They would visit various communities of faith and places of worship. Only rather than arming themselves with tracts and apologetic proof texts, they would enter an Islamic mosque or Baha’i or Buddhist temple and ask that community to evangelize them. There was no “and now it’s our turn” portion, but simply space to listen as another religious community shared their faith with a group of Christians from Belfast.
In their simple, unapologetic and anti-evangelistic approach this evangelism team embodies the incarnation. Their witness becomes an embodied experience. For Francis Bacon’s axiom that “knowledge is power” is swiftly giving way to “experience is power.” Too often the church’s view of mission is telling about the story when instead the church is called to simply (and profoundly) tell the story, continuing to practice resurrection in our life and world today. Because this story is not something to be pondered, deduced, or deconstructed, but incarnated, embodied, and experienced.
While our world has bought into global capitalism and fights for the myth of redemptive violence as our ruling myth, mission is not a military campaign; mission is not a marketing strategy. Mission is God’s ongoing work in the world. It is not coercing someone with words about a story but is the faithful witness of telling the story, a story that is bigger and broader and more inviting and more inclusive than anyone can imagine. Because God is bigger and broader and more inviting and more inclusive than anyone can imagine. Love is bigger and broader and more inviting and more inclusive than anyone can imagine. And this mission is the story of God’s unrelenting and unconditional love for all creation. Newbigin writes, “The Bible is universalistic in the sense that it is realistic about what human life really is – not the coexistence of a multitude of independent spiritual monads, but a participation with other human beings in a world that God has made, is making, and will make new. God’s saving purpose is addressed to the whole of [God’s] work in creation and to the human person, who has his [or her] real being only in his [or her] participation in this whole work.”
This mission is God’s ongoing project of New Creation, at work “in the beginning,” continuing through the invitation of the people of God who are “blessed to be a blessing” and called to be a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” This New Creation is brought to life in the Jesus, inaugurated in his resurrection, the first fruits of God’s future brought into our present. And the people of God continue to be empowered by the Spirit of God to join God in being and bringing this new creation to life. God has hands; they’re attached to our wrists. We are called, as poet Wendell Berry says, to “practice resurrection.” Mission is a movement into the “ever-new future,” towards “ever-new horizons,” and joined by “ever-new people.” Leslie Newbigin reminds us, “The acts of God do not cease with the Acts of the Apostles” and Richard Bauckham reiterates:
The biblical story is not, as the narrative of economic globalization has been called, a cultural tidal wave sweeping away all the wonderful diversity of human culture. Perhaps the miracle of tongues at Pentecost in Acts 2 is a symbol of this. It is a miracle that symbolically transcends the diversity of human languages; they no longer divide people or impede understanding, as they did at Babel. But this diversity of human languages is not abolished. Everyone hears the gospel in their own language.
Who’s Mission is It?
This mission invites all people to join God as the people of God, working with one another and God to bring God’s New Creation to life in the world around us. It requires our diverse and particular voices, not abolished for the sake of singularity but joined in divine solidarity. God has given each voice and God is calling each voice to this mission.
Because it is not our mission; it is God’s mission. God is not a part of the church’s mission; the church is a part of God’s mission. “The church in its missionary vocation is not so much the agent of the process as the product of the process on the way to its God-given goal. Mission is God’s work before and after it is ours.” And God will continue to work in us, through us, and in spite of us. Because history is not static but is going somewhere. And God invites us to be actors in this drama, participants in this ever-present and still-to-be project of New Creation in the world.
