Let us be friends: A vision for a better global missiological engagement

Abstract

World Christianity provides a glimpse of the shifting Christian landscape from the global North to the South, influencing a change in missiological patterns, especially in light of contemporary globalization, migration, and transnationalism. This short reflection considers such transition and proposes a vision for a better global missiological engagement for the next 50 years, calling for deeper friendship between western and non-western Christians. This reflection was presented at the 50th-year banquet celebration of the American Society of Missiology (ASM).

When I moved from India to England, I explained to folks that my father was a third-generation pastor and a “missionary.” I soon realized that my answer confused them because of my appropriation of the word “missionary.” While I took the word missionary to simply mean a Christian who crosses one culture to another to be a witness of Jesus Christ and establish churches, some of my friends understood a missionary to be one who is sent by a western mission organization to the non-western world. In other words, my friends couldn’t imagine an Indian could be a missionary to a different part of India.

In the last decade, as I moved my residence to three countries—India, England, and the USA, I see myself at the intersection of globalization, migration, and transnationalism. Not only am I part of the generation of Indian Christians who attempt to recapture the Indianness of Christianity, but I also embody the “in-between” space of traditional India, cosmopolitan urban India, and the Indian diaspora community in America.

As a young mission scholar with such an intercultural life journey, I recognize the need to deconstruct the old mission paradigm that went along with the western colonial imagination, and reconstruct a paradigm in terms of mission “from everywhere to everywhere” (Escobar, 2003). Even though the western church is slowly becoming informed about the rise of Christianity in the southern hemisphere, I sometimes wonder if there is still a paternalistic outlook in certain quarters of the American missiological discourse about what it means to engage in mission, who can be a missionary and who is qualified to produce resources for better missiological practice. However, with people-groups crisscrossing the world through forced displacement, voluntary economic migration, and through other causes, God’s mission can be done by whoever from whatever tribe, tongue, race, caste, and gender, irrespective of their economic status or mission organization affiliation. God calls God’s people for God’s mission. Furthermore, the Spirit of God empowers the “least” from the margins to sustain God’s mission. Therefore, mission in the age of Global migration and World Christianity can only be conceptualized as “from everywhere to everywhere” or as Sam George (2023: 252) recently put it, “here and there mission” reimagining a “go and send” paradigm.

In such a time as this, as members of American Society of Missiology (ASM) or as missiologists who often think inter-disciplinarily, a crucial step to take would be to intentionally cultivate authentic friendship, or as Dana Robert (2019) put it “faithful friendship,” with our counterparts in other parts of the world. In the 1910 World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh, V.S. Azariah from South India, ¹ in what has become a famous quote, proclaimed the importance of friendship, when he said:

Through all the ages to come, the Indian Church will rise up in gratitude to attest the heroism and self-denying labors of the missionary body. You have given your goods to feed the poor. You have given your bodies to be burned. We ask for love. Give us FRIENDS. (Quoted in Robert, 2009: 55)

Azariah uttered these words over a century ago in the shadow of colonialism and rampant inequalities. A century later, the world looks very different with decolonization and all the crisscrossing of worlds, offering hope towards a much more equal global society. However, it is vital to reiterate Azariah’s call with a slight change. Instead of the western church “giving friends” to the rest of the world, let us pursue to “be friends.” Let us be friends in the mission of God. Let us be friends with our counterparts around the world or with those who look different, speak other languages, or speak English differently in our own countries. In cultivating authentic friendship, we become vulnerable to being corrected and learning from our friends about what God has entrusted to them. As academics, by pursuing faithful friendship through co-writing, co-publishing, and amplifying the often “othered” voice, we also demonstrate solidarity in decentering any lingering regional hegemony in missiological discourses.

In the ASM I find a welcoming spirit and a genuine interest in forming friendships in the context of mission scholarship and practice. My prayer is that, as we continue to step into the next 50 years of collegiality, may we stay in the pursuit of forming authentic friendships. In doing so, let our faithful friendships be a missional testament of unity, which aligns with the Spirit’s unity that we are called into as Christians.