Abstract
Though not directly found in the pages of scripture, for much of the Christian world today, the word mission and its cognates (e.g., missionary, missions, missional, missio Dei, etc.) hold an indispensable place within Christian discourse that is inherently taken for granted as an essential aspect of Christian “reality.” In just under four-hundred meticulously argued pages, Baylor missiologist Michael W. Stroope turns a critical eye towards the history of the term’s late entrance into Christian vocabulary—dating only to the ecclesiastical-colonization efforts stemming from Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth-century before evolving later through Protestant Christianity’s move towards an overt emphasis upon worldwide evangelization in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries—so as to conclude that the ongoing debates about what the word mission refers to misses the point. Rather, for Stroope, the language of mission is itself the problem that needs to be “transcended” (i.e., done away with) if we want to recover a healthier, more biblically- and anciently-rooted expression of Christian faith and practice which is marked not by mission, but by what Stroope sees as the more holistic and pliable notion of “pilgrim witness to the kingdom of God” (1-30, 355-85).
While in his Introduction, Stroope gives voice to his scruples with twentieth-century theological innovations surrounding ideas like the missio Dei (first put forward by Karl Barth in 1932) and the adjective missional and adverb missionally (as popularized by Darrell Guder in 1998) (16-22), the bulk of the book is then divided into three parts. Part one, “Justifying Mission,” critically explores the biblical and historical validity of mission language, ultimately concluding that both scripture and Christian history are grossly distorted when viewed through the increasingly common yet unfortunate hermeneutical lens of mission (chs. 1-4). In part two, “Innovating Mission,” the roots of mission language are traced back to the crusades (ch. 5), Latin colonization through ecclesial means (ch. 6), and Ignatius of Loyola’s explicit use of the term in founding the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century (chs. 7-8). Part three, “Revising Mission,” draws a historical line from Ignatius and the Jesuits to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century reception of mission within Protestantism, with especial attention to the modern movement’s problematically inherent colonialist undercurrent (chs. 9-10). While the historical details offered in these three main parts is objectively difficult to refute (31-353), Stroope’s proposed solution in the Epilogue to replace mission language with the clunky notion of “pilgrim witness to the kingdom of God” carries potential but, at least in this early rendition of argumentation, comes across as superficial and underdeveloped.
Nevertheless, Stroope has bravely written a provocative book whose argument for “transcending mission” is worthy of both hearing and engagement. After all, the implications are staggering: without recourse to mission language, we can no longer think of Christianity as a “missionary religion”; mission is no longer to be considered an attribute of God nor is God to be seen as the “missionary God”; the church as well as its members are no longer explicitly defined by or active in mission or even the “Great Commission” (which was also a late-sixteenth, early-seventeenth-century addition to Christian terminology) (296-97). Further, our reading of scripture and Christian history can no longer viably be interpreted through the hermeneutical lens of “mission.” Along these lines, does removal of mission from Christian discourse create opportunities for new vistas for Christian faith and practice that are decidedly helpful for us to implement? Or does such removal undo too much of everything that most Christians have known and perhaps even cherished about the Christian faith to date? And is the word mission really as irredeemable as Stroope here argues? Stroope’s book has offered an important and timely conversation starter that will hopefully generate some fruitful debate and discussion moving forward.