Just returned from a great week in Germany with the World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission (WEA-MC). It was a planning week for the triennial gathering of 250 mission leaders from around the world, that will take place in November this year. What made it remarkable was that the MC leadership had invited a group of emerging leaders into their midst to build relationship and to engage with, to learn and understand one another. Out of that relationship and understanding they engaged in planning the event…or it might in fact, be more acurate to say they began to imagine a different future!
Why did they do this? Why did they not just get on and plan an event on their own as the established staff team who have been doing so for many years? What I saw and heard from them convinced me that they recognise the world has changed dramatically in the last 20 years and yet mission has changed very little: they recognised a need to change. Mission gatherings and movements across the world continue largely unchanged: focusing on mission as something intentional and controlled that they engage in and control, that is definable and measurable and which can be documented, declared and delivered. The MC leadership recognised that going forward with relevancy demands a very different way of doing mission, in fact it requires many different ways of doing mission and that that mission is messy because we live and witness to Jesus Christ in a messy world.
The experience was amazing to observe. As one who crossed both worlds there – younger and older, established and emerging, I watched the interchange with fascination. The two groups occasionally seemed to come from different planets more than different cultures, genuinely trying to grapple with something that was beyond the experience of the other. There were many times when it would have been easy to withdraw from the other, to the known, and feel safe again; or to react strongly against and criticise or belittle something that was not been understood. This did not happen once! Why, because they had told their stories to one another. Their own journeys in mission, their call from God, and their stumbles and struggles – they told their walk warts and all and in doing so, they made themselves vulnerable. This built a relationship that held across a gap of understanding even when it could not be crossed.
This is the third time in eight months I have seen the sharing of stories between leaders give a basis for relationship, in spite of difference and diversity, rather than the relationship coming because of understanding and agreement. I hope that out of this will come an event in November that is a gathering of leaders that will tell their stories, creating a set of relationships that will provide the platform for the diversity and debate we need to imagine a new missiology for a changed and messy world.
Look out for details of the event here
[I want to say a huge thank you to the established leadership of the WEA MC for their honesty and courage to go beyond their comfort zone, beyond the mapped terrain and engage with a new place. To the emerging guys - your courage to step up and engage with grace and humility sets you out as people who have begun to travel a new road, or indeed perhaps to go where there are no roads.]
MODEM is a national ecumenical Christian network, which encourages authentic dialogue between exponents of leadership, organisation, spirituality and ministry to aid the development of better disciples, community, society and world. Tim Harle – a colleague at University of the West of England (UWE) and Visiting Canon at Bristol Cathedral introduced me to MODEM – Tim is the Vice Chair. Below is a link to a report of their most recent conference.
