REDEFINING THE TASK OF MISSION

The world is awash with mission statements. Among church growth experts, corporate chiefs, and leadership gurus, mission talk is all the rage.

Lost in the buzz is an understanding of what compels an individual or organization to pursue a mission and toward what end mission leads. That’s an omission the American Baptist Seminary of the West seeks to address.

“We seek to redefine current understandings of mission in light of Jesus,” says President Keith Russell. “The redefinition of mission focuses on what is the intent of the gospel. The church is a vehicle for the sharing of the gospel. The growth of the church is not the goal. The reconstruction of human society is the goal in which the church can play a part.”

Mission can be understood on two levels, Russell says. “There’s the mission of the gospel and your piece in it.” And mission is possible anywhere. “Mission is the task of the church in response to the good news of Jesus wherever the church is,” he says. “So we have to get over the split of home missions and international missions.”

ABSW’s mission statement is to “create a community of learning composed of faculty, students and Christian churches that will provide a theological education that is: multiracial and multicultural, evangelical and ecumenical, academic and spiritual, theoretical and practical.”

The big question for ABSW, Russell says, is “Does our mission support the larger mission of a new heaven and a new earth?”

Journey to Central America
Mission was on the minds of ABSW faculty and staff in January as they traveled to Costa Rica and Nicaragua to explore the work of the church and the nature of theological education. Their partner in this journey was the faculty of Kansas City’s Central Baptist Theological Seminary. The trip was a next step in ongoing conversations between the two seminaries about cooperative ventures.

Sponsored in part by the Board of International Ministries, American Baptist Churches USA, the 10-day journey took the group to cities and rural settings, churches and theological centers. Along the way they encountered extreme poverty – in one city children were begging everywhere – and they met believers preaching and practicing liberation.

The Rev. Michelle Holmes, ABSW’s vice president of seminary relations, was struck by how prevalent the North American “theology of prosperity” is – a double wound to the poor “who are told it is their choice that they live in poverty,” Holmes says. Working against this tide with few resources are Latin American church leaders and their American Baptist mission partners.

It was a “learning moment” for many in the group, says Dr. George C.L. Cummings, ABSW’s academic dean and professor of theology. Participants came to see the complicity of the U.S. in the poverty of Nicaragua. “We impose our own free market policies on the setting,” he says. “We’ve contributed to the impoverishment.”

Cummings says such an experience moves one from an understanding of mission as “we’re doing something wonderful for people who are removed from us” to “they are our brothers and sisters.”

“Their future,” he says, “is tied together with our future.”

Contextualized Education
The trip emphasized the importance of context, affirming a central theme in ABSW’s new curriculum and its approach to mission. Like theological education in Latin America, ABSW’s curriculum is built around an action-reflection model. Through hands-on practice and dialogue in the midst of ministry settings, ABSW’s aim is to develop students’ capacity to critique and advocate. Understanding both the tradition – Bible, theology and church history – and the setting in which one does theology is vitally important, Russell contends.

“We’re not doing universal theology,” he says. “We’re doing theology in North America. We’re doing theology from a privileged perspective.”

The Incarnation, the focal point of Christian theology, “needs to be situated and work itself out from there,” he adds. “We need to be radically contextual. I think the trip to Latin America underlined this in big red lines.”

A Call to Servant Leadership
Cummings says the American Baptist missionaries they met in Central America, including ABSW graduates Gary and Mylinda Baits (’88), “very much represent a class of missionaries who understand themselves as partners who work alongside indigenous leaders. They understand themselves as servant leaders.”

This “shift in consciousness,” as Cummings calls it, butts heads with a North American “colonial missionary mentality,” Russell says.

“One sees that battle raging now in Costa Rica and Nicaragua,” he adds. “The money of churches of privilege drives the churches of less privilege.”

The Baits see their task in Costa Rica as proclaiming the gospel of Christ as Christ did. “Christ is both the message that we share and the model of how we share that message,” Gary has said.

The call for ministers – wherever they are – is to be servant of the church rather than controller, Russell says.

“That’s the kind of leadership human society so desperately needs,” he says. “It’s the kind of leadership we are developing here at ABSW – leaders who grasp the mission to seek a new heaven and a new earth through the servant way of Jesus.”