How Missions Has Changed

Writing in 1961 (Is Christ Divided?), Lesslie Newbigin reflects on the use of the phrase “foreign missions.” He understands why some Christians don’t like the phrase: “It has overtones of the nineteenth century, of paternalism and colonialism.” 

And he is well aware that the terrain of the Christian world has changed dramatically (32). Now foreign missions isn’t “the white man going from his advanced civilization to under-developed areas as the man with the ‘know how.’” It is instead “a matter of the witness of the whole people of God in Asia and Africa and the remotest islands of the sea equally with that of the peoples of the old Christendom” (32-33; emphasis added).

He elaborates: “I am often shocked by the evidence that even in well-informed church circles there is so little conception of the equality and quantity of Christian leadership in the so-called younger churches. The Church of South India, in which I serve, has nine hundred ordained clergy. Less than 10 percent of them are foreign missionaries. By any standards, there are cities of Europe far more pagan than some of the cities of Asia and Africa. The churches of Asia have already two hundred foreign missionaries sent out from their own lands to take the Gospel to others” (33).

Did I mention he published this in 1961!?