Click to join the conversation with over 500,000 Pentecostal believers and scholars
| PentecostalTheology.com
289
International
Partnership
New Testament
in Mission: Reflections
Christopher Sugden
The critical issue that the collection of articles on “Pentecostal Missiology”
raises is how the United States Church in its Pentecostal expression
will
position
itself with relation to the
global
task of the witness of the Christian Church in the 21 st Century. A major thrust and theme of the
essays appears
to be that the
growth
of the Christian Church
throughout
the world will
depend
on
1 ) training given by Christians from the United
States, 2)
in
procedures
and
processes
that have been shown to succeed in the United States
culture, and, 3)
an agenda
of church
planting
set
by
a theology and
missiology
that meets with the
approval
of churches in the United States. In those areas of the world where Christian
personnel
from the United States cannot
gain access as
religious teachers, they
can
support
themselves
by
secular work,
or
they
can visit on a nonresidential basis to ensure that
progress carries on as it should.
Douglas
Petersen
questions
this thesis on historical
grounds.
His article,
in
fact, provides
a
counterexample
to the basic theme of the other
essays.
Petersen seeks to show that the
growth
of Pentecostalism that has taken
place
in Latin America did not take
place through
such a process
of North American
intervention, participation
or
supervision.
My
interaction with this discussion comes from reflection on the New
Testament,
and
especially
Paul’s
teaching
on the
relationship between Christians of different cultures in the one international
church, and from
experience
of seeing this in practice.
First,
in
Ephesians
Paul outlines the
purpose
of the mission of the church,
that “the wisdom of God in its rich
variety might
now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the
heavenly places” (Eph. 3:10). This wisdom or
mystery
was that “the Gentiles have become fellow heirs,
members of the same
body,
and sharers in the
promise
in Jesus Christ
through
the
gospel” (3:6).
The “rulers and authorities in the heavenly places”
are understood to be
spiritual
forces behind the difference
groups
that make
up
human
society-races, cultures,
etc. An example
of one of these “rulers and authorities” in Paul’s
understanding was the Jewish
law,
an “elemental
spirit
of the universe”
(Co. 2:20), which enforced
regulations
which in the minds of the Jews reinforced their
separation,
distinction and
superiority
to the Gentiles.
The effect of the
principalities
and
powers
is to turn the complementary
differences between different
groups
into hostile divisions between them.
Jesus,
on the
cross,
“broke down the
dividing wall,
that
is,
the
hostility”
between Jews and Gentiles
(Eph. 2:14).
The calling
of the church is to demonstrate that that wall has indeed been
1
290
broken down
effectively by
Christ on the
cross,
and to create a community-“one
new
humanity” (Eph. 2: 1 5/which
shows that the Gentiles are indeed members of the same
body.
The creation of a community
where
people
from different
races,
cultures and groups-separated by
walls of
hostility
in the world-form a new community
is both to witness to the
principalities
and
powers
of evil that their
ability
to turn these differences into hostile divisions is at an end,
and to create “a
dwelling place
for God”
(Eph. 2:22).
In
short,
the creation of a
community
from members of hostile groups
in which all live in reconciliation with each other is to be a major
task of the church.
Thus,
the
way
in which Christians from different cultures and
groups
relate to each other is not a distraction from the
primary
task of
mission,
nor an
unnecessary
frustration. It is a central mission of the church to declare God’s
purpose
to those spiritual
forces that resist his purpose and continue to cause
damage by reinforcing
hostile divisions.
Second,
Paul makes clear in his letter to the Romans that across the divide of these
groups,
each
group
has much to learn from the other. In the Roman
church,
there were Gentile Christians and Jewish Christians who would not
fellowship together.
The Gentile Christians
regarded themselves as
strong
in faith since
they placed
all their trust in God’s grace
and none in their
religious
traditions.
They
therefore
regarded
as “weak in faith”
(Rom. 14:1 ) those who felt they
needed the
support
of their own Jewish
heritage
in addition to faith in Christ.’ 1
Paul answers this
hostility
at a number of levels.
First,
he
points
out that
they
are all sinners in
Adam,
and
they
are all
forgiven through Christ’s death.
Second,
he also
points
out that
Abraham,
the Jewish ancestor was saved
by
faith
(Rom. 4:9).
This observation
signals
to the Jewish Christians that the
very ancestor
to whom
they
look back was saved
by
faith as the Gentile Christians
urge.
And this
claim,
in
turn, signals
to the Gentile Christians that
they
have much to learn from the Jewish Christians and their
heritage
which is rooted in
being
saved
by faith.
Third,
he announces that his mission
strategy
is to win Gentiles to Christ in order to make the Jews
jealous
of their enemies
entering
into the Jewish
heritage (Rom. 11:13) and, thus,
some
may
be saved.
All this
theological argumentation
indicates that for
Paul,
no Christian
group
could
grow
to
maturity
in cultural
isolation-they
had to be
open
to the
insights
and
understandings
that came from Christian groups
whom
they
would have
formerly
counted as their enemies. This very process
witnessed to the world that Christ’s cross had
effectively destroyed
the
dividing
wall of hostility.
Third,
a further strand of evidence from the New Testament is relevant at this
point.
That is the contention in the
gospels
that the
‘ For a fuller discussion of this theme, see Paul Minear, T7re Obedience of Faith (London:
SCM Press,
1971), and
Johannes Munck, Paul and the Salvation
of Mankind (London: SCM Press, 1959).
2
291
gospel
is Good News to the Poor. For the New
Testament,
the
poor really
means the
economically
and
socially marginalized.
The
meaning of Good News to the Poor is that what the Good News means to
poor people
who receive it is to define what it means to
everyone
else. So Jesus in his
ministry
defined the
meaning
of his Good News
by
his ministry
in Galilee of the
Gentiles,
around Nazareth from which no good thing
could come
(John 1:46).2 This conception
of ministry means that it is very important that for their own
spiritual
health those
who
are not
poor
listen
humbly
to how those who are
poor
receive and
respond to the
good
news of the
kingdom.
The
meaning
of
poor
in
spirit
is
dependent
on the
meaning
of the poor,
and refers to the stance of
openness
to receive
help
from God which in
Scripture
characterizes those who are
poor.
This stance does not mean
they
are
saved-just
that
they
are
open
to
help
from God. For those who are not
poor
to be
poor
in
spirit
as well
requires
that
they learn from an attitude to God which is seen
among poor people, especially
those who
respond
to God.
The cumulative force of this biblical material is that it is
imperative for the witness of the
global
church that it is characterized
by relationships
between churches in different cultural
settings
in which
1) people
are free to set the
agenda
and work out the nature and
meaning of Christian faith and witness in their own contexts in obedience to the Scriptures,
and
2)
those who are not
poor
learn from those who are poor
who
respond
to the
good
news of the
gospel
about the
meaning
of the
good
news.
The
essays
on Pentecostal
missiology
in the
previous
issue of PNEZIMA, with the one exception that
I have
noted,
do not
appear
to me
adequately
to reflect this biblical
perspective
on the nature of the inter-cultural and cross-cultural witness of the church.
Moreover,
in Christian
discipleship
we learn most from
people
unlike ourselves. So the
question
that raises its head is where in the
essays
is a sense that the Pentecostal church in North America
might
learn from Christian fellowships
in other countries?
2 For a fuller discussion of this theme, see the author’s “What is Good about Good News to the Poor,” in AD 2000 and Beyond, A Mission Agenda, eds. Vinay Samuel and Chris
Sugden (Oxford: Regnum Books, 1991). For a full discussion of the biblical material, see “Christian Witness to the Urban Poor” (Lausanne Committee for World
Evangelisation, 1990)
and
Vinay
Samuel and Chris
Sugden, eds., Evangelism
and the Poor: A Third World Study Guide (Exeter: Paternoster Press, 1984).
3
