Emerging Africa

Matt Stone has just been reading Scot McKnight's summary of the Three Central Missional Conversations according to Alan Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren. Matt's transliteration:

Conversation 1: Understanding the West is now a mission field

Conversation 2: Rethinking the gospel in terms of God's mission

Conversation 3: Recasting the church as a contrast community

And Scot's addition:

Conversation 4: It's home brewed nature

And my response:

I suppose I'm sufficiently postmodern to want to question 2 and 3. I don't understand 4.

Concerning 1 - when *wasn't* the West a mission field?

The early Franciscans and Dominicans knew it. John Wesley knew it. Billy Sunday knew it. Billy Graham knew it.

But 2 and 3 are the biggest problem.

One of the first things one learns in missiology is multiculturalism. It is dangerous to make cultural assumptions about other people, and to assume that we all have the same worldview.

Modernity tends to make those assumptions. Modern writers pretend to objectivity, and make oracular pronouncements as though there was one grand narrative and everyone is familiar with it. So when you say "Re-" as in "Rethinking the gospel" there is a huge unquestioned assumption that everyone is thinking about the gospel in one way, that the writer knows what they are thinking, and knows they should be thinking another way.

Postmodernity suggests that we should not make such assumptions, but that we should rather begin by stating our own presuppositions, in order that others can see how far they fit in with their own.

I've just been involved in a rather frustrating interchange on Usenet (it was hardly a dialogue or discussion) with someone who calls himself a 1st century Christian. He stated that Jesus was baptised as an "adult believer". I asked him what he thought Jesus believed in, and in an interchange of 20 messages each way, he still hasn't told me. It seems to me that he is being evasive, but he seems to think that the answer is so obvious that I am simply being perverse in asking it. To him, it is blindingly obvious that Jesus was an "adult believer", and asking "believer in what?" is beside the point. But to me it is a prerequisite to any further discussion. We need to understand the terms we are using before we can have a meaningful discussion.

So when Scot McKnight talks about "rethinking the gospel" I want to ask what he thinks "thinking the gospel" means in the first place, before we start rethinking.

"Rethinking" suggests that we must change the route or the destination, but it is meaningless unless we know the starting point. If I tell Matt that in order to get to Brisbane you need to go east, that would be right for me, because I am in Pretoria, but Matt is in Sydney and to get to Brisbane he would have to travel north, not east. If he went east, every mile he travelled would take him further from Brisbane. So in order to know which direction we should travel in, we need to know the starting point. I may need to rethink my position, but if you are in a different position, my rethinking may not be appropriate for you. That is why it is important to understand and explain "where you are coming from".