Christopher J. H. Wright (Ph.D., Cambridge University) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He taught Old Testament at Union Biblical Seminary in India and later served as principal of All Nations Christian College, a missionary training school in England. He is now the international director of the Langham Partnership International, known in the United States as John Stott Ministries. He was also the primary theological coordinator for the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, which recently held the Lausanne III Congress in Cape Town, South Africa.
First of all, could you give us a firsthand report of what happened at the Lausanne Congress in Cape Town?
Cape Town was a marvelous event. There were between 4,000 and 5,000 people there from about 200 countries all around the world. That in itself is a marvelous thing’the sheer physical presence of people of almost every nation, language, and tribe gathered in one place praising the Lord Jesus Christ. There's a certain sense of biblical fulfillment about that, which was wonderful. I think it was also enormously encouraging to a lot of the people who came from countries where Christians are very few, where evangelical Christians are often in a tiny minority and persecuted. I think it was good for these people to meet with others, to be encouraged, to worship together, and to have freedom to talk and share. I also think that the whole balance of the congress was positive. They were looking at not just issues of evangelism and evangelistic strategy, which of course are important, but at other problems in the world: illness, brokenness, violence, war, other religions’all kinds of issues the church has to face in its mission. So I think it was a great deal of information for people who wanted it. We came home exhausted but very encouraged.
Your widely reported plenary address called for a second reformation, and according to reports, you received quite a warm response to that from the delegates. What was the basic point of your address?
The basic point was that in the midst of all the things that we had to look at Lausanne in terms of what the church needs to do in order to bring the gospel to the world, the church also always needs to look at itself. As you read the Bible, you see that God has a greater problem with his own people than he does with the nations of the world. At least when you read the prophets, there is far more that the prophets say against Israel, the people of God, than they ever do against the nations. What the prophets say is that the people of God need to return to God, to repent of their idolatry, and to be shaped again to be able to be a light and a blessing to the nations. The point I was trying to make was that the world evangelical community shouldn't simply indulge in a kind of triumphalism or a jamboree spirit in which we go out and say that we've got the answer to everyone else's problems. We need to recognize that there is a great deal about ourselves that is ugly, divided, filled with greed and consumerism and a great deal of pride; and where these things are true, we need to repent and come back to God before we go out to the world.
The language of reformation came to me because I had a Latin American friend who had done his Ph.D. with John Stott Ministries in the States and then returned to his home country in Latin America. He said that over a period of about six months, he and his wife attended ten different churches that were claiming to be evangelical. But, he said, in not one of them did he hear the Bible being preached. In all of them there was a single male minister who was extraordinarily wealthy and powerful, but the ordinary people were not being taught the Bible. They weren't really looking for salvation. They were looking for miracles, and they were being sold a version of the prosperity gospel that offered them all kinds of benefits in this life if they would give their money.
I thought to myself that sounds exactly like the pre-Reformation church in Europe, where there were very powerful, wealthy prince bishops, lording it over the population; where people were not hearing or understanding the Bible, because it wasn't in their language; and where people were being offered indulgences for blessings in the next life for payment of money in this life. And I thought it's the evangelicals today who need a reformation. We actually need to realize that these are deformities in the church, and we need to be rid of them and to reform ourselves.
That leads in well to your book The Mission of God. There's a lot of talk about "us" today, which is something you brought up in your address. We hear phrases often today that we might not have heard fifty or even twenty years ago, such as "living the gospel," "doing the gospel," "being the gospel," or "our work of extending the incarnation and the redeeming work of Christ." Why is it important for us to think of the church's mission as first and foremost the mission of God?
I think primarily because that's the way the Bible puts it. It seems to me that when we read the Bible as a whole from beginning to end, it shows us God, it reveals to us the God who is the creator and redeemer of the world, and it shows us God omniscient. God is about the business of bringing the world from the mess that we made of it in Genesis 3, through to the new creation in Revelation 21 and 22. And everything in between really is God's mission, God's plan, God's agenda, for which purpose he has created a people and used that people as a light to the nations. Then through that people he brought the Lord Jesus Christ to complete his mission, to embody it, to achieve it, and to accomplish it on the cross and in the resurrection. Then to lead his people, through the Holy Spirit, in the task of participating in God's mission to bring the gospel to people of every tribe and tongue and nation, until the day when Christ returns. And then, of course, we have the great vision of the end’the resurrection, final judgment, and the new creation in which God once again dwells with us in a new earth. In that sense, I believe we need to think biblically about God's mission and our part in it, rather than thinking about our mission and how we can somehow help God do a bit of his stuff, which he seems to have a lot of difficulty over. It's far better to start where the Bible starts, make it the mission of God, and then ask: What role do we have in that?
So now the Abrahamic promise, having been fulfilled, actually gets to be dispensed to people from every tribe, kindred, tongue, people, and nation.
Absolutely. In fact, in my book I describe God's words to Abraham in Genesis 12 as the Great Commission. It is, in a sense, the first Great Commis-sion because at the beginning of it God actually says, "Get up and go, be a blessing, and all nations on the earth will be blessed through you." That's God's promise and covenant and command all in one to Abraham in Genesis 12, and it's what the apostle Paul actually calls the gospel in Galatians 3. Paul says, "The Scriptures preached the gospel in advance to Abraham, saying, 'Through you all the nations will be blessed.'" So that blessing of the nations is gospel truth, and it's missional truth because it is God's purpose to bring it about.
And, of course, in the era that we now live in’that is, after the resurrection and ascension’we have that explicit command of the Lord Jesus Christ to go to the nations. But the reason why we go to the nations is to gather them into that Abrahamic promise of blessing. So it's one covenant, it's one commission, it's the mission of God to bring the blessing of Abraham to all nations, which is what Revelation 21-22 points to, to be completed.
The United Kingdom used to be the center of world mission, followed by the era of North American missions. How has the center of global Christian mission changed in the past fifty years or so?
It's certainly changed in the last fifty years, but I would go back a little bit before your question and say that for a period the United Kingdom had a very important role to play because of the sovereignty of God in which he raises up empires and then puts them down, and I suppose for a while, Britain had an empire that also facilitated mission. But long before that, there were Christian missionaries in and from Africa, and in and from the Middle East. There were Syrian missionaries in China from about A.D. 600 to 800, and Celtic missionaries from Ireland going through Egypt and elsewhere from about A.D. 300 to 400. So mission goes back a long, long way. And then, as you say, we moved through the era of Western mission. Now, global Christianity has spread such that the majority of all world Christians live outside the West, in the continents of the South and East. So you have huge numbers of Christians in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As you say, it has happened within the past fifty years or so, and it will continue.
But this does not mean somehow that the responsibility for mission has passed from one part of the church to another, because mission is not a relay race where you pass the baton on to somebody else, and then you drop out and they get on with the job. That's sometimes the way people talk. They say, "The West has had its great missionary era, and now it's the turn of Asia, now it's the turn of Africa." That's really a false way of looking at it, because mission is much more like a boat race where everybody pulls their weight until the race is over. It's the whole church taking the whole gospel to the whole world. The fact that there are now more Christians in Africa and Asia does not excuse the West from its responsibility in Christian mission.
There's often a lot of excitement about the shifting of so much activity to the global South in terms of missionary expansion, maybe for the reasons that you suggest there, to make us feel a little better about living in the secularized West. You're someone who sees global missions in terms of the big picture. Do you think that sometimes, in all of the excitement, we downplay the division and, as you say, some of the things that especially American pseudo-Christianity has exported’such as the prosperity gospel’so that there are lots of different forms of so-called Christianity exploding along with orthodox Christianity in the two-thirds world?
Yes, that's very true. Jesus in his parables said, "There are wheat and weeds." As the kingdom of God grows, so does the work of the Enemy in producing counterfeit and false forms of Christian profession and belief. It has always been thus. There is nothing new about that. I suppose when you get an explosion of Christian growth around the world, you will get all kinds of false elements to it.
I would not want to pretend or suggest to Western Christians that the growth of Christianity outside the West, in Africa and Asia, is all healthy. There is a lot that causes great concern, not just to us, but to them. There are many, many African brothers and sisters that I know who are deeply concerned about the shallowness of so much Christian profession’as you said, of the permeation of so many churches with prosperity gospel teaching, which is partly an export from the West. Some of it was birthed in America, but there are indigenous forms of the prosperity gospel all over the place, in Asia and Africa, tapping into what is basically human greed, human covetousness, and human desire to escape from the problems of life by whatever means possible.
There are forms of Christian-ity that are quite different from authentic New Testament faith and discipleship with humble walking in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ. But that would be true wherever you look. You used the phrase a moment ago, "North American pseudo-Christianity." I would say there is a great deal of what you might call "folk Christianity" around in the West in general, not just in America but also in Britain’that is, a kind of veneer of Christian culture alongside a fundamentally idolatrous consumerist culture, in which we really live by different gods and by different standards, but we just happen to have a somewhat Christianized version of it. It is essentially a kind of syncretism. It's not very different from what we find in the Old Testament when Israel was constantly tempted to mix the worship of the living God with the worship of the Baals (Baal, of course, being the god of business, the god of money, the god of sex, the god of fertility and land and everything else that mattered in everyday life). And so you basically try to have the best of both worlds until Jesus comes along and says, "Actually, you can't.
You can't serve God and Mammon." You need to work out who the true God is.
For Christian believers anywhere in the world, whether in the West or in the South, the challenge is to avoid a kind of syncretism of discipleship of Jesus with an unconverted worldview. It certainly faces us in the West. I suppose it also means to say that really there's no such thing as "the mission field out there" and "the home church back here." Everywhere now is mission field. We enter the mission field every time we go out the doors of our church. Many of our sisters and brothers in Africa and elsewhere recognize that. In fact, one of my British friends in Lausanne at Cape Town said that he had a very fascinating conversation with an African. The African said to him, "Where do you come from?" He said, "Well, I'm from Britain." And the African said, "Oh, that's a really tough country, isn't it?" This was revealing because it was recognizing that we live now in the secularized West in what is a primary mission field. The mission field is the line between belief and unbelief. Wherever that happens, that is the frontline of the gospel. We need to think in those terms rather than in purely geographical terms, that somehow we live here in a Christian place and everybody else out there lives in "the mission field." That's really a false paradigm.
Lesslie Newbigin emphasized that point, and it really changed my thinking about what the mission field was. But do you ever wonder if it's being taken too far by some when you get this sense that Africa and Asia are doing fine now? We don't need to send missionaries; we need to be missional. And then you add to that, we don't need to preach the gospel, we need to do works of service and show our faith by our works; basically, we become the gospel. Do you see the pendulum swinging a little too far in the other direction?
Yes, I do. I think this is one of the real problems. I think it must drive the Lord crazy sometimes, if I can put it like that. John Stott used to say that he longed for a balanced biblical Christianity. He said that we have this constant tendency as Christians to swing from one extreme to another extreme. And so if people at some stage were only concerned with sending missionaries to Africa and so on, and not doing mission on their own doorsteps, and thinking that the only way in which you are Christian is by preaching the gospel in what you say and not by what you do, then of course we need a swing of the pendulum that reminds us that mission is why we're on this planet. Local churches should be missional in their neighborhoods, and we should not just be preaching at people, but we should be embodying the gospel and living the gospel and doing works of service.
Why on earth do we have to keep saying one rather than the other when the Bible tells us that we ought to be doing both? A church has really lost the plot that wants to say, "We don't send missionaries overseas; we don't preach and evangelize; we are a missional church." They've actually lost the biblical point. We are to be and do and say, and we're to be and do and say here, where we are, and to the uttermost ends of the earth.
I very much regret if the word "missional" begins to get used as a way of opting out of international cross-cultural church-planting evangelistic mission work in places where the gospel has never been heard. And let's remember that there are still hundreds of peoples who have not yet heard of the name of Jesus, let alone been discipled. There still is an urgent need for evangelistic cross-cultural church-planting mission. I would not want anything that I've said or written to take away from that reality and that need.
But at the same time, we've got to ask, What are we here for as a church, if we're a local church, if we're a group of believers? And the answer is that we're here to be the presence of Jesus in this place, in the midst of these people in our neighborhood; and by acts of love and service, goodness and justice, and by bearing witness to the Lord Jesus Christ, to be the light of the gospel in this place. It's never to be an either/or. It ought to be a wholeness, an indivisible missional lifestyle, a missional commitment of a church and of a Christian believer.
Obviously, the history of missions is a mix of triumph and tragedy. But what do you say to people who identify modern missions with colonialism and imperialism, especially when you hear that in the media these days?
First of all, I would say to that kind of accusation that there's an element of truth in it that we shouldn't try to deny. We should say there is failure, there is brokenness, there are things we need to repent of in the history of the Christian faith throughout the centuries. We ought to be the first to repent of it and to say that's not the way we want to do missions.
The second thing to say, though, is that this can also be used as something of a myth with which to bash Christians. When you actually examine the history, often the imperialists and the colonialists were those who were most hostile to Christian mission. In India, which is where I worked, it was precisely the colonial powers and the commercial interests of the East India Trading Company that for years refused to allow missionaries to go inland at all, to go away from the coastal cities, precisely because they didn't want the gospel to reach the "natives," as they would have been called in those days. Because they knew that when Christianity touched these people, it tended to create a greater desire for freedom and for human rights and an end to exploitation and that people would get educated and be able to read. And then who would be able to control them? So in fact, colonial powers were often very obstructive to Christian mission’not at all just the Bible and the gun going hand in hand. There's a great deal of mythology about that, especially when opponents of Christian mission want to simply say, "Well, all Christian mission is imperialist or colonialist"’very far from it.
The next thing I would say is that today in our world, by far the majority of Christian mission is actually happening from the countries of the South and the East. There are far more missionaries now from Africa, India, and Latin American countries than from Britain or America. These people who are engaged in mission from those cultures are anything but colonialists and imperialists. In fact, they're quite the opposite’they are the formerly colonized. Mission is no longer, if it ever really was, from the powerful colonial nations to the darkest benighted corners of the earth. Mission is from everywhere to everywhere. You're far more likely to meet a Brazilian missionary in North America than a British missionary in Brazil. The whole shift of Christian mission has moved away from those eras of colonial or imperial domination of the world.
One of the things I appreciated so much from The Mission of God's People is the way you bring some balance. On one hand, there's a tendency’or at least a perceived tendency’to assume that our cultural context doesn't really affect our interpretations of Scripture or our mission. On the other hand, there's a reaction against that assumption’many missiologists today emphasize that the gospel itself is always changing, depending on its cultural context. How do we navigate between these extremes?
The first thing to say is that the gospel itself is unchangeable for the reason that it's not a concept but facts. In other words, we're bringing good news. The gospel is a narrative of what God has done in Christ, as Paul put it: that Jesus died for our sins and was raised again on the third day. Those are facts that are to be borne witness to.
Having said that, the fact is that every cultural context is different. That news of what God has done through Christ has to be communicated in both language and forms that make sense within the culture. Then it has to redeem that culture from within and give expression to itself in cultural forms that will not only show the full richness of the gospel but also enable the Abrahamic promise to be fulfilled. There is a sense in which the fullness of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, at one level, has already been accomplished. It has happened within history, and all that is needed for our salvation has been done by Jesus Christ and his cross and resurrection. This is point A. But point B is that because the promise is historical and God said that every nation would come into that blessing, there is a sense in which we won't see the fullness of all the gospel will have accomplished, and all the richness of who Jesus is and what Jesus has done, until we gather with people of every tribe and nation and language and culture’when we see the fullness and the richness of the redeemed creation and all the redeemed ethnic diversity of humanity, which is a creation reality.
So it's both/and. It's not that we have a gospel that has no cultural relevance’just a sort of transhistorical abstract gospel that we happen to know and just export everywhere else. It's not that. Nor, on the other hand, is it just that every culture makes up the gospel for itself, so that the gospel is purely contextual and subjective. But these objective historical facts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth have to take shape and be rooted in every culture and then transform those cultures redemptively from within. That's the exciting dimension of world mission’that it affirms cultures while redeeming them, and it brings them to their completion in Christ.
One of the things you pointed out in your book that I thought was helpful is that there is so much talk today about being advocates for particular groups, especially given the fact that we haven't necessarily been very good listeners’"we" meaning white, privileged people in the West’and we've just assumed that our culture is neutral and that everyone else has cultural biases. But you make the great point, after acknowledging all of that, that we are advocates for God first and foremost. We are not developing an African theology or an Indian theology or a Western theology. We need to work together as Christians from all around the world to be advocates first of all for God and his mission.
That's right. That's part of why it's the mission of God and not just a mission of the church. We have a mission, but the mission that we have is to bear witness to the Lord Jesus Christ and all his teaching and all that he reveals of the living God. Advocacy in that sense is to say that every human culture is relative to the biblical revelation of God. That's why it's all we sometimes talk about’Indian Christian theology or African Christian theology’but in the West we have grown so used to the hegemony of saying, "We've got the theology," because we hammered it out in our Western universities. "We've just got the theology; we haven't got a culturally contextualized theology." Of course we have. Every human context and every human culture is the product of a history, some of which is pre-Christian even if the pre-Christian era goes a long way back. So even if we're talking about European Christianity, there was a time when Europe was utterly pagan and had to be converted and was never perhaps fully converted. There are still worldviews within the European Christian reality that derive from its pre-Christian era.
You used the word "advocate." Of course we are advocates for God and bear witness to God, but I think what the Bible also shows is that because of God's heart for the needy, the lost, the broken, the oppressed, the exploited, and so on, there is that within the gospel that is intrinsically, as it were, on the side of those whom God particularly loves in relation to those who are being exploited or oppressed, those who are the victims of wrongdoing and evil. Therefore, there is an intrinsically liberating dimension to the gospel. We are for those whom the world is against, as it were. You see something of that in the ministry of Jesus as well’the directions he took and the priorities of his ministry. Any kind of gospel proclamation has to be good news that is a threat to those who are or do evil, and is liberating to those who are victims. In that sense, there is an advocacy element to Christian mission.
But precisely because we are advocates for God, we are advocates for those with whom he sides. Your work has been inextricably linked to a concern for theological training in the two-thirds world with Langham Partnership. One of the things that I've noticed in your writing is your concern that although it seems that theological training was very much a part of the initial thrust of modern missions, it has been waning in a lot of two-thirds world contexts. Do you think that the superficiality and loss of interest in theology in the West, generally speaking, is mirrored in what's happening in the two-thirds world?
I think there are several factors in what you describe. First of all, you're absolutely right to say that the concern for theological education as a dimension of mission is at the heart of the ministry of the Langham Partnership and John Stott Ministries, because we're very concerned for church depth and nurturing, not just for church growth and evangelism.
I think that one of the factors in the decline, or rather the sidelining, of theological education in the mission community, particularly in the West, is the idea of a sort of closure mentality based on a certain view of the Great Commission’which is to say that Jesus basically told us to evangelize every people in the world and get the job done, and that once the job's done, Jesus can come back. So we end up with a kind of urgency and a haste and an interpretation of the Great Commission in relation purely to evangelism, ignoring the fact that the Great Commission’if we're going to use that text’speaks of discipling the nations and specifically not just baptizing people, that is, bringing them to conversion and faith and repentance through evangelism. Explicitly, Jesus says, "Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you." The teaching ministry of the church is an essential part of mission.
Then when you look at the New Testament and see what Paul counted as mission, it wasn't only his work of church planting; it was also all the teaching he did in his churches, grounding them in the faith, teaching the whole counsel of God; and it was also the work of people such as Timothy and Apollos who came along after a church planter like Paul, who spent years in nurturing, teaching, and discipling the church. And in Corinthians, Paul says quite explicitly that neither he nor Apollos are more important in God's mission. In fact, he says that the one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, one mission. So the task of theological education’teaching and training of pastors and those who would equip the church’seems to me intrinsically missional. It's not just something that happens afterwards as a sort of superstructure on mission. But the task of teaching and training is itself intrinsically a legitimate part of Christian mission and should never have been sidelined. In fact, when some mission organizations opted out of it and said, "Well, now we will only support frontline evangelism and church planting," I think they were very shortsighted. I think they actually are leaving out an essential part of the missional task of the church as defined by the New Testament. I think theological education is intrinsically missional and should therefore also be intentionally missional, that it should see itself as a servant of the church there to enable the church to train pastors who will also then equip the saints for works of service, so the church itself is being equipped for their whole life's discipleship and mission in the workplaces of the world’not just in the sending of missionaries and pastors but actually enabling ordinary believers to be witnesses to the Lord Jesus Christ wherever they work, whether that's in the family, field, farm, office, workplace, or factory. In all of those places, they're being equipped to live according to the standards of Christ, to live out a Christian worldview, being taught by the Scriptures by pastors who've been properly trained with theological education that sees this as its purpose: missionary.
