#renepadilla

My grandfather was an evangelist. Like apostle Paul, he didn't marry so he can devote his time and his life for the sake of the Gospel. I remember, when I was a child, he would have two things that he treasured dearly. One is his motorcycle which serves as his ride for visiting people and telling them about Jesus. My grandfather believed with his whole heart that Jesus alone can change people's lives for the better. Then he has his notebook, with a long list of names of people he has encountered, shared the Good News, and engaged repeatedly so that they will accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. As a child, it looked to me like the "Book of Life" described in the Apocalypse of John. Every night he will pray for the names, one by one. For those who were 'born again' that they will continue to mature in faith, for those who haven't yet that they will one day surrender their lives to Christ, and for those who have forsaken the faith that they will realize the error of their ways and like the prodigal son return once more to the loving embrace of the Father. For quite a while, this vivid image is what I have of a life fully-devoted to the cause of mission.

Then I also have a grandmother. She was not an evangelist like my grandfather. She was an entrepreneur who raised two kids whom she sent to college as a single mother. While my grandfather mastered the Bible, my grandmother specialized in business. I remember when I was a child, day by day, my grandmother would hustle her way in the market, trying to crack the secrets of making money. She was convinced that the only way she can help others is by making sure she can help herself and help herself so well that she would have enough to spare and share with other people. But unlike my grandfather, she did not keep a notebook. She didn't have a list of names who borrowed money from her. She gave as she is able to whoever is in need. As a child, it looked to me like my grandmother was fashioning her life after the story of the feeding of the five thousand whom Jesus refused to send home with an empty stomach. But it will take me a while to understand that my grandmother’s life is in itself a vivid image of what it means to do mission.

I studied theology but it did not so much help me to realize that "giving a glass of water" is also an indispensable part of sharing the Gospel. You may wonder why. It is not that theology in itself is unhelpful, otherwise I would have stayed away from the Theological Commission of the WEA. But I realized that it is a certain kind of mission theology that restricted my peripheral vision. John Stott identified it as the 'Great Reversal' among the conservative side of Protestants. Ron Sider calls it the 'uneasy conscience' of evangelical Christianity. Or more recently, Richard Stearns spoke of the 'hole in the Gospel'. But what helped me the most to see the real face of the problem is what Carlos Rene Padilla, an evangelical theologian from Ecuador, described as a mission that is 'mutilada' (or 'mutilated' in English).* A kind of mission that has been so refined that in the process it also loses much of its essential ingredients. Just like refined sugar or bread made from refined flour, it may be tasty but it sure is lacking already the things that can make it healthy. Likewise, mission can be so mutilated that it hardly resembles the multi-faceted character of Jesus' ministry. Or it can be so refined that it neglects the one thing that Peter, James, and John reminded Apostle Paul when he was reconfiguring how missions would look like for the non-Jews, that he should continue to "remember the poor" (and you can read that in Galatians 2:9-10).

As an alternative to 'misión mutilada ', Padilla spoke of mission that is complete, not missing any component. In Spanish, he calls it 'misión integral' after a familiar bread among his people, 'pan integral' or 'whole wheat bread' which he himself often bakes at home. This he does as the necessary response to the specific context and need of Latin America at that time. As campus workers doing student ministry, together with Samuel Escobar and Pedro Arana, they could not possibly dismiss the deep questions of poverty, injustice, and oppression that were probed deeply in the universities of Latin America. They need to give their young people a vision of life that is as compelling if not even more convincing than the promise of armed revolution. What they did in Latin America was mine the Bible for the breadth and depth of what it means to follow Jesus in the most trying condition of their nations. And the Word of God led them to rediscover the revolutionary edge of the Gospel, so radical that it exposes how mutilated mission has unfortunately been in the Christianity of the Western world and how it would be so out of context for them to adopt that paradigm of mission.

Today, 'misión integral' has been embraced more and more by evangelicals globally. Sometimes translated as integral mission. Sometimes as holistic transformation. And it has been a tragedy.

Yes, a sad tragedy. ‘Misión integral’ could have been an invitation for the other regions of the world to reimagine missions as demanded by the very specific contours of their respective contexts. But what started as a solid example of local or context-rooted way of doing mission has been 'globalized' or should I say hijacked into the mold of 'Western-oriented missiology.' You see, 'integrate' in English can mean so differently from 'integral' in Spanish. Integrate can be used in the sense of fusing things that were otherwise taken apart like evangelism and social action or proclamation and demonstration. But integrating two things does not necessarily equate to being whole. You can integrate things together and still be missing something essential. And so the whole debate in the past two decades or so about whether political engagement or creation care should be part of the church's mission actually missed the bigger picture. The question rather is what else are we missing aside from these two that shall make our grasp of mission even more whole and complete?

Is beautiful poetry mission? How about health-conscious culinary? Or responsible artificial intelligence? For sure there is more to mission than water, gender, and fair trade coffee. But there can't be mission without all these because the Gospel best comes across as good news when it confronts the composite dilemma of human existence, social ills, and historical evils. Jesus was good news to the Samaritan woman, to Nicodemus, and the Garasene demoniac. But he was bad news to the Sanhedrin, to Herod, and eventually to the Roman Empire. So terrible a news that the people who are called by his name were put in jail, fed to the lions, and burned as torches in the Coliseum of Rome. They were caught defying Caesar’s decree by saying that there is another king, the one called Jesus" (Acts 17:7). Someone once said, "well, if everything is mission, then nothing is mission." I think this is an unfortunate case of mixing categories. It is like asking, Is violet delicious? Are roses compassionate? Do elephants short-circuit? For how can mission not be about a lot of different things if God is in the work of reconciling all things back to Himself through the peace accomplished at the cross by our Lord Jesus? (Colossians 1:19-20). And so this means that shalom is coming not only to people but to the whole planet, bees, rivers, and trees included, and all the rest of what Apostle Paul called as “things invisible.”

If that is so, then let us push the envelope further as we might still be missing something important. Bishop Hwa Yung of Malaysia often issued a reminder that one of the unfortunate impact of having Christianity that is molded in the worldview of Western Enlightenment is being blind to the supernatural realm that is very much a part of the world we inhabit. And unless we are able to shake off this deficient worldview, our mission will not gain traction in most parts of the world that remains to be attuned to the reality of the spirit world. To this day, Christianity remains to be a tiny fraction of the population in Asia. I will not forget a trek to the mountains that I had when I was traveling a few months ago in Chiang Rai, Northern Thailand. The driver was telling me how interested he is in many religions. But what he found most fascinating is Christianity. I can still hear him saying, "You see Christianity has been here in Thailand for more than 100 years and yet the number of Christians remains to be less than 1% of the population. There must be something wrong in how you are doing Christianity in this country."

So, what am I saying here? There is a clear and present danger when we fail to undo the 'single-story' of how to do missions. A hegemonic narrative that leaves little space to the likes of my grandmother. But Rene Padila and his Latin American friends have shown us what it takes to do a decolonial approach to mission. Likewise, how can we, in our time today, encourage the crafting of multiple stories of doing mission that is rooted in the specifics of different cultures, languages, and contexts? How can we undo the logic of copy-paste missiology in the new landscape of re/emerging centers of Christianity in the Majority World?

Maybe, we can get started with some more gastronomic reimagination... How about khao soi missions in Thailand? Phin coffee missions in Vietnam? Or 'sapin-sapin' mission, as suggested by Ian de Ocampo, when in the Philippines? The possibilities are exciting!

-Rei Lemuel Crizaldo (delivered as plenary talk for the Emerging Leaders Summit 2023, Sentul City, Indonesia) Watch the video recording here. *Notes: