Mission and Ecclesiology

Jesudas M. Athyal, Identity And Mission: Towards A New Ecclesiology"
Excerpts

Indigenous Forms of Mission


There is a tradition in India of permeation at the deeply spiritual level of relating faith in Christ to the pluralistic context as well. In his article: ‘The Church – The Fellowship of the Baptised and the Unbaptised?’, M. M. Thomas says that in the history of the modern neo-Hindu movements, the person of Jesus was a strong component. There were many Hindus who kept themselves in spiritual fellowship with other Christians without joining the church by baptism. Kandasamy Chetty of the Madras Christian College, who was one such, stated: ‘There is nothing essentially sinful in Hindu society any more than there is anything essentially pure in the Christian society - for that is what the Christian church amounts to – so that one should hasten from the one to the other…So long as the believer’s testimony for Christ is open and as long as his attitude towards the Hindu society in general is critical, and his attitude towards social and religious practices inconsistent with the spirit of Christ is protestant and practically protestant, I would allow him to struggle his way to the light with some failure here and some failure there perhaps, but with progress and success on the whole’.[xi]

There were several other forms of Christian witness, by individuals and local worshipping and witnessing communities, outside the established churches. Sattampillai, a man of high intellectual calibre and extraordinary qualities, founded the Hindu-Christian Church of Lord Jesus at Prakasapuram near Tirunelveli in 1857. He evolved the agenda of the Hindu-Christian Church to negotiate the contradictory impacts of conversion by developing at one level a critique of western Christianity as practised by the missionaries, in the context raising questions such as “What is real Christianity”?[xii] In his recent book, Christianity is Indian: The Emergence of an Indigenous Community, Roger Hedlund of the Mylapore Institute for Indigenous Studies, identifies and describes several such “little traditions” of Indian Christianity – movements largely unstudied and unknown.

Within the framework of the mainline churches too, there were small, yet definite, forms of indigenous expressions of mission and witness in India. Much before dialogue was officially recognised as a form of Christian witness, several theologians and church leaders like Keshub Chandra Sen and Bishop Appasamy here practised a dialogical form of mission. The itinerant evangelist Sadhu Sunder Singh and organisations like the National Missionary Society too represent indigenous patterns of mission and evangelism. The grave situation in our country today might require a more rigorous articulation of a theology of mission in comparison to the earlier indigenous forms of mission, though as forms of mission rooted in our soil, these patterns will continue ‘to be challengingly relevant’ at all times.

Any attempt to identify and define viable patterns of mission and evangelism today need to be placed firmly within a definite historical context. The search for patterns of church and Christian witness sensitive to the cultural and religious settings of India is not only a theological discussion of the last generation but a pertinent question in our current context. M. M. Thomas says: ‘The crucial question for evangelistic mission today is how in a changed post-colonial situation the forms of church and its evangelistic proclamation of Christ, the call to conversion and invitation to join the fellowship of the church may take place within the context of the recognition of religious and cultural plurality and common participation in building a new just society and state’.[xiii]

Our societies today are experiencing changes that are unprecedented and historic. It is therefore important that the traditional patterns of mission and evangelism be drastically reviewed in a search for more relevant patterns. It has often been pointed out that the aggressive evangelistic campaigns of most churches do not adequately reflect the holistic mission of Christ and are often insensitive to the delicate pluralistic framework of our societies. While critically reviewing our existing structures, we however, also recognise the search by small Christ-inspired groups at various levels – within the churches as well as outside - for authentic and relevant patterns of Christian witness in today’s pluralistic context. Such groups are not however, always a rejection of our existing church structures. What is central to our discussion is that the challenge of the gospel demands us to repeatedly relate God’s mission to the context, which is central to our affirmation that, at the cutting edge of the mission, the church meets the world. The Church is defined by the necessity of proclaiming the saving activity of God through Christ in history. The central ecclesiological concern in pluralistic societies like India therefore, is the search for contextual forms of proclamation - evangelisation.


IV


A New Ecclesiology


The link between the renewal of the church and her missionary mandate is crucial. T. V. Philip says that in the history of the Church, it has been the people engaged in mission in the world who have often raised fundamental questions about the nature of the church, its catholicity and unity.[xiv] In recent times, theologians have been re-interpreting the identity and function of the church not so much as a given and unchanging reality but as a movement of the Holy Spirit and in response to the major concerns of the period. Accordingly, Wesley Ariarajah, in his book, Not Without My Neighbour, outlines dialogue as a paradigm for ecclesiology. He asks the pertinent question: ‘Why are we in mission? Is it because God is present with our neighbour or because God is absent?’[xv] M. M. Thomas, in his Chavara Lectures (1994), on the other hand, discusses a diaconal approach to Indian Ecclesiology aimed at the re-structuring of the church of Christ in modern religiously and ideologically pluralistic India in ways more relevant to the discharging of its humanizing mission.[xvi] The underlying concern in these attempts to re-articulate the identity and role of the church, is the growing awareness that the traditional understanding of the functions of the church as teaching the Word of God and administering the sacraments, is in urgent need of revision. A serious challenge for the church today is the gulf between its life and mission. In the words of Abraham Kuruvilla, ‘When the liturgy itself was degraded to the level of a sacramental act, the character of the ordained ministry became significantly altered….The ministry of the Word of God was not merely a matter of preaching sermons; ‘it meant equipping the church to live in orthodoxy and orthopraxis. But preaching and the sacraments got divorced from witnessing to the marvelous acts of God and participating in God’s continuing work in history’.[xvii]

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