Mission and the Margins

A margin is the blank border of a printed page. To be
marginal is to be of the edge, neither central nor significant.
Some 150 million human beings officially qualified as
“migrants,” of which an estimated 20 million were refugees,
according to United Nations figures for 2002. Such ciphers mask
the angst of social dislocation—with its attendant miseries, humiliations,
and dangers—endured by specific individuals, each
with a name, a story, and modest hopes. Refugees are on the
margins of the marginalized, significant only to the extent that
they constitute an inconvenience or a security threat to their
comfortably incumbent host populations.

In his lead article, Jehu Hanciles explores the impact of
migration on church and mission, arguing that the Christian faith
depends for its survival upon cross-cultural diffusion—one of
the inevitable side effects of population dislocation. Lalsangkima
Pachuau’s wonderfully informative study takes a close look at
some of the most vital churches in the world, whose combined
membership represents nearly a quarter of India’s Christian
population. Inhabiting the disdained edges of mainstream Hindu
society, the peoples of Northeast India have affirmed and
grounded their indigenous identities by embracing an extraordinarily
missional Christianity.

In Great Britain, as elsewhere in Christendom’s traditional
heartlands, a once confident establishment church, having atrophied
into a spiritually enfeebled, demographically decimated,
and missiologically tentative vestige of its former self, now
struggles to survive. Although it has paid scant official attention
to its missionary fringes in the past, its renewal—if there is
renewal—may spring from these now vital margins, according
to Kenneth Ross in his article “Blessed Reflex.”

The essays in this issue remind us that the universe is not like
a two-dimensional sheet of paper. Seeing merely the surface of
things, we humans necessarily invent and employ terms that
reflect this limitation. But the mysterious verity embedded in our
moral universe is that those on the outer edges of human cognitive
maps are at the center of God’s modus operandi. God’s
multidimensional perspective places human margins—even religious
ones, as Jacques Dupuis suggests—at the center of divine
significance. The One whose memory “Christianity” evokes was
himself profoundly dispossessed. Born into the ethnic fringes of
a powerful empire, he found himself on its margins. He annoyed,
provoked, and was finally dispatched by custodians of the status
quo. His coterie comprised mostly people with neither pedigree
nor the capacity to make a mark on human history. The humble,
his mother had sung, would be exalted; the meek, he had claimed,
would inherit the earth.

And truly, it was and is such men and women who, acutely 
conscious that “here we have no lasting city,” have turned the
world upside down. This issue of the IBMR reflects that reality.

Contents

Mission and Migration: Some Implications for the Twenty-first-Century Church
Jehu J. Hanciles

Church-Mission Dynamics in Northeast India
Lalsangkima Pachuau

“Blessed Reflex”: Mission as God’s Spiral of Renewal
Kenneth R. Ross

Noteworthy

My Pilgrimage in Mission
Jacques Dupuis, S.J.

The Legacy of Robert Henry Codrington
Allan K. Davidson

In Coming Issues

After Conversion—Then What?
Christopher J. H. Wright

Converts or Proselytes? The Crisis
over Conversion in the Early Church
Andrew F. Walls

Shopping Around: Conflict over
Interpretation of Conversions in
Latin America
Edward L. Cleary, O.P.

Christians and Indians: Conflict,
Compromise, or Completion?
John F. Gorski, M.M.

Said’s Orientalism and the Study of
Christian Mission
Herb Swanson

The Religious Worldview of the
Indigenous Population of the
Northern Ob’ as Understood by
Christian Missionaries
Anatolii M. Ablazhei

Pre-Revolution Russian Mission to
Central Asia: A Contextualized
Legacy
David M. Johnstone

In our Series on the Legacy of
Outstanding Missionary Figures of
the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries, articles about

Norman Anderson
Thomas Barclay
George Bowen
Hélène de Chappotin
Dorothy Davis Cook
François E. Daubanton
John Duncan
Nehemiah Goreh
Pa Yohanna Gowon
Hannah Kilham
Rudolf Lechler
Leslie E. Maxwell
Lesslie Newbigin
James Howell Pyke
Pandita Ramabai
Elizabeth Russell
Bakht Singh
James Stephen
Philip B. Sullivan
John V. Taylor
James M. Thoburn
M. M. Thomas
Harold W. Turner
Johannes Verkuyl
William Vories