International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Issue 27:4, October 2003
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (48 pp., 2.4 MB PDF)

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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.

 

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Issue 27:4, October 2003
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (48 pp., 2.4 MB PDF)