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International
Bulletin April 2003
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Christian Mission as Complex Reality
Authentic Christian mission, God�s mission, is a single reality, but it is a far from simple actuality. All of creation is caught up in the redemptive drama of its Creator. Addressing our human tendency to reduce missio Dei to proprietary, monodimensional agendas and methods, contributing editor Stephen Bevans offers a helpful taxonomy of mission as a complex reality. The same point is amply illustrated by other contributors to this issue of the IBMR.
Missio Dei is evident in the remarkable story of Mazhar Mallouhi, a Syrian �Muslim who follows Jesus,� whose conversion to the way of love was the result of Mahatma Ghandi�s admiration for Jesus Christ�not the brutal Christ of crusading Christendom, but the loving, self-giving, reconciling Christ of the Gospels. It is apparent as well in the Parsi and Nigerian conversion narratives recounted by Farshid Namdaran and Felix Ekechi.
It can be discerned in the conversion of a supposedly calcified institutional church, as John Gorski, a new contributing editor, reports on a remarkable phenomenon that is quietly but profoundly transforming the once passive Roman Catholic Church in Latin America into an active initiator of local and international mission. And it manifests itself in human languages. Knowledge of God, missionaries Edwin Smith and William Chapman discovered, did not arrive among the Ila of Zambia with them, nor did the Ila�s extensive theological vocabulary come via the Bible. The Ila had at least forty-four names for the Supreme Being and scores of words for prayer; the missionaries� task was simply to connect what was already there with the Christian Gospel.
Even the human quest for the transcendent traces its source to missio Dei. The Preacher�s enigmatic words, echoed elsewhere in our Christian Scriptures and amply illustrated throughout human cultures and across human time, may provide us with a clue: �He has also set eternity in the hearts of [everyone]; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end� (Eccles. 3:11 NIV).
As Marcella Hoesl, M.M., discovered early in her pilgrimage, God�s mission in this world is a God-sized, complex reality too vast for any human being to conceive, let alone manage. That we humans should be invited to participate as both ends and means in God�s great enterprise is as humbling as it is daunting. Christian missionaries can be sustained in their endeavors and constrained in their pride by the awareness that however peculiar the language to be learned, God has spoken and is speaking through it; that however unfamiliar the culture in which the missionary must pitch his or her tent, God is already present�and has been in residence there for a long time.
April 2003
Unraveling a �Complex
Reality�: Six Elements
of Mission
Stephen B. Bevans, S.V.D.
Mazhar Mallouhi: Gandhi�s
Living Christian Legacy in the Muslim World
Paul-Gordon Chandler
How the Catholic Church in
Latin America Became Missionary
John F. Gorski, M.M.
What the Ila Believed About
God: Traditional Religion and the Gospel
Dennis G. Fowler
Keeping Faith with Culture:
Protestant Mission Among Zoroastrians of Bombay in the Nineteenth Century
Farshid Namdaran
My Pilgrimage in Mission
Marcella Hoesl, M.M.
The Legacy of M. D. Opara
Felix K. Ekechi
In Coming Issues
Doctoral Dissertations on
Mission:
Ten-Year Update, 1992�2001
Stanley H. Skreslet
Migration and Mission
Jehu Hanciles
Conversion in Christian
History
Andrew Walls
Church-Mission Dynamics in
Northeast India
Lalsangkima Pachuau
�Blessed Reflex�: Mission
as God�s Spiral of Renewal
Kenneth R. Ross
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
Rowland V. Bingham
George Bowen
H�l�ne de Chappotin
Robert Codrington
Fran�ois Daubanton
John Duncan
Hannah Kilham
Rudolf Lechler
George Leslie Mackay
Leslie E. Maxwell
Lesslie Newbigin
Vincent O'Donovan
Constance E. Padwick
Peter Parker
Julius Richter
Elizabeth Russell
Bakht Singh
James Stephen
Philip B. Sullivan
John V. Taylor
James M. Thoburn
M. M. Thomas
William Cameron Townsend
Johannes Verkuyl
William Vories