March 1, 2000
Missions model changing,
HSU conference told
___By Marv Knox
___Editor
___ABILENE--A chaotically changing world calls for renewed cooperation in missions, speakers stressed during a missions conference at Hardin-Simmons University.
___"Missions in the 21st Century" was the theme for the conference, sponsored by HSU's Logsdon School of Theology Feb. 18.
___The conference capped a week-long focus on missions at the Texas Baptist school inAbilene. Dedication of the Connally Missions Center Feb. 17 highlighted the emphasis.
___The missions center is named for Virginia Boyd Connally of Abilene, a 1933 HSU alumnus, retired physician and university benefactor, and her husband, the late Ed Connally, a businessman and political leader.
___The 21st century presents the greatest challenge for missions the church has ever known, insisted Bill O'Brien, recently retired director of Samford University's Global Center.
___That challenge can be seen through the "dimensions of migration," he said.
___To begin with, God is the "God of missio-migrants," faithful people who are on the move and on mission for God, O'Brien explained. For example, the story of salvation history begins with God telling the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, "Get up and go."
___An almost-chaotic pattern of global movement or migration characterizes the world today, he said, citing a range of examples.
___Political, environmental and economic refugees number in the multi-millions and shape national and international policy around the globe, he reported. Information will travel at the speed of light, and $1.5 trillion changes hands daily, as "cybercurrency" is exchanged over the Internet. Because information equates into power, transnational corporations, not national governments, are the seats of power. Diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, ebola, hepatitis C and AIDS circle the globe. Technology, particularly biotechnology, presents humanity with ethical challenges much more rapidly than the church can respond.
___With all these and other global challenges, "frustration is migrating like crazy," O'Brien added. Frustration crops up in tribalism and ethnicity, which produces ethnic cleansing, he said. Even the superpowers cannot deal with global terrorism. Fundamentalism is making an impact on all the major world religions. And persecution is rampant, with 160,000 Christians martyred last year alone.
___Still, Christians are making progress in world missions and evangelism, he acknowledged.
___"The church is bigger than you think," he said. "The most dynamic churches are in the Southern Hemisphere and the Eastern bloc."
___And that means missions-minded Christians must team up if they're going to have a chance of sharing the gospel with the whole world. "The last frontier of missions is collaboration," he said. "Be open to new ways for new days."
___But Christians must avoid the temptation to "recreate old methods that were not effective" to begin with, warned Keith Parks, recently retired coordinator of global missions for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and former longtime president of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board.
___"The face of missions is already in rapid transition," he said. The world's missions-minded Christians encountered the most recent shift in missions thinking and approach in 1966, Parks reported.
___They "began to emphasize people, not nations" as a way to approach spreading the gospel around the world, he said, admitting, "Baptists were slow to recognize this."
___The focus on reaching the ethno-linguistic people groups of the world recognized the global migration of people of similar racial/ethnic background and language, as well as the diminished legitimacy of national borders as boundaries for defining people, he said.
___A national approach to missions fails to recognize all the people groups within a particular nation and also fails to track the movement of people groups to other nations, he added.
___The world now is home to about 13,000 distinct people groups, Parks said. Of those, 6,000 groups are comprised primarily of Christians. Another 3,000 groups represent a "missiological breakthrough," with people expressing receptiveness to the gospel. Still another 2,500 groups have very small indigenous churches, "with such a limited witness that there is limited human anticipation of spreading the gospel," he said. And the final 1,500 groups have absolutely no indigenous churches or missionaries serving among them.
___Missions-minded Christians must support new and innovative methods for getting the gospel to people who have not had the opportunity to accept Christ as Savior, Parks urged.
___Many Christians "would try to say: 'It really doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're sincere. We're all on different paths to the same place,'" he lamented. "I don't believe that. Scriptures don't teach that.
___"What we're engaged in is a spiritual battle. We've never really participated in intercessory prayer (for missions) and grappled with the notion of spiritual warfare. ... We must try to extend the kingdom of God the furthest, the fastest for God's glory, not ours."
___That extension of God's kingdom is happening through collaboration among Christians "on the last frontier," the part of the world that has not yet been evangelized, said Kent Parks, Keith Parks' son and a missions strategy coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
___"We can't do the job by ourselves," Kent Parks conceded. "And we cannot fully know God from the perspectives of all the people groups of the world."
___Collaborating mission organizations are weaving three main emphases to reach the unreached people groups, he added. They are "social justice, evangelical proclamation and a celebration of mysticism and belief in the power of prayer."
___Most people unreached by the gospel are adherents of other faiths, and the key to communicating with them is "incarnational wisdom," said John Jonsson, professor of world religions at Baylor University and the son of Swedish Baptist missionaries to the Zulu people in South Africa.
___"We should be less propositional and more human--winning friends across cultures," Jonsson advised.
___Propositional faith, which focuses almost exclusively on ideas and rational thought, tends to divide people and even subordinate people who hold different ideas, he said.
___Incarnational wisdom, on the other hand, grows out of common humanity and relationships, he explained.
___Jesus personified incarnational wisdom--God became a human being, Jesus, who lived among and related to other human beings, he said.
___"Incarnational wisdom is all about rubbing shoulders with these people," the non-believers of the world, he said. "And if we consider ourselves the royal citizens of the kingdom of God, then they need to be rubbing shoulders with us."
___That challenge is "an unfinished task," insisted Dellanna O'Brien, recently retired executive director of Woman's Missionary Union, who spoke at a luncheon held in her honor.
___"We must embrace the world," she said, particularly challenging members of Woman's Missionary Union. "Having seen the need, we cannot withdraw."
___The challenge of spreading the gospel through the whole world is "an unfinished task," she declared. "Our future depends upon how willing we are to pick up the needs of the world."
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