The Mission and Missionaries

One is always called to serve, to go out to share life experience this experience has to be well centered in Jesus or else one becomes a red cross volunteer or an NGO employee. Education and formation are central to this call. No one, who knows the history of mission, can doubt that missionaries were pioneers of education wherever they went, and it is hardly possible to exaggerate the debt of gratitude which is due to them for their labors in education, nor can it be doubted how important a part education, nor can it be doubted how important a part education has played in the process of evangelization.

The time is ripe enough to evaluate, to make it necessary to review the principles and their processes to whether today, we still would continue with them or abandon them all together or rebrand. This falls in the line of education and formation. If we have to prepare future missionaries for the church, much has to be put into consideration. All this has to be properly contextualized: India, China, Japan, Africa and what we can call "Muhammedan lands in the Near East".

The Christian Truth to indigenous thought and feeling, which has to form the heart of missioning. This will take a proper form of the identity of whoever is being involved in the mission, not missions. The mission is one, that of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who is in the communion of the Trinity who send the Church. Missions are the other activities we do in the mission like teaching, preaching, sacraments, etc. 

To have a mission means you are called by the Church, living what the Church teaches, and sent out with the help of the Holy Spirit to do that what the mother Church believes and loves. The rule is one: Belief what you read, teach what you believe and practice what you teach, live what you teach. All this will depend on: world conditions affecting Christian mission, theories learned in the formation and education. The rapidly changing world situation is seen as challenging the churches to produce a higher standard of mission agents who are ISO Certified and on top of their game, men and women who are genuinely called with the highest possible level of professional and theological training. 

WHY EMPHASIS ON ISO CERTIFIED FOR MISSION?

 

The missionary education should be a leavening, like yeast, the entire life of each nation with Christian beliefs and values. In tension with such a view where the church-centered approach that put the priority on the formation of leadership for the emerging indigenous churches. This is towards building a native Church. The primary purpose is to be served by the educational work of missionaries to train local, native Church to bear its own proper witness. The native church should be able to bear its own proper witness and to move forward towards the position of independence and self-government in which it ought to stand with native teachers, leaders, officers, training those who are to be spiritual leaders and teachers of their own nation, community, and congregation.

The central purpose of mission education is to influence the general life and thought of the community, and thereby to lay a greatly needed foundation for all forms of Christian work. The education and formation of local leaders for the emerging indigenous churches take priority, in the estimation of Christian values and principles throughout wider society.

The attitude of thinking that Christianity is a foreign influence, tending to alienate its converts from the mission life. We have to awaken ourselves, our consciousness among people of all regions in our considerations of what it means to be Christian educators. Missionaries should be experts in indigenization, inculturation and contextualization approaches, what we have to factor in the emerging ecumenical paradigms. Theologians and educators of the century have not only to keep writing but to put themselves on the road to enter classes and present themselves, or what we can call identify themselves.

Mission was not about disseminating in new cultural contexts the form of Christian faith which had found expression in the western world. It was rather a matter of the common core of the faith being received and processed in terms of many different cultures and contexts worldwide. In every context, missionaries should not be people to transport to the countries in which they mission that form or type of Christianity which is prevalent in the lands from which they have come but to lodge in the hearts of the people the fundamental truths of Christianity.

Catholicity should not be seen in matters of uniformity in every aspect of life and conduct. The universality of Christian faith is to be found, rather in a shared adherence to the substance of the substance of the faith, as expressed in a statement such as the Apostles' Creed, which allows the faith to be appropriately expressed in a great variety of the ways according to the distinctive genius of each people and nation. The work of acclimatization should and ought to be done by native teachers; the native pastors that become the most important work of Christian missions. This will depend on how they will be trained, no to denationalize them or occupy their minds with distinctively western elements and controversies of religion.

Christianity, even if it's highly valued, appears to be a faith that is foreign to the local culture and context. This drives us to the whole question of language, where an international language such as English is a medium of instruction. Religion can only be acclimatized in the heart of the natives of the country if it finds expression in their native language, the language of the ordinary home. A theology which is truly indigenous as well as properly Christian and Biblical must develop a native terminology, an end which is only likely to be attained where vernacular is used for the expression of religious ideas.

The greatest pain must be taken as far as possible to use all that is available in the literature of the nation to provide preparation for distinctively Christian learning and literature, and it must never be left out of sight that an indigenous Christian means a native Christian literature by competent native writers. The primary task of evangelists is to raise up properly equipped and instructed native Churches and native leaders who shall have to temptation to feel that they are alienated from life and aspiration of their nation in becoming Christians. If the Gospel has to be inculturated, indigenized, adopted into a specific people, have to be presented in the people's language, not a medium of foreign language it will have no sense and will lose its meaning, but to do something else of missions rather than mission.

The people of God have to be educated, the education which has to equip them for positions of usefulness and influence in the community, and secures the development of strong Christian manhood and womanhood. The education of women should take priority. There can be no question at all that the education of women is, in every grade, quite as important as the education of men, and that educational training is quite as important in the case of women teachers as in the case of men. Character is largely determined in the early years and by the influence of the mother in the home, the education of women acquires a place of first importance. While higher education may be less necessary in the case of women than men, but on condition that care should be taken not to offend unnecessarily traditional feeling respecting the place of women in society, yet in all plans for Christian education, women ought to receive equal consideration with men, and equal care should be exercised that the education provided for them is adapted to their needs. This will lead to a social revolution. (Cf. M.P. Joseph, Missionary Education: 105-18).

HOW MISSIONARIES OUGHT TO BE PREPARED

The whole issue at hand is based on the human side of it that hinges on the quality of the missionary. The quality of the missionary will triumph over the absence of money. The quality of the missionary, therefore, becomes a supreme question of investigation. This will manifest in the Christian life, where we encounter Christ who was more than a Teacher and his messengers must do their best to manifest the power hidden in the Christian Life. This comes out both in personality and life of the evangelist and in every variety of medical, education and industrial work.

The real grasp of the message has to be delivered, and a personal experience of its power, understanding of the needs and perplexities of human life in general, and in particular of the modes of thought of those to whom the message is to be delivered, the ability to show how the message meets these needs. Men of exceptional ability and learning often fail curiously in a field where everything is new to them. The very fullness of a man’s attainment may make docility and humility more difficult, and yet it is upon these childlike qualities more than on outstanding ability that true success in leadership depends.

The missionaries training, for all types of missionaries, should integrate spiritual, moral and intellectual elements. Formal training has its limitations. No act of the self can win them, and it follows that no training can give them, though it may remove some obstacles in the way of their development. Missionaries have to learn to face great strain and heavy responsibility without the support of visible Christian fellowship and to maintain a high level of spiritual life without the continual renewing which is supplied under normal conditions by the ordinances of common worship.

On the other side we have the moral training with its qualities of docility in being open and willing to learn; gentleness that comes with the spirit of courtesy, this should enable missionaries to understand the customs of the people among whom they are called to live; and sympathy that empowers missionaries to love the people they serve. A missionary is powerless to help people whom he cannot love. There should be a mutual understanding between the missionaries and the people they encounter.

The other is the intellectual training that has to be the best education which his own country and Church can give him or her, whatever is to be his department of labor. If he is to be a preacher, theological teacher, or an educationalist, he must go through the task of technical equipment for those offices. A medical man, he must have the full training and professional qualifications which are necessary to his standing as a physician in his own country.

The intellectual formation should help a missionary to be an open-minded person, can't be profoundly trained in one direction, especially for a great profession involving varied cultures, and is most capable of self-adaptation to changing circumstances and to new calls upon its energy. The urgent need now is for quality leadership and we have to do what it takes to improve and rework on what kind of missionary we want to pass on to the coming generation.