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The Church and Mission
The new general secretary of the Council for World Mission is Rev Dr Desmond van der Water. He spoke with Tim Watkin about a new understanding of mission.
Somewhere in the crowds at Los Angeles international airport there's a missionary in trouble, and pacing round his Auckland hotel room, Rev Dr Desmond van der Water is running short on rescue plans. The Caribbean representative on his way to the Council for World Mission's executive meeting in Auckland has made it as far as Los Angeles on the understanding from his travel agent that he didn't need a visa for New Zealand. Turns out his travel agent was wrong.
Van der Water, 50 years old, tall and quietly spoken, is working the phones, talking to any immigration and airline staff working on a Sunday afternoon. But he's hitting a wall of rules - the missionary looks to be marooned until Monday and van der Water is genuinely troubled that one of the twice-yearly meetings will get underway without a Caribbean voice.
He sinks into the hotel-issue leather couch and rubs his long face wearily. It's the kind of day when the job of running one of the world's biggest mission organisation can seem an endless task. Van der Water is the general secretary of the Council for World Mission (CWM), making him one of the ten most influential people in the global ecumenical church. Starting his five year term in February, he has taken the reins of the cooperative that was once the world's most famous missionary organisation, London Missionary Society, and which still today brings together the mission work of 31 Christian denominations.
He moved his wife Norma and two children - Andre 14 and Deidre 7 - from South Africa to London to co-ordinate CWM's four permanent programmes - financial sharing (it gives millions to church and non-church projects each year, although van der Water wants to combat "the emerging heresy that we cannot engage in mission without money"), personnel sharing, mission development and education, and communication.
But as with any church work, there's an element of bottle-washer to the position. Dealing with the more mundane details of running the organisation, such as rescuing misinformed missionaries, is part of the job.
The other part is transforming the churches' view of mission; a view he says that is too often stuck back in the days of the LMS.
"We've got to get away from the 19th century understanding of mission," he says. He starts by explaining what mission is not. "People confuse it, but when they're talking about mission, what they're often talking about is actually evangelism."
Evangelism is merely a part of mission, but it desperately needs rethinking, he says. Standing in the square preaching no longer works. Neither does sending individuals out to preach to the heathen. Those ideas have been losing traction for some time and the LMS became the CWM as long ago as 1976 to reflect that. In a changing world, former colonies of faded European empires had become independent nations and the old paternalistic attitudes of sending the good news from Europe to the rest of the world no longer made sense.
"It was a paradigm shift to mission from everywhere to everywhere," van der Water says.
Now, he continues, we have to broaden our understanding of mission. "For me Christian mission is about the total tasks of the life of the church." That includes teaching the gospel, but, adds the bureaucrat who stresses that he's a pastor at heart. it also means tending to God's people, transcending church and society, treasuring the gospels ourselves and building bridges with other faiths.
And it's a matter of who we are, not what we do.
"Mission isn't something you do. The church cannot exist apart from being a church in mission. The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning."
He says churches who say they focus on pastoral care or community work and don't 'do' mission are kidding themselves. It's inherent. But that doesn't mean it can be ignored. The gospel, he says, requires Christians to express our private faith in the public arena.
He honed this belief in the white heat of South African politics, as one of the church leaders who drew up the Kairos document in 1985, finally criticising apartheid. A minister and former CEO of the United Congregational Church of South Africa, he says he learnt that mission included taking a stand against injustice and for community.
"The gospel is not an individualistic thing only. In the African context you don't separate faith from politics anyway, so it [the Kairo document] was a practical expression of what was inherent in the African psyche."
As example of the word being preached from everywhere to everywhere, he says the western church could learn a lot about community from the African church. He quotes a concept known as "ubunto", which essentially means: I am because you are. "In Africa you are human through other human beings." Sharing the faith publicly, does not mean hectoring members of other faiths, however.
"Mission is also about dialogue with people of other faiths, which is a big issue today becauee of September 11. It's about imparting God's love to bridge communities... It's an entirely new way, a way of reaching out, not preaching, but talking and listening."
In a quiet voice, carefully choosing his words, he says the church needs to be radical. And as he travels the world he sees others coming to the same conclusion. With falling memberships and incomes, many churches are staring at extinction if they don't make radical change.
He believes this crisis point offers a huge opportunity to speak the gospel.
"When the church is pushed to the margins it's more prophetic and more critical, rather than just helping to maintain things as they are. I'm essentially a bureaucrat, yet the impulses in me are saying there has to be strong criticism all the time."