The Changing Contours of World Mission and Christianity: Quality of Roman Catholic mission

The Changing Contours of World Mission and Christianity: Quality of Roman Catholic mission: Editor’s note: The following post arises from small group reflections from The Rise of Global Christianity, 1910–2010, taught by Dr. Todd Johnson at Boston University in the Fall of 2010. Led by doctoral students, the small groups discussed lectures given by Christian scholars in various disciplines, including significant changes that have occurred in global Christianity over the past 100 years.

This past week in our Global Christianity course we had the opportunity to hear from guest lecturer Father Vincent Machozi of Boston University on significant changes in Roman Catholicism over the last one hundred years. Father Machozi brought up some important points that stimulated our discussion. Among his points was expansion of the church in the global South, and with it a changing understanding of ‘catholicity’ as fullness of life. Father Machozi also brought attention to changes in the Roman Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council, particularly with the attention given to the church and social action.

We found Father Machozi’s point that catholicity understood as fullness of life has a profound impact on mission very interesting. Such an approach no longer sees mission as converting the whole world, and instead focuses on mission as quality of life. It shifts the evaluation of mission success away from quantitative convert head counts, to whether Christianity is qualitatively relevant and potent to deal with problems people face daily, such as poverty and injustice. We noted that the question of quantity vs. quality in Roman Catholic missions is very important in Latin America, where Catholics are a majority in most countries. If quality is not emphasized, then people might become Catholics in name or identity only, without Christianity having a significant influence on important activities and decisions.

The Roman Catholic Church’s emphasis on social action was an aspect that we found very interesting, especially since all of us came from Protestant traditions we thought failed to take global action seriously as church bodies. We discussed whether the centralized hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church allows Catholics to speak with tremendous power with a unified voice on important issues and stand up to such things as the debt of developing nations, poverty, and nuclear proliferation. We were left engaging with ideas on how Protestant churches might be inspired to take similar positions with resolve.