The Changing Contours of World Mission and Christianity: "Boundaries" for mission today

The Changing Contours of World Mission and Christianity: "Boundaries" for mission today: 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.

Boston University historian Dr. Dana L. Robert was the most recent guest lecturer for our Global Christianity course. Dr. Robert’s fascinating talk traced the shifting use over the last century of the concept of the mission field as ‘frontier.’ Earlier uses of the term, influenced by American Western expansion, saw mission as a territorial frontier. But the strictly territorial use of the idea of mission as frontier shifted to accommodate political and social realities. Drawing ‘Social Gospel’ movement, some missionaries envisioned mission frontiers in terms of social justice. Others likened mission frontier to that of crossing the boundary between ‘belief’ and ‘unbelief.’ A more recent transformation of the idea of frontier comes from work of Donald McGavran and Ralph Winter, who made popular the idea that “Unreached People” who do not have access to the Gospel are the primary frontier for modern missions. Dr. Robert suggested this view a is narrowing of the meaning of frontier. Mission is commonly understood as a crossing over some kind of boundary, and ‘frontier’ language has proved resilient, and may see another transformation in the coming years.

As our group discussed the lecture, we could agree that mission is most recognizable as a crossing of a boundary. Yet given the thorny history of Christian expansion which is sometimes linked with imperialism, several important questions emerged in discussion. Is the term ‘frontier’ for mission useful today? And if so, what is the most helpful way to understand the main ‘frontier’ for contemporary mission? If one abandons the specific use of the word ‘frontier’, what is the boundary that is most important to cross in order to engage responsibly in mission?

One suggestion in the discussion was to see the incarnation event itself as crossing a frontier, and an incarnational model of mission, being Christ in a holistic sense to our neighbors and seeing Christ in them, might be helpful. In this sense each person, each heart, could be considered a mission frontier. Although it has some evangelical overtones (‘every person is a missionary, every heart is a mission field’), it might be more helpful a word than the word ‘frontier’ that to some smacks of territorial takeover. But would this be saying that everyone can or should be a missionary, thereby diluting the meaning of mission? Perhaps there is a distinction between saying everyone is a missionary and saying Christian should strive to be missional. There is a movement in the West identifying itself as “missional church” that engages in theology and local outreach which is intentionally incarnational. Through the discussion many of us still sought to grapple with mission as a boundary crossing. We further asked ourselves what were the main ‘boundaries’ for mission today?