The Challenges of Cross-Cultural Church Planting in a Neo-Colonial World
Missiological Theology Part 1: The "Why" of Missiological Theology
As I work on the literature review for my dissertation, I am examining Missiological Theology as a framework indigenous expressions of church as a movement. I will be posting reflections on my readings here, as a form of pre-writing. This post represents one in that series of reflections.
Much can be learned about the complexities of cross-cultural missions from John Gast’s portrait, American Progress. Painted in 1872, it reflects the predominant worldview of Westerners at the time. In it, a beautiful white woman is depicted leading European settlers across the plains of North America. In one hand she holds a school book, and in the other, a spool of wire by which she plants power lines. She is flanked by pioneers wielding shovels and guns, driving covered wagons and plowing fields, and in her wake, railways miraculously spring into being, trailing locomotives behind her.
Cowering before her, however, are native Americans. Unable to hault her advance, they flee Westward, carrying their woman and children with them, and herds of bison flee as well. Behind the woman is a New England harbor, brilliantly lit by a magnificent sunrise. But before her the land is dark, as the natives flee into its shadows. Several of them look up, meeting her gaze as she advances, but she doesn’t seem to notice. Her eyes are fixed on the horizon, moving ever onward, claiming more land in the name of Western civilization.
As previously discussed, many of the earliest mission strategists in the evangelical movement were ahead of their time. They were not afraid to identify social evils like slavery for what they are, and for this reason they dreamed of planting indigenous churches capable of leading, financing, and propagating themselves. But they were also products of their time, and did not deny the assumed superiority of the West.1 Today, colonial expansion as a political force has for the most part ceased, but its effect on the intellectual and cultural framework of those involved in missions is still felt acutely. This has led many to wrestle with questions of indigeneity and how we might rediscover a theology capable of overcoming such colonial tendencies.
The Problem: Old and New
Not long after Henry Venn’s death, a missionary from Venn’s Church Missionary Society (CMS) wrote to his brother on the subject of the Sierra Leone mission. In it, he reported that the native believers “delight in loud singing, and they rejoice in the latest of European fashion in clothes, but of morals of the true Christian standard with rare exception they have absolutely no idea.”2 This is peculiar, as Venn was particularly fond of the Sierra Leone mission.3 Surely, of all the stations of the CMS, this one would have faithfully applied Venn and Anderson’s 3-Self Formula for indigenous churches.45 Why, then, did native believers in the mission display such a taste for non-native expressions of faith, and why were they so lacking in discipleship?
Lest we assume this problem a thing of the past, we should look to modern-day missions with sober judgement. Indeed, churches all over the world display a troubling uniformity to Western ways of understanding and expressing faith in Christ. The term Hillsongization has even been coined to describe non-Western churches’ mimicry of the style of Australia’s Hillsong Church.6 In one case study of this phenomenon, Brazilian youth were said to have been attracted to one such church precisely because of Hillsong’s location in the global North.7 Michael Cooper considers this a kind of neo-colonialism, expressed primarily through a “Western cultural hegemony,” which has “only increased” in the modern era of missions.8
Additions to the 3-Self Formula
Even though the CMS planted missions with indigeneity in mind according to its 3-Self Formula, they were still “subordinated” to the “presuppositions of Euro-American culture,” setting out to create an “exact reproduction of European models.”9 For this reason Paul Hiebert called for a fourth self: Self-theologizing.10
For Hiebert, theology is “the application of Biblical truths to the situations in which people [find] themselves,” and this is best done within a “hermeneutical community,” in order to humbly overcome bias and mistaken interpretations.11 Cooper, himself a student of Hiebert’s, thus describes the act of self-theologizing in community as “a missiological exercise that involves the voices of Christians from other cultures who can adequately address issues occurring in their contexts.”12 But Cooper goes further than Hiebert, including the voices of Christians throughout history within the hermeneutical community, citing the Vincentian Canon: “hold to what is believed everywhere, all the time, by everyone.”13
Though some effort has been made at self-theologizing in the Majority World, Neill also observed that “little has been done to set free the Christian genius of the nations to express itself in art and literature.”14 For this reason, Cooper also suggests self-expression as a fifth element to the Self Formula. Focusing on “adapting cultural forms in biblical ways that identify the church with the culture,”15 such self-expression is primarily a ecclesial matter.
Andrew Walls famously posed a thought experiment in which he imagines a visitor from space and time, observing the Christian movement throughout history. His investigation carries him from the Jewish church gathering in the Temple of Jerusalem in 37 A. D. to the Nicean council arguing over Greek phrases in 325 A. D. He surveys the fanatic Irish monks in the 600s and excited Evangelicals in the 1840s, before landing on the white-robed Pentecostals in 1980s Lagos. The spaceman recognizes an essential continuity within the Christian community, based on the ultimate significance of Jesus, the use of scripture and sacraments, but they are also “cloaked with such heavy veils belonging to their environment.”16
Self-theologizing, then, allows indigenous churches to answer the questions posed by their contexts using “indigenous resources and vernacular,”17 while self-expression allows them to feel at home in their cultures. The Christians of the world, Walls says, should be “transformed, yet recognizable.”18
Why it Matters
It is perhaps easier to diagnose the problem than it is to solve it. Indeed, Neill acknowledged the replication of Western forms was historically unintentional for many missionaries. He reported a case study in which a group of CMS missionaries reluctantly agreed to allow a group of insistent new believers in Syria to become Anglicans.19 Surprisingly, he suggests that resistance to indigenization can come “primarily from the converts themselves, and from their reluctance to have anything to do with the world from which they have emerged.”20 Roland Allen agreed with this assessment, observing that, even when native believers were given positions of leadership, “they always strive to act as they think will please the foreigners; they imitate them as closely as possible; they fear to take any independent action.”21
Yet neither Neill nor Allen let the missionaries off the hook, either. Neill insists that missionaries with good intentions “yielded to the colonial complex” that situated the white man as the undeniable leader. Anyone who suggested otherwise was “liable to be shouted down by a nearly unanimous chorus of disapproval.”22 Allen, meanwhile, condemned unconciensious missionaries in harsh terms. For him, it is a “lust of control and government” that is “the besetting sin of Western people.”23
This begins to reveal why the problem is so difficult to confront. Postcolonial theory often speaks of a dual identity, as colonized people learn to view themselves “through the eyes of others.”24 They may behave in ways they assume ruling foreigners expect of them, leading to a kind of mimicry.25 This is not the kind of imitation the New Testament speaks of as discipleship.26 Rather, it is a mask shown in public that may not reflect a private sense of identity.27 In this way, colonialism has created a situation whereby natives are predisposed to the outward mimicry of Western forms, while remaining privately un-discipled.
But what about Cooper’s neo-colonialism? If colonialism as a political project has ended, it still exists as a cultural exercise. Under neo-colonialism, the people of the Majority World find themselves “yearning for American style, even in the most intense contexts of opposition to the United States.”28 But due to the complexities of globalization, even churches that try to express native ecclesial styles may find it difficult to do so.
This is because such small, locally scaled institutions are often unable to compete with the large scales of global institutions.29 Imagine a small local church trying to encourage native worship, for example, when its youth become captivated by trendy American worship bands on the internet as soon as they become Christians. In the context of Church Planting Movements, Cooper identifies that a lack of theological depth can lead to theological syncretism on one hand, but a suppressed ability to reproduce exponentially on the other.30
All of this is disconcerting, because it makes the cross-cultural planting of truly indigenous churches seem nearly impossible. Yet Christian history if replete with moments of triumph over seemingly impossible obstacles. It is a faith built, after all, upon Christ’s victory over the obstacle of death itself! If we look to Christ for our answer, we see that it is through the process of this cultural translation that our vision of Him grows.31 The New Testament teaches us that Jewish culture gave us Christ as messiah, while the Greeks gave us Christ as kyrios and soter.
Bosch speaks not about “Christian theology,” but “Christian theologies.”32 Stephen Bevans says that “all theology is contextual theology.”33 The mission world is beginning to understand the global benefit of a local theology. As the CMS missionary who wrote on the troubling foreign-ness of the Sierra Leone mission said, the end of the missionary enterprise is not just checking unreached people groups off of a list, but rather, when those to whom we are ministering are “in a position to re-interperet to us the knowledge which we are now trying to share with them.”34
This leads me to propose that the solution to the challenges of cross-cultural church planting in a postcolonial world (or, perhaps, neo-colonial world) do not lie in the strategy of cross-cultural missions, but rather in the theology of cross-cultural missions. To that end, there is a robust discourse on contextual theology, intercultural theology, and missiological theology, which will be examined in the following article.
Henry Venn, “The Organization of Native Churches,” in To Apply the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Henry Venn, ed. Max Warren (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1971), 78.
John Robinson, “Letter to His Brother Charles” in Florence Robinson, Charles H. Robinson: A Record of Travel and Work (London: The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1928) 46.
Henry Venn, “Letter to an African,” in To Apply the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Henry Venn, ed. Max Warren (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1971), 61.
Henry Venn, “Second Paper, Issued July 1861,” in “Minutes on the Organisation of Native Churches,” appendix in William Knight, Memoir of Henry Venn, B. D.: Prebendary of St Paul’s, and Honorary Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (Cambridge Library Collection – Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 415
Rufus Anderson, “Development of the Missions” in To Advance the Gospel, ed. R. Pierce Beaver (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1967), 90
Tanya Riches and Tom Wagner, The Hillsong Movement Examined: You Call Me Out Upon the Waters (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 185.
Ibid, 138.
Michael T. Cooper, “Colonialism, Neo-Colonialism and Forgotten Missiological Lessons,” in Global Missiology (January 2005) 4.
David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (20th Anniversary Edition), (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 2011) under “Missions as Inculturation,” “Twentieth Century Developments.”
Paul Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 2001) 96-97.
Ibid, 100-101.
Michael T. Cooper, Ephesiology: A Study of the Ephesian Movement (Littleton, CO: William Carey Publishing, 2020) 115.
Ibid, 116.
Stephen Neill, Colonialism and Christian Missions (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1966) 420.
Cooper, Ephesiology, 285.
Andrew F. Walls, “The Gospel as Prisoner and Liberator of Culture,” in The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002) 3-7.
Natee Tanchanpongs, “Asian Reformulations of the Trinity: An Evaluation,” in Gene Green, Stephen Pardue and K. K. Yeo, The Trinity Among the Nations: The Doctrine of God in the Majority World. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015) 101
Walls, “Culture and Coherence in Christian History,” in Missionary Movement, 24.
Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Mission (London: Penguin Books, 1990) 230.
Ibid, 397.
Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (Delhi: Grapevine India Publishers, 2023) 104.
Neill, A History, 220.
Roland Allen, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder It. (Jawbone Digital, 2012) 67.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Gorham, Me: Myers Education Press, 2018) 9.
Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” October 28, no. 1 (Spring, 1984) 125–133.
“Be imitators of me as I imitate Christ.” 1 Corinthians 11:1 (NIV)
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986) 9.
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large : Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 174.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (London: Pluto Press, 2016) 133.
Michael T. Cooper, “The Potential Risk of Syncretism in Church Planting Movements” in Evangelical Missions Quarterly 57, no. 1 (Jan-March 2021) 28-31.
Walls, “Introduction,” in The Missionary Movement, xvii.
Bosch, Transforming Mission, under “Paradigm Changes in Missiology", “Six Epochs.”
Stephen B. Bevans, Essays in Contextual Theology (Boston, MA: Brill, 2018) 30.
Charles H. Robinson, The Interpretation of the Character of Christ to non-Christian Races; an Apology for Christian Missions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1910) vi.