Christianity Encountering World Religions by Terry C. Muck

Christianity Encountering World Religions by Terry C. Muck

Author:Terry C. Muck [Muck, Terry C. and Frances S. Adeney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL045000, REL030000, Missions—Theory, Christianity and other religions
ISBN: 9781441205261
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-17T16:00:00+00:00


CONCLUSION

It is quite clear that some kind of mission innovation is needed in the twentieth century. Billy Graham and Mother Teresa seem to have shown us the way forward in their enormously productive lives of mission service. Both took advantage of technologies, medical and communicative, that were not available to earlier Christian mission workers.

Conflict abounds in the world today, both political and interreligious. Often politics and religion seem indistinguishable. That conflict abounds is not unique in history. Humanity seems destined to conflict as surely as the sparks of a fire fly upward. What was different about late twentieth-century conflict and continues to be different about conflict in the twenty-first century is its increasing power to destroy. Nuclear weapons will soon fall into the hands of nonstate agents (if they have not already), and the world will be forced to deal with religious terrorists whose worldview admits no negotiations of the traditional political sort.

Like it or not, mission has become part of this complex of religiously based problems. Mission has become associated with starting conflicts, with perpetuating conflicts, and with raising them to unacceptably risky levels.

In such a situation, we have a limited number of options. We can continue to operate on what has become a conflict model of missions. We can roll the mission dice and assume that Christianity will be the more powerful religious force in the world, backed as it is by large numbers of adherents and political associations with the world’s one remaining superpower, the United States. If we choose this option, it is most likely we will find ourselves in a war that is at least in part religiously motivated. This option does not seem consistent with the message of the gospel.

A second option is to give in to the clamor to abandon religious missions altogether. Both legal and theological options toward this end are being developed and implemented as we write. Anticonversion laws are being proposed and sometimes passed in many parts of the world. The usual aim of these laws is to do away with Christian mission efforts. And some Christian theologians have bought into this option and are writing and advocating theologies that essentially eliminate the need for Christian mission. This option also does not seem consistent with the message of the gospel.

Missional ecumenism seems to be an innovation that offers a third option. It does not abandon the scriptural mandate to tell the world the story of Jesus. But it attempts to do it in a way that dramatically reduces confrontation with the many identities people of the world hold dear.



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