Theology of Mission in the Classroom: Embodied Cultural Contestations?

What if much of our thinking about how to form “missional” leaders in seminary is based on misleading (or flat out wrong) assumptions about “culture?”

This current semester, viagra I have set for myself the challenge of teaching “theology of mission” in a mainline Protestant seminary. As with an increasing number of courses at my seminary, search the class is populated by masters-level students, pastors seeking continuing education, and interested community members from the Indianapolis area.

Beyond the logistics of working with multiple constituencies, the topic itself was challenging for two reasons – two reasons which, at first glance, may seem to contradict each other.

Jargon vs. Thought

The first challenge is that, in many respects, mainline Protestants these days arguably spend too much time talking “mission.” As Nadia Bolz-Weber has recently pointed out, mainline churches have recently begun employing the term “missional” to describe everything from theological formation to congregational strategy to the layout of worship spaces (a latter a trend to which, in full disclosure, I have contributed), and the dangers of potential overuse of this sort of jargon-y term are apparent. Like the term “stewardship,” “mission” runs the risk of being both overly churchy AND overly corporate-sounding, especially when invoked in the context of anxiety about the financial decline of congregations and judicatories. I received more than a few eye-rolls when I told friends and colleagues that I wanted to teach in the area.

But therein lies the second challenge, which is that in many respects mainline church institutions don’t (in my judgment) THEOLOGIZE about mission enough. Seminaries tend to do a fine job of teaching the history of missions; moreover, theology classes tend to do well in pointing out the pitfalls of Christian mission historically. But as important as it is for church leaders to absorb the critiques of colonialism, lack of respect for alterity, and other ills of missionary efforts past and present, staying solely in “deconstructive” mode vis-à-vis theology of missions doesn’t really help them navigate the complexities of theologically engaging culture. A more robust theological engagement is needed.

A Cacophony, not a Vacuum

In working with students and colleagues towards that theological task, I’ve become convinced that much of the common currency of how theology/proclamation of the Christian gospel interacts with culture rests upon two fundamental misunderstandings of North American “culture” (which for the sake of argument I’ll use here in the singular, even though that too can be misleading).

The first major mistake, perhaps following on the heels of H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture as well as the persistence of Paul Tillich-esque models of “correlation,” is to portray culture as a vacuum into which theological content might somehow be injected. Just as the missionaries of centuries past made the mistake of thinking that they were “bringing” God into new contexts, we linguistically portray culture as a kind of theological tabula rasa. But we do not send our messages out into a void, but rather into a cultural cacophony – a dense symbolic network of significations.

Moreover, in the North American context, these significations are largely shaped by the Christian imagination. If one takes a plant, uproots it, and replants it in different soil, over the generations the plant will take on new characteristics (often in surprising fashion); similarly, much of North American culture has been shaped by Christian concepts which have escaped the confines of ecclesial discourse and have taken on mutations from which Christian leaders might learn a great deal. Put bluntly, theology as a discipline does not bring theology into the public square(s) – it joins the operative and often covert theologies already there.

The second mistake is to assume that culture is somehow self-satisfied; that is, that the culture needs theology’s “counter-cultural” witness in order to be thrown into a crisis of contestation. I would argue that any glance at the blogosphere or online news comment section will demonstrate that culture is NOT a self-satisfied monolith, but is always already a site of contestation around truth, beauty, and meaning. This means that theology JOINS cultural contestation that is already in place.

Classroom as Hermeneutical Space

What does this mean for theologizing about mission in the seminary classroom?

I would suggest that it means that discussions of theology and mission need to take a cue from history courses and emphasize that culture, like the history of the church, is not a peaceful stream of predictable events but a contested series of contingencies, complex theologies, and variegated worldviews. We must “complicate” talk of culture in the classroom with the same rigor with which we complicate the theological discourses native to our seminaries.

Here the mixed constituency classroom (masters students, continuing ed, non-degree students) is of tremendous help, because one’s location in the ecology of the church tends to change the degree to which one is socialized into the common theological discourse of the church. If part of the challenge of theologizing about mission and culture comes from recognizing the variety of beneficial “mutations” that theological concepts undergo when they leave the safe confines of that discourse, then this embodied variety in the classroom is helpful.

It has interested me for a while now that many U.S. ambassadors in the 20^th century were the children of missionaries. As easy as it is for us in hindsight to critique the cultural blindness of these past missionaries, it’s clear that many of them were some of the more cosmopolitan and culturally savvy citizens of their day. To the extent that the seminary classroom can become a space where the complexities and contestations of North American culture can be embodied, then formation in the hermeneutics of cultural competency might become a hallmark of “missional” formation.

Photo Credit: “Clash of cultures” by dierk schaefer  – CC by 2.0

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