Crusading Koreans?

I spent this evening reflecting with mission colleagues on the significance of the Korean mission movement. A Pentecostal Korean missiologist, Julie Ma, had raised a few challenging questions in her opening lecture at the Asian Mission Consultation at Redcliffe College and that got us going. With Korea now sending more cross-cultural missionaries than any other country outside the US (so Julie claimed) their missiology and methodology must be significant. I was struck by how many times Julie spoke of the Korean mindset as 'crusading' - ouch!! - but she's right in many respects. Another colleague later talked of Korean missionaries as being 'modern' (rational, linear, success oriented, goal setting) and therefore finding it difficult to address pre- and post-modern mission contexts.

My question was what distinctive contributions Koreans bring to global mission. The 'birth ground' of their faith is in many ways unique - suffering, struggle, Shamanism overlaid by Buddhism, and rapid church growth. That must give them something unique. The answers we began to get were in terms of an acute awareness of spiritual realities, a deeply prayerful ministry, dogged determination, and generosity. But Korean missions need to relate to the rest of us and we need them - if only we can overcome substantial language and cultural barriers. The future looks good.

Looking to Brazil on Trinity Sunday

With two members of the British National Party being declared members of the European Parliament on Trinity Sunday my paniced mind ran to Leonado Boff (right). Who else would I go to, you might ask! Boff is (was?) a professor of theology in Petropolis, Brazil, whose commentaries on society and politics are steeped in good biblical theology. In 1986 he wrote Trinity and Society and there he has a wonderful section on how the inner life of the Trinity provides us with a powerful critique of both capitalism and socialism. Pages. 148f for those who want to read it but here are two short quotations:

The greatness of trinitarian communion, however, consists precisely in its being a communion of three different beings; in it, mutual acceptance of differences is the vehicle for the plural unity of the three divine Persons.

Being a person in the image and likeness of [God] means acting as a permanently active web of relationships: relating backwards and upwards to one's origin in the unfathonable mystery of the Father, relating outwards to one's fellow human beings by revealing oneself to them and welcoming the revelation of them in the mystery of the Son, relating inwards to the depth's of one's own personality in the mystery of the Spirit.

The challenge for me is including those who voted BNP amongst those others to whom I must reach out in order to complete the community of differences to which Boff calls us and in which we, as Christians, rejoice!