Did David Bosch miss something?

Next month will mark the 20th. anniversary of the untimely death of David Bosch so let me get in first before everyone else comments on his legacy - and some legacy it is!

I only met David once. Frankly he was not very impressive, that is until you got him talking. It is almost axiomatic today to say that if you have not read his seminal Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission you have not really begun studying mission. His 519 close packed pages are hard work but I have yet to meet anyone who regretted reading them. That accident on the N4 between Belfast and Middleburg, in his native South Africa, 20 years ago robbed us of a genius.

But, twenty years on, I have been rereading his final chapter and realising that he missed something. In fact it is the second thing he missed. As soon as Transforming Mission was published  he himself realised that he had missed one thing. He saw that he had not commented sufficiently on the missional challenge of post-modernity. He quickly put that right in his little monograph Believing in the Future: Towards a Missiology of Western Culture.  But he missed something else as well, something we can only really see with hindsight.

His final chapter in Transforming Mission, called Elements of an Emerging Ecumenical Missionary Paradigm, verges on the prophetic. His thirteen 'elements' cover so many aspects of what many of us today consider essential aspects of the mission of God. He includes evangelism, liberation, contextualisation, justice, inculturation, the mediation of salvation, the need for unity in mission, the role of every Christian in mission and much more.  So what did he miss?  Some would say he paid too little attention to mission as creation care, but much more significantly I would say he missed a seismic shift in mission, only just beginning as he wrote - the work of the Spirit in raising up myriad new mission movements around the world, especially in the Global South.  That final chapter describes well (and prophetically) the mission we know today emanating from the Global North but it stands uncomfortably as a pointer to what the Spirit is doing today in Africa, Latin America, China, and so many corners of Asia.

We now need someone to write a new chapter in honour of David. Something like, "Elements of an Emerging Global South Spirit-led Missionary Paradigm".