Bifocal nation watching

Having received an email earlier today from a colleague in the USA about Ukraine - an email I found quite alarming - I deliberately sat down tonight to watch the news on BBC and then flicked over to see the news on Russia Today. Both were talking about a nation they called Ukraine but they were two very different places it seems. One of those Ukraines has been overrun by terrorists who have ousted the elected president. Hope however is not lost because good citizens in the east and south are maintaining their links with neighbouring Russia and will eventually restore law and order. Some of the terrorists we saw in the pictures were very violent, attacking police and setting fire to public buildings.  In the other Ukraine there has been an invasion by thousands of Russian troops and an illegal referendum is being organised by rebels in the south. The Russian soldiers we saw in the pictures were 'digging in' ready for battle.

These two nations also have different histories. One, it appears has always been a European state with international borders which must remain sacrosanct. The other has a long history of being partly in the Austro-Hungarian empire, partly in the Soviet Union, and more recently a satellite state of Russia with international borders that have been very fluid over the centuries.

Even their religious make up is very different. One has a majority Russian Orthodox Church and a few Catholics in the east (who can be trouble makers). The other has multiple Orthodox Churches, a large Catholic population, Protestants, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and everything else - in fact exactly the eclectic mix you would expect to find in a contemporary European state.

The real problem is that these two nations have co-terminus territory.

God give us understanding - of complex identities, long and difficult histories, interwoven religious communities and a matrix of relationship between the people of these two Ukraines which in the end will be their salvation or their hell.

I am not Ukrainian. My concern tonight is about media reporting that sees exactly what it wants to see (soldiers without insignia must be Russians, an angry citizen holding aloft a lump of wood must be a terrorist) and outsiders who want a simplistic view.  One question asked in the email this morning that started all this was, "Who is to blame - Russia or Ukraine?"  To ask that question is to fail to understand.

God give us wisdom.

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".