Mission as Reconciling Practice

A Presentation to the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church, USA

March 2004 meeting

Camp Allen Conference Center, Navasota, Texas

By Willis Jenkins

The basic idea of what I am going to say is that the remarkable mission energy in so many of our dioceses, although taking on such varied and even contrary forms, may hold great promise for finding a way into the fullness of our differences, both internally and externally. We need to reaffirm our commitment to mission, I will be suggesting, just at this period in the life of the Anglican Communion, not to distract attention away from our problems, but because mission is a practical way to let God make sense of them. As a following in Christ's way of reconciliation for the world's alienation, mission can also be a practice for actively engaging with what ecclesial differences may mean.

The Sunday after my first arrival in Uganda I went to church with a priest from the seminary in which I was to teach for the following year. And though I had embarked upon my mission experience in great excitement to experience the African church, and in what I thought was a profound openness to what I might find, something happened in church that first Sunday that I found quite offensive. Toward the end of the liturgy, just as I thought this joyful and moving service was coming to a close, a well-dressed man sitting in front stood up and gathered up all the non-cash items that had been given in the multiple offerings, and to my great surprise, he started selling them. For a while I thought, to myself, perhaps the church is selling these beans and vegetables to the poor at a discount rate – but no, it was clear he was actively auctioneering, cajoling this peasant congregation into giving still more. And as the money for an item would come in, a treasurer off to the side would enter the amount in a ledger, tabulating the church's return, I thought, even in the service. I simmered in my seat, feeling my breathing quicken, and my stomach flutter as I grew angry at these money-hungry church officials, so blatantly extorting money from the poor. I thought of Jesus driving out the money-changers, and my heart beat faster as I wondered how I could get away from this scandal of a parish. But I was in a village somewhere in southwestern Uganda with not a hint of how to get around nor yet a word of the language. I could not easily escape.

To my dismay, I soon discovered this practice was quite the norm. In my own village parish, week after week, up would stand one of the wealthier parishioners, and he would extort high prices for the fruits and vegetables that had been brought. Sunday after Sunday the service would come to the auction, and I would sit quietly and steam, until at some point, inevitably, I myself would be coerced by the auctioneer into buying some sugar cane or something, with which I would then have to carry back to my hut in total aggravation.

Well, over time there, I came to know and deeply respect one of the village elders, an old retired priest both wise and learned. Mzee Katureebe is the sort of man whose approval is not easily won, but is worth everything when is. So when I saw him apparently untroubled by the auctions – indeed they seemed nearly his favorite part of the service – I began to wonder there might be in them for Mzee Katureebe to smile upon.

I actually had to intentionally will myself to think beyond my aggravation, but I set myself to imagining what missiological good there might be to church auctions. And as I did, I started noticing the applause every time a bag of beans was purchased for three times its market price, and the blushing grin on the face of a woman whose single melon offering just sold for the price of a dozen, and the way that the members with paying jobs stepped up time after time to make sure every last thing was bought, and the laughter when the church auctioneer forced someone to buy something and give it to someone else . . . and how my elder friend invariably gave half of his purchases to the children seated on the dirt floor.   

And then different biblical images started coming to mind: the widow with her two mites, and the feeding of the five thousand – here was the church celebrating the smallest of offerings, and in its celebration turning them into greater gifts. This poor village parish each Sunday turned these poor peasants, with literally nothing else than what had grown from the ground that week, into great givers, receiving their two papayas and blessing them as worthy of applause and shouts. I had started out thinking the church had given up its mandate to care for the poor; now, I came to marvel, what more empowering thing could be done, than to make givers out of the needy? There was even some redistributive justice at work, for the richer in buying these high-priced goods increased the church pledges of the poor – what the treasurer was recording in the book.

I eventually came to see my own refusal to participate in the auctions as complicity in the anonymity of the poor, refusing to bless the gifts brought in person to the church, as recusing myself from experiencing the Spirit in just the liturgical place the rest of the congregation seemed to invoke the Spirit.

I eventually came to see my own refusal to participate in the auctions as complicity in the anonymity of the poor, refusing to bless the gifts brought in person to the church, as recusing myself from experiencing the Spirit in just the liturgical place the rest of the congregation seemed to invoke the Spirit. Because of a narrow view of what fighting poverty meant I was dull to what was going on in a mission practice that seemed patently wrong to me.

Needless to say, the auctions are now for me a buoyant moment in worship, and I have learned how to participate in fitting ways, outbidding myself for mangoes and giving them to the children.  

This is not to say I no longer have any questions about money and poverty and ecclesial authority in the Church of Uganda. But I have come to see that those auctions might turn out to be a liturgical center for holistic development strategies, as the Church of Uganda continues to address poverty. In fact it may be the start of a distinctively Ugandan theology of development – something quite needed by that church. At the very least, anything critical I might want to say about the church and poverty only means something insofar as I understand the power of that church's current mission to its poor.  

The reason I start with this story is that it is for me an example of a period of aggravation turning out to be occasion for missiological reflection – reflection that led me to see better the community I was living in, to appreciate the ministry of its church, and to understand anew my own vocation with them. What else I have to say today is moved by a similar hope, that in the more complicated tensions of our church and communion, our aggravations can be occasion for some searching missiological reflection – and from that, just maybe, opportunities for more authentic relationship, for coming to reclaim anew our own ecclesial vocation, as we come to understand more clearly the missions of our companion churches.

To privilege missiology here is not to valorize one subdiscipline of academic theology over others, but to recommend that our understandings of each other emerge from a distinctive mode of Christian practice: that of moving toward mutual relationship in Jesus Christ across and through significant differences. Or to put it another way, mission is the practice of rendering of ourselves susceptible to the Holy Spirit showing us the presence of Christ in the work and persons of those different from ourselves. (Missiology is, of course, reflection on that practice.)

In this time especially, I suggest, it is of great importance that we encourage a missiological perception of each other and that is something that can really only be done from within renewed mission practices. I want to mention three ways of reflecting through mission practice that seem to me especially important at this time. I'm of course not going to be able to say much about each of these here, but I want to bookmark them as topics important for our reflection in any way forward:

1.   Ecclesial integrity through mission relations  

The first thing I want to talk about is what it means for a missionary church to talk about its ecclesiology (or its sense of its own integrity).  

A few years ago, the Rev. Joel Asiimwe came from Uganda to be a visiting priest at St. John's, Tulsa. Now, Rev. Asiimwe was chosen for this American assignment by his bishop because he is a man of moral certainties and acknowledged integrity – so likely to be able to resist the panoply of American temptations. These same qualities, however, made his stay in Oklahoma at times difficult for Joel; I imagine there were times in the fellowship hall or on youth retreats that his blood boiled faster than mine did at seeing church auctions. Among the aspects of American church life Joel found distressing was our easy acceptance of divorce, allowing full and undisciplined membership to those who have separated. Joel found the presence of single divorced women to be especially uncomfortable for him, and the expectation that he would visit with them in pastoral meetings seemed to him just scandalous.

I don't think Joel came to affirm the easy acceptance of divorcees in Oklahoma in quite the same way that I came to accept church auctions in West Ankole. And I mention his story in part to point out that I don't expect mission visits should necessarily lead to unqualified affirmation of how others do things. (As I will say later, mission is not the suspension of judgment, but its precondition.) But after Joel's departure one of the parishioners at St. John's, herself single and divorced, told me how much she missed him, intimating that he had taken the break-up of her marriage seriously, in a way others in the church had not. There was apparently something to Joel's presence that could see her brokenness and respond to it uniquely. And I think this is because Rev. Asiimwe managed to hold together his certainty that divorce is objectively wrong with a sense that his mission existed for the service of the diocese of Oklahoma – including its divorced women.

In our current debates over the form of our welcome for homosexual persons, I sense the arguments are most intractable when they single-mindedly champion ecclesiological principles (e.g., unity or justice), and most promising – however different their trajectories – when witness to the importance of certain ecclesial missions.

What I want to point out here is that Joel apparently endeavored to consider divorce under the aspect of the church's mission for the sake of others; or, we might say, his ecclesiology followed his missiology. In our current debates over the form of our welcome for homosexual persons, I sense the arguments are most intractable when they single-mindedly champion ecclesiological principles (e.g., unity or justice), and most promising – however different their trajectories – when witness to the importance of certain ecclesial missions.

In moments of controversy or conflict, we often try to return to the basic ground of our identities, to reclaim and hold up the essence of who we take ourselves to be. For the church, however, this move to re-center ourselves around ecclesiological essentials, can sometimes seem to be looking in the wrong direction. For the church is a body that takes itself to be primarily in service not to itself, but to the world. At the core of the ekklesia there is not a substantial nature or ontological value, there is rather a referential movement, if you will, an arrow pointing outward to others. Which is to say, the church's body is perhaps most fittingly thought as an active relation, and its ecclesial integrity best measured by the state of its relations. Or to put it as St. Thomas Aquinas might: an ecclesial mark of integrity (e.g. unity) is not so much an ideal to be defended, but a virtue which is actively habituated to more or less perfection.

Archbishop William Temple is often remembered for having said that the church is the only society in the world which exists for the sake of those who are not its members. If there is something to that, then talking about ecclesial integrity is not something that can be done in abstraction from the relations of particular church-communities to those outside themselves. I am reminded of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who throughout his life identified the integrity of a church-community by its cruciformity, for him the active symbol of the church's body being given over for the sake of the world. In his case, the corporeal unity of the German Christian Church and then even the Confessing Church, was sacrificed for the sake of continuing to offer hope and resistance in Nazi Germany. Or we might think of Martin Luther King, in this regard, who, frustrated with its institutional self-regard, came to locate the life of the church in the civil rights movement, in those giving over their bodies in redemptive love for the world.   

The church, for better or worse, is always the church of those for the sake of whom it is in relation. This must be especially so of a church whose incorporated name is, after all: “The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.” So it is also especially grievous for us that some of our members find themselves estranged from others, and that some of those provinces with which we take ourselves to be in essential relationship, have announced their hurt and betrayal. I am suggesting we can think of this impaired unity as having to do with certain breakdowns in particular mission relationships, and so perhaps less aptly redressed by argument around the instruments of unity, than by renewed and repaired mission relationships.

The testimony of Bonhoeffer and King suggests an initial missiological question to be asked of our ruptured communions: for whose sake is this body broken? And that cannot be a polemical question, to call out those with whom we disagree, but truly a missiological one. It is in seeking to understand the value of particular missions so precious to a church-community it is willing to suffer rupture, that we ask, “for whose sake is this body broken?” What, we must inquire, is going on with the others for whom this particular church-community exists? What is at stake for its mission? Some of the statements made by bishops and church bodies in the last six months have, in my view, demonstrated a distressing incapacity to imagine what pastoral and missional concerns might be at heart for their supposed antagonists. To be candid: I would wish more inclusivist American bishops were able to demonstrate understanding and concern for the peculiar ways homosexual inclusion here may disturb church mission in some other provinces; and I wish more overseas bishops could respond in ways that at least perceive the missional significance of churches in the United States in some way reaching out for the sake of homosexual persons. (But these are possibilities probably only born through sharing each other's life for a time.)

I find our factiousness most promising when the question our aggravations press upon us is not something like, “by what criteria do we judge a church more or less the body of Christ (more or less Anglican)?” but when we ask, “who does this body of Christ exist for?” Who is the Church of Uganda trying to exist for? Who is St. John's-Tulsa trying to exist for? Are we broken for the sake of others? Or are we broken by refusal to love others?

Insofar as we are permitting rupture by holding ourselves in besieged reserve from each other, erecting walls of withdrawal behind which to remain secure, then I think we lose the promise of cruciformity, and cannot claim to suffer the passion of being Christ's body for others. However, insofar as a church-community takes itself to suffer its rupture for the sake of others, then I think we must seek first to discern precisely how they are assuming the form of Christ's body for a particular part of the world.

This discernment is one of the more important aspects to the many short-term mission exchanges that occur within the Anglican Communion. By visiting, worshipping with, and sharing for a time the life of our companion bodies, we are sometimes able to come into a sense of their mission, to see those for whom they exist and to understand how they go about that. Sometimes this comes about through us ourselves accepting care and counsel from those previously strange to us, so renewing and expanding our own vocations. It is a familiar thing to hear from those who have returned from short-term missions that they were surprised and grateful to find themselves ministered to by those they thought they went to serve. At its best this experience also directs us to understand the missions of these companion churches, the unique ways in which they are seeking to serve their piece of the world.

It may be important to note here, that I think one of the attitudes that can keep us from developing this sort of missiological understanding is an overdeveloped sense of the “for” preposition, in mission as “being-for-others.” We are all familiar with short-term missions that have failed because, in their eagerness to serve others their participants effectively refused meaningful relationship. David Bosch, a South African missiologist, warns against the latent narcissism in this “helper syndrome”, suggesting we think of mission instead as being-with-others. Perhaps we might say in the context of the Anglican Communion, the best way to be for our companion churches is to be with them in their being for others.  

In any case, the point here is that the best way to understand what is going in church-communities that seem odd to us is to spend some time with them, and preferably by participating in the activities and relations they take to be central to their own life. One of the most helpful things I think we are doing in mission right now, is sending and hosting pilgrimages. In pilgrimage from one church-community to another, one crosses a significant human boundary in search of a shared life in Christ. These boundaries (political, ideological, economic, ethnic) which separate us are indeed significant, and there may be an aspect of personal ordeal to suffering the differences they signify; but so the reward of rediscovered relationship is all the greater. Recall Abagail Nelson from Episcopal Relief & Development (ERD), who, at the Presiding Bishop's Forum on Global Reconciliation at General Convention, reflected through her story of being embraced by an AIDS-racked patient , that: “God does not call us to be comfortable, but to be whole.” And, remember, wholeness for the church is not so much a value to be championed, as a virtue of active relations.

So I commend to you pilgrimage – sending and hosting – as a formational discipline for our church, as a way of being with others, and most importantly as a mode of missiological understanding. Mission as an activity of “ministering in a dimension of difference” and being ministered to by erstwhile strangers, can be a mode of renewing wholeness.   I want now to move on to consider what it would mean to missiologically conceive differences and to point toward the shape of their reconciliation.

2.   Missio Dei

As we seek out others in pilgrimage, an interpretive principle that may help us in charitably understanding the mission endeavors of strange church-communities, is the primacy of God's own mission. Being able to make sense of such assorted mission identities within our communion should push us to reaffirm that mission is a first of all a sharing in the eternal life of God. Ecclesial missions are then to be understood as the body of Christ recapitulating, in diverse ways, God's acting for creation. Or, to put it more familiarly, the many missions of the church are participations in the one missio Dei .

The reason it is important for us to reaffirm this at this time is because if it is so, as I have suggested, that mission is a mode of discerning the significance of our differences, then we best sort them out by looking to how difference functions in the single mission of God.  

St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Charlottesville is a wonderful community of academic intelligentsia and the local literati – just the sort of parish one might expect to find across the street from Thomas Jefferson's Rotunda. It is a place where the sermons indefatigably (and mellifluously) exhibit good will for humankind, but whose active ministry outreach is directed primarily for those associated with the University of Virginia (UVA). Of recent, however, their rather local good will has taken on a surprising extension, for two years ago a young man named Ross Kane fell into their midst. A very able candidate to the Young Adult Service Corps (YASC), with an eye to working in the Sudan, Ross was a student at UVA, new to the Episcopal Church, and, it turned out, quite innocently attending a local parish which was Anglican in some way, but not really in communion with ECUSA. But for Ross to be a missionary of ours, of course he really needed to be sponsored by a parish within the Episcopal Church, and St. Paul's as the chaplaincy to UVA seemed the likely place to petition. Perhaps somewhat indifferent to missions in Sudan, the parish nevertheless saw in Ross someone for whom their university outreach existed, and so they graciously welcomed him, found a scholarship for him, signed his papers, and sent him on his way.

Ross is currently in a joint appointment with the Reformed Church in America , developed in consultation with Anglican Frontier Missions (AFM), to the New Sudan Council of Churches as an assistant to a program that seeks to mediate reconciliation efforts between the factions of the southern Sudan. Ross, in other words, is working in an innovative and promising part of our world mission commitment, where Christian practices of evangelism and forgiveness are part of the everyday conversations around capacity-building and good governance. And St. Paul's has been inadvertently caught up into it, for everywhere he goes, he is considered sent by St. Paul's, to which his stories come back home, and where he has spoken at coffee-hour forums. So the limited scope of St. Paul's outreach commitment to UVA has snatched them up into a much wider part of God's movement on earth, for through Ross they find themselves in partnership both with the [Episcopal] Church Center and with an independent evangelical mission agency, implicated in reconciliation work in Sudan, and to policy advocacy in Washington, D.C.

My point here, I want to be clear, is not that St. Paul's is finally coming round in some way, but it is to commend them, for from within the boundedness of their own sense of mission vocation they were yet open to one representing a mission vision rather different from their own – and because of their openness, they have been drawn into a greater sense of God's mission and their own place within it. Their own parochial vocabulary of mission has been at once stretched and reaffirmed, as their discrete mission to the university is held as a unique participation, related to others, in the ongoing ecclesial adumbration of the one mission of God.

[W]e need to reclaim the centrality of the missio Dei . For if all our missions are so many participations in the one mission of God, then we can not only afford to be less defensive about the centrality of our always-parochial mission visions, we can also cooperate in the missions of other church-communities with less fear that we are somehow capitulating to the misguided.

In order to at once defuse the adversarial rivalry between our various mission commitments, and at the same time to intensify the ecclesial significance of cooperating in the missions of others, we need to reclaim the centrality of the missio Dei . For if all our missions are so many participations in the one mission of God, then we can not only afford to be less defensive about the centrality of our always-parochial mission visions, we can also cooperate in the missions of other church-communities with less fear that we are somehow capitulating to the misguided. Indeed, if a church sees its efforts as always responsive to God's mission, then both humility and cooperation seem to become imperative: churches are vital mission communities only by developing particular relations on behalf of certain others, and in ways it finds itself uniquely called. (For example, reaching out to a university population, or partnering with the Church of Sudan.) At the same time this uniqueness is most serviceable to the Spirit's use when the mission community is open to being caught up into unexpected alliances with other mission communities. (The university outreach leads to companionship with Sudan.) Our mission works are not, after all, something we have final control over; they are instead so many receptions of God's mission for creation. Whether we are sending or receiving, partnering or granting, evangelizing or developing, being with or being for – we are always creatively hosting in our particular (and of course, deficient) ways the one eternal mission of God.

My appeal here to the missio Dei is not, let me be clear, simply a renamed version of “can't we all just get along?” Referring our particular missions to the mission of God allows us to begin naming the significance of our differences. Under the missio Dei , when we talk of mission as ministry in a dimension of difference, we affirm the source of this dimension, the fund of all our many kinds of separation, as the eternal differences in God: of the Son processing forth from the Father, and of the Spirit moving in its own way from them both. These intra-divine differences are the very possibility of our being, and the world experiences them through God's acting for creation: in the procession of the Word for the sake of the Father's loving the world, and in the Spirit's actualizing this love within creation. In the ministry and especially the prayers of Jesus, and in the Spirit making present the power of Jesus in surprising people and places, we are made witness to these different relations within God's life. In other words, through experiencing God's missionary activity in Jesus, we are drawn to see our separations, good and bad, as a shadowy repetition of the divine life, and by holding God's mission primary we refer the meaning of our differences to the ways they make us partakers in the divine life. Referring our mission identities to God's mission in Jesus, we find both forgiveness for the sin of our having turned graced differences into estrangement, and hope for getting beyond the vapid diversity we form in pride and anxiety. Through the church we are invited into the grace of authentic and life-giving identities; invited into a reconciled dimension of differences that bear real and salvific testimony. Through participation in God's mission, rendering our differences for the sake of Christ's being with and for the world, we are invited into an authentic and reconciled diversity.

Here is suggested a second missiological test question to ask of any divisions: Do they seem to exist for the service of God's mission? Or are they oriented to preserving our parochial identities for their own sake? Probably some of both, of course – but by asking these questions we at least refuse to fetishize what makes us unique, instead holding on to how our uniqueness is being used by the Spirit to serve the mission of God.

So on the one hand we can feel good about the variety of mission identities within our church and communion, for this seems fitting of the God in whose mission we participate, apt for assumption by the hypostatic movements of Son and Spirit. Even somewhat estranged from each other, we can take our diversity of mission identities as a promising note of the Spirit's heteroglossia. Yet on the other hand, we cannot of course allow ourselves to privilege our mission identities to the extent that we close ourselves off to God's wider activity. So we continually seek to allow the Spirit to make our mission communities more actually christoform, particular incarnations of a universal mission.  

I am suggesting that one of the best ways for giving over our own unique mission commitments to become more fully christoform, is to take a still riskier step: practically cooperating with each other in mission, especially with those from whom we are separated.

Despite how I may have made it sound, this is really an everyday practical exercise. I have already recommended that one way to understand the potential grace to strange mission communities is by participating in them as a pilgrim. Now I am suggesting that one of the best ways for giving over our own unique mission commitments to become more fully christoform, is to take a still riskier step: practically cooperating with each other in mission, especially with those from whom we are separated. For when we work together with those different from us, we open ourselves to a fuller sense of God's mission, and as we come into that sense, are better enabled to understand not only which of our differences matter, but in what precise ways they do.

Cooperation, however, requires at least some shared mission vision, and that may seem less and less likely right now. But we have in the [Anglican] Communion a number of examples of Anglicans from very different points of view continuing to work together, without sacrificing their parochial integrities or unique mission commitments. Think for example of the Episcopal Partnership for Global Mission , a remarkable community of mission agencies from across the spectrum of ideological and theological commitments. Together they have been working out, by unanimous consensus, missiological principles for mutual recognition and accountability. Its members include such as ERD, AFM, Five Talents , the South American Missionary Society (SAMS), the Episcopal Diocese of Texas , Anglican Global Relations (AGR), the Episcopal Diocese of Massachussetts – and so on. And this is not simply nominal agreement: Ross Kane's placement in Sudan is just one example of cooperation between these agencies, and there are many others. Just ask Craig Cole from Five Talents, or Sandra Swan from ERD, and they will have story after story of concrete projects cooperatively carried out with folks you wouldn't expect to get along.

Tomorrow, Bishop Jeffrey Rowthorn will have something to say about Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation and the 0.7% campaign for a renewed commitment to address global poverty. I would suggest to you that as we discern the significance of our differences under the aspect of God's mission for the world, being able to affirm some form of mutual commitment to the world outside ourselves will be enormously helpful. A first step toward understanding the role our own missions with those of others by the light of missio Dei , may be recognizing the work we can still do together in reducing poverty and combating AIDS. Perhaps these and other of the Millennium Development Goals can serve for us as a kind of missiological overlapping consensus – minimum criteria upon which we can agree from our different standpoints, and by which we can know each other's work.

For I should hasten to say here, that the final point of mission is of course not about us coming to terms with the character of our differences, but about God reconciling the world to God. And the place to start in on that may well be to put down mending our nets and follow Jesus for a while. For this at least we can agree upon: that too many are poor, yet avoidably so; too many are sick, yet preventably so; too many are imprisoned, yet unnecessarily; too many are without hope, yet there is good news.

This is to say, there are some differences we loathe, some boundaries that are indeed perversions of God's life, and do not serve God's mission. Mission can be a practice of discernment and judgment, disclosing which differences are glories of the Spirit and which are wounds in Christ's body.

3.   The Frontiers of Belonging

Last week, I met with a Young Adult Service Corps volunteer who had recently returned from Haiti in the wake of the turmoil there. Justin, who was doing a year of mission as part of an ordination discernment process, has been assigned to work with a public health NGO, and for the past seven months or so has been working on a project which traces the interconnection of certain indices of suffering: between foul water and typhoid, between malnourishment and location. But his mind has been tracing the connections still further. When I met with Justin in a Charlottesville coffee shop, he was quietly angry: upset over the way a national border and economic divide has functioned to weaken the poorest of our hemisphere and deflate their hopes, frustrated by the half-hearted efforts of aid organizations to alleviate needs without pausing to understand them, and most of all, disheartened to have been made witness to the church's apparent obsession with itself, to the neglect of caring for its neighbors, for one of its own dioceses. He gave voice to wondering whether parish ministry would make him similarly opaque to matters beyond its own boundaries, but I can tell you that while Justin's interest in parish work may be fading, his border-crossing experience has only fired his vocation all the more. As he reflects on his experience, he is looking into graduate research in political economy and theology, with an eye to formulating distinctively Christian approaches to political and economic development, and in nurturing local theologies of community. Justin is headed back to Haiti this week, and I tell you his re-crossing that border will be a blessing for the church.

The point of mentioning Justin is to indicate the way that missionary journeying can itself be a critique of significant human boundaries, and a clarifying exercise in our perception of what mission ought to be about. Missionaries are those who cross over a significant boundary of some sort to risk themselves in meeting others in some way different. This includes national boundaries, yes, but also economic, cultural, ethnic, or linguistic boundaries. In a time of AIDS, mission boundaries may include also the ones between those HIV+ and those negative, the sick and the healthy.

When the missionaries of the church understand themselves to be always sent from and received into the flesh of the Word, however imperfect or degenerate, then the church is drawn to wonder over the valence of the differences it seeks to move beyond.

Yet while the boundaries missionaries cross may be sometimes historical or natural, they are in no way absolute, for whatever boundary we have in mind, God has already crossed it in some way. Or as St. Thomas Aquinas puts it, the mission of God does not mean that God comes into a place where God was previously absent, but that God comes to dwell there in a new way. There is then an implied judgment of differences as we cross boundaries, because we are always sent by and received into a community that, however different, already has its life from the one mission of God. When the missionaries of the church understand themselves to be always sent from and received into the flesh of the Word, however imperfect or degenerate, then the church is drawn to wonder over the valence of the differences it seeks to move beyond.

In light of the church's commission to “wage reconciliation,” boundaries may be interpreted as degenerate divisiveness to be overcome, or as grace-giving differences to preserve – or, as is most often the case, some of both. Thus many of our boundaries we rightly celebrate as glorious differences; for example, the cultural, ethnic, and linguistic variety that invite us into a deeper sense of our humanity, and adds color and voice to our worship. But others, such as the distances crossed to be in solidarity with the poor, the victims, the oppressed, the hungry – these are grievous walls of separation. Much missionary effort is put into discerning which boundaries are glories of God and which are wounds in God's body. But it is not so simple a task to divide the wheat from the chaff, and cannot aptly be done by observational analysis from afar. The only way of discerning our differences is the way of Christ. Archbishop Rowan Williams has written that to recognize the authority of Jesus is to affirm his ability “to re-make the frontiers of human belonging.” A practical way of following how Jesus does that still, I submit, is in the movement of giving oneself over to some sort of ministry in a dimension of difference. Missionaries, that is, might be seen as those ministers of the church relentlessly seeking to understand what Christ makes of our frontiers and what the Spirit is doing with our boundaries. A church lets its missionaries be outward signs of Christ's reconciliation across all boundaries, both sinful and glorious, insofar as it lets itself be formed by this movement.

This missionary movement may sometimes happen by accident, as is the case with the Sudanese refugees who have come to live in the U.S.   Here is an example of a population whose experiences of persecution along tribal and religious lines have been transformed into a glorious testimony through their arrival into our midst. Quite a few Episcopal parishes have found some of their own parochial boundaries questioned as they welcomed Sudanese into their parishes. Some have becoming actively interested in the plight of southern Sudan and in U.S. foreign policy, others have become more attuned to other refugees and immigrants in their communities. In short, insofar as these parishes have received the Sudanese as missionaries of a kind, many of them have experienced this unexpected arrival as a revitalizing energy in their midst, and for some, this has led to the transformation of their parishes into places at once more visionary and more hospitable.

The Sudanese refugees remind us that the U.S. is home to many such newly arrived populations, and no doubt one of our mission endeavors must be to not only reach out to such groups, but to affirm their mission here, and to let them empower the whole church for mission in new ways. Or as Bishop Wilfredo Ramos-Orench might prefer me to say it: one way to hear Christ speak to the boundary of native/immigrant is to empower these populations to themselves overcome it in mission.      

Through the boundary-crossing activity of its missionaries, the church, both sending and hosting, is better enabled to question the divisions of the world, and our own divisions. When, for example, missionaries travel from a wealthy consumerist population to a desperately poor one, the economic boundary they cross must be refuted as unnatural and a disgrace. Analogies pertain for all sorts of other boundaries as well: insofar as they function for exclusion and degradation, the church testifies against their power. For example, AIDS ministries have worked to overcome stigma and alienation. This discloses the way a disease boundary has functioned for isolation and dehumanization, and the way an ecclesial mission has sought to redeem that through the healing touch of Jesus, to make even this frontier of suffering and death disclose God's love for the world.

The point here is that for the church, differences are made for God's mission, but just how this is so, we only discover through crossing them. It is in the activity of continually moving across boundaries that the church is able to discern their significance, and only then that the form of reconciliation may be given to us.

Over the last triennium, the Episcopal Church's Standing Commission on World Mission , in consultation with a great many Episcopal bodies, networks, and agencies, offered to the church a concise articulation of what seems to be the mission vision shared by many. This was received for study by the church's 2003 General Convention. I want to bring it to your attention in this context, for the end of it includes a quite dramatic program of recommitment to the wider world, primarily through increased funding for hosting and sending missionaries, but as well through more adequately forming the church around this missionary movement. One way of thinking about these proposals is to consider them as a way of reengaging with the Communion and the world through a mode of discerning companionship. They are a way of affirming that we are a church of mission relationships, seeking to faithfully live out our own call to participate in the mission of God for the world, and attentive to the complex axes of alienation at work in our world.

Think of Justin returning this week to Haiti. The Episcopal Church needs him to be there, to cross those borders, and to find his voice in witness to what God is making of them. We also need many more like him, both those we receive into our midst from abroad as well as those we send. We need both to be able to offer these missionaries the training and ongoing formation that enables them to be wise and sensitive boundary-crossers, and we need to find ways to make our parishes more receptive to their witness. For in Joel Asiimwe, and Ross Kane, and Justin Mutter, and the Sudanese Lost Boys, there are important testimonies to understanding the differences in our communion and knowing what to make of them – there are glimpses of the shape of a way forward.

Conclusion

In the past, when faced with the need for internal healing, ECUSA withdrew into itself away from mission. This time the need for internal healing comes with a clarion call for ECUSA to re-engage in international mission, that we may rediscover what the Spirit is doing in other provinces, peoples, and confessions. The way forward is yet unseen – I don't mean to simplify the task of reconciliation ahead, and I think we must not attempt to seize our blessing without bearing the full burden of its trial. But I think we do at least know the first steps of our way forward: it is in following the way of Jesus in mission. Whatever happens next, we will be the church of our mission relationships – for better or worse. This is why missiological discernment is so important now: we Episcopalians do not simply decide on the shape of our church; we become church as a missionary society – we are church through the others with whom we are in relation, and for the world, for whose sake we exist.

At the 2000 General Convention, the Standing Commission on World Mission and the Episcopal Partnership for Global Mission issued a joint statement calling on the church to “to avoid letting differences about human sexuality impair our partnership in God's mission in the world.” I think perhaps it should have said, “ because of our differences about human sexuality, let us come together in mission.” Anglicans need to rejoin through mission not having put aside our problems, but because only in mission practice will we discover the Christian significance of our differences. In other words, the key point in what I have been saying, is that we will discover distinctively Christian things to say, about sexuality and anything else, only from within distinctively Christian practices – and the central, hallmark, distinctive Christian practice is the mission of following Jesus: the ecstatic activity of going out from and receiving others into the body of Christ.

Willis Jenkins is a member of the Episcopal Church's Standing Commission on World Mission, and was a cofounder of the church's international Young Adult Service Corps. His international ministry has been concentrated in Uganda and Kenya, and he currently lives in Charlottesville, Va. Willis may be reached by email at wjj2c@cms.mail.virginia.edu .