November 1962

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Vol. XIII, No. 11

DEC 20 1362
BRINGING OUR MISSIONARY METHODS UNDER THE WORD OF GOD Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, Director Division of World Mission and Evangelism, World Council of Churches

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The Presbyterian Church in the United States held a very significant Consultation on World Missions at Montreat, North Carolina, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth of October, 1962. Some 250 delegates [members and executives of the Board of World Missions of The Presbyterian Church in the Q.s., other officials of that Church, representative missionaries, and nationals from the areas of its overseas mission work/, consultants and observers met for frank and intense discussion of problems of the Christian mission. The following article is an address which Bishop Newbigin delivered before the Consultation on October 14. It deals with the foundational consideration which ought to characterize every inquiry into the motives, strategies, structures, and practices of the mission of Christ and His Church. The address is reproduced here by permission of the author and the Board of World Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. --Editor.

It is the proper character of a Reformed Church that we do as we are seeking to do here in this Consultation - reconsider our work as bearers of the gospel to the ends of the earth. If we dare to take to ourselves the title "ecclesia reformata semper reformanda", if we believe in the great tradition of the Reformed Churches that reformation is not a thing which is simply done once, but that on the contrary the Church must in every generation be ready to bring its tradition afresh under the light of the Word of God, then we will most certainly agree that the work of foreign missions is no exception to that rule. The commission of our Lord to his disciples to "disciple all the nations" is of unchanging validity until He comes again. But the forms in which that commission is to be fulfilled are most certainly subject to change. Foreign missions in the sense that we know them are a relatively recent form of obedience to the Great Commission. On the one hand they have been used by God to write one of the most glorious chapters in church history, but on the other hand, as we are becoming acutely aware, they have been perhaps more deeply molded than we; realized some time ago by the events of the secular world in the midst of which they were carried out, by the relatively short-lived though immensely significant movement of cultural and political expansion of the white races of western Europe into the rest of the world. Now that that temporary dominance has come to an end, it is natural that with such a profound change in the secular circumstances of the world the patterns of missionary action which have been familiar should come under drastic criticism. But at this point we need to be careful.

Single copies: 25. Orders should be addressed: Missionary Research Library, P.O. Box 590, Manhattanville Station, New York 27, New York.

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If we now see that we have been tao much conformed to the world of the nineteenth century, it is no adequate response to try now to be conformed to the world of the twen- tieth century. We are not intended to be conformed to the worLd, but to be transformed by the renewing of our minds. God uses the changes and chances of history to shake His people from time to time out of their conf'ormi.ty with the world; but when that happens our job surely is not just to push over the ti.ller and sail before the winds of change , but to look afresh to our chart and compass and to ask how we now use the new winds and the new tides to carry out our sailing orders. Every new situation is a summons to bring all our traditions afresh "under the Word of God". That phrase is a proper description, and if I am to essay some introduction to it I have to ask myself, How is t:j.1.s properly approached? If under this title I were to produce a few general ideas of my own and then fetch texts from all parts of scripture, a verse from here and a verse from there, to buttress these ideas, I would not be dealing faithfully either with scripture or wUh this task. I think therefore that the right thing to do, recognizing the limHations that it imposes, is to take a single passage of scripture which is close to the heart of our subject and to dwell on it with you, seeking to draw out from it what I believe God says to us in it concerning our work. Since no scripture is of private iLterpretation, I take it for granted that what I say will by no means necessarily be accepted but that it will perhaps contribute to further consideration. I have chosen for this purpose that text of scripture recorded in the Gospel according to John, chapter 20, verses 19-23, in which the manner and the substance of Christ I s Commission to Ht s Church are disclosed to us. "On the evening of that day, t he first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them. It The risen Jesus; That is the point at which I believe we must begin. The Christian missi.on begins with the risen Lord. It begins with this tremendous, this unbelievable fact - that He is risen from the dead . It does not begin with a program of action, of moral reformation. It does not have about it that atmosphere of strain and anxiety which always characterizes a human program. It begins with a shout of joy - yes, first of all .,ith incredulity, then when that Ls finally broken down, a shout of joy. liE IS RISEN FROM THE DEAD. The Christian mission began not as something to be done for the world but as something God has done once for all - the conquest of death. The risen Lord with us - that is the starting point. Jesus reigns; He is the alpha and omega; all authori.ty in heaven and earth is His. He builds up and casts down, He roots up and He plants. He is not struggling against a world too strong for Him. He is not appealing to us to help Him to overcome the world. He has overcome the world, and all things - the things that so baffle us and frighten us - are in His hands to deal with as He will. How foolish we are when we allow ourselves to be tempted to seek some other source of authority and assurance for our mission, some other reasons for urgency, some other grounds for commending the mission to others. As if who Christ is and what He has done were not good enough reasons to go singing to the ends of the earth. What fools we make of ourselves when we allow other things to get into the center of the picture J The context of the mission is the joy of the resurrection: "Al.l authority in heaven and earth is gi ven to me. Go therefore." That means being utterly committed not only in word but in deed to the faith which takes every single thing on the assurance that Jesus is Lord. That means accepting that everything - our desires, our way of life - is secondary, is under judgment, and that the one decisive thing which governs everything else is that He is Lord. There were times even in my own memory when I heard missions in India defended as a sort of cement for the British Empire. There have been times when Christianity has been championed as the defense of feudalism against capitalism, as the de rense of oligarchy against democracy, and now - God forgive us - we hear it talked about as if i.t were the defense for the western way of life against communism. What nonsense : As though the Christian mission were a sort of spiritual arm for the cold war. All of this is to forsake the living fountain and hew out cisterns, broken cisterns, that hold

-3no water. The whole context, the whole governing fact of the mission, is that Jesus is risen and that therefore He is Lord of all . The risen Jesus stood in t heir midst and said to t hem, "Peace be wit h you". And I need not remind you of all the depth and meaning which t he word "peace" ha s in t he Bible. The fullness of God's blessing on His people, peace with God, peace with man, shalom - t hat word which in the Ol d Testament encompasses as it were everything that God has in store for His people. That is what we are if we are truly the emissaries of the risen Christ - the bearers of peace. Is that what we are? Where then does that anxiety, that stridency, that restless busyness come from that so often seems to infect our work? A man of God who recently spent some time in the Middle East trying to conduct retreats for the deepening of the spiritual life for pastors and others in that area reported that he had come to the conclusion that the headquarters of a mission were about as good place to conduct a retreat as the doorway of a department store. Perhaps that is a hard saying, but is it wholly untnle? Do we give the impression that at the heart of our activities there is the peace of God? That our words and deeds are but the brimming over of a fullness that springs up from below, from the ever-flowing river of God's peace? I know it is easy to criticize, but we have to look at ourselves sometimes the way others see us. When the peoples of Asia, for instance, see our competing acti vt.tLes , our anxiety to build up our own organi zati ons, our enthusiasm about statistics, our exaltation of the administrator over t he minister, is it surprising if they often think they see in us one element of western cultural invasion, rather than the emissaries of t he peace of God? Above all, when they l ook at t he fragmentation of our Christian witness - at those divisions which so often seem to be simply t he projection into Asia of the splintered society in the western world and which seem to have no real relevance to the problems with which men are wrestling in Asia today, when they see those who preach t he same atonement unable to live together in one family - how hard it is for them to believe that we are really the bearers of the peace of God. The longing for peace is very deep in men's souls today, and this is not only, I think, simply the fear of war , though that indeed is surely something to be taken with the utmost seriousness. There is a longing also for some structure of meaning by which life can be understood and lived with some stabili.ty. Old structures that gave meaning to life for former generations are being destroyed in every part of the world. Old securities are being taken away, and the stable societies to which so many men look back with nostalgia are gone and will never be reconstructed. And that is all in the hands of God, the God who shakes the things that can be shaken in order that things whi ch cannot be shaken may remain. If we are to be God's messengers today we need to be able to speak to that longing for peace. Some of us a few weeks ago heard a Russian bishop telling this story. He had to take a taxi one day in Moscow and the driver, seef.ng the ecclesiastical garments, t hought this was a good occasion for a bit of mockery. So he started talking: "Look what we've got here. What's the latest news from heaven, Father?" The bishop said, "Everything is quiet in heaven. ,t The mockery went out of t he driver and he was silent for a moment. Then he said, ''Well, if it wasn't quiet it wouldn 't be heaven, would it, Father?". JIm the bishop' s comment was that t here behind that brassy-hard atheism there was sti.ll t he sense that there is a peace of God and that t hat is our proper hope . There is, then, a longing for peace deep in men's hearts, and surely we know that peac e cannot be had on our terms but only on God!s terms, and that therefore we cannot Just say "peace, peace". But surely also we cannot speak to man unless we are able to speak to that longing for peace out of our own sure knowledge of the peace of God. If our programs spring, as, God forgive us, they sometimes seem to do, from other roots, from fear for ourselves and our civilization and our way of life, we have no true and meaningful message. The same is the case if missionary activity springs from selfjustification, as we begin to repent, perhaps not for our own sins but at least for the

-4al leged s i ns .f our predec e s sors, and try a l.ittle bit of righteousness by works. Only if our preaching bespeaks the deep assurance that the Crucified reigns and that He has in Hi s authority the gift of peace, will we speak to that deep longing in the hearts of men for peace. For it i s the Cruc i fied who offers us this peace. His peace is not the wor-Ld s pe a c e , not the kind of peace the world expects, it is not freedom from tribulation but peace in tribulation. The marks of this peace - the marks of His hands and His side - are the marks of suffering borne for others, and in the New Testament these are clearly also the marks of the nrl s s i .on , One might almost say that in the New Testament suffering is the primary form of witness to Jesus Christ. When Paul is driven reluctantly to defend his apostleship against those who doubted it, it is to his suffering and to his humiliation that he points and not to anything else. Listen again to these words in which he speaks of what it means to be an apostle.
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"Lt seems to me", he says, "God has made us apostles the most abject of mankind. We are like men condemned to death in the arena - a spectacle to the whole universe, angels as well as men . We are fools for Christ :s sake, while you are such sensible Chri.stians! We are weak, you are so powerful. We are in disgrace, you are honored. To thi.s day we go hungry and thirsty and in rags . we are roughly handled, we wander from place to place, we wear ourselves out working with our own hands. They curse us and we bless; they persecute us and we submit to it. They slander us and we humbly make our appeal. We are treated as the scum of the earth, the dregs of humanity to this day ." The apostles, you see., are definitely among the have not.s . "Scum of the earth, dregs of humanf.t.y" - t hose are the marks of the missionary, according to Paul. And in India there used to be a discussion, not so long ago, about whether Indians should be given "mi.s sf.onary st at us'": Tha.t was really the phrase that was used, and it meant the right to boss other people ) to give orders . It meant a person who could command privileges and perquisites and, above all, the power of giving orders to other people. That was what was called "mi.ssd onary st.atus'". Where di.d we go so wrong that we produced such a caricature of what the New Testament says about apostleship? Surely the missionary movement has its roll of ma.rtyrs, praise be to God, and surely also from the point of v i ew of the major ve st.ern co.rnt.r'Le s the category of "mt ssf.onary" does not have any particular status. But if we look at our whole operation again from the angle of the peoples to whom it is principally directed, it does not, on the whole, suggest Paul's description of the apostolate, does it? It looks too often like something quite definitely from the haves to the have nots, from a wealthy and influential and powerful organization, as the world counts these things, to the "under-developed" peoples , There is plenty of evade-nee in missionary literature to confirm that impression. If things are changing now . if we have to accept weakness, poverty, and rejection, and if we have to know now that there :i.s no political power that is going to back us up, shall we not accept it as God I s mercy that He has not given us up as worthless? Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you . As the Father has sent me so send I you't. To whom does the Lord speak these words? Is it to a small group among the d i s c i p l e s or is it to them all? Surely there can be no doubt among us: this Commission is addressed to the whole company of those who are the witnesses of His resurrection. By it they are cons t Lt.ut.ed as the body which is to continue in the world that mission for which He came from the Father . It is in this sending that the Church receives its being. It is itself a sending. The mission, therefore, is not the affair of an elite group, distinct from the Church. The mission, which is God's mission, is entrusted to the whole body of those who believe in Jesus. And they abide in Jesus by partici.pating in His mission. These biblicaJ. truths are not disputed among us, but we know that the application of tcese truths to our practice raises questions on which we are not agreed. And i.f I try to speak about these questions it is not with the thought that what I say will necessar:"ly carry universal assent, but simply that i.t would be evasion not to attempt at least to say what it seems to me the Word of God says to us ab out these thi.ngs.

-5At every point, it seems to me, we have to ask ourselves, Have we been conformed to the world or have we been conformed to Word of God? Of course, one's convictions in these matters are always shaped by one's own experiences, and therefore perhaps the most honest thing is to begin by saying what those experiences have been. I have lived on the one hand in situations where the mission and the church were two quite distinct and separate organizations with a total administrative dichotomy, and I have seen what seemed to me the inevitable results of that. The church, so to say, took the hint that it was not the mission, and that it could therefore with a good conscience proceed to attend to its own affairs. But I have lived also in circumstances where there was no such dichotomy, where there was no separate organization called a mission, and where from the first moment of baptism new converts understood that being baptized meant being baptized into a mission, and that the first implication of baptism was that one went and talked to other people about the experience in Christ. The convert reali zed that there was no other organization which would do this over his head or alongside of him or instead of him, but that this was what it meant to be a Christian. And I have seen in such circumstances the Church multiplying itself by a kind of spontaneous expansion, precisely because from the very first moment there was never any doubt on that point. Now of course if we begin to talk of these matters, we must immediately agree that it is wholly improper to try to make direct deductions from scripture for the details of administration. Scripture does not provide us with administrative blueprints; that would be wholly to misuse the scriptures. And yet I cannot help feeling that this total administrative dichotomy between two bodies, one called a church and the other called a mission, is in such flagrant contrast with anything that we find in the New Testament that it does demand a very critical examination. Certainly, one can hardly conceive of how Paul's letters would have been written if in each of the places to which he wrote he were in a sense writing to two quite separate bodi e s , one, so to say, the Antioch Mission and the other t he people of God in that place. And is i t not interesting that we do not find this dichotomy at the very beginning of the modern Protestant missionary movement? Those gre at men of Ser-ampor-e - the brotherhood of Carey and his friends - never organized themselves as a Mission. They were from the beginning simply the Church. That is what they called themselves, and into that fellowship the converts came as members with those who were in Christ before. The same is true in the first beginnings of the mission in which I worked, the Church of Scotland Mission in Madras, where at the outset it was never organized otherwise than simply as the fellowship of Christ's people in this place, into which the converts came and lived 11terally as part of the family. Why, then, was the decision made in so many places to depart from that pattern and to set up an organizational dichotomy between mission and church? I think i t is clear that the answer in almost every case was, in order to give the Church its spiritual freedom, in or der that the Church might be free to develop its own selfhood, free from control or undue influence by the missionary. But if that is a true analysis, then the question arises, Why was that necessary? Why was it not possible for missionaries and Indians to live together in one fellowship without the former dominating the l atter and without the latter losing their birthright of freedom? Why this contrast with, for instance, what we see in the Epistle to the Ephesians, where the most colossal contrasts, Jew and Gentile, slave and f r ee - contrasts beside which the cultural difference between a missionary and his Indian convert is nothing - were transcended in Christ, so that there is but one body as there is one spirit? Why was that which was possible there not possible here? And why, therefore, did we come this position that f or the sake of the spiritual independence of the church there had to be not only this dichotomy, but the missionaries themselves had to be put in the position where they were contradicting by their practice what they preached about the nature of the church? I have never forgotten a moment in my own experience as a young missionary when, sitting as a member, as I was entitled to do, in the Presbytery in which our work was

-6placed, a discussion was going on concerning a certain pastor who was refusing to submit to the Presbytery in a matter where the Presbytery had proper jurisdiction. One or two missionaries arose and spoke in moving terms and in the most scriptural way concerning the nature of the Church as the body of Christ and the temple of the Holy Spi r i t , and of the obligation of those who served to acknowledge and honor the court of the Church. Then one of the Indian brethren got up and said, '~ill you missionaries do the same?". And at that moment we had to say "No", because the rules of our mission forbade such submission to the Presbytery in India. We were not permitted t o accept the spiritual jurisdiction of that court of the chu~ch in which we sat, but some of us knew at that moment that we would never rest until that scandal was ended . And, thank God, i.t was. How did it come that we were put int o this position where we were throwing down with one hand what we sought to build up with the other, where we were contradict:i.ng by our practice the very central thing that we were trying to teach with our lips ? Why was it that we did not trust the church enough to believe that we could place ourselves Wholly under its authority? I cannot escape the conclusion that it was because we allowed ourselves to be conformed to the ,vorld. This may not have been true of other gr oup s . I must simply say that I think it was true of myself and of others with me that we were too much shaped by the world in which we lived, the world of the colonial pattern in which it was accepted that a white man was in charge, and that a person who was not w hi t e was only put in charge if he had been so rigorously trained by a white man that he could be counted upon to act just like a white man under all ci.rcumstances . I may be wrong, but my own conscience compels me to say that it was there that the world penetrated into the Church. The pattern of relations between mission and church was conformed to the pattern of the world around us, rather than conformed to the basic truth of the nature of the Church as we read it in scripture and as we expounded it every time we preached. And so in spite of our belief about church and mission we cre ate, this dichotomy. And clearly it is no answer now if we simply swing around and become c onformed to the world in another way. Alas, I have the impression sometimes, indeed all too often, that missions have only finally surrendered their control when the political situation around them made it impossible to do anything else, that it was done not out of deep conviction from the Word of God, but because the pressures of the world around had changed. One heard such phrases as "in an independent India these things ought not to happen", or "now that Africans are in charge of government affairs, we ought to have African leadership in the church". And surely this is the treason of doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Paul tells us that we are not to be conformed to this world. Let me use the readi ng from the new translation. "Adapt yourselves no longer to the pattern of this present world but let your minds be remade and your whole nature thus transformed . Then you will be able to discern t he wi l l of God, to know what is good and acceptable and perfect." Well, this is what we must try to do, to seek together to discern the will of God. I am sure that this seeking must take us to the point where we sit down together in fullest partnership and frankness, older and younger churches together in the same area, the same region, facing the same tasks. The churches placed by God in the same places with the same responsibili,ties must together, with the utmost f'r ankne ss and above all with submission to the Word of God, try to find out, not how we maybe conformed to the world in this new post-colonial era int o which we have entered, but how we can be transformed by the renew:i.ng of our minds so that men will see in our corporate life, in our church-missi on relationships, in the whole structure of our work, not a mere echo of the pressures of the world, but something that represents in truth this new creation, this new supernatural creation in Jesus Christ wherein the deepest human differences are transcended. But that can only be as we attend to this further word in this passage, which brings us perhaps to the heart of it. "When He had said this, He breathed on them and

-7said 'Receive the Holy Spirit " '. This sending is not the mere commissioning of a human expedition. At every point when the Lord's commissioning of His disciples is spoken of, there is close in the background this promise of the Holy Spirit. It is only in the power of the Spirit that we can be sent out, ~~d here I believe is the place where we shall find the word of God questioning us most sharply. Have we taken seriously enough the clear teaching of the New Testament that witness is an activity of the Holy Spirit and only secondarily and derivatively our action? That it is essentially an action of which He is in control? Now I know that no Christian would deny this in theory, but I ask, Have we taken it seriously enough in practice? Have we acted on the belief that the Holy Spirit, who is free and sovereign, is able to furnish those whom He calls into the fellowship of Jesus with all the gifts that they need for their corporate life in Him? Even if those of the fellowship are, as Paul says, "not many wise, not many mighty, not many nob Le"? Or have we been so conformed to this world that we have distrusted that power, and we have therefore allowed the work of missions to become assimilated to the processes of western cultural invasion, so that we have made of it an affair in which we were responsible for directing a process of teaching and training for the so-called younger churches until in our judgment they were ready for responsibility? This is the point at which the thing becomes so clear, the point around which so much missionary debate has centered in the past decades. There have been the questions: At what point does a mission hand over responsibility to an independent church? How long should the period be in which missionaries are in control? But what does not seem to have been noticed is that the question does not seem to arise at all in the biblical situation. There is no period in which the church is independent. From the very beginning everyone of these young churches, with all its manifold weaknesses and even scandalous sins, is treated as simply the body of Christ in that place, the dwelling place of the Holy Spiri.t, and therefore as being not independent and not dependent but always and from the very beginning in a position of reciprocal interdependence with the other members in the body of Christ. Paul takes it as fact that the Holy Spirit gives to these companies of believers all the gifts they need for their up-building and for their witness. Certainly the Apostle possesses, and is not afraid to use, an apostolic authority. But it is wholly different from that coercive financial and administrative control wielded by missions over churches in recent decades. As he ironically reminds the Corinthians in the passage that I read, they are the wise and wealthy ones, and he and his fellow apostles are paupers, the scum of the earth. Their only authority is that they share the humility of Christ. The secret of this assurance is that the Holy Spirit is present among them and is in control. And that is not a pious platitude; it is a ma.tter vhi ch determines what one does in practice. It determines, for instance, the patterns of missionary action. When I went as a young missionary to India, I learned that the way you dealt with a group of people who came from a village asking for Christian instruction and baptism was to look for a trained, salaried agent, somebody whom you had tutored in the mission training school and whom you knew and trusted, and send him to take charge of the "congregation", as it was said. After the experiences of the last twelve or fourteen years of my missionary life in India, I know that there is another way. And it begins precisely by listening long enough to find out what it is that the Holy Spirit has already begun to do, and then building on that. It means finding the person or persons whom the Holy Spirit has already touched, in whom He has already kindled this faith in Jesus, however ignorant and primitive i.t might be, and taking that person or those persons as the ones whom He has chosen to begin the good work. It means that one can never . elbow that person aside in favor of the more highly trained and dependable agent of the mission, but that one takes this work that the Holy Spirit has begun as the core and foundation of all that is to follow.

-8That of course leads on to further questions, controversial questions, about the nature of the ministry, about the question of how seriously we take the faith that the ministry is essentially a body equipped by the Holy Spirit. What relative place do we give to this, on the one hand, and to academic and sociological criteria, on the other hand, in determining our policy about the ministry? When the Holy Spirit has manifestly bestowed the gifts of ministry on a man and is using him for converting men to Christ and for building up the church, are we willing to acknowledge that fact and to commit to that man the ministry of the Word and Sacraments in the Church, or are we tied and bound by sociological and institutional categories which have right of way over that spiritual discernment, and which cDmpel us to refrain from doing so? I put these things as questions because I know they are highly controversial. But this I believe is not controversial: unless the Church can recover a kind of flexibility in these matters which it does not at present possess in most at least of its branches, we will not be able to follow where the Holy Spirit leads. In South India we have been brought to the point where we are ordaining to the holy ministry not only men with the highest possible academic qualifications but also very simple village men, some of whom were illiterate when the Holy Spirit began to use them but who are bringing forth the fruits of the Spirit abundantly. Now I believe that this is something which has tremendous relevance to the whole missionary advance of the Church in our time. I do not believe it is conceivable that we can meet the demands of our time on the basis of the institutionalized patterns of the past, patterns which were themselves only possible in the period of the political and economic cultural expansion of the western world. There are situations allover India today, for instance, where God is scattering the congregation. God is sending men and women allover the country, so that you have a place here where there is a single Christian policeman and no other Christian for fifty miles, and over there a single Christian midwife and no other Christian for a hundred miles, and so on. We are not seeing these as God's missionary invitation; we see them only, God forgive us, as insoluble pastoral problems, and do not see them as colossal missionary opportunities. And we do not see them thus because, when the Holy Spirit takes a man or a woman like that and uses this individual to become the nucleus of a new and liVing congregation drawn out of the unbelieving world, we are not free to acknowledge those ministries and make them fully a part of the ministry of the Church. Surely what strikes one when one reads the Acts of the Apostles is both that the Holy Spirit always leads and also that the Church follows. The Holy Spirit leads and goes out ahead where the Church did not expect Him to go. He baptizes Cornelius with the gifts of the Spirit. He raises up a congregation in Samaria, and another out of the uncircumcised Greeks in Antioch. He goes ahead of the Church. But the Church follows, acknowledges, accepts the lead, changes its practice. The Church thus confesses that the Spirit is the sovereign, the only true controller and strategist of the mission of the Church. To take that seriously also means saying something about our priorities, does it not? Why is it we have created in so many situations a picture of the work of missions which seems to be centered more in the office than in the sanctuary, more in the program than in prayer, more in administering than in ministering? Why do the typewriter and the duplicator seem to bulk so much more largely than the Bible and the kneeling mat? Why do we have to take it for granted that the ablest young graduates of our theological seminaries in at least many of the younger churches will not go into the pastoral ministry because they are equipped for something "hi ghe r'", for some administrative position somewhere? Have we set the wrong patterns? In so many places was it not the administrative jobs which we were the last to give up? So it seemed, at least, that we prized such posts most, and the result is what one might expect. Was it that we did not take seriously enough the truth that the Holy Spirit is the missionary, and so allowed our-

-9selves to be conformed to the patterns of the world and to become the mere administrators of a program? There is a church in Madras which for a number of years was astonishing everybody by becoming the place where a succession of distinguished high caste Hindus, of the kind that are normally regarded as unreachable by the gospel, were being baptized , People came to look at this church and to ask why this was happening. Strategists of mission came along to look at it, administrators of programs came along with their notebooks to ask the pastor what he did, what was the program. He kept on saying, '~e don't have a .p r ogr am; we pray and they come'", And there was nothing to put down in the notebook! Have we got our priorities wrong? This takes me to the last and most difficult words in this text. "If you forgive the sins of .any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained. ,t Formidable words! pne could wish to be excused from trying to interpret them, but if we accept the scripture as the source of light and the standard of teaching, we cannot just skip the bits we find hard. At the least this passage means that the Church has been sent into the world as the concrete instrument of God:s forgiveness , That is the dread responsibility that rests upon the Church. It is, by God's appointment, the place where the mercy seat is. It is the place, therefore, where forgiveness is known, the place where mercy and truth have met together, where righteousness and peace have kissed each other. I find the meaning of this text most vivid to me in microcosm, in many, many Vividly remembered experiences in village congregations where bitter <1uarrels came up for settlement. There one saw how easily the church could be a place where righteousness has become self-righteousness, a congregation of the Pharisees, or else a place where peace has become appeasement, a place where everything is easy-going, where everybody is kept happy and cooperative and where the devil is never troubled. Only when the cross is in the center, only when the mercy seat is there in tne center, is there the reality of a new community in which righteousness and peace are met together. And conversely, only when that new community is present, visibly present , can we commend Christ effectively. The same is true if ve look at this in macrocosm on the scale of the world-wide mission of the Church in this divided world of ours. Only Christ can create a fellowship strong enough to endure the tensions of the cold war, a fellowship in which both righteousness and peace are present, a fellowship Ln which these deep and terrible differences are not glossed over in a mush of superficial friendliness, but faced in honesty, and yet a place in whi.ch there is forgiveness, in which the common debt to our Redeemer wi.pes out everything that has been exposed. Only as the lineaments of such fellowship begin to be discernible to the world will the world be able to believe that here is the mercy seat, the place of forgiveness. There is a word at the beginning of this passage that I hardly touched. Let me finish with it. 'tJesus stood among them .. " .and they were glad." The very heart of our mission lies in the presence of the livi.ng Jesus in the midst of the Church. Without that, our programs can become mere propaganda . Do you ever find yourself terrified by that text in Matthew 23: "You cross land and sea to make one proselyte and when you have done so you make him ten times more fit for Hell than yourseLf'"? Our programs can become mere exercises in egotism, personal or corporate, driven by our own anxieties and fears. But at the heart of all true mission there is the presence of the living Christ, personal communion with Him, joy in Him, adoration of Him. True missionary zeal, abiding, enduring missionary zeal, is the overflow from a heart overwhelmed by the goodness of God, the loveliness of God. But this spirit can go out of the missionary effort, and then we become mere proselytizers, mere peddlers of our own wares. There is no place at which r-enewal, is more fundamental, more essential than here - that at the very heart of all our service there should. be a continually renewed, continually deepened life of disciplined prayer, the inward personal communion with Christ, joy in Him, adoration of Him who is the Lord and Saviour of all.