Canon Tim Dakin, CMS general secretary (Photo: ©Jeremy Woodham/CMS) I spent a pleasant week in Malta on holiday last month. Sally and I got around the island and visited lots of places.
Malta is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic. Back in 1811 it was a Catholic leader who, having been impressed with the translation work of the Bible Society, then invited CMS to send missionaries to Malta. We were not able to respond until 1815 (the year of Waterloo!) when William Jowett went to live on Malta and was later joined by two more missionaries.
Related links
CMS statement on Gafcon
Gafcon FAQ
External links
Gafcon Final Statement
Archbishop of Canterbury's responseThe aim of the enterprise – and remember this was in the ‘fly-casting’ period when CMS was trying to work out how to do mission – was threefold: to do research on the Eastern European/Middle Eastern context, to encourage biblical literacy among the Orthodox believers through the provision of vernacular translations of the Scriptures, and, third, to strengthen thereby the local church to reach out to the Muslim world. Here is an interesting vision for Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox to work together in order to re-engage with the culture and people of Islam (under the Sultanate).
Lamin Sanneh describes CMS, in its support for the translation of the scriptures into the vernacular, as one of the most significant mission communities of the modern period. His thesis is now well known:
- …that Christianity, from its origins, identified itself with the need to translate out of Aramaic and Hebrew, and from that position came to exert a dual force in its historical development. One was the resolve to relativize its Judaic roots, with the consequence that it promoted significant aspects of the those roots. The other was to destigmatize Gentile culture and adopt that culture as a natural extension of the life of the new religion. This action to destigmatize complemented the other action to relativize. Thus it was that the two subjects, the Judaic and the Gentile, became closely intertwined in the Christian dispensation, both crucial to the formative image of the new religion.” (Translating the Message, DLT 1991, p1)
This thesis has been developed by others, including Andrew Walls in his writings about the Ephesian moment – that coming together of Jew and Gentile to discover the greater fullness of the Lord (Gentile) Jesus Christ (Jewish).
In talking with Lamin Sanneh at Gafcon (where I was with Bishop Paul Butler, the chair of CMS trustees), he directed me to an early article of his where he had first tested his thesis, comparing Christian mission and Islamic mission in Africa under the colonial context (“The Domestification of Islam and Christianity in African Societies”,
Journal of Religion in Africa, 1980).
His concern was to show how the pattern of Christian mission led to the renewal of culture and how this differed from Islam.
The reason for this was because of fundamentally different approaches to mission. In Christianity the commitment to the transmission of the gospel into the vernacular leads to an affirmation of the local culture. This then results in the enrichment of the Christian faith and the further encouragement to pilgrimage – “as you go, make disciples of all nations”.
So mission renews Christianity in the process of bringing the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ to others. Mission and reform go together.
This is not the same in Islam, which is committed to a core culture encapsulated in the Qur’an. Commenting on the implications in the African context, Sanneh says:
- …reform in Islam has always been on the basis of an uncompromising repudiation of the African religious heritage without any attempt to allow a margin of interface. In Christianity reform or renewal has been on the basis of discovering and relativizing African cultural and religious elements. Christianity seeks to take shelter in the flowering of local culture and tradition which in the independent African churches assumes eruptive force but which nevertheless exists even in the historic churches under the agency of African recipients. (p11)
It was this eruptive force in an historic church which Sanneh discerned in Gafcon. For this reason he hoped that the wider Anglican Communion and its leaders would, in his words, “embrace Gafcon”.
In the wider context of the processes of mission, Gafcon, in so far as it represents the renewal of local agency, represents the kind of reform which comes from the Christian commitment to the translation of the gospel.
At this level CMS should embrace Gafcon as the outcome of its work in sharing the gospel and planting the churches in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and West Africa (and in being alongside SAMS work in South America).
This is what we should expect: the possibility of the eruptive force of reform coming from a colonial context.
Anglicanism is being remade through the integration of the missionary movement.
This does not mean we should accept all that has emerged from Jerusalem and be uncritical of Gafcon (see the positive but challenging critiques by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Durham) but let us go on exploring, in the spirit of the Malta mission, what sharing Jesus, changing lives means today.