Public missiology: A brief introduction

I, like many others, religious and secular, am deeply concerned about where our societies — and the planet itself — are headed as we look toward a mid-century time frame. A crisis, both ecological and technological, looms — one well-described by Bill McKibben in his latest book Falter, in my opinion one of the most important books of 2019. All fields of research and practice (I would hope) are retooling themselves to address this and other emerging crises. Missiology, my field, is no different. What follows is a public statement addressed to colleagues in our field, and a challenge to radically rethink what we are doing.

The document is a group effort, a summary of several years of consultation which I have chaired, and is being circulated for discussion, critique and (possibly?) inspiration. Addressed to specialists (you will find words and ideas you won’t get if this is your first encounter with missiology), nonetheless, it might help you grasp how the Christian faith community is grappling with issues that affect all of us. It also admits what the general public seems to be concluding, that for the last 40 years American Christians’ public voice has been — well — nearly incoherent. We desire to fix this, for everybody’s benefit and that of our planet.

Public Missiology: A Brief Introduction

The Public Missiology Working Group[1]

Public missiology proposes a new paradigm to reinterpret and to reformulate contemporary concepts of Christian mission at a time of nearly stupefying cultural, social, technological, and environmental change. A new historical era is taking shape around us, one that no longer can be explained adequately in modern and postmodern language, an era without a name other than to call it post-postmodern. 

Taken as a whole, our present missiological paradigms, formed in modernity and postmodernity, are failing to arrest the loss of Christian witness, its public coherence, its generative public voice, and its integrity and credibility, especially in North America. Nor do present paradigms adequately address the reality that long-established, modern and durable modes of public order are themselves fracturing, creating new, unarticulated and unstable forms of social and cultural life. 

New and untested modes of public order emerge in the shadow of a looming and unprecedented ecological and technological crisis threatening the future of the environment and humanity itself. Managing this crisis stretches human ingenuity to the limit—exacerbated by other trends, among them the crisis of liberal democracy, surging economic inequality, mass migration, identity conflict, and fading community life, human solidarity and belonging. To this compounding crisis, mission must speak in a new language yet to be conceived and respond with new practices yet to be invented.   

What’s at Stake?

Creating healthy and inclusive modes of public order is the primary human task—a biblical task begun by tending a Garden—and one in which mission operates as redemptive leaven as the dough expands. Indeed, cultivating flourishing modes of public life—including the uplift and healing of individuals, publics, and of the earth—lies at the very center of the missionary enterprise. 

At stake is the health of every public’s mode of life. Mission’s full soteriological influence begins within a public’s social imaginary—that is, within its collective consciousness, spirituality and the logics that define the mode of life upon which its public order is built. A social imaginary is created and recreated through routine, daily public interactions, and collectively organizes our thoughts, ethics, politics, economies, social structures, power structures, laws, sensibilities, and our faith, and reaches into our everyday life decisions. 

Poor social imaginaries blind us. Well-constructed ones liberate the vision and creativity we need to imagine and develop new habits, social relationships, civic practices, and diaconal ministries. And new energies must be liberated as we encounter a new and difficult era, a post-postmodern, post-Christian life world that none of us has ever seen—a life world that deeply challenges mission’s redemptive possibilities.  

Why “Public”? 

The term “public” is proposed to frame a new paradigm to grasp the dynamics of our emerging life world. Why “public”? Commonly available concepts—such as society, culture, politics, economy, or ecology and their analogue fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, or earth science—fail to provide a fully integrated, or synoptic, vision of the whole of public life, nor fully explain the complex sources of social change and the operation and manipulation of socio-economic-political power. Hence, the general academic trend toward interdisciplinary cooperation as well as the need for a new framing term to concentrate such work. “Public” is proposed as a framing concept to analyze our complex modes of human life as such (including Christian interaction with them), as well as to orchestrate multiple interdisciplinary projects to understand them and to promote their health and vigor.  

“Public” is defined as the site of, and the entire space of, human-to-human and human-to-nonhuman interaction, whether conceived of as local or universal spaces. Public is thus a complex, contested semiotic space—i.e., symbolic and interactive—through which humans continuously give rise to new forms of social structures, cultural consciousness and relations to the natural world. Grasping this complexity or interwoven “thickness” requires myriad, networked philosophical, phenomenological, hermeneutical, empirical, and pragmatic approaches. And what is grasped by these approaches must range through the human experience from the level of social, cultural, diaconal, and routine daily practices both personal and collective, secular and religious, through to the meta-level of human metaphysical and ontological consciousness.

At its core, public life is defined as the space where humans collectively build their life worlds by searching for and by creating imagined orders—‘assemblages’ of nature and culture—and then drawing meaning from these, including their sense of the meaning of life, their faith, and their awareness of God. This generative process is a quintessentially human quest, repeated in every society and now also globally, to find and to perfect an all-embracing public order—in classical terms a “cosmo-public” or “cosmopolis.” These terms more accurately reflect the biblical language of oikoumene and kosmos than the more general English “world,” and enrich the understanding and world-orientation of the on-going Christian movement.  

Public Missiology

Missiology works with the advantage that it, too, creates a synoptic vision to articulate the entire Christian movement in its engagement of the whole Gospel with the whole of public life as the public weaves together and builds its world. As such, it possesses the conceptual capacity to grasp the public whole at the point of its intersection with the whole of Christian engagement. Public missiology warns that such advantage is lost when missiology is overly preoccupied with the church itself and its survival in public life. A public missiology requires that the public be addressed in the foreground as the space of emerging public orders, while the church remains vitally involved—especially through local congregations—to discern, serve, influence, witness to, and share in what emerges. 

Thus, public missiology joins together two holistic, synoptic discourses—“public” and “mission”—in a single frame and within a comprehensive thematic to examine their interaction and to guide (to the limit of its resources) a healthy interaction. This task includes reassessing 1) the aims and world-orientation of mission to the present crisis of public life; 2) the church’s role as sign and agent of God’s mission; 3) the “world,” or “public,” that mission engages; and 4) their intersection and interpenetration. 

Public missiology proposes a “public turn” (a turn toward and for the public’s well-being) in the Christian understanding of the world and the place of Christians within it. It recognizes that the church participates in and is enclosed within public life such that the health of the public, good or ill, is reflected in the health of the church, and thus the church has a deep stake in the public’s flourishing. By moving “public” to the center of missiological reflection and reconsidering the reciprocal interaction between “public” and mission, public missiology encourages new directions of inquiry, fresh research programs, and innovative forms of practice related to mission within our emerging modes of public life. This brief introduction summarizes substantial work already accomplished to reframe contemporary missiology and is a first and necessary step to prepare the ground for new initiatives. 

Affirming Our Tradition

Significant shifts in historical eras naturally require new priorities and paradigms of thought and action. Missiology has been here before. Public missiology stands in a line of similar historical paradigm shifts in mission. Examples include the post-war ecumenical paradigm, which renewed normative, trinitarian concepts such as missio Dei and the reign of God; the 1960s cultural and social “revolution,” which produced a “cultural turn” and renewed emphasis on contextualization, inculturation and “people groups,” a new ethics emphasizing peace, justice, and the integrity of creation, and theologies of liberation; David Bosch’s 1991 proposals for a paradigm shift in postmodern mission; the missional church “conversation,” guided by The Gospel and Our Culture project; and public and political theologies. Public missiology assumes, embraces, includes, and extends these recent paradigms, celebrating their robustly trinitarian, ecumenical, missional, soteriological, and cruciform normative emphasis on witness in word and deed to faith in Christ, the reconciling reign of God, life in the Holy Spirit, and repair of the world. 

Public missiology extends our tradition, endeavoring to make the gracious liberality and the generative, cooperative, redemptive sensibilities of Christian witness intelligible to the public as public life itself reshapes the public order and the church’s operating context in a rapidly changing, post-postmodern era. A missiological understanding of public and a publicly informed understanding of mission will co-evolve to the benefit of each as each mutually influences the other. At heart, then, public missiology is an invitation to renew Christian initiative to engage our emerging public order in fresh ways and with intelligence, love, faith, and hope for the flourishing of all in the presence of God and together with one another.

[1] Public Missiology Working Group:

Gregory Leffel, One Horizon Institute

Charles Fensham, Knox College/Toronto School of Theology/University of Toronto

George Hunsberger, Western Theological Seminary

Robert Hunt, Perkins School of Theology/Southern Methodist University

William Kenney, One Horizon Institute

Gregg Okesson, Asbury Theological Seminary

Hendrik Pieterse, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary