Recovering Mission: Majority World Mission—A Return to Mission for the Majority

In one city in the Arabian Peninsula, an Ethiopian pastor trains every one of his church members as a missionary. There are thirty-five thousand Ethiopians working in that country; ninety-six percent of them are young, female domestic workers living on a few dollars a week. The Christians among them come, like every other young Ethiopian woman working in that country, hoping to send home a little money to support their families. They discover, however, that God has placed them in a key mission context.

In just eleven months these young women took the JESUS film and Arabic New Testaments into eight hundred Arab homes, where they were able to share the film with children and read the Bible with their mothers. Yet these women, actively engaged in evangelism in one of the world’s most closed mission contexts, would not appear in many statistics of “foreign missionaries.” They attracted little prayer or financial support from Western churches concerned with reaching the unreached.

I start with this story of Ethiopian missionaries because we need to revise our understanding of who a missionary is in a contemporary, globalised world. We also need to revisit mission history and take a more realistic account of those who have been the “midwives of the gospel” over the past two thousand years. Samuel Escobar writes:

Another missionary force is also at work today, although it does not appear in the records of missionary activity or the databanks of specialists. It is the transcultural witnessing for Christ that takes place as people move around as migrants or refugees, just as in New Testament days. They are missionaries “from below” who do not have the power, prestige, or money of a developed nation and are not part of a missionary organisation. They are vulnerable in many ways, but have learnt the art of survival, supported by their faith in Jesus Christ.¹

Although “mission from below” has always been a significant aspect of Christian mission, it becomes especially important for three reasons:

1. The rapid shift in Christian demography means that many Christians are financially poor, politically marginalised, or socially restricted by gender, age, or ethnicity.²
2. The increasing prevalence of migration has expanded opportunities for migrant Christians to participate in cross-cultural mission. Migration may follow war, natural disaster, and persecution, but also education, employment, financial security, and family unity.
3. International travel and communication are more accessible. Christians with modest resources can remain in contact with people in other parts of the world. A student or migrant worker who comes to faith abroad may share that faith with an extended family through messages and calls home.

The professional and the voluntary missionary

More than a century has passed since Rowland Allen completed his comparative study of the missionary methods of St. Paul and those of the twentieth-century Church,³ encouraging readers to examine the “spontaneous expansion of the church”⁴ and the place of “non-professional missionaries.”⁵

Allen was not the first to suggest that through baptism Christians are commissioned as participants in the mission of God, without waiting to be selected, trained, and appointed as mission professionals. The shift toward mission from the Majority World may help recover a deeper and more ancient understanding of who a missionary is.

Historical reviews by David Bosch, Stephen Bevans, Roger Schroeder, and others trace changing models of mission. Bosch speaks of six epochs,⁶ while Bevans and Schroeder discuss periods in which different models predominate.⁷ Kenneth Latourette’s earlier work helps illuminate the changing roles of professional and voluntary Christians in the Church’s mission.⁸

Rather than focusing only on periods, it is useful to focus on the actors. Although one group may have been more historically visible at a particular moment, several forms of participation have often worked side by side:

• refugee evangelists,
• witnessing traders and entrepreneurs,
• monastic communities in mission,
• imperial philanthropists, and
• professional missionaries.

These groups can represent stages in Christian history, but they also describe movements that coexist within the contemporary Church. The experience of Majority World Christians can help recover a broader understanding of what a missionary God is doing among and through people today.

Refugee evangelists and business as mission

In accounts of the early Church, including Acts 8:4, some of the first cross-cultural missionaries were fleeing for their lives. In every century, faith in Jesus Christ has been carried by people escaping persecution, war, ethnic cleansing, famine, and drought. Those who have known suffering and found God faithful may become compelling witnesses. The challenge for the global Christian community is to support, equip, and encourage refugee evangelists.

Business as mission⁹ became a widely used term for ways entrepreneurs can discover a vocation in mission while serving communities that lack employment or access to Christian witness. Yet Christian participation in mission through commerce is not new. In the early centuries, news of salvation in Jesus travelled along the Silk Roads of Central Asia and into China. Nestorian Christians planted churches while participating in international trade.¹⁰

Entrepreneurs, traders, business executives, and skilled workers may find it difficult to be recognised as participants in mission by their churches. Nevertheless, their work creates opportunities for Christian witness.

For many centuries religious communities carried the Christian faith from village to village and on to India, China, and beyond. The early twenty-first century saw renewed interest in intentional and missional communities.¹¹ In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European empires brought religiously motivated philanthropy alongside practices now understood as destructive. Only in the last two centuries did the model of professional missionaries—recruited, trained, deployed, and financially supported for full-time work—become especially prominent.

A new kind of dance

This history matters because Christians across regions can forget that refugees, merchants, monks, civil servants, students, and workers may all participate in mission. Addressing an international mission community in 2006, Duncan Olumbe of Mission Together Africa warned Majority World colleagues against joining a European-choreographed “power dance,” “imitation dance,” and “position dance.” His concern was that the professional missionary paradigm had become so pervasive that communities with their own strong missional rhythms felt constrained to follow a European style.

Many Majority World churches would struggle to support one traditional missionary family, but many of their members could be equipped as refugees, migrants, businesswomen, overseas students, or traders in cross-cultural mission. Olumbe asked how space could be made for different dancers—African, Asian, European, American, and others—with their varied rhythms and practices.¹²

The question applies to mission leaders in every region. While recognising the work of professional missionaries, churches can create space for other forms of service. That may involve reallocating resources to train Christians already moving through the world as migrant workers, rethinking preparation for entrepreneurs who cross cultures, or equipping displaced Christians to offer hope in the communities where they arrive.

This requires global partnership in which power relationships are reconsidered and resources pooled. As Majority World Christians shape new steps and rhythms, the wider Church may escape an overly narrow professionalisation of mission. Every baptised believer can be understood as a participant; many are women, many are poor, and the monk, diplomat, refugee, trader, worker, and overseas student are all part of the story. God’s mission comes in many shapes and sizes.