Rev. Dr. La Wu, Myanmar.
litsom@cybertech.net.mm
Abstract
Joy to the World
There are many different trends of thought with regard to missiology and many
scholarly missiologist endeavouring to give definitions of the word “mission” in
their own concept based upon their researches and discoveries. All of these
existing definitions and hypotheses we can categorize them generally into three
major trends: spiritual, social, and both inclusive or moderate. As some
missiologists convinced of spiritual mandate are extremist rejecting social
mandate- education, development, and health except faith healing, focusing on
the life to come- other worldliness, some convinced of social mandate on the
other hand, go extremely beyond the range of spirituality saying no word nor
witness of the Good News of Jesus Christ, but action for social welfare only. My
argument in this paper is to state against both polarizing extreme ends, and to
depict a clear picture of missiology that include both spiritual and social
mandate.
There are papers and books on mission written from the perspective of
missionaries, and mission senders, and mostly from the corner of scholars who
mostly work out of books, documents and papers highly credited of academic value,
which are available in grand libraries and archives. But we have very rare
papers written from the perspectives of mission receivers who reap the real
fruits good and bad. Nothing can be understood or felt bereavement except one is
really bereaved by himself. As the fruit is the outcome of the tree this paper
written from the perspective of mission receivers would give benefit to the
quest of the truth about the will of God on mission which is given through
Jesus.
Once, an American missionary came to my office. We were having a short free
informal introductory talks. I told him that there will come some American
missionaries to teach English. He said, “No one can be called missionary except
teaching the Bible.” His argument was that the work of the apostle Paul, doing
nothing except preaching the Good News is the example of mission works today . I
said, “ Paul is liken to be a missionary nowadays, sent to United States or to
any of the most developed countries in Europe where one does not need to talk
about anything except preaching the Good News”. Then he said nodding his head,
“Hm..., what you said is good to consider.” I had a chance of laying down
ill-fate story of my own poor people Lisu, the victim of one-sided mission who
become the society of the world to come, neglecting and rejecting both the
blessings and obligations for this world.
I was invited to a group of church ministers to give lecture on “Mission
Contextualization”. After my talk, the next lecturer started with comment on me
saying that he would surely refuse if he were asked to participate in discussion
about mission work as converting Buddhists into Christianity. Here, in this
paper, is my message to all who favours for social gospel following after the
idea of forming a global religion on the basis of the belief that God, the
creator of all is addressed by all religions and therefore no need to convert
each other.
There are many different sound trends of theology each having certain truth.
Neither one trend of theology nor one thread of thought can cover the whole
truth about God the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. It has no use
therefore, for one trend to stand against the other (theology of confrontation)
nor to compromise but it should be there as complement to each other. The lovely
part of having different trends is that the application of each has specific
effect based upon the context. The theology of religious compromise might be
applicable to the context of the Western world. But it would become a theology
of swift surrender or a sugar coded poison and as a matter of fact, the
application of it would turn out to be a suicidal attempt for Christians in the
country like Burma where Christians are very minority while the country, in its
full power, is trying to swallow or choke the Christians by various vindictive
means.