Gregg Okesson - A Public Missiology: How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World

T he seeds of this book germinated in 1998 within a couple of remote villages in north-central Tanzania. Until my family moved there, I had never really considered the nature of public witness. Like most Westerners, I thought of witness primarily as a personal enterprise, something one does with individuals. Of course, as a missiologist I had studied contextual theology and knew, at least conceptually, that the gospel moves into public spaces, but nothing in my education prepared me for what I would face. In the villages, I encountered a thickness to the public realm that defied any simplistic answers. In a classroom we could discuss the different realms of public life, such as ethnicity, clan, economics, and politics, but in the villages each of these intermingled with the others like the dust devils that skip and dance across the arid Maasai Steppe.

We moved to Tanzania to plant churches, but I quickly realized one could not do evangelism, nor discipleship, nor ecclesiology of any kind, without taking seriously the public realities surrounding the people. And the publics we encountered in the villages were not just a matter of academic deliberation but were something we experienced with our bodies, such as with malnutrition or disease. My family struggled with malaria, worms, tuberculosis, and other sicknesses along with daily challenges of nutrition. Early on I sought simple solutions to what I thought were relatively simple problems, only to realize that one of the reasons the publics were so virulent was due to the ways they interpenetrated one another, or to their thickness. I eventually began asking myself, How does church planting relate to poverty, or evangelism to health, or religion to development? I did not have good answers to those queries, but the questions lingered with me and resulted in this book.

After living in the village two years, my family moved to Kenya, where I taught theology and mission at Scott Theological College in Machakos for a decade. My students deepened this public trajectory through their questions in the classroom, along with sharing with me their lives and ministries outside in public spaces. During that time I also began studying local congregations. In the beginning I did it as part of my PhD studies. But I then realized something equally as dramatic as what I had learned in the villages: the thickness of the public realm was countered by a different kind of thickness found in congregations. At first I only saw the slightest glimmers of thickness within churches, but the more I studied them, I came to realize that all local congregations are filled with movements. I liken the thickness of local congregations to the delicate movements of diverse threads that weave in and out within the liturgy and sacraments of the church, and then outside into public spaces, and back inside again, in a never-ending knitting of dense fabric.

Of course, not all local congregations are thick. And not all churches are thick in the same way. However, instead of spending an entire book bemoaning the introversion or thinness of a local congregation, I have chosen to take a different course: to show how missiology helps us witness through movement, which I have likened to the threads of a dense fabric, and how local congregations do so within and for their surrounding publics.

As I have reflected on those years in Africa, I have come to see that many Western Christians, and especially those from my tribe (called evangelicals), love to approach complex, thick problems with simplistic, thin solutions. Some of this arises from our socioreligious background emanating from the Enlightenment, where our knee-jerk reaction is to retreat from the public realm altogether or attempt to solve complex social challenges with simplistic, individual answers (e.g., if only poor people would work harder). Hence, we eagerly rally around political leaders who reinforce our ideological positions (and may even attend our churches). Our reticence to talk about public witness also proceeds from our theological heritage of using Christology and soteriology to solve only individual, spiritual issues (such as sin management or where one will spend eternity) but not the redemption of public life. As Christians we do not possess a robust heritage of embracing complexity, or what I am calling thickness. Our understandings of salvation tend to go no further than the individual. Thus it is not surprising that the thinness of our faith does little to interpenetrate the thickness of the public realm, and that is as true for the context of large cities in North America as it was for my villages in Tanzania.

In this book I seek to accomplish three related goals. First, I want us to see complexity, or thickness, not as the enemy of the church but as our greatest ally. Second, I hope to demonstrate how thickness arises from different movements, and why missiology is so critical in highlighting various movements within the missio Dei to redeem the fullness of Gods world. Finally, I desire to show how congregations possess their own thickness, arising from different movements of thread, and how they use that weave of movement to witness to the public realm around the church.

Let me acknowledge a group of key dialogue partners who helped shape my early ruminations on this book. They are members of a working group on public missiology within the American Society of Missiology (ASM): George Hunsberger, Gregory Leffel, Charles Fensham, Robert Hunt, Hendrik Pieterse, and Bill Kenney. Hunsberger initially championed these discussions on public missiology with his presidential address at the ASM annual meeting in 2005. The subject was then picked up by Leffel during the 2016 ASM meetings. Since that time, our working group, led by Leffel, has been presenting papers, dialoguing, and attempting to parse what we mean by public missiology. This book is my attempt to do so and should in no manner reflect the consensus opinion of the working group. But I would be remiss to neglect their valuable influence.