Nazarene Theological Seminary

Good morning!  President Benefiel, Dean Hahn, Dean Miller, Trustees, Members of the Faculty and Staff, students, and guests:  Nazarene Theological Seminary is in its fifty-eighth year of service to Christ and the church preparing women and men for the various Christian ministries.  I am humbled and deeply honored to be standing here this morning, to be invited to become a part of the faculty of this, my alma mater.

NTS: An Excellent Record of Missions Preparation

Among the several programs NTS has developed, it has done well in developing a missions program.  In the earliest years of the Seminary’s history, missions was taught by various faculty members.  However, in 1964 Dr. Paul Orjala was inducted as the first full-time professor of missions at NTS, followed by Dr. Donald D. Owens in 1974 and Dr. Terry Read in 1991.  My hermano and colleague, Dr. Mario Zani, is now in his fourth year, having been inducted in 1998.  My predecessor, Dr. Charles Gailey, was inducted in 1981 and served for twenty-two years until his retirement just last school year.  A number of others have served in an adjunct capacity.1

The contributions of each of these to the preparation of men and women for Christian ministry have been outstanding, both here at NTS and in the missions of the Church of the Nazarene and other denominations.  It is with great appreciation for these who have taught, and those who now teach here in all areas, that we come to this day.  These exemplify the highest level of servant commitment to Christ and the Kingdom of God.

The Seminary not only appointed missions faculty but also developed a degree program, first offering the Master of Arts (Missions)2 in the 1975-76 school year.  The Reverend Mr. John Seaman received the first MA (Missions) degree in 1977.  Since then, ninety-eight women and men have received this degree.  Another thirty have earned the Master of Divinity with an emphasis in missiology.  Many of these are now serving in various missions capacities throughout the world.

A Personal Word

Missions is very personal to me.  I was privileged to have been introduced to Christ through the Church of the Nazarene when I was about six years old.  My whole family “got in” at about the same time and through Dad and Mom’s leading, we became “every time the door was open” Christians.  I can’t remember a time when missions was not an essential part of the ministry of our local church.

I remember the missions leaders in that church and the fervency with which they prayed and taught and challenged us to give all to Christ in every area of life--and to be open to a call to missions.  One year they even had a quota for the number of their youth who would be called to missionary service.  As a child of eleven years at a missionary zone rally, I sensed God’s call on my life to be a missionary.  I struggled with that call during my early teen years.  However, I was surrounded by praying, giving, and caring people.  Eventually, I fully embraced that call and have tried to follow God’s continued direction in my life since.  I studied here at NTS, and after pastoring a church, my wife Becky and I were appointed as missionaries to Hong Kong.  Appointed as missionaries in the Church of the Nazarene!  What a high calling!

But in my mind, the call to the formation and preparation of women and men who have responded to God’s call to service, particularly to cross-cultural ministry, is an even higher calling.  I am deeply privileged but also understand that this is truly an awesome responsibility.

The Nature of Missions

What do we understand missions to be?  In much of our experience, missions perhaps is seen simply as the sending of missionaries cross-culturally as witnesses of Jesus Christ, establishing churches, and developing local leadership.  The command of Christ to go and make disciples is often cited as our mandate.  However, the source of missions is much more profound.
The delegates of the International Missions Council who met at Willingen, Germany, in 1952, posited that “there is no participation in Christ without participation in his mission to the world.  That by which the Church receives its existence is that by which it is also given its world mission.”3  From this conference comes a clear understanding that mission is first of all God’s redemptive movement toward humanity, widely identified and accepted as the missio Dei, the mission of God.4  And so we may speak of mission:  that having to do with God’s desire that all people everywhere come to know and worship him; and missions:  all the multitude of ways that we, as God’s people, accept his mission and accept his sending us out as part of the missio Dei.

We remind students that missions did not just begin at the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  The foundation of missions is deep within God’s heart.  Certainly, though, our mission is centered in the Christ who came announcing the Kingdom of God.  Our motivation for missions must come from the mission of God, that in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.  As 2 Corinthians 5:20 describes it, “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us.  We implore you on Christ’s behalf:  be reconciled to God” (NIV).

At the beginning of the fall semester this current school year, Dr. Paul Bassett spoke to the new students about our mission here at NTS.  In several ways he emphasized that what we are about at NTS is centered in the person and work of Jesus Christ.  I stood at the back and listened because as a new faculty member, I also need to be reminded of who we are and what comprises our task.

Essentials of Missiology
The discipline that studies the Church in mission is missiology.  Charles Van Engen describes missiology as a multi-disciplinary discipline.5  That is, missiology, although a distinct discipline centering on the work of Jesus Christ and his mission, also draws on a wide range of other disciplines in order to understand the nature of the Church’s mission in the world and how best to prepare those the Church sends in mission.

Good missiology must begin with a proper foundation in theology and biblical understanding.  As the heart and lungs are essential to the health of the human body, so theology and biblical study are essential to the health of missiology.  Missiology is not primarily about technique or simply about methods.  It is about understanding the great heart of God and God’s desire that all peoples come into relationship with God.

Missiology is necessarily incarnational.  Missiology deals with the sending, going, and receiving of the one sent, the missionary.  But it does so because of the One who was first sent.  God’s way was to make himself known to us through the Incarnation of our Lord.  His incarnation serves as our model.  Missiology also deals with the context of mission.  Our Lord was incarnated into a very specific context, real flesh and blood, in a specific place, into a specific nation, and a culture that included specific languages.  Because he entered so thoroughly into that context, we are to understand that the gospel can be incarnated into any context, into every context.

Recently the term missional has been used for churches in North America.  Part of the reason for this is that North American churches, while faithfully sending missionaries to various parts of the world, have failed to see their own central role as sending entities within their own context.  We now look upon the U.S. and Canada as mission areas; to reach the people of these areas we need a missions outlook; we need to be missional.

If missiologists had included the churches of North America in their world-wide focus, we might not need suddenly to be stressing the importance of a cross-cultural (missions) perspective right around us.  Missiology can help inform this missional outlook so we don’t run in two different directions, or even on two parallel tracks in the same general direction.  Rather, we see the whole world in a cross-cultural context.

Missiology and the Social Sciences

Some may observe that missiology has apparently gone outside the seminary and has been dancing with the social sciences.  For a hundred years or so anthropology has helped us understand the peoples of the world, especially in describing cultures, and in linguistics.  The Church has especially used the methods and the research of anthropology to assist it in understanding the peoples to whom it was going in the mission of the Gospel.  We have exegeted the biblical and theological bases for missions.  The social sciences help us to exegete, as it were, the cultural context.

Anthropology has also emphasized the cross-cultural perspective and has made us aware of our ethnocentrism.  This perspective is helpful not only to missionaries but to anyone attempting to communicate anything to anyone else.

Anthropology has also recognized that every culture is to be valued.  Cultural relativism, though, is not new to the gospel.  In the missio Dei God is for all peoples everywhere.  We are grateful to Christian anthropologists for bringing anthropology and other social sciences into the missions toolbox.  We are especially grateful to these who have helped us understand the usefulness of the social sciences, but also have warned us of where the boundaries need to lie.

We must be careful not to accept uncritically the assumptions under which the social sciences tend to operate:  scientific positivism, humanism without spirituality, secularization through the separation of the natural from the supernatural, cultural relativism that is helpful but that may lead into moral relativism, or simply stopping with an understanding of a particular cultural context and not going on properly to contextualize the gospel.  Good ethnology does not necessarily lead to good missiology.

The one who is sent needs to understand context, both that out of which s/he comes, and the one into which s/he goes.  We are praying people who ask the Holy Spirit to open our eyes and hearts and understanding.  God places within our hands tools to be used to understand the context.  To adapt a phrase from the Apostle Paul, we take every tool and make it captive to Christ.  We utilize these tools as fully as possible.

Changes Missiology Must Consider

The contexts to which we are sent are changing.  As the world changes, the missio Dei does not change.  However, missions, the way we carry out the missio Dei, does change and must change as the world in which we make disciples also changes.

Challenging changes include the following:

1.  The changing centers of mission that are moving from North to South, and from West to East.  Phillip Jenkins in his recently published book The Next Christendom: the Coming of Global Christianity, quotes Kenyan scholar John Mbiti, “The centers of the church’s universality [are] no longer in Geneva, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, New York, but Kinshasa, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, and Manila.”6
2. The development of new theologies that arise out of the areas of the world that once were the recipients of Western Christian missions.  Theologians from Africa, Asia, and Latin America are developing theologies out of worldviews, histories, and experiences different from, but certainly no less valid than, the theologies of the West.  Former teacher here at NTS, Dr. Roy Stults, encouraged this theologizing in his 1989 book, Developing an Asian Evangelical Theology.7
3. These developments, as they lead us to a new perspective of the peoples in our world.  We used to think of missions easily as “us” and “them.”  Now we are learning to think more as “we.”  As Dr. Zani reminds us, for example, there is not a persecuted church, but it is the church of which we all are a part that is under persecution.
4. An increasingly pluralistic approach to spirituality and religion.  People of the West seem increasingly comfortable with forging a hybrid religion comprised of whatever seems to work for their own needs.  Religious pluralism does not value one religious expression over another and criticizes those who do.  The context in which we do mission in the West, and those other areas of the world increasingly influenced by western thought, will require that we be able to articulate clearly the person of Jesus Christ.
5. Barring catastrophic events, the continuing increased mobility of the peoples of the world.  This will mean also that cross-cultural ministry may be done across the street, in the neighborhood, and not just across the oceans.
6. Missionaries who will come increasingly from all parts of the world and go to all parts of the world.  As my predecessor Dr. Charles Gailey points out in his recent book, Mission in the Third Millennium, the number of missionaries from western countries grows annually at the rate of about three percent.  However, the rate of growth of missionaries going out from non-Western countries grows at the rate of thirteen percent annually.  This increasingly will impact the growth of the Church throughout the world.
7. Missionaries who are less and less generalists, required to do a multitude of tasks, and increasingly specificists (specialists), trained to be facilitators and trainers in very specific, often support and enabling, ministries.
8. Increasing use of short term and volunteer missionaries.  The Church of the Nazarene already includes these in the total number of missionaries it counts in its workforce.
9. Missions required to be incarnational at every level.  Incarnation, the building of relationships over which the Gospel so often moves, takes time.  There still is the need to think long-term and not be overly influenced by our plug-and-play culture.

Opportunities arising from change include these:

1. Nazarene Theological Seminary linking more closely with the seminaries and universities in different areas of the world.  In our current degree program in missiology, students are required to be involved in a cross-cultural supervised ministry experience.  We are thankful for the multi-cultural places of ministry provided in the Kansas City area, but we need to develop ways to get our students out beyond North America for supervised ministry internships.
2. Linking of the international schools in mission.  Nazarene Theological Seminary is the one to do this!  The relationship between Nazarene Theological College, Manchester, England, and European Nazarene College in Switzerland is a helpful model that should extend to schools such as Asia Pacific Nazarene Theological Seminary near Manila, Korean Nazarene University, and African Nazarene University.  Some of the faculty of these and other institutions throughout the world already are fully qualified to teach at the graduate level and their cross-cultural context can only contribute to our mission at NTS.
3. Nazarene Theological Seminary as the educator of faculty for many schools throughout the world.  Missionary intern Matt Price from the fall semester and intern Rolf Kleinfeld from this semester have been assigned to two of these new schools, in Cote d’Ivoire and Cambodia.  We must maintain close communication with them and the mission and national leadership that these schools develop.  This knowledge will help shape our curriculum and program.
4. Nazarene Theological Seminary students currently enrolled in the in-service program, and already educating pastoral leadership in the Ukraine and the Commonwealth of Independent States in cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd.  These centers have hundreds of students coming from surrounding areas.  We can partner with these developing trainers/educators, serving as resource faculty, training developing leaders on the emerging frontiers of the church.
5. The partnership between NTS and the World Mission Division, which has been very fruitful, especially in the education of new interns.  This was the dream, I believe, of Dr. Charles Gailey and The Reverend Mr. David Hayse, among others.  Now that the program is in its fourth year, reports are that the missionaries who are being appointed and sent out arrive at their first assignment much further along in their preparation and adjustment.  Nazarene Theological Seminary has an important role in this.  Should/shall NTS develop an in-service program for missionaries much as it has for pastors?
6. Thorough review of the missiology program at NTS by my colleague, Dr. Mario Zani, and I.  This is necessary, not because it hasn’t served well, but in order to continue serving well.  We must look continually at what we are doing and how we are doing it.  We will review intended outcomes, curriculum and sequencing, supervised ministry internship, our relationship to the Division of World Mission and every area.  We will continue to work with the Dean and appropriate committees to be sure we are offering the best program possible.
7. Cooperative assessment of the one hundred twenty-eight who already have graduated from NTS, either with the Missiology emphasis as part of the Master of Divinity degree, or with the Master of Arts in Missiology.  Where are they now?  How has their work here in missiology been helpful to them?  What suggestions can they make that will help us design a better program?

Missiology’s Central Servant Role at NTS

Where does missiology fit in the mission of NTS?  Missions is at the heart of the Church of Jesus Christ.  Emil Brunner is quoted as saying, “The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.” 8  If the mission Dei is at the heart of the church, then it is properly at the heart of our purpose here at NTS.  Part of the mission statement of Nazarene Theological Seminary (which, by the way, I have framed and in my office) is “to offer itself as a theological resource in service to the Church.”9  Is missiology at NTS simply a service to the Church, something helpful but at the periphery of our mission, or is its role central?  I believe it to be central; hence, the title of this address, “Missiology:  The Role of a Servant Discipline.”
Missiology may be a multi-disciplinary discipline, but first of all it must be founded on good theology.  We need more than good evangelical doctrine; we need an understanding of our Wesleyan heritage and theological perspective, especially as it relates to mission.  We need the help of the Seminary to ground our students in learning to think theologically.
Missiology is also grounded in a good and proper understanding of the role of the Scripture in our lives and our task.  Our students need more than the understanding of a few golden missions texts.  We need to engage the whole text and to be engaged by the text.  We need a proper hermeneutic that will guide us in understanding the full and awesome role of the Scripture in the whole life of the church and its people.  Our students need to know how to communicate the word and properly contextualize it in the new
contexts that our Lord will open to us.

Those who study missiology at NTS need to learn more than methods and “how tos.”  Those we send out--and aren’t we all sent out in mission?--need to be thoroughly formed spiritually within the body of Christ and know how to care for each other.  Our students need to understand the development of philosophical thought over the centuries and how to find their way in the paradigmatic shifts of these days.

They need to understand the history of the Church, including missions, not just so we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, but also in order that we get the long-term perspective and see where God has led us and where God is calling us now, and to see that it truly is a glorious Church.  The short-term view doesn’t always show this to us.  Missiology needs every discipline of the seminary if we are going to present ourselves to our Lord as workers who do not need to be ashamed.
Our students need to develop a theology that will serve them in the cities of the world, that are the growing centers of populace, decision, and influence.  Missiology at NTS would not be complete without urban ministries.

However, the seminary needs missiology, too.  Theology in the New Testament was formed as Christ’s followers obeyed and went out with the gospel as Christ instructed.  Their experience of Christ gave them new understandings of the Scriptures.  As they went, or as they were thrust out through persecution, issues and questions arose, needs developed.  By working through these in light of what they were experiencing of the risen Christ, theology developed.

Much of the New Testament that is in our canon today is the result of the new churches established and the instruction regarding what faith in Christ meant to these new churches.  There was a dynamic development of theology, of the Scripture and of God’s revealing of himself.

Would you allow your discipline to be informed by the going and the making of disciples in these new contexts?  As the history of the Christian Church continues to be written in new places by people of various worldviews and allegiances, what impact will that have on your understanding of theology, of Scripture, of the place of the church?

Please help us to understand the meaning of what God is doing, but I invite you also to test your understanding in the marketplaces of the worldviews, philosophies, and religions of the world.

As we continue to take up the task of God’s mission, it is proper, therefore, for us to think of ourselves as Nazarene Missiological Seminary.  I say this not because my responsibility in the Seminary is missiology and I would like to see it as the leading discipline.  Rather, we may think of ourselves as a missiological seminary because the mission of God is central to who we are as the Church.  Missiology is unselfconsciously in the middle, not because it should be served by all the other disciplines, but because it is available to be the servant of all.

Missiology can serve as an integrating center at many points.  As the church sends out in mission, it goes with theological and biblical assumptions.  As it seeks to fulfill the mission to which God has called it, it faces new contexts.  Questions are raised regarding its assumptions.  It returns to the Seminary asking how the Gospel may be communicated in these new contexts.  As the church embraces, communicates, and incarnates the Gospel, the Gospel brings about changes in the new contexts.

So missiology returns to the Seminary and brings its questions, in order that missiology may communicate the gospel properly and effectively, but also that the Seminary may consider its own understanding of theology and all the disciplines.

Conclusion

I am challenged by the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci who in 1578 was the first Christian missionary allowed into China in modern times.  (Well, the late Sixteenth Century is modern for China!)  I am challenged by how he was given the very best education the Church could offer him in Italy.  His mind was keen, his intellect sharpened, and his heart passionate for Christ.  His ways in China were innovative and shaped by his goal of getting to the emperor with the gospel.  He learned Chinese to the extent that he could converse with the scholars about their classic writings.  Ricci also brought the skills of clock making and cartography to a culture that named itself basically, “The Kingdom at the Center of the World.”  Ricci was a servant of Christ who offered his very best and all that he could bring to the task of the Gospel.

At Nazarene Theological Seminary we have the opportunity and obligation to combine the best of Christian scholarship with the passion of total commitment to Christ in servanthood within the community of the body of Christ.  This is the milieu in which to prepare for ministry in this present world.  I can hardly believe that you would invite me to be a part of this incredible community and join with you in this most important, and most delightful, of tasks until we can say among all nations, “The LORD reigns!”
Thank you.

Notes:

1. Harold E. Raser, More Preachers and Better Preachers:  The First Fifty Years of Nazarene Theological Seminary, (Kansas City: Nazarene Publ. House, 1995), 112, 130.
2. The designation Master of Arts (Missiology) first appeared in the 1984-85 edition of the NTS Catalog.
3. International Missionary Council, The Missionary Obligation of the Church, (London: Edinburgh House, 1952), 3.
4. David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission:  Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission, (Maryknoll:  Orbis Books, 1991), 390.
5. Charles Van Engen, Mission on the Way:  Issues in Mission Theology, (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996), 18-19.
6. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom:  The Coming of Global Christianity, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2.
7. Donald Leroy Stults, Developing an Asian Evangelical Theology, (Manila, OMF Literature, Inc. 1989).
8. Cf. Charles Van Engen, God’s Missionary People:  Rethinking the Purpose of the Local Church, (Grand Rapids, Baker Book House, 1991), 27.
9. The compete mission statement is “ The mission of Nazarene Theological Seminary, a graduate school of theology in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, is to prepare women and men to be faithful and effective ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to offer itself as a theological resource in service to the Church of the Nazarene, its sponsoring denomination, and the wider Christian Church.” – NTS Catalog, 2002-03 Supplement.