Integral mission is: The packet of leftovers from the Chinese restaurant at dinner I gave to the homeless lady outside the Tube station, whose eager expression when taking it I will not forget. The whimper of a prayer, “Lord, have mercy,” as I read about the horrors of war and hunger in Yemen. The lively conversation with a migrant worker about who Jesus is in his own religious scriptures after a kebab dinner following the closure of his legal suit I helped pro bono on. The visit to a pro bono client in Tanah Merah Prison before he was repatriated to his home country, where he told me to relay some messages to his brother through an NGO worker who helped him with his case. The frisbee game w
As missiologist Paul Hiebert says, for a long time, life was fragmented into different spheres such as – public and private; economic, social and political, and religious; rich and poor. In the same vein, missions was separated from evangelism, and proclamation separated from acts of justice and mercy. Today we are trying to pull these threads together again, since they should not have been separated in the first place. But it’s hard to hold proclamation and justice together, as history has shown. There have been groups who have so focused exclusively on telling people about Jesus that they have cared little for the body; while other groups actively cared for the needs of people without poin
Integral mission started with the apostles but we are indebted to our Latin American brethren for naming the theology which responded to their dire social problems. Evangelical theologians, recognising that their theological studies in Western seminaries were unable to provide a response they needed, produced a contextual theology called mision integral or integral mission which emphasised, and provided equal weightage for, both the social action and proclamation of the gospel. It was also in response to the Liberation Theology that had several shortcomings, chiefly on the unbalanced emphasis on political action, without offering the gospel that brings hope and transforms people. It is commo
Having been a Christian from a young age, I have long been familiar with the word ‘Mission’. For a considerable time, I associated the word with being overseas doing some kind of ‘physical labour’ as well as preaching the Gospel. Yet, I never had to confront the tension of when to do what, as it was always simply a function of the program that was planned. It was not until I was challenged to live missionally – an ‘everyday life’ of knowing God and making Him known wherever I am – that I truly wrestled with the tension between proclamation and demonstration of the Gospel. Which should take prominence in any given situation? Is the feeding of a homeless person only given ‘true meaning’ if I t
There was a time when the Church saw her mission primarily as that of ‘saving souls’, and of world evangelisation (i.e. saving souls from all nations). After being saved, one was to ‘do church-y stuff’, and live a quiet life with minimal fuss about the ‘secular affairs of the world’. At some other time, the mission was expanded to that of making disciples. We shouldn’t just be saving souls, but we should also bring them up to spiritual maturity. Still quite ‘churchy’, rather personal (i.e. not social), but closer to the truth behind the Great Commission. There was also a time when the Church looked at the awful mess of the world all around – the poverty, injustice, violence, and concluded th
