Incarnation and Intercultural Mission Beyond Boundaries

 The Way Forward in Mission

1. We now live in a time when the illusions of mono-cultures can be sustained only by voluntary ignorance and political manipulation. The idea that God’s Word crosses cultural boundaries, while it was once a revolutionary improvement in mission theology, now seems naive. The Gospel doesn’t travel, it becomes manifest in the process of evangelization - bearing witness to God’s Reign in constant dialogue with those being invited to take their place in it at the intersections of multiple cultures.
2. So Kerygma isn’t just dogma and euangelizomai isn’t just talking. They are participation in God’s Reign in ways that create the opportunity for Incarnation to be recognized and affirmed by faith. The apostles themselves didn’t know the meaning of Incarnation until they engaged in and were transformed by intercultural mission. Intercultural dialogue turns out to be the essence of obedient witness, it isn’t the transmission of the gospel, it is the way we learn the gospel.
3. And this makes us all missionaries in our time, because we all live at the intersection of multiple cultures in which God is not yet incarnate. And this, in closing, presents these challenges. 
1. We must become self-consciously intercultural people if we are to become an incarnational presence in the world.
2. We will need to broaden our understanding of revelation. We’ll need to recognize that God makes God’s-self known in culture, and with it religion, as much as in the natural world and the reasoning capacity of the human mind. We need to take on board the Georgia Harkness' hymn, “this is my home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine: but other hearts in other lands are beating, with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.” And those other lands may be as close as our next-door neighbor. 
3. We must live for a gospel that is continually emergent rather than merely being passed on. Jesus tells us that new wine needs new wine skins. In Austria, where I was just visiting my family, it is the beginning of the season for harvesting grapes. When the trauben saft, the grape juice, begins to ferment it lets off gas. You can this fermenting wine, called stürm, on the roadside in half gallon jugs. They are covered with aluminum foil attached by a rubber band, and into the foil holes are punched to let out the gas. Because otherwise they explode. Some of us are quite fond of the metaphor of holding the treasure of the gospel in earth vessels, as Paul writes to the Corinthians. I'll remind us that even after 2100 years what we hold in earthen pots is new wine, still alive and active.  If we get broken it’s likely because we tried to contain it in our dogma and our ritual and it blew its way out.
4. We need to cultivate the skills for intercultural living:
1. We need to make cultural intelligence part of every program of Christian preparation for witness.
2. We need to adopt an emotional toolkit that helps us see that all emotions are created, as Batja Mequita says, Between Us. They don’t exist apart from a social, cultural, and situational context. Emotions are a dance with different steps in different cultures – and we may need to learn more steps than we know.
3. We need to grasp, as James Fowler and others have shown, that faith, just like morals and the intellect develops. 
4. And finally, we need to recognize that identity is created by the stories we tell with others about ourselves. Identity is narrative not essentialist, and the church in mission must provide the space for many different narratives to unfold. 
5. But these are only a basis for what is most important, a willingness for dialogue and commitment to the emergence of God's incarnate word among us. Dialogue, even in the hardest of conflicts, is the ultimate expression of "hope in things unseen.” We carry out dialogue because of our confidence that the gospel will emerge between us in a way that it has never before existed within us. 
5. In her brilliant song, The Joke, Brandy Carlisle sings of those who oppress and exclude, “Let 'em laugh while they can, Let 'em spin, let 'em scatter in the wind, I have been to the movies, I've seen how it ends, And the joke's on them.”
6. Well it wasn’t in the movies, but we know how it ends. Rev. 21:22

"I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it."

Is it not the task of Christian mission to play our role in affirming that the glory and the honor of the nations of the earth is brought into God’s Reign? 

In the book of Matthew Jesus gives Peter, the representative of the apostolic church, the keys to the Reign of God and tells him that what he binds on earth will be bound in heaven, and what he looses on earth will be loosed in heaven. Given that God's Reign is a place where the gates will never be shut, then we who hold the keys must make sure they are always open to everyone.