Progressive Missiology? AIDS, Biodiversity, and Evangelism

By Willis Jenkins

Just before the 2002 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, a group of Anglicans from around the worldwide Communion met together in Hartebeesport, South Africa, to discuss and draft an Anglican statement on "sustainable development." During a break in the conference I found myself in congenial conversation with an officer from an Anglican development agency. But when I asked about his program's "mission work" he became irritated, as if I misunderstood what his agency was about. Curious that a church program officer, in the midst of an all-Anglican gathering, should be so chary of being seen as implicated in mission, I pressed my case that using church resources and personnel to empower local communities looked very much to me like a form of mission. He relented dismissively: "Well. . . you could call it that, if you wanted."

Christian progressives. . . have been leery of "world mission" -- and with good reasons: after legacies of imperial complicity and within contemporary American economic and cultural dominance, anything missionary can seem embarrasingly Victorian and perhaps inextricable from immediate exploitations.

His reaction is normal enough among Christian progressives, who have been leery of "world mission" -- and with good reasons: after legacies of imperial complicity and within contemporary American economic and cultural dominance, anything missionary can seem embarrasingly Victorian and perhaps inextricable from immediate exploitations. So, quite understandably, many progressives have diluted their attention to the wider world, avoiding long-term relations with overseas churches, opting to express their international concern instead through policy advocacy, financial granting, or short-term visits. And when these activities do entail sending and receiving of international personnel, they are often held a respectful distance from association with the word "mission" -- as my colleague in Hartebeesport made clear.

Yet understandable as this response is, it is troublesome to me on several accounts. First, personal forms of mission remain a central practice of being church, particularly so within the Anglican Communion, an entity which is only as alive as its internal mission relations are vital. The sort of mutual understanding that can only come from living with others, and having others live with us, is obviously needed more than ever within our communion. To give over the personal presence of mission only to those who have claimed its vocabulary is to allow international relations of the church to be shaped by just one style of being Anglican and Christian.

But what most concerns me here is that this disavowal of mission allows to go unnoticed the illuminative potential of progressive missiologies already active "in the field." For, as my opening example implied, the fact is progressives already do international mission in a wide variety of modes and contexts. And when recognized as so many lived mission stories, these international efforts can be held up as (also) important modes of the church's responsiveness to those outside itself -- as, perhaps, the stuff of a "progressive missiology" much wanting in the Episcopal Church.

Take for example the ways many Episcopal congregations and agencies have responded to the AIDS crisis, both here and internationally. Outreaches to AIDS-stricken individuals and communities were often undertaken first among Christian churches by progressive Episcopalians, and have been remarkable for the way they disclose a divine care that goes beyond souls unto bodies, and then unto to wider social relations and to governmental policies as well. There is a witness here that needs claiming.

The myriad AIDS ministries I have seen in African churches seem united in their belief that to proclaim the saving love of God for someone is as well to declare that God cares about their suffering, diseased, dying bodies. Suffering from HIV/AIDS continues, but held by the healing, accepting, touching, praying missions of the church, it can be experienced in the light of liberation and even hope. But HIV/AIDS has not to do simply with a disease of the immune system; its spread is hastened by various forms of social degeneration, including the disempowerment of women before androcentric presumptions, the dissolution of traditional community structures, political instability and its concomitant military mobilizations, and, perhaps most devastatingly, abject poverty.

. . .the response of the church has been beyond simply palliative care for individual bodies; it has sought to redemptively engage social relations and political policy. There is an important missiological testimony here: God is concerned not just with souls, and not just with embodied souls either, but with persons in their social wholeness, and so the multitude of relations by which we have our being.

The AIDS missions of churches in Africa and their international companions therefore often include such facets as public education, empowerment initiatives for women, moral exhortation for men, protection for children, advocacy for the family, and relief from poverty. The reasons for the spread of AIDS are of course still more complex, socially and personally, but the point is simply that the response of the church has been beyond simply palliative care for individual bodies; it has sought to redemptively engage social relations and political policy. There is an important missiological testimony here: God is concerned not just with souls, and not just with embodied souls either, but with persons in their social wholeness, and so the multitude of relations by which we have our being.

One could go on to say something about a vision of Christ here, the one who offers life through his own relations of dependency and vulnerability, who by assuming relational flesh brings transfiguration to all these relations, and so makes possible the sort of world where relations are not poisoned or even agonistic, where vulnerability is not dehumanizing, where sex is not about social privilege and does not carry a death sentence. This is a word here that needs proclaiming.

But I want to point to what more may be promised by such progressive missiologies. Think for a moment of the AIDS crisis in relation to the biodiversity crisis, of all this loss of so many sorts of lives, especially as so much of both sorts of dying happen especially in the tropics. Shouldn't the church have something to say against this tide of dying, and be able to offer hope in the midst of it?

It might seem from the point of view of those who love elephants and acacia trees that there is relief for the earth in so much human dying, some clearing for nature to grow back. Or from the point of view of a public health worker in Botswana, that every resources hitherto devoted to conservation must be diverted to the AIDS crisis. That is, if the biodiversity concern is a worry over the effects that six-plus billion people are having on depleting species and clearing the last verdant places, then, from an ecocentric point of view, maybe this virus is doing a strained earth some good. But if the AIDS crisis really could be nearly ended with the right expenditures of public health money, then the considerable funds sent to Africa to protect its wildlife should go towards lives closer to our own.

Progressive missiologies might allow the church to show how working with God against one sort of dying need not come at the expense of the other. With a bit of reflection on what is already going on in progressive missions within the Communion, there may be a uniquely Christian word on both AIDS and biodiversity loss.

First, from those already working on economic reform and globalization, especially through the Jubilee justice movement, there are some hard prophetic words our church may need to hear. In particular, when the question has to do with population pressure and biodiversity loss, the statistical intuition that the AIDS crisis in Africa will provide relief is simply mistaken. The boundary of rich and poor that largely follows a boundary of global North and South is one made by prodigal economic lifestyles that directly contribute to the loss of habitat for species all over the world.

While it is true the African poor are often those on the ecological margins, and so are in direct competition for habitat with many of the species in jeopardy, these people are there most often because market forces (and sometimes explicit policy) have created those margins and pushed people there. Dehumanizing economic conditions have created human living situations so desperate that people are driven to clear rainforest, kill endangered animals, and over-use the land and water available to them. The progressive voice of the church must require the global North to see that the biodiversity crisis is more intimate to their exotically-fed flesh than they pretend -- and to perhaps kneel more humbly when they pray for justice to come like rain off the mountains.

Progressives may be uniquely able to hold together a love for six billion human individuals as compatible with a love for disappearing species. They may be able to say that it is with the same hope that the church offers healing and liberation to AIDS victims that it offers relief and restoration for threatened non-human creatures.

Secondly, as we have seen from the lived missiology within the AIDS crisis, there is a sense of the church's activity that can demonstrate the significance of Christ for a whole wider web of relations. No doubt there is resource here for saying something beyond the social and political to the still more intimate ecological webs by which we have our being. That is, progressives may be uniquely able to hold together a love for six billion human individuals as compatible with a love for disappearing species. They may be able to say that it is with the same hope that the church offers healing and liberation to AIDS victims that it offers relief and restoration for threatened non-human creatures.

Were progressives to claim their commitments as mission work, and so as apt for reflection on the very heart of their faith, their words might become especially bold and timely. They might start saying things about Christ and the world like: because we are all made through the Word by which all things were made, and because Christ took on the flesh of the whole world, every creaturely kind desires to be held within the body of Christ. What if the social left were to challenge the church to direct its mission to offer the love of God to the whole world -- indeed to every bit of it? What if progressives, who are especially concerned to make the choirs of the church made up of diverse voices, to challenge the church to fashion its doxologies from all the voices of the earth?

It seems to me we would have a progressive rendering of "for God so loved the world. . .", a lived conviction that to love the earth as God loves it is to show that it is through the HIV-positive bodies of the church that the despair and groans of the earth can be turned to hope and joy. We would have the "great commission" of a church committed to renewal of human lives in the AIDS crisis, extending also to companionship with all the earth. We would show how a concern for the earth includes care for the integrity of whole persons.

In bringing together personal, social, ecological, and indeed ecclesial integrity, here is a missiology progressives have already for the developing -- in the mission work of very many Episcopalians all around the world.

 

Willis Jenkins is a member of the Episcopal Church's Standing Commission on World Mission, and was a cofounder of the church's international Young Adult Service Corps (YASC). His international ministry has been concentrated in Uganda and Kenya, and he currently lives in Charlottesville, Va. Willis may be reached by email at wjj2c@cms.mail.virginia.edu.

Read More or Get Involved:

• "The Body of Christ has AIDS: Responding to a gendered pandemic as an embodied community" by Denise Ackermann (from the Jan./Feb. 2003 issue of The Witness, AIDS in a Global Age.)
• "Current Anglican AIDS Initiatives in Africa" as reported on the Anglican Communion website
• The Cambridge Consultation (soon to be known as "Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation")