Much of the program at last week’s Fourth Lausanne Congress was structured around 25 issue areas, or gaps. These represent distinct opportunities and challenges for the spread of the gospel in today’s world. By highlighting these specific areas of concern during the conference and beyond, the Lausanne leadership seeks to encourage collaborative action to address needs and opportunities that are currently under-resourced or underdeveloped. Rallying those who have been called to serve in these areas creates the space for them to work together in new ways, leveraging their respective strengths and doing more together than they could accomplish by simply working alone.
Yet some have pointed out that this granular approach to the overall mission effort ignores the context of each of the gaps, as well as the ways in which they interrelate.
Jay Mātenga, Executive Director of the World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission, writes, “For Lausanne 4, each identified gap is devoid of context. They are presented as depersonalized universal components. A pathology paradigm is evident here. The issues are problematized and by and large treated like a disease, for which we are being tasked with developing universal vaccines.”
To put it succinctly, Mātenga says, “The gap in the gaps is the gap.”
Fragmented Narratives
Much the same may be said about how evangelicals have often approached China and China ministry. Our fragmented narratives do reveal important truths about what is happening in China, but they lack context. Focusing only on the persecuted church, for example, or on the need for training or the mobilization of missionaries from China can lead to a pathological approach to solving problems in these respective areas. Whoever defines the gaps—or the narratives—defines the agenda. Yet without a proper understanding of the larger context, we miss the connections between those specific issues and the myriad other factors at play in the lives of Chinese believers.
A case in point is the recent increase in Christians emigrating from China.
Focusing on the repression that is making life more difficult for believers in the country (the persecution narrative), it becomes clear that the need is to aid those who are suffering and to assist those who choose to leave. A longer-term approach might include advocacy on their behalf and efforts to reduce the pressure through promoting legal reform.
All these may be needed, yet making freedom or the alleviation of suffering the ultimate goal misses the larger concern of God’s purposes in the lives of these Christians. The pathological approach to the situation in which many Christians find themselves today does not address what happens to those who do manage to leave the country. More than a few Chinese Christians have been delivered out of dire situations through the sacrificial efforts of foreign believers, sometimes with much fanfare, only to flounder once they reached safer shores.
On the other end of the spectrum are the stories of those who choose to leave China to serve in other lands (the missionary church narrative). With the intensifying focus on cross-cultural workers from China, foreign organizations and individuals are giving considerable thought to where they will go, what it will take to get there, how they should prepare, and how they can thrive in their new environments.
Scattered or Sent?
Whereas the story of those fleeing persecution ends once they leave China, for those sent out as missionaries it is just beginning. Together both groups comprise perhaps several hundred people.
Yet there are many times that number of Christians among the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Chinese leaving China each year. They are neither in such dire straits that they require rescue or emergency assistance, nor are they intentionally going out as missionaries. Falling outside the parameters of our traditional narratives, these believers disappear into the cracks in our perception of how God is working in China.
By defying our categories, the Chinese diaspora highlights the pitfalls of focusing so narrowly on one feature in the lives of Chinese Christians that we lose sight of who they are as people.
China’s Unintentional Missionaries
Isolating the push of repression and the pull of the mission field obscures the much larger picture of what God is doing through Christians from China. As he sovereignly repositions members of China’s church, the gospel is going forth in new ways.
Effectively engaging with the Chinese diaspora requires more than rearranging our categories. It requires a theological shift, namely, a pilgrim theology that redefines the diaspora not as settlers in a new homeland but as sojourners on a journey with God; and a theology of vocation that values the unique skills and experience each diaspora Christian brings with them as gifts to be used in glorifying God wherever he takes them.
In the gaps between our carefully crafted China narratives lie vast uncharted regions where God’s Spirit is already at work. May he lead us to those places and grant us there the imagination to see ourselves in his greater story.
Many thanks to my friends in the People on the Move issue group at Lausanne 4 for stimulating the ideas explored in this post.
