Transcending pedantry

One of my lecturers at LST on my Master’s Course, Max Turner, was regularly asked to write blurbs/recommendations for books. One day I asked him what he did if a friend/publisher asked him for a blurb and when he read the book he realised it was a shocker. Max’s answer was to indicate that there were certain codes that were used, for example, “not everyone will agree” means “I don’t agree” and “the author tries” means “the author fails”. This advice has saved me time and again from buying bad books.

I was reminded of this conversation during Home Assignment when I picked up the latest fad book in missiology to read from the IMC library, Michael Stroope’s Transcending Mission. The dreaded words “not everyone will agree” were in the blurb! This possibly shaped my response…

Stroope’s basic thesis is that the language of mission is a modern invention, and is thus problematic and should be ditched, a point that he repeats ad nauseum for about 300 pages as he surveys mission history. I must admit that after 75 pages my response was, “yes, you’ve made your point, now move on” but tried my best to plough on, although I must confess to skim reading certain sections, there being a limit to how many obscure medieval writers I could pretend to be interested in.

Then after 300 pages of boredom, we came to what I thought would be the key point of the book, the modern origins of mission language and why it is problematic, yet this part of the book was much shorter and superficial in nature. We got a look into the 1910 Edinburgh Congress, a short survey of subsequent events (almost no reference to the moratorium debate-which was not anti-mission but about partnership in mission) and then some typical postmoderny tropes on how language shapes reality. The impression that I was left with was that for the author proving the modern origins of mission language was sufficient to dismiss it.

The book ended with what I found a frankly bizarre proposal. Having stated that the crusades were not framed as mission but as pilgrimage earlier in the book, he then goes on to conclude that we should replace the language of mission with that of pilgrim witness, my mind ended up failing to engage with the necessary gymnastics.

Concluding comments:

1. Stroope is aware that like mission, “trinity” is not present in the Bible, but his attempts to differentiate the two concepts were unconvincing.
2. Stroope is correct in affirming that there is no clear definition of mission, and that it can be used very differently by diverse authors. Nonetheless, this is true of other general terms such as “education”, “society”, “science”, even “theology”, yet this is rarely mentioned as a reason for abandoning them.
3. Stroope acknowledges that the language of mission is rarely seen as problematic by the majority of Christians in the Global South, but then patronizingly dismisses this as being due to them still being overly under Western influence. I might counter this by suggesting that the whole book is a colonial attempt to impose Western linguistic hangups on the rest of the World.
4. Somewhere there was the potential for a very good 150-page book on the origins, use and problems with the language of mission. Instead, the book is about 3 times longer than it needed to be. This seems to be a growing trend.  Others have mentioned it before, but what has happened to the art of concise writing? Maybe it is time to bring back old style typewriters!
5. Similarly, the book could have stimulated an interesting debate on mission language. However, in a world of consumerism and short attention spans everything needs to be spun as radical, paradigm breaking and innovative. Hence we get more and more books which make hyperbolic claims, (The Church on the Other Side, the Lost Message of Jesus,) I guess publishers have much to answer for on this issue. Reflections on Mission Language, yes, Transcending Mission, give us a break.

So is there anything in this book to suggest that BMS World Mission should engage in an expensive process of rebranding to re-emerge as something like BPW Kingdom Pilgrims?

No.

The title of the book is an obvious riff of Bosch’s Transforming Mission, but Stroope is to Bosch as, alas, my dear Charlton Athletic are to Manchester City. In a course starting this week, I am setting Transforming Mission and Chris Wright’s Mission of God as compulsory reading as they are books that I regularly revisit. Transcending Mission, in contrast, is a book I am relieved to only read once.