Sermon by Jennifer Potter, Minister, Wesley’s Chapel, London

World Church Sunday, 21^st March 2010

RETHINKING MISSION

When I stand in the pulpit or at the lectern at Wesley’s Chapel and look around me I can see on all sides memorials to earlier generations of Methodists, not least among them pioneering missionaries.

In the apse with the memorials to John and Charles Wesley, there is a stone for Thomas Coke, the inspiration and driver of early Methodist Missions long before the Missionary Society itself was set up. His mind was always fixed on Asia but Wesley managed to rein him in and gave him responsibility for North America. He crossed the Atlantic nineteen times but his heart was still set on Asia. He died at seas in 1814 en route for Sri Lanka. The Wesleys themselves were, of course, missionaries in the new colony of Georgia, though that was not the happiest of episodes.

Other memorials in the Chapel are to William Shaw – the missionary to the Eastern Cape of South Africa and to Hunt and Calvert who travelled to Fiji. Around the Church there are jasper columns holding up the gallery – these were gifts from Methodist Churches around the world – from America and Canada, from Ireland, the Caribbean and South Africa.

Mission is in the Methodist DNA.

Yet all of this is a reminder of a different age. Our forefathers and foremothers in faith were inspired by the Great Commission which we read from Matthew’s Gospel. They carried out their mission with zeal, with confidence, in the face of many privations, sometimes in a culturally insensitive way, and sometimes as an adjunct of colonialism: but they were fired by the Gospel message.

The late 18^th and early19^th centuries were the era of European dominance both in the world and in the church. Livingstone could talk of carrying Christianity, civilisation and commerce around the world, and that was what missionaries sought to do – in China and India, on the West coast of Africa and in the south, in the islands of the Pacific, Malaya and Indonesia, to the Caribbean and mainland South America.

In his Commission to his disciples, Jesus urged them to announce the Good News, to baptise people as a public sign of admission to a new life in Christ and to teach people what being a Christian meant in their day to day life. And to do this generations of Methodists, as well as other denominations and groups, travelled, often poorly equipped, to answer God’s call. They learned languages, they produced scripts for languages which had never been written down, they translated the Scriptures, brought health care, educated young and old and produced books for them to read. They laboured long and hard, often for little reward – even in terms of numbers of converts. They had little contact with their families back home and died early deaths.

The older people among us here today, and I include myself in that, were growing up at the very end of that era. We still had missionary boxes in our homes, collected as children for JMA, hosted missionaries on deputation, and read magazines like ‘Now’ avidly. At that time 25 Marylebone Road in London housed only the Missionary Society not, as now, the whole of the Methodist Church administration.

Now we live in a different world – a decolonised, global village. We are all partners now – not sending and receiving churches. At least that is the theory if not always the practice.

If Europe was the old Christendom, we now have a new Christendom in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The era of Western Christianity has passed within our lifetime and the day of Southern Christianity has dawned. Mission is no longer from us to them, it is now multi-directional with missionaries from Africa and Korea here with us to try to convert post-Christian Britain.

And the church in Britain is no longer uni-cultural. Migration has brought the world to our doorstep; Mr Wesley’s world parish has come home. At Wesley’s Chapel we have people from at least 30 national backgrounds. Half of London’s Christians are people who have moved in within the last generation and are predominantly black. What are the implications of all this?

What are the implications for the mission of British Methodists? There are between a quarter and half a million Methodists in the UK – we are vastly outnumbered by Korean Methodists, Nigerian Methodists not to speak of North and South Americans.

Where does this leave us? - With a lot of thinking and praying to do. Later this year the British Methodist Church will hold an All Partners Consultation before Conference to begin to consider those sorts of questions.

The centre of gravity of Christianity has shifted, so how do we remain faithful to the mission mandate of the Gospel and of our Methodist forbears in such circumstances? We need to ‘rethink mission’ – how we learn and prepare for it and carry it out both here and overseas. And we need to learn how to receive the mission efforts of others.

I would like us now to look at two situations that pose questions to us about the nature of our mission outreach – i) Haiti and ii) Zimbabwe.

Haiti – over £660,000 has been raised by British Methodists alone in response to the earthquake. This money will go to the relatively small Haitian Methodist Church, which punches above its weight in education and health provision but is set in a predominantly Catholic country. The response of British Methodists was at one and the same time both wonderful and challenging. But who is going to decide on the priorities for the spending of this money? What levels of accountability are going to be expected? Is detailed reporting about how the money is spent a priority, or even possible? How might partner relationships be skewed by such an influx of money and personnel? Will local leadership be undermined? Will personnel from outside be needed – for how long, and under whose supervision? And in which language will all this be carried out? There were plenty of challenges in old-style mission but the challenges are of a different order now. There is a challenge also to see beyond the destruction of buildings to the faith and resilience of the people, to gain inspiration from that and be humbled by it.

Then let us turn to Zimbabwe – I am the companion appointed by the Methodist Church to Methodist Church Zimbabwe (MCZ). You may well ask, ‘what does that mean?’ And that is a question I am still struggling to answer. The relationship of Britain and British Churches with Zimbabwe has been very difficult. The late and messy independence of Zimbabwe, the settler population and land issues have all meant that the British institutions in Zimbabwe have a lot of baggage.

I was in Zimbabwe in August 2009 for only five days and attending Conference for most of that time. The local currency is worthless and has been replaced by the US$ and other currencies. The Government of National Unity has very little unified about it. Intimidation continues. The Church is struggling to pay its ministers; their pensions have disappeared with the currency and no help is forthcoming from Government for schools and clinics. Yet again the people are resilient and have a buoyant faith.

Then, of course there is the issue of a large number of Zimbabwean refugees and asylum-seekers in this country. London is known as Harare North! With all this complexity how do we engage in a mission partnership with the MCZ? Especially when Britain is seen as the bad old colonial master?

Some people in this country want our Methodist Church to denounce Mugabe and all his works as we once denounced Ian Smith, yet in anything we might do or want to do we have to work together with the MCZ because it will be they not us who will take the flack. Often it will mean that we from Britain will have to work anonymously through other countries and churches to get money or resources into the country.

My role is to nurture links between us and to keep lines of communication open so that we can pray with and for one another. In the meantime all of us are challenged to assist Zimbabweans living here in Britain such that they may, when the time is right, be ready and equipped to go back and rebuild their country.

So what might it mean to be involved in rethinking mission for the 21^st century?

a) Well it certainly demands more thinking and praying from us. If it were ever true

that one-size-fitted-all our partners, which I doubt, it is certainly not true now.

b) We need to get behind the media hype and relate to the people, the Methodists

in other countries and know them as people of hope and faith, not the down-trodden and desperate of the earth. They have a faith which humbles us and a generosity of spirit that can at times shame us.

c) We also need to think about how we relate to people from around the world who are part and parcel of our communities. How can we respond to those who need help? I have heard of the wonderful work that the Women’s Friendship Group (with the support of Chilwell Road) does in Nottingham with asylum-seekers and refugees.

d) And how do we (the indigenous community I mean) respond to people from other ethnic backgrounds living as citizens here among us? Are we able to share the riches of our culture and traditions with one another?

Paul in the passage we heard from Ephesians [ 2:11-22] was talking about Jews and Gentiles but could just have easily been talking about the relationship between the immigrant population of Britain and the host community. Those who have settled here in our towns and in our churches should feel keenly that they are ‘no longer foreigners or strangers, no, you are fellow citizens, members of the household, all of you.’

Putting this into practice demands openness and humility on our part. It throws up tough issues not least when an election is imminent and the economy is struggling. For example the issue of inter-faith relations can be contentious. People who have come from places like Nigeria where there has been violence between faith groups cannot be expected to have the same attitudes as people in Britain. Other issues of contention can be the role of women in church and society, and also attitudes to homosexuality.

We must not dodge such issues – they need to be explored sensitively, non-judge-mentally and that can be far from easy.

“Go, then”, Jesus said to the twelve, “and make disciples of all nations.”

That is still our calling but we may just as easily be called around the corner as around the world. It may mean working quietly with Christians in other places and not advertising what we are doing in order that they should not be abused or persecuted. Most difficult of all it may mean being re-discipled ourselves by Christians who have come amongst us or who we meet on overseas visits.

May God bless all you do and all that you will do for mission in the 21^st century. Amen