A Corrective Vision for Missions
Too often, sound doctrine is seen as a burden in the missionary enterprise, an obstacle to obedience to the Great Commission rather than a partner in it. This spirit of pragmatism, while sometimes born from a creditable desire for the church to act, can over time become the catalyst for division between “senders” and “goers.” This can lead to paralysis and barren ministry, both on the field and in the home church.
For both the missionary and his or her sending church, it is critical to know what one believes and what it means for their ministry, on the field and off. It was this need that The Southgate Fellowship (TSF) sought to address by publishing Affirmations & Denials, a rigorous theological document intended by the authors to “identify, challenge, and offer corrections to the errors we perceive in the world of missions,” and “to call missiologists, missionaries, mission agencies, and Christ’s global church to biblical fidelity in belief, thought, methods, and goals—all in obedience to Jesus Christ, the Lord of the nations.”
These Affirmations & Denials have been adopted by a number of missionary agencies and ministry leaders around the world (including at Missionary.com). A print edition was distributed as well, reaching thousands of pastors and teachers.
As Affirmations & Denials approaches five years of circulation, Missionary sat down with David B. Garner and Daniel Strange of The Southgate Fellowship to discuss the background of the fellowship and how doctrine connects with the Great Commission.
This interview has been compressed and condensed for clarity.
Missionary: Let’s start at the beginning, with the genesis of The Southgate Fellowship (TSF). What is the mission of TSF, and how did you both come to it?
Dan Strange: It was summer 2016. I'd gotten to know a guy called Flavien Pardigon. Both of us realized that we had the same kinds of questions about missions and missiology. Then we wondered how we could get together a group of reformed missiologists to talk about some of the issues. So we both drew a list of people who we'd like to draw into the conversation. Top of Flavien’s list was Dave, because American efficiency was needed if we were going to do anything with this.
So then we met together, seven or eight of us, and we had an initial conversation, a symposium where we just chatted. And then during the second meeting Dave said, “What are we going to do with this?” And I said, “Well, I thought we were going to do some affirmations and denials. Can we do those?” I thought that this would be quite an easy thing to do. And Dave, having been involved in a similar project on inerrancy said, “It's going to take a lot longer than you think.” So then we reconvened, sometime at the beginning of 2017, and then we met over a period of two years to draft these Affirmations & Denials.
David Garner: Following that conversation, Flavien reached out to me and just said, “Hey, we're thinking about this. Would you be interested in gathering with us?”
My family and I had served as missionaries, and when we went to the field we thought we were going to be there for our lifetime. That was what we had committed to do. The Lord had other plans, but what I discovered on the mission field, rubbing shoulders with a variety of different countries in Eastern Europe, central Europe and Central Asia, is that missions was the wild, wild west in terms of what people were doing and in how they were thinking about what they were doing. Having read missions history and so many things that had been so compelling to me, to discover what people were doing on the ground was deeply concerning.
Then, when we moved back to the states and I came to Westminster Theological Seminary, our denomination, the PCA, was also walking through some of these missiological questions. I was asked to join a study committee on Insider Movements and Muslim idiom translation. The questions that lay behind those issues really exposed an underbelly to the way in which the evangelical and the reformed world were relying on some new tools and resources from the field of the social sciences as a critical foundation for effective missions. So, when I was asked to meet with Dan and others in Southgate, my interest was significant because I really do believe that the gospel and the advance of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to the nations is what is at stake. And it was a delight to be around other guys who had, for a variety of reasons, these same concerns.
Dan Strange: Anthropology, sociology, phenomenology, ethnography, all those tools are really important, but they're not ultimate. Good missiology has got to be theological. A lot of us have had experiences where we've been to evangelical missiological events where really it's been sociology, not theology. For us as kind of reformed believers the fundamentals of reform theology must stay when it comes to missiology. That's why the methodology sections in the Affirmations & Denials are so important because it's recognizing that we do see the world through the word of God theologically, however much we learn from these other disciplines.
David Garner: One of the things that I've discovered in the world of global mission has been people will profess a faithful confessional theology, but when it comes to the practice of what they're doing in mission and in the way they even think about the practice of mission, it's almost as though the theological concerns are shelved and then something else replaces the ultimate authority and decision-making grid.
I don't question whether most of these people are truly Christian. I think they are, but I don't think they've thought through how that theology we profess has got to actually be manifested in the method that we carry out in gospel mission. TSF wanted to have a resilient assertion of theology tethered to a strong application of that theology to culture, and relate that to the place and role of the church in mission, the visible church, etc. Those things, they cannot be separated. They're distinct but inseparable.
Missionary: So this project didn't happen in a vacuum. What are some of those ideas, practices, or theologies that you were interacting with that posed a threat to biblical missiology?
David Garner: How we think about the relationship of parachurch ministry to local or visible church ministry is actually one of the more important issues that we sought to address. And there is still a variety of opinions on this. We received a lot of feedback in that area. If you read our document carefully, there's certain things that we say, but there's a lot of things that we don't say. In no way are we saying there's no place for parachurch ministry. We're not denying the value of that, but the question is “what is the primary body that has the responsibility for the work of global mission to what body has that task been assigned?” And then, “What are the implications of that for the way in which we might work with parachurch ministries?”
For the vast majority of my life, I've worked for a parachurch organization. I serve at one now at Westminster. We are not a church, but we only exist insofar as we support the visible church. And so our true purpose, frankly, is tied to the institution that Christ established for a number of purposes, not the least of which is the advance of His gospel to the nations.
There's room for conversation. What I would say though is our document is actually much more of a consensus document. It's not narrow, it's targeted and it actually drives people to think about these things in certain ways. But there's some flexibility and latitude in terms of application.
One of the areas that I thought might generate more questions is related to revelation on the spectrum of cessationism to continuation…I thought we might get a bit more pushback on that framing of a closed canon than we did.
Dan Strange: The other area where there was flexibility and latitude would be on some of the discussions about transformational versus two kingdoms. And the document allows that you could shade more towards one of those than the other and still be able to think that the document's important. But again, we spent quite a lot of time trying to parse that out a little bit.
When we were writing the document, there were some issues that came up. We tried to not be too niche because we want the document to have longevity so there's nothing in here about discipleship making movements or church planting movements. However, the document is deep enough and structural enough that you'd be able to take new issues as they arise and compare them to the document and see whether those foundations hold.
Interestingly, the area that actually was most striking was probably the stuff on ecclesiology. In some ways that received some of the most pushback from even some of our friends who were looking at the document, in terms of how we were talking about the relationship between the local church and mission. There are some intricacies there, but that's not the area that I thought would be the most discussed. The contextualization question continually sheds more heat than light in terms of how we understand contextualization and the dangers of extraction or syncretism and then stuff on culture as well. There were some surprising issues that were actually more knotty that we went through in the process. Those are the ones that come to mind, even though they're not the ones that you would imagine would be the biggest issues. But that's my own personal reflection.
Missionary: What is your hope for how Affirmations & Denials can be used by Christians, churches, and missions committees or agencies?
Dan Strange: We wanted to do something with it. We didn't want it just to be one and done. We wanted to get a website and some funding. So originally the document was published in Themelios, and there was a special one-off printing for all the participants at the T4G Conference. We wanted it to be useful. At the beginning we did ask for signatories and that was an interesting process. If you go onto the website, there's a lot of people who signed it. Some people didn't, and that's fine.
David Garner: It keeps appearing in more recent publications. I know of at least two missions organizations that are parachurch organizations that have made this an essential component for all of their missionaries to be able to sign off on before they serve with that mission. I would love to see that grow. There are professors that I know use this document in their courses on missions to help students who will then either become missionaries or pastors. It gives them a tool by which to assess the way in which their churches think about mission and the missionaries they would recruit, deploy, send, and oversee.
I know of churches that have taken this document and used it to actually bring their missions committee to reflect on it to say, “Are we thinking about mission the way that God would have us to think about mission?” And that's happened in a number of cases, probably well beyond the numbers that I know.
Dan Strange: We didn't want to write something that was unnecessarily polemic, but some of these areas can be quite ambiguous and slippery. Whether you agree with the document or you don't agree with it, it does force you to say with more precision and clarity what one does think about certain issues. And that can only be good for discussion and debate, and we hope it's the start of a conversation, not the end of one.
We've never claimed that it's got creedal, canonical status or anything. It's definitely a work in progress. We think having this positive statement is a good thing for the discipline of missiology because it does force people to kind of come out, I suppose, and say, “Well, no, actually I don't agree with this, and this is why….” And then we can have a conversation. Often we're talking at cross purposes or people use the same terms and we cross our fingers, hoping they believe exactly the same thing that we do. That's not helpful. So it brings clarity, and the affirmations and denials method is a particularly effective way of doing that.
Missionary: So is this something you’d recommend to individual Christians who are passionate about missions but maybe don't know doctrinally what things mean, or is it better suited for churches who are sending missionaries, to calibrate their beliefs?
Dan Strange: It's not meant to be for everyone. It has a certain purpose for missiologists, for reflective practitioners. But what we'd love to see is it being distilled at a more accessible, popular level. Different versions of it could become the basis of a kind of Sunday school catechesis.
I see the whole process, the whole apparatus as nothing other than Titus 1:9. It is declaring sound doctrine and refuting error. And, if those are the two of the main things that the elder, the overseer needs to be doing…it is a pastoral document in that way.
David Garner: Our hope remains that more will grow out of these tools and resources for the church. This will require investment and even funding for us on the Southgate side in order to have the capacity to deliver more. There’s interest in translating the Affirmations & Denials into multiple languages. It's not a simple undertaking to do the translation, but we do hope it will be useful, so we're prayerfully pursuing that.
Our conviction as Southgate Fellowship Council is that as creatures made in God's image, that we have a biblical anthropology that actually suffuses the way in which we think about ourselves before the Creator. When I go to a new missiological context as a missionary sent, how am I going to assess the culture? What tools am I going to use? Am I going to look at what scripture says about divine providence to borrow our own confessional language from Westminster, of the great creator of all things who upholds, directs, and disposes, and governs all creature’s actions and things? Is that the framework that I'm going to have when I go and carry out my work of gospel mission in this land? What is the role of how I think about first Adam and last Adam? Does that actually have bearing upon the way in which this society perceives itself? And this bears on the question of the so-called “guilt versus shame cultures.” How do I rightly address that? Do I just give way to some sort of neutral conclusion, that every society has its own way of seeing things, or do I interpret that society in the way that I would want to interpret my own convictions, through the lens of scripture and a theologically informed worldview from that scripture? Finally, how does our understanding of redemptive history, about the dawn of the ages that has come upon us in the person and work of Christ, and how does eschatology frame the way in which I think about my task and missions? Everything needs to be filtered through those lenses. If it's not, guess what? It's going to be filtered through another set of lenses.
Missionary: So, in the context of having a solid doctrinal foundation, why is it important to be a missionary and how would you encourage someone with similar doctrinal concerns to go? What would you say to prospective missionaries or sending churches?
Dan Strange: Well, what we've tried to do with The Southgate Fellowship is not some niche thing that's just for those who are thinking about going overseas into cross-cultural situations. We are facing in the West, post-Christendom, fairly shocking de-churching statistics in the states, let alone anywhere else. And still, in theological education, even in good schools, missions is something that's put on the side. Without saying that missiology has to rule every other discipline or saying that it just becomes a mush of disciplines, missiology has to be front and center in the way that we're training people. So, my big plea is that theological educators are thinking missiologically. This stuff in the Affirmations & Denials is going to become more and more important for your average minister training.
David Garner: What the church needs, in order to be faithful in our stewardship of theology, is to think of ourselves on the divine errand of mercy in which we take that which we have been given and commit to delivering it. That's the way Paul thought: “that which I received, I have delivered unto you.” That's what theology is supposed to do. It's not just to instruct me to know how to defend my faith. That's important. But in the defense, I must be also on the offense. I must be advancing or I become like a stagnant pool. If I seek to preserve the doctrine and only defend it, I actually end up corrupting the very thing that I'm trying to preserve. And so this is not an option, to bring these things back together where they belong.
Secondly, I would add this, think about what Jesus says in Matthew's gospel. “The gates of hell will not prevail against my church.” Why? Because He said, “I'm going to build it.” So through the visible entity that He has created, what He calls His church, those who are called out, those that gather for worship, are also the place from which the gospel is to be sent to the four corners of the earth. If you want to be a part of something that can't fail, that is the one entity, the one endeavor that we know, that will and must succeed and cannot fail. As we're thinking about the next generation of the church, it is incumbent upon us to cast a vision of what Christ has said, and we cannot fail to cast that vision before the next generations of the church so that they will occupy and delight in that vision, and delight in the Christ of that vision.
Comforts, pleasures, all of that is fleeting. And what actually is essential for us as theologians and as members of the body of Christ is to reset our hearts in repentance against our idolatry and actually to love that which Christ loves. And He says that He's given His life for His church. So let's be about that church, the advance of that church.
When we think rightly about missions, we're not going to think only geographically. We must think generationally. And this is what Paul says in 2 Timothy 2:2. Paul instructs Timothy so that he might instruct others.
I would contend that if the church is going to be a faithful church, she's always going to be thinking about her children's children. What is it that we're doing now that is actually going to advance the name of Christ to my great grandchildren? What does that look like? And so that sort of orientation needs to be rekindled within the life of the church. I serve at a theological seminary. I want our students to not ask the question, “Should I consider global mission?” But I want to have them ask the question, “In what way will I serve global mission?” Answering that question should not be an option.