360 Mission History"

Missiological Committee Defining Our Worldwide Mission Introduction Our assignment was to define AGWM's mission using a historical lens for analytical perspective. As we began to probe into our history we found that our own personal biographies in mission continually routed us back to three fundamental questions: 1. How were missiological decisions made and disseminated over our history? 2. Do we have a collective calling and priority for ministry in AGWM? 3. If we do have a collective calling, how does the individual calling mesh with that of the organization? These questions shaped the way that we looked at our history and provided the framework for our analysis. We begin with reflection on the formation of AGWM's missiology in light of both early official statements of purpose and subsequent practice. After a reflective analysis of that history, the final section develops two major implications of our historical review and ends with recommendations for future work. Historical Review: Early Pentecostal Missiology Here in the opening decades of the 21st century Assemblies of God World Missions (AGWM), the sending arm of the Assemblies of God USA, is one of the largest agencies in North America, and the World Assemblies of God Fellowship's over 65 million adherents makes it one of the most successful mission endeavors of the 20th century. As we move into a second century of service, there is an increasing sense for many that now is an appropriate time to revisit our history and sense of calling as a movement and mission to seek the voice of the Spirit for direction to face the mission challenges of this era. As we look to the future, it is helpful to reflect on our past. The question before us in this paper is to review the history of what has in recent years been called our 360º mission, with particular attention to some of the earliest conceptions of mission by the General Councils from 1914 into the early part of the 1920s. This section serves as an introduction to this historical exercise as we look at the formative sources of Pentecostal missiology and draw upon the notion of unresolved polar tension points as a rubric for thinking about the development of AGWM missions philosophy and strategy. Pentecostal mission, of whom the Assemblies of God is the largest agency with the largest worldwide constituency, grew out of a particular worldview and set of assumptions. Gary McGee uses the term “radical evangelicals” to describe those who during the closing decades of the 19th century sought to complete the Great Commission (McGee, 2010:90). Part of what motivated their search for a solution to the challenge of world evangelization was their critique of the Great Century of missions’ civilizing assumptions and the slow and gradual progress it implied (2010:xiii). This led to an interest in pneumatology and restoration of the dynamics found in the early church in order to see rapid results. McGee thus concluded that the key to understanding Pentecostal mission is that it was all about missiology in that it was the quest for power to fulfill mission (2010:xiii). He states that, “Early Pentecostalism arose from the eschatological and missiological concerns raised by radical evangelicals in the nineteenth-century missionary movement (2010:90). Many have noted that prior to the Azusa Street revival there were instances of tongues speech, but it was the genius of these radical evangelicals who experienced Spirit baptism to make the theological link between tongues and mission. In the initial flowering of Pentecostal movements around the nexus of power for mission other ideas were connected and part of the total package. Some of these were relatively short-lived and changed either doctrinally, as people interacted with Scripture in understanding this new experience, or in contact with on-the-ground realities. The restorationist view was also linked with a millennial view that brought urgency to the mission. The coming of the Spirit that brought the restoration of the church heralded the soon return of Christ, and this drove Pentecostal missionaries to the ends of the earth to bear witness expecting a great ingathering. Initially many believed in a missio-linguistic view of tongues that would make language study unnecessary, but this soon faded as people found they still had to learn through the traditional means of study and hard work. Eventually tongues became identified with accessing power to do mission. There was an emphasis on calling, often an extreme individualism and fear of organization, faith to trust God for provision of needs, the belief that Spirit baptism would produce a unified church, even bridging the racial divide, and the expectation of success on an unparalleled scale. What McGee points out is that you find a series of unresolved internal tensions that form polarities between Pentecostal belief and pragmatic on-the-ground realities. The success of an organization like the Assemblies of God came in part because they were able to navigate these tensions and relate to both sides of the polarity successfully without exploring or attempting to reconcile them. Some of these polarities include (McGee, 2010:140ff.): 1. They resisted organization, but organized under a national executive presbytery which also served as the missionary presbytery. 2. They felt they were a movement and not a denomination, yet to retain their evangelical identity they condemned the Oneness doctrine and adopted a Statement of Fundamental truths. 3. They believed passionately in the soon return of Christ, (in fact 1918 was widely seen as the year Jesus would return), yet in 1919 they formed a Foreign Mission department to handle communication and the 90,000 dollars that passed through to missionaries, and in 1920 joined the FMCA to help with missionaries traveling and living overseas. 4. They believed in miracles and the radical strategy of signs and wonders, yet their letters show great suffering and challenges. 5. They believed in the life of faith and provision from God, yet missionaries admitted that systematic support was better, and many explicitly made their needs known showing a belief in a corporate responsibility to get them to the field. 6. They believed in the specific guidance of the Holy Spirit yet formed as a movement in part because of ineffective practices they observed. They then gave directives from a central committee to their missionary body. 7. The put a priority on preaching the Gospel yet became involved in many charitable pursuits justifying it as the leading of the Spirit. McGee observes that many of these ideas are directly observable in the revivals from 1901 to 1908, but the Pentecostal movement “gradually developed in ways not originally envisioned by the earliest participants” (2010:90). Pentecostals organized, created mission agencies, experienced theological division, developed creedal statements and denominations, built church-related institutions, aligned themselves with conservative Evangelicalism, saw the younger churches in the global movement develop a wider screen of issues than just tongues for understanding Pentecostal identity, and saw the rise of progressive Pentecostals (2010:90). He sees this inability to achieve a cohesive mission theology related to the North American cultural preference for activism over theorizing and part of the larger Protestant approach to mission (2010:110). What is relevant to this study is the recognition that many of these polarities and unresolved tensions persist to this day in Pentecostal mission and show that AG missiology has both a Spirit- and a Word- driven side combined with a strong practical bent. It is precisely this combination of pragmatism and practicality with a strong emphasis upon and trust in the guidance of the Spirit that allowed Assemblies of God missions to avoid the pitfalls of a dead bureaucracy on the one hand, and on the other hand the flightiness of some who attributed their lack of long haul commitment to the leading of the Spirit. This also shows us that our current practice has both continuity and discontinuity with the earliest mission efforts in our organization, and that continuous change while holding to central values, like the experience of Spirit baptism for power in mission, is how our missiology continually adjusts to its setting. Finally, it shows there is no single source for Assemblies of God missiology, but rather multiple sources and a dynamic interaction with current scenarios. Historical Reflection: The Shaping of Assemblies of God Missiology 1900-1921: Toward Coordination, Efficiency, and Responsibility Understanding the missiology of the Assemblies of God sending structure (now called Assemblies of God World Missions) requires a look at the founding of the organization itself. It relates directly to one of the key unresolved tensions of Pentecostals at the turn of the century: the relationship between the freedom to be led by the Spirit without organizational or institutional constraint and the need for organization. The advertisement announcing the call for the meeting that resulted in the founding of the AG USA in April 1914 reveals this tension. While Pentecostals saw their experience of the Spirit as the power to bear witness, actual experience revealed a number of practical difficulties that organizing could address. The advertisement listed four needs: a) To know the needs of the various mission fields, b) to know how to give so that some missionaries do not suffer lack while others live in luxury, c) to discourage wasting money with those who are roving here and there and accomplishing nothing, and d) to concentrate support on missionaries who mean business (Brumback, 1961:157, also Blumhofer, 1989:287). Thus the initial conception was that the entire organization would serve as a mission sending agency and it was for that purpose called into being. Blumhofer observes that at 1916 there were some 40 Pentecostal associations in the USA, but their mission goals were diffuse and unformulated (1989:287).

Load more