One hundred years ago, a small group of Quakers gathered at a home in Whittier, California to plan for the Training School for Christian Workers (TSCW), forerunner to Azusa Pacific University. The catalog and prospectus of 1900 listed among the objectives of the school: "To impart information concerning mission fields; to inspire missionary enthusiasm; and to cultivate a passion for winning of souls . . ."(1) For both faculty and students, the world was their parish. Following rigorous Bible training, they sold their belongings and set out to preach the gospel in foreign fields, often suffering great hardship. During the first two years of the TSCW's existence, more than 80 percent of the student body would be sent out as cross-cultural missionaries. A century later, the APU freshman class of 2000 faces a radically different world-and missionary challenge. The Industrial Revolution has given way to the Information Age. Biotechnology is leading to a world in which plants, animals, and human beings are going to be partly made with human hands. Transnational corporations ply a borderless world and increasingly control a global commercial culture that is accelerating the breakdown of the planet's life support systems and widening the gap between the rich and the poor. More than 100 million people worldwide are on the move, from south to north and east to west. Affluent migrants follow the flows of international capital and modern education. Others are political, environmental, or economic refugees who find themselves "left out" of the global economy. Both types are transforming the racial and religious complexion of cities as diverse as Amsterdam and Ankara, London and Los Angeles. (APU itself exists within a 70 percent Latino city and is flanked by an Islamic mosque on one side and a Buddhist temple on the other.) Under the driving force of urban growth, local ecologies grapple with perilous levels of overcrowding, air and water pollution, and toxic waste. Diverse groups sharing a common geography compete for enough land, water, work, and recognition to sustain their lives. Increasingly, the tragic end of this struggle for survival is civil unrest and war, even genocide. Each of these global realities was virtually nonexistent in kind or degree 10 decades ago. During the colonial era in which the Training School was founded, missions-minded believers assumed that the reshaping of the world that would follow the conversion of peoples would be in the image of the West. The gospel that made Western civilization strong and great would do the same for them. The non-Christian world was primitive, dark, and degenerate, while the Christianized West was civilized, enlightened, and normative. Missionaries saw little need to understand, much less build upon, the customs, morés, wisdom, and arts of native lands. (Why try to relate the gospel to local cultures when the latter are destined for destruction?) One needed only to sacrifice oneself without reservation to rescue the perishing in distant lands before Judgment Day. This mentality tended to reduce complex individuals-in-community to disembodied "souls" to be won by any means necessary, as quickly as possible. |
An APU education that is genuinely missional in character will prepare all students to pioneer truth in all spheres of society—in education, health care, politics, law, business, social services, media, sports, science, art, music, and the rest, in order to lead people to Christ and to make the world more pleasing for Christ. Their mission will involve announcing the Good News in culturally authentic ways, struggling against the abuses of corporate capitalism, overcoming violence and waging peace, protecting the environment, engaging with people of other faiths, and establishing counter-cultural communities of Christ-followers. In most cases, it will be a distinctively local and urban mission. As missiologist Ray Bakke is fond of saying: "Mission is no longer about crossing the oceans, jungles, and deserts, but about crossing the streets of the world's cities." At the dawn of a new millennium, many Christian organizations are uncertain of their mission and unable to muster the optimism and momentum of days past. Certainly the romance of missions that captivated the founders of the Training School for Christian Workers is largely absent within the APU community of 2000. We stand at the end of a long era that is coming to a slow close, wondering what shape mission will take in the coming decades. The goal of history is clear: "to reconcile all things to Christ, whether things on earth or things in heaven" (Colossians 1:19) through the energized witness of the Church (Ephesians 3:10). It is for us to boldly imagine new wineskins for the new wine of God's Spirit-mission structures dedicated to comprehending God's vision of and for the world, to discerning the changing frontiers of the gospel, to cultivating new depths of cultural sensitivity, to establishing mutual and interdependent relationships in mission, and to persisting in the complex process of individual and social transformation. 1 Sheldon Jackson, Azusa Pacific University: One Hundred Years of Christian Service and Scholarship, 1899-1999. Azusa, CA: Azusa Pacific University, 1999. Richard Slimbach, Ph.D., chair of and professor in the Department of Global Studies and Sociology Originally published in APU Life Fall 2000, Vol. 13, No. 3. |
