CWM's Network of Theological Enquiry

A Question of Mission – A Mission of Questions

J N J (Klippies) Kritsinger

What a wonder that this question, which has been echoing down the corridors of history for two thousand years, has lost nothing of its relevance and enigma! Here we are in Kuala Lumpur in the year 2001 Anno Domini and this question keeps on intriguing and challenging us.

I believe that part of the genius of the Jewish-Christian tradition, as focused in Jesus of Nazareth, lies in its searching and evocative questions. I will come back to this again, but let me remind you of just two probing questions at the beginning of the Bible: To Adam: "Where are you?" (Genesis 3:9); and to Cain: "Where is your brother Abel?" (Genesis 4:9). There are many ways in which God's reaching out to humanity is pictured in the Bible. I want to emphasise one of those today: God is not an angry despot, ready to pulverise and humiliate, but a caring and searching parent or friend, who comes to us and – through questioning – creates space for us to respond and thus to become responsible, accountable human beings.

The life of Israel was decisively shaped by this image of a God who searches and questions, but who may also be questioned, as in liturgical laments, characterised by the agonising questions "why?" (eg Psalm 22:1, Psalm 44:24f, Jer 14:8, CAB 1:13, etc.) and "how long?" (e.g. Psalm 79:5, 80:5, 85:6, 89:47, Jer 3:5, CAB 1:2) addressed to God. Shaped by such interaction with the living God, Israel developed over the years what H D Bastian (1969:268 passim) has called a "question culture" ("Fragekultur"), which culminates in the majestic scene of Job 38-40, where Job – that relentless questioner who refused to accept the neatly wrapped up "answer theologies" of his three friends – eventually falls silent as God encounters him with a barrage of .... questions!

Jesus grew up in and was shaped by this question culture of Israel and we see that clearly in his interaction with people. So when he asks his disciples "Who do you say that I am?", he embodies that age-old tradition of faith as accountability, as being called to give account, to confess one's faith "before the people" (Mt 10:32). Today the living Christ stands before us and calls us to account here in Asia. When we have to search together for a meaningful answer to this question, I want to make the following basic remarks:

There is clearly no one final answer to this question of Jesus. It was the mistake of traditional orthodoxy and of colonial mission that it presumed to have the answer to this question, which it merely had to export to the rest of the world. What we need to agree on at this conference, I believe, is not the definitive answer to this question but two things: an attitude and a method. An attitude that will determine the way we position ourselves in the world of the 21st century, and a method by means of which we can seek – on our journey together – to discover who Jesus is for us today.

An attitude – roots and wings

As you bring up your children, you want them to have roots and wings. You want them to feel grounded and secure, to feel connected with things that count. But you also want them to think new thoughts and feel new feelings, to be able to fly in new directions (Rabbi Eugene Levy, in McDaniel 1995:23).

The deep wisdom from the Jewish tradition can help us to find a basic posture in society from which to be Christian and to do mission in the 21st century. As McDaniel (1995:4) puts it, we seek "connectedness and creativity, ... communion and adventure." This delightful paradox of being both rooted and winged at the same time can help us to be Christian in creative new ways. If we are able to hold these two dimensions in creative tension – with rootedness as the "heavy" side and wingedness as the "light" side, almost like a yin-yang – we open up space for creative theology and mission to be born. ¹

This image of roots and wings can be used in a number of ways. For example, to describe the relationship between Christian faith and other faiths: when our rootedness in the Judaeo-Christian tradition becomes dominant and we clip our own wings to prevent us from interacting freely and openly with other people of faith, we could easily become sterile conservatives or even strident fundamentalists. Conversely, when wingedness becomes dominant and we begin to lose our rootedness in the Christian tradition, we could easily become individualistic liberals who are no longer trusted or recognised by our Christian communities. The more deeply rooted we are in our Christian faith, the more confident and humble we become, so that we are able to interact more respectfully and freely with others. ²

Similarly one could use the image of roots and wings to reflect the delicate interplay between culture and faith: If I should say: "I am in the first place African and only secondly Christian," there is the danger that my rootedness in the culture and language of my own community could become so dominant that I close myself off from others and become a narrow and ethnocentric believer. Conversely, if I say: "I am firstly Christian and only secondly African," I could slip into a superficial internationalism, without organic roots in any community. The more deeply I am rooted in a community of people, however hybridised its language and culture may be, the more I am empowered to become a sensitive intercultural Christian. ³

We do the world no favour by being either wingless fanatics or rootless liberals. We need to show the globalising and fragmenting world of the 21st century ⁴ a new way, and I believe that the metaphor of roots and wings embodies such a way.

A method – the praxis cycle
In the second place we need a relevant and meaningful theological method. By this I do not mean a superficial recipe or a set of multiple-choice alternatives. We need a dynamic Christological method that leads to action – and that emerges out of action – so that our theologising does not alienate us from people, but connects us with them in an organic way. We need a Christological praxis which is inherently missiological. We need to hear the question of Jesus not only as "Who do you say that I am?" but also as "What do you do ... if this is who you say that I am?" To find this method, I want to start at an unlikely place. Jesus once prayed:

"I thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants" (Mt 11:25).

In spite of what Jesus said so clearly in this portion, and in other key sayings recorded in the Bible, the church has never really allowed children to teach it how to formulate the understanding of its faith. Of all the silenced and voiceless groups in the church, children are perhaps the most silenced and ignored, especially by academic theologians. I want to start by telling you what happened in a Sunday school class of the inner-city congregation of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa, to which my family and I belong. ⁵ It was a class that was more or less representative of South African society; it had about 90 per cent black African, 5 per cent Indian African and 5 per cent white African children, aged between nine and twelve.

One Sunday morning, after the teacher had told the class a story from the life of Jesus, a twelve-year old black child named Humphrey asked her: "This Jesus, was he a black or a white?" Wisely the teacher did not give an answer but redirected the question to the class as a whole: "What did Jesus look like?" And then a fascinating thing happened: All the children first looked down at their hands and arms, then they looked around at one another, and finally started discussing among themselves, until someone pushed forward Ashish, a young Indian boy, with general support from the class: "This is what Jesus looked like."

The conclusion of this group of children is not the only valid Christology that one could develop in an inner-city South African context, but I believe that their Christological method has much to commend it. I think they followed a highly creative theological method in answering the question of Jesus: "Who do you say that I am?" and the question of Humphrey: "This Jesus, was he a black or a white?" Briefly stated, and at the risk of reading too much into the children's actions, I think their theological method consisted of three questions: a) Who am I? Am I white or black, or what? b) Who are we? Together with whom, in what kind of community, am I asking this question? c) and then: Who is Jesus for us today? What would Jesus look like when seen through the filters of our experiences as persons and as a group?

And why did they arrive at the answer of an Indian Jesus? Perhaps they had enough cultural sense to know that the historical Jesus was neither a black African nor a white European and that of all the children in the class an Indian represented the closest to what he probably looked like. But maybe that is assuming too much. I wonder if they were not looking for a Christ who could unite them as a group, who could stand in their midst as a symbol of unity, leading them beyond the "racial" divisions of the past. In which case they found an excellent Christology for inner-city Pretoria!

However, I am more interested in their theological method, which one could describe as a three step process in which the questions of identity (Who am I?) and community (Who are we?) are addressed before one can honestly and fruitfully address the christological question (Who is Jesus for us today?). One could also relate this method to that of the "pastoral circle" popularised by Holland & Henriot (1982). ⁶ They developed a four-point pastoral circle consisting of the elements or "moments" of insertion, social analysis, theological reflection and pastoral planning. It seems to me that the contextual theological method of the Sunday school class corresponds to the first three points of the pastoral circle, namely insertion (personal involvement), social analysis and theological reflection.

Following the lead of the children, I use an adapted version of the "pastoral circle," which I prefer to call a "praxis cycle." In their book, In Word and Deed, Cochrane, de Gruchy and Peterson (1990), widened the four-point pastoral circle into a seven-point project, by adding elements of prior faith understanding, church analysis and spirituality. To my mind that makes the cycle too complicated to work with, so I settle for a five-point "praxis cycle".

Before going any further, let me explain that the term "praxis" is not simply a synonym for "practice" or action. It refers to action that is collective, transformative and integrates thinking and acting, praying and working.

An adequate Christological-missiological praxis needs to be collective because the "you" in Jesus's question (Mk 8:29) is in the plural. Individualist responses, which have become so customary under the influence of missionary pietism, are not an adequate answer to Jesus's question. The praxis cycle is an approach designed for a group of committed people who wish to think together, work together and pray together, in order to make a difference to society. This brings me, secondly, to the transformative nature of praxis. One of the key features of the Christian tradition – in its better moments – is its world-formative and world-transformative power. ⁷ So perhaps I should give my own "definition" of mission at this point:

We understand Christian mission to be a wide and inclusive complex of activities aimed at the realisation of the reign of God in history. It includes evangelism but is at the same time much wider than that. Perhaps one could say that mission is the 'cutting edge' of the Christian movement – that activist streak in the church's life that refuses to accept the world as it is and keeps on trying to change it, prodding it on towards God's final reign of justice and peace (Botha, Kritsinger & Malueke 1994:21).

The praxis cycle is designed for groups of people who wish to work together to make such a difference to their society.

Thirdly, the holistic or integrative nature of the praxis cycle. In my version of the cycle, there is a constant interplay – and a delicate balance – between the dimensions of involvement, analysis, reflection, spirituality and planning. If one or more of these dimensions are ignored or neglected, one gets missiological "shortcuts" with negative consequences.

a) The first could be called the "political activist" short-cut, which occurs when a group of Christians, working from within their faith, become so aware of the brokenness of society as they analyse the challenges facing them, that – in their attempt to change the world – they gradually neglect the dimensions of theological

reflection and spirituality in their activism, thus producing a "secularised" three-point cycle consisting only of involvement, analysis and planning;

b) A second possible short-cut is the "ivory tower" reduction of the praxis cycle to social analysis and reflection (with spirituality perhaps included). There are too many theologians at universities (and seminaries?) who limit their theological work to an interplay between social analysis and theological reflection, while ignoring personal involvement, spirituality (church involvement) and planning (working with others in concrete projects). Such a "shortcut" is woefully inadequate to address the challenges of our time and to answer the question of Jesus in Mk 8:29;

c) A third type of short-cut could be called the "missionary activist" option, which limits itself to involvement, spirituality and planning. Many Christians, with very good intentions and a huge amount of spiritual energy, ignore social analysis and theological reflection in their Christian activism, thus reducing their praxis to a spiritualising short-cut. By doing so they often repeat the mistakes of earlier generations of missionaries, because they do not take the time to learn lessons from history or to think through the ideological implications of the choices they make or the methods they employ.

We need to avoid these reductionist shortcuts if we are to develop a meaningful praxis of mission.

We need a full-blown and well-rounded praxis that creates a dynamic interplay between personal involvement, social analysis, theological reflection, communal spirituality and strategic planning. Short-cut approaches to mission produce "soft" theologies that cannot make a dent in social reality. If we want a robust and streetwise praxis of mission, we need to find the kind of wholeness expressed by this praxis cycle.

If the 21st century is to be about anything in Christian mission, then it must be about wholeness, about a creative and meaningful integration of the diverse dimensions of Christian action in society. Too often Christian churches and organisations that represent these short-cuts become polarised against each other, thus sapping a huge amount of energy that should have gone into constructive co-operation and growth. My plea is for a dialogical openness and sensitivity between all forms of Christian praxis, so that together we can become aware of the shortcuts we are taking and develop greater wholeness as we move forward together.⁸
The rest of this paper is structured around the five points of this praxis cycle.

A question of involvement (insertion)
Who am I? This was the first question the children seemed to ask in their Christological search. To look down at your hands, to be in touch with oneself – and to be honest about that – is a key dimension of personal maturity. Coming to terms with who I am, in terms of how I define myself, but also in terms of how other people define me; negotiating my own identity through interacting with the social constructs and stereotypes floating around in society. This is the search for personhood and selfhood described as follows by K. C. Abraham & M. P Joseph (200:328):

Personhood in relation to community is the new humanity. Since the preamble to our faith affirmation is the concern for people, not as objects but as subjects of their own history and dignity, claims of subjecthood and the creation of selfhood shall remain principles of mission.

Where are we inserted into social reality? How are we involved in our community? Where do we fit into the existing roles of gender, class, culture and "race" operating in society? This is where our missionary praxis has to begin, if it is to have any credibility. People who avoid these questions are trying to jump over their own shadows. The funny – but at the same time very scary – incident of the sons of Sceva in Acts 19 is a case in point: When these Jewish exorcists tried to use the name of Jesus in an exorcism ("I adjure you by the Jesus whom Paul proclaims"), the evil spirit said to them: "Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?" (Acts 19:15). Indeed, who am I? This is a fundamental question of mission praxis. Let me break this down into two dimensions: personal identity and personal commitment

Personal identity
From the heyday of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa in the 1970s comes a powerful image that expresses the struggle for selfhood and authentic humanity.This image portrays the (often painful) conversion experience from "non-white" to "black". Here is a person stripping away the negative imposed identity of the grinning "non-white" clown ("Our non-whites are happy; they are always singing and dancing") and out of it emerges a self-assertive, even angry, black person who means business and is ready to "do his own thing".⁹

Very similar to this is the moving account of a Filipina with the name of Leny Mendoza Strobel on her struggle to "undo the colonial gaze" in her life. As a woman who grew up in the Philippines, married a North American husband and eventually settled in the USA, she writes about the ways in which Filipino people, both in the Philippines and in the USA, are working to deconstruct the false self imposed on them by colonisers, to allow "an indigenous identity to replace the obsequious, inferior identity which before had no access to its own strength and identity" (Montgomery-Fate 1997:91).

What does this have to do with mission? Everything! Mission cannot mean in the first place to go and change other people or to turn their world upside down. Credible mission in the first place asks: Who am I? Unless we do this, and develop a growing reflexive competence — the ability to work with ourselves and become more authentic and peaceful within ourselves — we will transfer all our hang-ups and frustrations to other people, thus adding to their burdens.

This leads on to a dimension of spirituality, to which I return later, but which must be mentioned here. The emphasis in Buddhist and Hindu meditation on awareness, fostered through breathing exercises and the control of one's thoughts, presents an important challenge to Christian understandings of self-awareness and personal maturity. Far from being "world-negating" spiritualities (as some Christian apologists have suggested), these approaches to meditation deal very pertinently with the human body and its functions, since they believe — correctly, I think — that the only way to a meaningful spirituality is through coming to terms with one's body.

We need to learn from people of other faiths, and from the rich ecumenical treasures of Catholic and Orthodox spirituality, how to become more at peace with our bodies and within ourselves — as emotional, intuitive, intellectual and sexual beings — as we reach out to try and make a difference to the world. Too often various forms of Christian activism, whether in evangelism, education or social justice, attract people with unresolved inner struggles, thus leading to serious personality clashes and power struggles in Christian organisations. We need to do much more in personal spiritual formation to develop an irenic-yet-urgent commitment to the coming of God's reign on earth. We have much homework to do in this regard, especially in theological education.

Personal commitments
The 1976 Dar es Salaam conference of Third World theologians, where EATWOT ¹⁰ was established, rightly stated that commitment is the first act of theology (Torres & Fabella 1978:269). ¹¹ We need to be reminded, especially academic theologians like myself, of the words of Gustavo Gutiérrez (1974:308) that "all the political theologies, the theologies of hope, of revolution, and of liberation, {and we could add 'all the holistic theologies of mission'} are not worth one act of genuine solidarity with exploited social classes. They are not worth one act of faith, hope and love, committed — in one way or another — in active participation to liberate man (sic) from everything that dehumanises him and prevents him from living according to the will of the Father."

So when I join Holland & Henriot (and others) in speaking of involvement (or insertion) as a key dimension of praxis, this also includes the way one's personal identity is shaped by who one's primary interlocutors (discussion partners) are. Who am I? I am who my main discussion partners and colleagues make me to be, since my personal identity is always a social identity, expressed in relation to others. This insight is expressed in the African context by the well-known adage, occurring in most ("Bantu") African languages, motho ke motho ka batho (here in Sesotho): "A person is a person because of {other} persons." This is usually called the principle of ubuntu in an African worldview, which affirms that there is an inherently relational dimension to being human. Similar views of human solidarity are found in other cultures, and these should be treasured and affirmed as the only basis on which constructive human relationships can be built.

Who are the people that inform my decision-making and the way I interpret what I read in newspapers or see on television? The Latin verb interloquor, from which the noun interlocutor is derived, usually means "to speak to" but can also mean "to interrupt." Perhaps we need to ask who the privileged people are that we allow to interrupt our other conversations, whom we accord the status of "trump card" over our other cards.

It is significant that Jesus regularly and without embarrassment allowed himself to be interrupted by marginal and neglected people. Think of his meal with a Pharisee, interrupted by the woman who anointed his feet with her tears (Lk 7:36-50); or his walk with a whole crowd of people — in a hurry to meet a serious need in the home of Jairus — interrupted by a woman suffering from haemorrhages (Lk 8:43-48); or the mothers who brought their children to him for a blessing (Mt 19: 13-15), thus interrupting the learned conversation between the disciples and their Master; or the blind man outside Jericho, clamouring for the right to be heard (Lk 18:35-43). In each of these situations Jesus stopped, unembarrassed, and allowed the oppressed right of way over the beautiful and powerful people of the world.

It is at this point that the "preferential option for the poor," which was emphasised so strongly by Latin American liberation theologians, retains its validity. Our commitment to make a difference to the world proceeds from the premises that, "in a world full of injustice and enmity He is in a special way the God of the destitute, the poor and the wronged and that He calls his Church to follow Him in this" (Belhar Confession:13). It is through this fundamental commitment that we express our identity as the people who "belong to the Way" (Acts 9:2).

Who am I? Among whom do I insert myself in society? Whose needs and whose proposals determine my agenda? The acknowledgement of the importance of these questions helps us to avoid both the "objective truth" of fundamentalism and the pure subjectivity of individualism. It situates us missiologists as "organic intellectuals"¹² in the midst of society, with all its competing interests and groups. The answers we give to these questions do not merely have implications for our practice of mission; they are the first steps, the very foundation, of our mission praxis. Everything else flows from this.

Personal stories
Narrative is a key dimension of personal identity. In this first ("involvement") aspect of the praxis cycle it is crucial for group members, as they begin to work together, to tell their stories to one another. Such story-telling is not a preparation for mission, but the very first steps of mission praxis itself. From a similar point of view; speaking about globalisation in theological education, Dow Edgerton (1944:33) says:

My own conviction is that in the work of learning and teaching, globalisation is founded upon a telling. It is, in the first place, not an analysis, method or program. Those are vital and come in their proper time. But analysis, method and program are themselves ways of coming to terms with stories which must be told. The stories come first and last.

As group members enter each other's lives by story telling and listening, and as they learn to work together, they begin to make history and thus create new stories that need to be told. No trust is possible between praxis partners unless they confide in each other by sharing their stories of success and failure, pleasure and pain. Story-telling creates community: The narrative mode, more than other forms of self-reporting, serves to foster the sense of movement and process in individual and communal life. In that sense, the narrative framework is a human necessity. Stories hold us together and keep us apart. We tell stories in order to live (Anderson & Foley 1998:4).

Since this is a paper about the praxis cycle and not a group of colleagues using the praxis cycle, I can do little more at this point that tell a bit of my own story, in order to help the reader understand where my theological ideas come from.

Between 1769 and 1776, two brothers with the surname of Grösinger from southern Germany sailed to South Africa, where they settled (S. J. Kritsinger 1974). Their descendants, now known by the surname Kritsinger, lost their German roots and became part of the "Afrikaner" community in South Africa. Today, more than 230 years later, these descendants live in different parts of South Africa and most of them see themselves as Africans, with no other homeland. Whereas German emigrants to Canada, Australia or the USA are seldom questioned when they introduce themselves as Canadians, Australians or North Americans, white Africans are sometimes questioned when they identify themselves as such. This is clearly a result of the negative role played in Africa by many Germans (and their Afrikaner descendants) during colonialism and in South Africa's apartheid policy. In another paper I have told a more detailed story of how I became aware of racism and started working against it (Kritsinger 2001).

In this context I only wish to state that I regard myself as an African, according to the definition of Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, the well-known and highly respected leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), one of the liberation movements that played a key role in the history of South Africa. Sobukwe insisted that there is only one race, namely the human race. Consequently his definition of an African has nothing to do with skin colour or the notion of "race". He wrote: "We aim, politically, at government of the Africans by the Africans for Africans, with everybody who owes his (sic) only loyalty to Africa and who is prepared to accept the democratic rule of an African majority being regarded as a n African" (Gerhart 1978:195). Having accepted this invitation, I identify myself with the continent of Africa, celebrating the riches of our cultural diversity and working with fellow Africans to overcome our many problems.

A question of social analysis
Who are we? This seems to be the second question the Sunday school children asked in their search for the face of Christ – and the colour of Christ – in the inner city of Pretoria. Whereas the first dimension (or "moment") of mission praxis was owning up to who we are as persons, the second move we need to make is to "own" the church and to analyse the church in all its diversity — in its greatness and its brokenness — as the primary context in which we seek to confess the name of Christ and to do our mission. Here too, we need to say that context analysis, which includes church analysis, is not a preparation for mission praxis; it is an integral part of mission praxis itself, without which it will always remain an alien and irrelevant import from elsewhere.

A communal hermeneutic – a journey of discovery
Before looking at social analysis itself, I want to emphasise that we need a communal hermeneutic if we are going to develop a transformative praxis. The community of believers – as an interpretive community — is an epistemological necessity for good mission praxis. This principle is stated by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 3:18, where he prays for the Ephesians that they may "have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God." In order to comprehend all the dimensions of the unfathomable love of Christ it is necessary to interact with "all the saints" in open ecumenical fellowship. The smaller your circle of fellowship, the smaller your Christ.

In this context I wish to argue that world mission should not be seen (or done) as a voyage of conquest or empire, but as a journey of discovery. World mission is the pilgrimage of the people of God through time and space, moved by the Spirit of God to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and to continue his work on earth. We need to criss-cross the globe, from one end of the earth to another, in order to discover — together with more and more of the saints — just how wide and deep, how high and long, Christ's love is. The worldwide church — as a hugely diverse faith community — is an integral part of the hermeneutic of the gospel. And, as the Sotho proverb in South Africa has it, Go tsamaya ke go bona: "To go is to see." Worldwide witness, dialogue and service in the name of Jesus opens our eyes progressively to see who he is, to experience the gospel as surprise, as gift, as a new encounter between the eternal Christ and people created in his image across the globe.

We do not "bring Christ" to people. We are not capable of carrying Christ around in our pockets. If we have a Trinitarian faith, ¹³ we accept that God was present with people, long before Christians arrived to tell them about Jesus. We also affirm that Christ did not come to Asia or Africa by ship (with the missionaries) and that the Holy Spirit did not come to Asia or Africa by aeroplane from the USA (with Pentecostal evangelists). What we can do is to bring the Bible to people, to tell them the story of God's dealings with Israel and with Jesus, but the people we meet have already been touched by Christ, and the Spirit has long been at work in their lives. ¹⁴

By this I do not mean to make people of other faiths into "anonymous Christians", thus "sweeping them into the church through the back door" against their will. It is not an imperialistic claim, but an acknowledgement that we do not carry Christ around with us, an attitude which "cuts us down to size" as witnesses: we are merely witnesses, and in the process of witness we receive as much as we give — we are converted as much as anyone else, towards a fuller understanding of who Christ is. The account that is usually called "The conversion of Cornelius" in Bible translations (Acts 10-11) could with equal justification be called "The conversion of Peter."

This means that a Christian witness is grateful to learn more about Christ in the process of witness and to appreciate what God's Spirit has already done in other people's lives. One example, among many others, is that the inscription that the Mughal emperor Akbar placed on the Victory Gate (Buland Darwaza) at Fatehpur Sikri in North India. It reads: "Jesus (peace be upon him) said: The world is a bridge, pass over it but do not build a house on it." What do we do with such a testimony to Christ mediated to us by a Mughal emperor? Do we reject it as false, or do we receive it gratefully as something that enriches and challenges our understanding of Christ? Who do you say that I am? Lord, we have many titles with which to describe you, we have many stories and theologies to tell of what you mean to us, but give us more time, we need to meet more of your people, so that together we can more adequately fathom (and dare to express) who you are.... We begin to answer Jesus's question, "Who do you say that I am?" by exploring the question of the Sunday school children, "Who are we?" and therefore by entering into intercultural dialogue. We will approach world mission more in the spirit of Jesus when we base it not only on his command in Mt 28:18-20 but also on his question in Mt 16:15 (Who do you say that I am?). We should integrate the "Great Commission" into a holistic biblical vision that includes the "Great Commandment" of Mt 22:34-40 and the "Great Question" of Mt 16:15. Who are we? We are pilgrims moving onwards together to discover the fullness of our own faith. Rooted in our own cultural and linguistic traditions, we learn to spread our wings and become intercultural believers.

Searching all things – the Spirit of analysis
Social analysis in theology is discredited by some theologians since they see it as a Marxist exercise – and therefore as either dangerous or irrelevant. Others reject it because they believe that to make social analysis a part of theology is to accord it some authority, thus diminishing the authority of the Bible, which in their view is fatal to theology.I believe that context analysis is an inherent necessity for theology, not as an afterthought or merely as an element of "application" after the "explication" of the normative Scripture has been completed, but as an indispensable dimension of the praxis cycle. There are two Scriptural notions that seem to support this.

The first is the fact that Jesus asked his disciples to be uninformed about what was happening around them in Palestine. In fact, I want to argue that his first question lays an obligation on disciples to do careful context analysis: to investigate or research what is going on around them. Our confession of Christ is situated in a particular time and place, and it can only be a responsible, relevant articulation of who Jesus is for us if we know what the people around us believe and how they live. With these two probing questions Jesus has set an agenda for theological reflection, in which thorough context analysis is integral to theology.

My second scriptural notion comes from 1 Cor 2:10, where the apostle Paul reflects on the work of the Holy Spirit. After speaking about the hidden wisdom that God has finally revealed to the world through the Spirit, Paul makes the amasing statement: "the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God" (1 Cor 2:10). It is true that the "searching" in this particular context refers in the first place to the discernment and understanding of spiritual gifts given to believers by God, but the words "the Spirit searches everything" seems general enough to include all of reality. And this search has to do with knowing (v.11), understanding (v.12) and discerning (v.15). In this vision of the Spirit's work, I see a mandate for believers — who are guided and filled with the Holy Spirit — to "search all things" themselves.

The Holy Spirit is the searching, questioning, discerning Spirit, moving believers to ask questions in order to discern and understand what is going on in the world. The strange words "even the depths of God" add a special dimension to this verse. The verse seems to be a creative Pauline interpretation of Proverbs 20:27 ("The human spirit is the lamp of the LORD, searching every innermost part"). In the same way that a lamp can help one to penetrate into the darkest storerooms of a house, the Spirit of God is also like a lamp, with whose help we can search the deepest corners of society, whether in scientific or social research, to uncover the secret plans hatched behind the scenes to manipulate public policy, to disadvantage groups of people, to fix prices of goods, to discredit political opponents, to get cronies appointed to jobs, etc. The same Spirit also searches the very depths of God, not because there is darkness within God, but because God will always remain an inexhaustible mystery.

This is the wholeness we need for mission in the 21st century: In the same verse there is the mandate for searching scientific, social, economic and political analysis (into the deepest recesses of society) and for deep contemplative spirituality (into the very depths of God)! ¹⁵ May the Spirit make us part of God's searching and questioning mission.

The exercise of context analysis
The main purpose of my paper is not to identify the urgent issues we need to analyse at this juncture in history, but to argue for a theological method in which context analysis becomes an integral dimension of mission praxis. There are many different approaches to context analysis, depending on the type of analytical tools that one uses, resulting in a wide variety of contextual theologies and consequently in a wide diversity of mission praxis. The two publications sponsored by CWM (Wickeri, Wickeri & Niles 2000; Wickeri 2000) make a huge contribution towards identifying the key issues to be analysed in the exercise of mission during the 21st century. All I wish to underline at this stage is the enormous challenge posed to the church in Africa by the AIDS pandemic. We shall have to pool all our resources of context analysis, theological reflection, spirituality and strategic planning if we are to stem this tide.

A question of theological reflection
Who is Jesus for us today? This was the third (and final) step in the theological method of our young interlocutors from Pretoria's inner city. At this point in their method they seemed to consider what the Bible says about Jesus, after owning up to their own identities and examining the nature of the group in which they found themselves. There can be no creative and inspiring mission if we do not return, again and again, to search the Scriptures, to let the searching Spirit take us also into the deepest recesses of the Bible, in order to rediscover our mission — and also to admit where the Bible itself as an ancient document has oppressive features — or features that can be used (and have been used) in Christian history to oppress women, slaves, children and "others."

Whatever our view of Scripture and its inspiration or inerrancy, at the heart of the Christian faith stands Jesus of Nazareth, whose mission we are called and sent to continue on earth. So in this section of my paper I wish to highlight a few aspects of the life and ministry of Jesus that may gain particular relevance for us in the light of the theme of this conference.

The questioning Jesus
As I pointed out at the outset of the paper, the people of Israel developed a "question culture," due to the peculiar nature of God's covenant dealings with them. Out of this emerged a special rabbinic question culture, in which the rabbis developed questioning to a fine art, not only as a didactic tool for teaching disciples but as a fundamental feature of their theology. The Jewish scholar Frantz Rosenzweig said once that a teacher is "a choir leader conducting a choir of questioners" (in Bastian 1969:280). An exasperated disciple once asked his teacher: "Rabbi, why do you always answer a question with a question?" To which the rabbi — predictably — replied: "Do I?"

Jesus was shaped by this question culture of Israel, as we can see in various New Testament incidents. I want to highlight some of these, in an attempt to find a Christology and a missiology that could show us the way in this new century.

Hans-Dieter Bastian (1969:282) has pointed out the close affinity between questions and parables. When hearing a parable of Jesus, his hearers were addressed in their real life context, without an escape route and willy-nilly became involved in the challenge posed by the reign of God, which is at hand. According to Bastian (1969:284), the "Christus praesens" is always the "Christus quaerens" — the present Christ is always the questioning Christ. So let us explore a "Biblical foundation for mission" on the basis of the questions asked by Jesus, not his commands or promises. I do this because the theme of this conference made me realise how powerful Jesus's questions actually are, and this convinced me that they are a seriously neglected resource in biblical reflections on mission.

Let me list a few key questions that Jesus asked:

Luke 18:41 What do you want me to do for you?
John 5:6 Do you want to be made well?
John 6:67 Do you also wish to go away?
John 8:10 Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?
Mark 8:27 Who do people say that I am?
Mark 8:29 Who do you say that I am?
Mark 15:34 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
John 21:15 Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Acts 9:4 Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?

It is impossible to examine these portions in detail, but the general impression created by this (very incomplete) selection of questions is that Jesus, through his questions, creates space for a unique response by every person he meets. His questions are not humiliating or interrogating, but evocative and empowering, calling forth genuine and life-changing responses from people. It is in the nature of such searching questions that they respect the dignity and integrity of the person involved and enable him/her to "make a move" across the open space created by the question.

Too many of our evangelistic attempts "push people into a corner" and try to persuade them through various means to switch allegiance and "join our group." The same can happen in social action groups, since they often confront authorities in rather blatant ways with their injustice, which makes them not very different from evangelistic activists in the style (and effect) of their efforts. What seems to distinguish these examples from Jesus is that he respected his hearers more fundamentally and made it possible for them to change without shaming or humiliating them. But at the same time his "success" did not depend on his having "converts." In Jn 6:67 he even asks his inner circle of twelve disciples whether they also wanted to leave! Very few evangelistic preachers would be prepared to ask such a question! But it shows that, through his questions, Jesus created around him a space of freedom, a liberated zone, in which people could become themselves and take the courage to change. Jesus would rather have no followers than to have reluctant or conditional ones. He is the Chosen One, the universal sign and sacrament of salvation, with no intention to "conquer the world." He creates an open space around him where genuine faith can arise and grow.

Evangelism, as a key dimension of mission, is still burdened with the notion of numerical growth as its main criterion for success, whereas it is clear that Jesus had a different "arithmetic" (see H. —R. Weber, "God's arithmetic"). We should continue the kind of witness that Jesus rendered, as people who are solidly rooted in the gospel but do not have a "noisy" or "crusading" religion (Koyama) that we keep on "pushing" at people.

A question to the church
Until now I have suggested that the church should follow Christ's questioning approach in its witness. In other words, I have presented the questioning Christ primarily as an example for Christians. But that is a serious reduction of the theme. In the first place, perhaps, we should see Christ's mission as that of questioning the church itself. Before we can work shoulder-to-shoulder with Christ to continue his mission on earth, we first need to face the probing questions he directs at us.

Mission is — and will always remain — a challenge to the church. This is one of the key reasons why we need to affirm the term missio Dei: to remind us never to take mission for granted, since in the final analysis it is not our project. The One whose mission it is confronts us with questions such as "Where is your brother, Abel?" Who do you say that I am? Do you also want to go away? Do you love me? Unless we constantly expose ourselves to the purifying effect of these questions, our mission can easily degenerate into ethnocentrism power games or cultural propaganda. The risen Christ not only stands behind us as the one who commands us to "Go, therefore" or beside us with the promise to be with us to the end of the age; He also stands in front of us as the one who questions our motives and methods as we risk to do mission in his name.

New christological images
There a re many christological images being produced across the world to help us discover Christ in new ways, not as the imperial or colonial Lord who thrives on subjected followers, but as a humble Christ, at home among people, inviting them, empowering them and washing their feet. Such a Christ is portrayed by the African sculptor, Jackson Hlungwani, in a wood sculpture entitled "Christ the soccer champion." It shows a figure with an outstretched leg that has just scored a goal. He also wears a crown, so this Christ is clearly portrayed as a king. There he is, a people's hero, the epitome of success in the eyes of urban African culture: a royal soccer champion who has the world at his feet. And yet, he does not wave his hands in the air as a gesture of victory; on the contrary, when you look closely you see that he has his right hand to his ear, listening intently. To the applause of the crowds? Not likely. He must be listening to the people whose sighs and whispers are drowned out by the noise of the crowds. Here is a new, yet old, christological image: the popular and powerful champion who reveals his power by giving priority attention to the suffering and the excluded.

"As the Father has sent me, so I send you" (John 20:21). May we find the freedom and the inner strength not to gather "fan clubs" of people around us who follow Christ conditionally, for the sake of the benefits they got from him, but to develop unconditional and non-manipulative relationships that grow through mutual questioning and listening. Proclamation is important, because we have something to announce, but this dimension of Christian communication must be tempered by respectful dialogue and sharing, in order to discover what God has already done in people's personal lives, cultures and religions.

A theology of apostasy?
In our globalising world we need not only a theology of conversion but also a theology of apostasy. In this pluralistic and market-dominated world, where we meet other religions who are actively pursuing their own missions, we find people switching their religious allegiances more easily. Religion becomes a commodity that you can exchange for another if it no longer fulfils all your needs, like switching to another bank or buying a better car. What do we do in such a situation when our members join another religious community? This is the acid test for our "theology of religions." It is relatively easy to develop theories of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, as many theologians have done, but what practical action do these theories help us to take? I find the set of interfaith "ideologies" identified by David Lochhead (1989), namely hostility, isolation, competition, partnership, and dialogue much more useful than the three theories of exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism used by other theologians.

The question how I evaluate another religion is most clearly revealed in what I do when one of my church members joins that religion. If we let people go easily, without a fuss, we are not taking ourselves (or the gospel) seriously; surely, it matters if people leave the church to join other religions. On the other hand, if we refuse to let people go or put huge pressure on them, finally sending people away with a curse or condemnation, we reveal an attitude of hostility that is unworthy of Christ. If we simply ignore what is happening, however, we fail to deal with this fundamental theological question and we miss an important pastoral opportunity. Should we send people away to another faith community with our blessing, as we do when someone joins another Christian church? Perhaps we could develop a concrete contextual "theology of religions" by developing a pastoral approach to deal with apostasy.

A question of spirituality
This is the deepest secret of our mission, the inner heart of the whole enterprise, which distinguishes it from propaganda, advertising and conquest. Pietist mission nurtured an individualist spirituality, focused on personal Bible study and intercession. This has shaped the lives of millions of believers across the globe, but I believe that the most conducive contexts in which to nurture a new spirituality for mission in the 21st century are the creative use of music and the sacrament of the Lord's Supper (Eucharist).

Music-and-dance is an indispensable feature of Christianity, at least in Africa. It expresses the spontaneous joy of believers and succeeds in involving visitors and "outsiders" in a way that preaching or discussion could never do. Exuberant African worship communicates in a non-aggressive way the fact that everyone is welcome and nobody is condemned. Drawing on traditional values of African culture, it reinforces in a Christian idiom the gracious invitation extended to all people. Whether people respond or not, they are made to feel welcome and they are valued as people.

The Eucharist is the key to such a missionary spirituality because it is Christ who invites us to the Table; he does not command or threaten or bribe us to do so. And an invitation is a kind of question: "Would you like to join us at the table?" Around the table an open space is created, into which we are called. The basic tenor of a Table-centred spirituality is therefore the undeserved grace of God in Christ. This is the only basis on which non-triumphalistic witness can proceed: beggars telling other beggars where they found bread (D. T. Niles). Mission is therefore inherently eucharistic and the Eucharist is inherently missionary. There is no way to separate being Christ's table companions and continuing his mission.

Being Christian and doing mission are inextricably bound together at the table, in a way that does not happen quite that clearly in any other Christian ritual. That is why the Eucharist can become the prime learning ground for a grace-based and non-aggressive mission praxis. The Eucharist also nurtures a communal spirituality, where it is quite clear that there is no private Christianity or individualist relationship with God. It also fosters a kenotic lifestyle, since the One whose death and resurrection we commemorate and celebrate is the one who washed his disciples' feet and gave himself sacrificially for the realisation of God's reign on earth.

The spirituality nurtured at the Lord's Table is communal and grace-based, which is why it has a leveling effect on Christians, if practised creatively. It is a radically egalitarian ritual that inculcates a spirituality of embrace rather than exclusion (Volf 1996). Islam, with its annual ritual of the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) presents a very powerful challenge to Christian faith and practice. In the early 1980s, when apartheid was still firmly entrenched in South Africa, this presented a particularly acute challenge to me personally and I wondered whether we had anything in Christianity that could have a comparable symbolic power and exert a similar effect on society. I asked myself whether the church had a qiblah (a direction in which to pray), but one day during a church service, while walking forward to the Communion Table, it struck me that the Eucharist is our pilgrimage ritual. The axis mundi, (center of the world) around which our symbolic world as Christians revolves, is the death of Jesus on the cross, presented to us ritually and symbolically at the Table. Jesus said according to Jn 12:31-32: "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." Such a magnetic and non-coercive Christology can produce a spirituality that will root us deeply in an incarnational Christian faith and at the same time give us the wings to interact respectfully with people of other faiths (and of no faith), to co-operate with them for the good of society.

It is necessary, however, to go one step further, because not everybody accepts the invitation to come to the Lord's Table. Sadly, not all Christians live in eucharistic fellowship with one another, and the vast majority of people of other faiths do not — and will not — accept the invitation when it is extended to them. So, while the Eucharist shapes us for sensitive witness and inter-faith cooperation, we need an even wider spirituality, which roots us in solidarity with humanity as a whole and with the created universe.

Two notions can perhaps help us here: First the idea of the African Muslim scholar, Ali Mazrui (1991), that the First Supper took place on African soil at the distant beginnings of the human race. If humanity evolved on the African continent, as some research seems to suggest, then there must have been a moment when a family first sat down after a hunt and consciously had a human meal together, as opposed to merely sharing the spoils of a kill. That First Supper can also be commemorated at the eucharistic table in church, as we draw everyone's attention to the fact that we are human — together with all other human beings. This fits in well with Prof C S Song's emphasis on creation in our reconception of mission. ¹⁷

Another spiritual resource is the story of the Jewish rabbi who had asked his students: "When does the day begin?" They made various suggestions: "Is it when you can distinguish a fig tree from an olive tree at a distance? Is it when you can distinguish a sheep from a goat at a distance?" When the rabbi wasn't satisfied with their proposals, he said: "When one human being looks into the face of another and says: 'You are my sister,' r 'You are my brother', then the night is over and the day has begun." We need such a spirituality of recognition, because a new day in human relationships will not be ushered in by an approach that specialises in seeing distinctions and differences (between trees, sheep, goats or people); a new day will dawn only if we develop a spirituality that recognises human similarities and commonalities, while celebrating our differences. Once again, it requires a spirituality of roots and wings.

A question of planning
The praxis cycle will remain incomplete unless the cumulative effect of the earlier dimensions of involvement, context analysis, theological reflection, and spirituality leads to concrete projects — and unless those projects in turn lead to a renewed cycle of involvement, analysis, etc., spiraling onwards into a progressively more rooted and winged mission praxis.

A helpful insight comes from the relatively unknown Saint Exuperius (4th century) who is reported to have said: "To love someone is not to look at that person, but to look in the same direction." Love has a face-to-face dimension, but the basic posture of love is shoulder-to-shoulder. Loving our neighbours, whether Christian or not, therefore means facing a common future and working towards it together. It would be presumptuous of me to suggest which projects would be meaningful in East Asia. In terms of the theological praxis model I have suggested here, such projects must emerge from the foregoing dimensions of the cycle, developed by committed Christian groups as well as groups of Christians working together with people of other faiths.

Conclusion
The 21st century needs an inclusive mission and missiology. We must learn from one another how to hold together Pentecostal urgency and Roman Catholic gentleness; Reformed-Presbyterian theologising and North-American/East Asian pragmatism, etc., so that the church of Christ may mobilise all its cultural resources, economic strengths, and spiritual insights in the task of continuing Christ's mission on earth: The mission of the One who stands in our midst even today, asking his probing, empowering and liberating questions.

Footnotes
1 This is similar to the view of Felix Wilfred (2000:87ff) that we need a series of 'balancing acts' in mission.

2 Niles (2000:110) formulates this as follows: 'Our hope is that ... the deeper sharing of life, devotion and insight with people of other faiths will lead to a deeper and more comprehensive expression of one's own normative vision and a deeper appreciation of the other's vision.'

3 Niles (2000:107) speaks of avoiding overemphasis on both similarity and difference, in order to open up a 'space between the subjects' similarity and difference' in which a constructive 'comparative enterprise' can flourish.

4 Kavunkal (2000:372), writing from an Asian perspective, describes the 'postmodern' world as being characterised – paradoxically – by both globalisation and fragmentation.

5 I used a similar description of this incident also in a recent publication (Kritsinger 2001:264).

6 This method was first developed by Catholic theologians in Latin America. A key figure was Father (later Cardinal) Cardijn, a Belgian priest working among Catholic workers and students in Latin America. He developed the See-Judge-Act method for Christian action groups, which was later refined and adapted by various other theologians into a 'pastoral circle'.

7 Nicholas Wolterstorff has developed this in the chapter "World-formative Christianity" in his book Unitl justice and peace embrace (Wolterstorff 1983:3-22), with special reference to the 'restless disciplined reformism' characteristic of the social piety of early Calvinism.

8 For this reason I question the strategy of the CCA-CWM Theological Roundtable to identify twelve "Approaches to mission which we reject" (Wickeri 2000:45). Such an approach may lead to further polarisation among missiologists rather than greater understanding and cooperation.

9 This image has lost nothing of its relevance and power, even though we must admit that every truth has its time and that there is the danger that self-assertive and liberated black subjects of history may themselves become oppressors thirty or forty years later, when they have attained political and economic power.

10 Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians.

11 The full quotation reads: 'We reject as irrelevant an academic type of theology that is divorced from action. We are prepared for a radical break in epistemology which makes commitment the first act of theology and engages in critical reflection on the praxis of the reality of the Third World' (Torres & Fabella 1978:269).

12 This term was coined by Antonio Gramsci, the 20th century Italian Marxist thinker-activist. For Gramsci, an organic intellectual is someone who is directly connected to a social group (or class) and who uses his/her intellectual skills and energy within that group, thinking with, for and among people. For Gramsci, these people were especially the poor, the unemployed, and the exploited. Organic intellectuals differ from "traditional intellectuals," since the latter have fixed social positions and work hard to retrain them, whereas organic intellectuals are "the thinking and organising element of a particular fundamental social class," who are distinguished by "their function in directing the ideas and aspirations of the class to which they organically belong" (Hoare & Smith 1971:3) and therefore attempt to make a difference to society.

13 To support this view one need not subscribe to every detail of the full-blown Trinitarian doctrine as formulated in terms of Hellenistic philosophy at the Council of Chalcedon (451). Even a rudimentary trinitarianism, based on Scripture portions such as John 1:1-18 would lead to this implication.

14 I agree with the view of Robert Schreiter (1985:29) in this regard: 'The development of local theologies depends as much on finding Christ already active in the culture as it does on bringing Christ to the culture. The great respect for culture has a christological basis. It grows out of a belief that the risen Christ's salvific activity in bringing about the kingdom of God is already going on before our arrival.'

15 Felix Wilfred (2000:88) expresses a similar sentiment when he proposes that Christian mission should practise the 'balancing act' of 'reinterpreting the prophetic through the mystical'.

16 The whole praxis cycle is theological, since it is impossible to separate the five dimensions from each other, but this dimension of the cycle concentrates on what some would call 'theology proper', i.e. the interpretation of Scripture, the study of Christian history, the systematic thinking through of Christian doctrine, etc.

17 See the book by C.S. Song (1977) entitled Christian mission in reconstruction.

List of references
Anderson, Herbert & Foley, Edward. 1998. Mighty stories, dangerous rituals. Weaving together the human and divine. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Bastian, Hans-Dieter. 1969. Theologie der Frage. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag.
Belhar Confession, 1986. Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa. Belhar: LUS Publishers.
Botha, Nico, Kritsinger, Klippies & Maluleke, Tinyiko. 1994. Crucial issues for Christian mission — A missiological analysis of contemporary South Africa. International Review of Mission 83 (January), 21-36.
Cochrane, Jl, de Gruchy, J.W. & Peterson, R. 1990. In word and deed. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications.
Edgerton, Dow. 1994. Stand by me, in Beyond theological tourism: Mentoring as a grassroots approach to theological education, edited by Susan B. Thistlethwaite and George F. Cairns. Maryknoll: Orbis, 16-33.
Gerhart, Gail. 1978. Black Power in South Africa. The evolution of an ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. (Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1974. A theology of liberation. Maryknoll: Orbis.
Hoare, Quintin & Smith, Geoffrey N. 1971. Introduction, in Gramsci 1971, 3-4.
Holland, Joe & Henriot, Peter. 1982. Social analysis: Linking faith and justice. Maryknoll: Orbis.
Kavunkal, Jacob. 2000. Conquest or presence — Mission in Asia in the new millennium. Verbum SVD, 41(3): 371-394.
Kritsinger, J.N.J. 2001. Becoming aware of racism in the church. The story of a personal journey, in Towards an agenda for contextual theology. Essays in honour of Albert Nolan, edited by McGlory Speckman and Larry T. Kaufmann. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 231-275.
Kritsinger, S.J. (ed.) 1974. Gedenkboek oor die famillie Kritsinger. Pretoria: J.L. van Schaik.
Lochhead, David. 1989. The dialogical imperative. Maryknoll: Orbis.
McDaniel, Jay B. 1995. With roots and wings. Christianity in an age of ecology and dialogue. Maryknoll: Orbis.
Montgomery-Fate, Tom. 1997. Beyond the white noise. Mission in a multi-cultural world. St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press.
Niles, Damayanthi M.A. 2000. In search of theological method that takes plurality seriously in the task of mission, in Wickeri 2000, 101-112.
Schreiter, Robert J. 1985. Constructing local theologies. Maryknoll: Orbis.
Song, Choan-Seng. 1977. Christian mission in reconstruction — an Asian analysis. Maryknoll: Orbis.
Torres, Sergio & Fabella, Virginia (eds) 1978. The emergent gospel. Theology from the developing world. London: Geoffrey Chapman.
Volf, Miroslav. 1996. Exclusion & embrace: A theological exploration of identity, otherness, and reconciliation. Nashville: Abingdon Press.
WCRP. 1991. See World Conference on Religion and Peace.
Wickeri, Philip L. (ed) 2000. The people of God among all God's peoples: Frontiers in Christian mission. Hong Kong: CCA; London: CWM.
Wickeri, Philip L., Wickeri, Janice & Niles, Damayanthi (eds) 2000. Plurality, power and mission. Intercontextual theological explorations on the role of religion in the new millennium. London: CWM.
Wilfred, Felix 2000. Our neighbours and our Christian mission: Deconstructing mission without destroying the gospel, in Wickeri 2000, 78-100.
World Conference on Religion and Peace. 1991. Believers in the future: Proceedings of the National Inter-Faith Conference on Religion-State Relations, December 2-4 1990, Johannesburg. Cape Town: WCRP.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1983. Until justice and peace embrace. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.