While the statement articulates a brief yet robust doctrine of the church and rightly highlights the moral decline within mission organizations and among Christian leaders, it unfairly places the blame for these issues on integral mission. Ironically however, in Clause 43, the same statement embraces the essence of integral mission through its threefold theme of “Christ-filled presence, Christ-centered proclamation, and Christlike practice.” It also described evangelism as essential to the Church’s witness, without making it “primary” or “central.” Therefore, the criticism of “integral mission” in one portion of the statement and the indirect endorsement of it in another could be an unintended contradiction. It could also be an attempt to leave behind the term altogether for all the baggage it carries within modern-western evangelicalism.
On the other hand, Stetzer, a popular evangelical missiologist, has found the Seoul statement lacking in its emphasis on the “primacy” of evangelism. He suggests the following as an addition to paragraph 45 of the statement:
We embrace holistic mission, while also acknowledging the history of Christians in generations past, who, like us, wanted to declare and display Christ, yet saw their evangelistic focus diminish over time. We remain committed to keeping evangelism central and indispensable in our understanding of mission, and to making it a priority in our lives and ministries.
He argues in his response that “in a time of aggressive religious pluralism (when evangelism receives such significant pushback), evangelism (‘declaring’) needs greater focus, particularly in a time of evangelistic decline.” Although Stetzer is not against “holistic mission” (which is a term that is used interchangeably with “integral mission”), he is emphatic that the way to combat mission drift in the next generation is to highlight “evangelism [as] central to the mission.” In response to this discussion, Chris Wright, a key leader in the shaping of the Cape Town commitment, implied the need to reunite proclamation and social action in an interview, highlighting that “we wouldn’t have to relate them if we hadn’t separated them in the first place.”
As a young leader, I find the concerns about both mission drift and evangelicalism’s moral decline misplaced. It seems to me that what is at stake for the church is not the rank or priority of evangelism, but the credibility of the evangelist(s). While the diminishing of proclamation in Christian mission can be a sign of complacency, compromise, and/or cowardice, the gospel message cannot be neatly separated from the medium. The gospel message is inadvertently shaped and substantiated by the messenger. Why else is the gospel witness entrusted to the members of the body of Christ, the church, who are not only empowered by the Spirit but are being conformed to the image of Christ by the Spirit? Here the language of embodiment is crucial as the gospel is always incarnational. This is an emphasis that is maintained in the concept of “integral mission.” Removing the gospel from realm of embodiment is to remove it from the imperative of social action. If the gospel is merely an announcement, it bears no accountability for how that same announcement has a cruciform and incarnational shape.
Also, contrary to what the Seoul statement claims, “integral mission” has always been concerned about holiness and moral integrity. But these concerns are not absent of a social dimension since sin and the consequences of sin are not isolated individualistic events. As the Micah Network Declaration on Integral Mission explains, “Integral mission is not simply that evangelism and social involvement are to be done alongside each other. Rather, in integral mission our proclamation has social consequences as we call people to love and repentance in all areas of life.”1
My sense is not that integral mission has failed. It is the church that fails when it continues to elevate pragmatism over the slow ferment of Christian mission as a fruit of discipleship. In the words of The Cape Town commitment, “Arguably the scale of un-Christlike and worldly leadership in the global Church today is glaring evidence of generations of reductionist evangelism, neglected discipling and shallow growth.”
This kind of emphasis on discipleship and the church’s moral credibility directly confronts evangelicalism’s industrial complex. It reevaluates the market values of profitability, power, and influence for kingdom values of spiritual and ethical integrity. As a result, virtues such as patience and humility become central to how the church conceives its mission as opposed to being driven by numbers and statistics.
It is only through an organic relationship between words and deeds can we mitigate the tendencies to think in terms of “the ends justify the means.” The Manila Manifesto urges the church that in the footsteps of the human career of Christ, “[w]e are called today to a similar integration of words and deeds. In a spirit of humility we are to preach and teach, minister to the sick, feed the hungry, care for prisoners, help the disadvantaged and handicapped, and deliver the oppressed” (italics added).
In contrast, what was apparent at the Seoul gathering was a triumphalist attitude based on the potential of AI and digital technology to accomplish world evangelization. Padilla’s prophetic insight from 1974 comes to mind:
[If] the strategy for world evangelization is tied up to technology, then obviously the ones who have the final word on the strategy that the church is to follow in the future are those who have the technical know-how as well as the resources to make the necessary investigations. The church in the Third World has nothing to say on the matter. Isn’t this again a way to identify the Gospel with worldly power, a way to perpetuate the dominion/dependence patterns that have often characterized missionary work for the last hundred years? What becomes of the universal character and the unity of the church of Christ? But perhaps these things don’t matter, after all—the real problem is to produce the greatest number of Christians at the least possible cost in the shortest possible time!
1 Micah Network, “Micah Network Declaration on Integral Mission,” September 27, 2001. Italics added.
