Last week, I spent some time with friends who are exploring ways to help churches and their leaders work out a wider conception of what it means to do Christian ministry.
We talked about holistic mission and how people find the different terminologies being used in talking about it helpful (or not) especially in the very polarized religious contexts of the Philippines.
I came home really gripped by our conversation and recall similar/parallel reflections especially after the 4th Congress of the Lausanne Movement in South Korea last year. There were intense conversations on how still, in 2025, the tension continues between those who emphasize the work of evangelism (aka #prioritism) and those who feel it should come alongside and inseparable from works of social justice (aka #integralmission).
So, can’t we just say ‘mission’ and not put any qualifier/adjective before it? One observer at the 4th Lausanne Congress actually said that in the resulting Seoul Statement, it ignored Integral Mission* totally and in its place offered a brand new emerging mission framework: the 3Ps of presence, proclamation, and practice. (see Evangelical Review of Theology Journal, 49/1)
But consider this line from the Radical Discipleship group of the 1st Lausanne Congress in 1974:
“Men will look as they listen and what they see must be at one with what they hear. The Christian community must chatter, discuss and proclaim the gospel; it must express the gospel in its life as the new society, in its sacrificial service of others as a genuine expression of God’s love, in its prophetic exposing and opposing of all demonic forces that deny the Lordship of Christ and keep men less than human; in its pursuit of real justice for all men; in its responsible and caring trusteeship of God’s creation and its resources.”
To which, Rene Padilla, remarked, “This definition of holistic mission as including what the church IS, what the church DOES, and what the church SAYS can hardly be improved.” So, well, go figure…
That being said, I guess, it remains helpful to have Integral Mission as a point of reflection in the pursuit of a more innovative, impactful, and authentic ministries in different parts of the world. Some reasons, top of my head, below:
Theological Reason: Mission is the mother of theology or it ought to be. Unfortunately, in the course of time and history, there are theologies that were developed which practically ‘maimed’ mission and reduced it to the sensibilities, demands, and context of a particular geographical region. A study in Korea, for example, revealed how Dispensational Theology, the version imported from the US, can be closely linked to the local churches’ apathy towards responsible dealings with the environment and the rest of creation. And so, you need a robust theology of mission that could serve as an alternative and give people a firm grounding for a more well-rounded approach to Christian witness, one that is more life-giving than death-dealing.
Historical Reason: Integral Mission is a critical moment in the history of evangelicalism. It is what happens when North American missiology encounters the missiology of the Majority World. In 1974, Rene Padilla carried the voice of the then so-called Third World leaders when he delivered what is called as the “speech that shook the evangelical world.” Basically, he critiqued certain influential brand of missiology developed from the West as a kind of “Gospel with no teeth.” A gospel that brought forth ministries with nothing much to say to people’s oppression brought about by social inequality perpetuated by the powers that be. Rene issued an invitation to reimagine the mission of God’s people in the world in such a way that is not truncated, not ’mutilado’ (mutilated) but instead more ’integrale’ (whole, not lacking anything). Hence, Integral-Mission. Today, young people will describe it as a ‘decolonial’ moment which surely disrupted the old imperial order of things.
Decolonial Reason: It is unfortunate that later on Integral Mission was also hijacked by the habits and structures of imperial imagination. Whereas Integral Mission is a solid and concrete example of a locally-rooted theologizing from Latin America with profound missional implications, and provides as well a sharp decolonial pushback to the hegemonic mission models of its time, it soon was universalized, objectivized, exactly in the mold of Western missiology. Instead of seeing it as a starting point, it got framed as ‘the’ end point. But it did miss the point, right?
From a decolonial perspective, Integral Mission swings the door wide open for people of different contexts to interrogate the single-story of missions that they have been told, confront its failings, and articulate a truly context-rooted perspective of mission that shall resonate with the language, realities, and metaphors of the corner of the world they live in. Something that can be traced back all the way to the model of Apostle Paul when he himself tried to figure out fresh pathways for the Greek churches when it was set free from the religious wineskins of the Jewish believers.
How about you? Are you still talking about Integral Mission?
-Rei Lemuel Crizaldo (July 22, 2025)
*Notes: for those wondering what is Integral Mission, this article by Jonathan Cho (Can you feed the poor with a Bible?) provides a short and down-to-earth introduction.