La semaine derni\u00e8re, j’ai pass\u00e9 du temps avec des amis qui cherchent des moyens d’aider les \u00e9glises et leurs dirigeants \u00e0 \u00e9laborer une conception plus large de ce que signifie le minist\u00e8re chr\u00e9tien.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nous avons parl\u00e9 de la mission holistique et de la fa\u00e7on dont les gens trouvent utiles (ou non) les diff\u00e9rentes terminologies utilis\u00e9es pour en parler, en particulier dans le contexte religieux tr\u00e8s polaris\u00e9 des Philippines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Je suis rentr\u00e9 chez moi tr\u00e8s marqu\u00e9 par notre conversation et je me suis souvenu de r\u00e9flexions similaires\/parall\u00e8les, notamment apr\u00e8s le 4e Congr\u00e8s du Mouvement de Lausanne en Cor\u00e9e du Sud l’ann\u00e9e derni\u00e8re. Il y a eu des discussions intenses sur le fait qu’en 2025, la tension persiste entre ceux qui mettent l’accent sur l’\u00e9vang\u00e9lisation (alias #prioritism) et ceux qui estiment qu’elle doit aller de pair et \u00eatre indissociable des \u0153uvres de justice sociale (alias #integralmission).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, can\u2019t we just say \u2018mission\u2019 and not put any qualifier\/adjective before it? One observer at the 4th Lausanne Congress actually said that in the resulting Seoul Statement<\/em>, 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<\/em>, 49\/1)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But consider this line from the Radical Discipleship group of the 1st Lausanne Congress in 1974:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMen 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\u2019s 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\u2019s creation and its resources.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n To which, Rene Padilla, remarked, \u201cThis definition of holistic mission as including what the church IS, what the church DOES, and what the church SAYS can hardly be improved.\u201d So, well, go figure\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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: 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" La semaine derni\u00e8re, j’ai pass\u00e9 du temps avec des amis qui cherchent des moyens d’aider les \u00e9glises et leurs dirigeants […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-missio-integralis-fr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11\/revisions\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.missio-integralis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Theological Reason<\/strong>: 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 \u2018maimed\u2019 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<\/em>, the version imported from the US, can be closely linked to the local churches\u2019 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<\/strong>: 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 \u201cspeech that shook the evangelical world.\u201d Basically, he critiqued certain influential brand of missiology developed from the West as a kind of \u201cGospel with no teeth.\u201d A gospel that brought forth ministries with nothing much to say to people\u2019s oppression brought about by social inequality perpetuated by the powers that be. Rene issued an invitation to reimagine the mission of God\u2019s people in the world in such a way that is not truncated, not \u2019mutilado<\/em>\u2019 (mutilated) but instead more \u2019integrale<\/em>\u2019 (whole, not lacking anything). Hence, Integral-Mission. Today, young people will describe it as a \u2018decolonial\u2019 moment which surely disrupted the old imperial order of things.
Decolonial Reason<\/strong>: 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 \u2018the\u2019 end point. But it did miss the point, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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?<\/a>) provides a short and down-to-earth introduction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n