World Religions and their Missions

Aaron J. Ghiloni

In the summer of 1976, fourteen Muslim and Christian leaders and scholars met in Chambésy, Switzerland. Summoned by the Geneva-based World Council of Churches (WCC), their brief was to compare Christian mission and Islamic da’wah.¹ The five-day symposium was situated against the backdrop of violent conflicts: Christians and Muslims massacring one another in Lebanon; Muslims and Christians warring in Mindano leaving 50,000 dead.² The talks transpired in emotive thickness. There were “grievances on both sides.”³ This was no consequence-free junket. The meeting of “two great missionary faiths” generated “sharp and at times angry controversy of inter-religious debate…”⁴

Dialogues can be mirrors, and mirrors can be uncomfortable. Participants described the Chambésy consultation as “intense,” “painful,” and “suspicious,” but also as conducted in “good faith” and a “spirit of frankness and fairness.” They saw themselves as navigating “uncharted waters,” and one co-convener commented that “never before, to my knowledge have Christians and Muslims met together at an international level to address themselves explicitly to this vital issue which is elemental to the integrity of both.”⁵ What was unique was not Muslim–Christian dialogue itself, but rather the content of the dialogue. Mission was difficult to discuss equitably insofar as mission was seen as anti-dialogical—competitive, manipulative, unscrupulous, even anti-Muslim. “Muslims feel that Christian mission among Muslims overshadows dialogue everywhere,” a Muslim leader observed.⁶ Nevertheless, the summit resulted in the identification of an analogue: “da’wah is to Islam as mission is to Christianity…”⁷

The International Review of Mission (IRM), a WCC-operated journal, published the resulting papers in its autumn edition. This issue has historical significance for being one of the earliest and most deliberate considerations of ←1 | 2→mission in comparative perspective. The proceedings were heralded as marking a “first time” and a “first occasion in the history of Christian-Muslim relations” that a da’wah/mission comparison had occurred.⁸ In 1982, the Islamic Foundation republished the proceedings noting that “neither before nor since have ‘mission and da’wah’ been placed into the limelight of dialogue.”⁹

IRM’s editor concluded that “the same missionary compulsion” was shared by Islam and Christianity.¹⁰ Nonetheless, the hard work of the conference did not result in full unanimity. In IRM’s following issue (January 1977), a letter of protest was published. Ali Muhsin (a Muslim participant) noted that his remarks had been “distorted” by the WCC journal, edited to make his paper seem more quarrelsome than the “ecumenical spirit” in which it had been framed.¹¹ Understanding and respecting the missions of other religious groups was no simple task. When the Islamic Foundation republished the material, a foreword was added noting that “the issues debated at Chambésy have not been resolved.”¹² In April of 1977, the disagreement again appeared on IRM’s pages with Bishop Kenneth Cragg (a participant in the summit) describing the tensions at Chambésy as arising from a starting point that “dismay[ed] and oppress[ed].”¹³

What is an adequate starting point for studying the varieties of religious mission? Perhaps the historic dialogue would have been less volatile had other kinds of religious missionaries been present. Instead of two groups staring head-on at one another, what if a third and even a fourth and fifth were present? Perhaps a way forward is through pluralizing the concept of mission. That is an intent of this book.

Two’s company, but not a plurality. The WCC consultation considered only Islam and Christianity. Although Buddhism is widely recognized as a missionizing religion, Buddhists were not invited to Chambésy. This gap limited the comparative possibilities of the summit. When the study of mission is confined to a dialogue between Christian and Islamic theological distinctives, the dialogue tends to crystallize around binaries—particularly, the translatability or non-translatability of divine language.¹⁴ The analogue renders as a dualism, a dualism that excludes Buddhism from its remit. Likewise, when Islam and Christianity are treated as mirror “religions,” institutionalism is often emphasized. The actors responsible for sending missionaries are portrayed as possessing hierarchical authority and having clerical concerns.¹⁵ Indeed, the symposium reinforced the centrality of religious institutions to the practice of mission insofar as it was initiated by the World Council of Churches, a fact both the Muslim convenor and the Christian convenor pointed out. Months later, Bishop Cragg noted that a “psychology ←2 | 3→of possessiveness” in which each side saw itself as “institutional proprietors of truth” persisted.¹⁶ David Kerr, a co-convenor, recognized the dyad as a limitation and hinted at the possibility for a far more variegated study of mission impulses. He wrote, “We are living in a situation not simply of plurality of religions, but of plurality of missions…”¹⁷

Dialogue is better than what Wilfred Cantwell Smith called the “erstwhile monologue of proselytising missions,” but colloquy is even better. Smith urged theologizing side-by-side rather than face-to-face as a more genuinely global approach to facing “our strange new age.”¹⁸ In this vein, this book introduces seven missionizing traditions—not all of which are conversionary, Western, text-centered, or even theistic. A benefit of a multilateral perspective is how it invariably complicates stereotypes of mission as the proselytization, coercion, or evangelization of outsiders. Islamic da’wah, for example, is as much directed to Muslims as to non-Muslims. Islam’s universality implies a call to go in as much as a call to go out. Buddhist missionaries, to give another example, practiced translation before Christianity existed, but did so based on the principle of compassion (karuna) rather than a theology of incarnation.¹⁹ Their means were similar (venularization), but their motives different. Richard Fox Young—likely coiner of the term comparative missiology—refers to the study of missiological variegation as “making comparative missiology more comparative.”²⁰ 7 > 2.