Decolonizing Urban Mission

The Church Needs More Gardeners, Not Harvesters.

When our family moved to the Haughville neighborhood four years ago, our yard was a barren place filled with weeds, rocks, glass, and trash. Now, after long periods of patient cleaning, digging, tilling, planting, and watering, our yard is full of life. The grass is lush beneath our children’s bare feet. Nearly 200 square feet of healthy soil provides room for our fruits and vegetables to grow. Birds find rest at our bird feeder. Bees pollinate our flower bed.

Our yard has become a garden in the most beautiful sense of the word.

Naturally, when our church acquired its own little property in the neighborhood this year, I was eager to expand my personal garden into a space for our community. I envisioned a place where our church and neighbors could come together to create something beautiful. With the help of some local high school students and our church youth group, we quickly built several garden beds and filled them with flowers, fruits, and vegetables (this essay’s cover image is from a portion of our church garden!). Carl helped me install an irrigation system that waters our new garden on a daily timer. All we had to do was wait!

My romantic ideals came crashing down when I returned from a couple of weeks of travel to find the garden a complete mess. Weeds were everywhere, plants were stressed and underproducing, and pests had overtaken the squash. Tomatoes and cucumbers were rotting on the vine because no one had picked them.

That’s when it hit me: I had unrealistic expectations, and now our garden was suffering. I rushed things. What had taken me four years at my home, I tried to accomplish in three months. The soil wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. More importantly, our church members weren’t ready. I didn’t teach them to garden, and I didn’t invite them into the process.

And that flowery vision I had of our neighbors enjoying the garden? Yeah, they don’t care.

I spent years learning to patiently tend my garden at our home, only to assume the church’s garden would yield a quick harvest. As it turns out, I still have a lot to learn.

If you’ve followed my writing for any length of time, you know that my garden has been a place where I’ve learned some of my best ministry lessons as an urban church planter. The garden, like ministry, will teach you the meaning of patience, hard work, observation, care, and joy.

Yet urban ministry, like urban gardening, is a slow and difficult work. Participating in the kingdom of God in our city’s most neglected communities presents significant challenges on its own merits. Additional challenges arise for urban ministers who have been shaped by missionary models whose influence can be traced back to the darker parts of Christianity’s oppressive, colonizing histories. Such models anticipate metrics that can be controlled and expectations that fit our timeline.

Not unlike my attempts for a quick harvest in the church garden, colonized models of urban ministry produce ineffective, even harmful, results. The future of urban ministry requires pastors and church members who are willing to “decolonize” their understanding of urban mission. Such efforts, while personally painful, will present us with opportunities to envision new ministry models that prioritize spiritual health and fruitfulness.

The Colonized Origins of “Mission”

The terms “mission” and “missionaries” are often used to describe those who bring the gospel from one nation or culture to another. But in its simplest and purest form, “mission” is the work of every Christian sent by Christ (cf. Matthew 28:18-20) to accompany God in making his love known to the world (cf. John 3:16).

Yet our purest motives are quickly stained in the hands of sinful human beings.

In his book Transforming Mission, widely regarded as one of the most important texts for understanding the church’s work, the South African missiologist David Bosch explains that the church’s “mission” must begin with the right motives. Unfortunately, as the history of Christianity shows, Christians have often been motivated more by power and prejudice than by a love for Christ and the world he has made. Indeed, the word “mission” itself, as we now understand it, is a fairly recent development in the history of Christianity. As Bosch describes,

The Jesuits were the first to use [mission] in terms of the spread of the Christian faith among people who were not members of the Catholic Church. In this sense it was intimately associated with the colonial expansion of the Western world into what has more recently become known as the Third World. The term “mission” presupposes a sender, a person or persons sent by the sender, those to whom one is sent, and an assignment. The entire terminology thus presumes that the one who sends has the authority to do so.¹

For centuries, the Latin word missio, from which we derive the term “mission,” was used almost exclusively to refer to the doctrine of the Trinity, in which we understand that the Father sends the Son and that the Holy Spirit is sent together by the Father and the Son. Other terms, such as “apostolic proclamation” or “the planting of the church,” were used to describe the church’s work. “The new word, ‘mission,’ is historically linked indissolubly with the colonial era and with the idea of a magisterial commissioning.”²

This close association with colonial expansion has infused the history of “mission” with several “impure motives,” such as:

· The imperialist motive (turning “natives” into docile subjects of colonial authorities);

· The cultural motive (mission as the transfer of the missionary’s “superior” culture);

· The romantic motive (the desire to go to far-away and exotic countries and peoples);

· The motive of ecclesiastical colonialism (the urge to export one’s own confession and church order to other territories).³

It is not within the scope of this essay to detail the results of Christianity’s twisted ties to colonial powers. It is enough for me to conclude with the neo-Calvinist missiologist J.H. Bavinck:

The history of missions can show us that the great motive for missionary work, the motive of God, has in the course of history repeatedly been more or less lost behind other motives of human origin. It can open our eyes to the fact that whenever purely human motives have been at work, distortions, detours, and great disappointments inevitably follow. While wishing to serve God, the church has repeatedly been an obstacle to his love of the world. The history of missions is terrifying in its disclosures. When viewed from the human point of view, it is a path of endless confusion, despair, error, degeneration, and discouragement.⁴

Every missionary work, no matter its context, must wrestle with the influence of this history on our motives today. In what ways are we still motivated to “preach Christ” from our notions of national, cultural, or theological superiority?

Decolonizing Urban Mission

Urban mission has not been immune to the influence of impure motives. Though the urban missionary may only be crossing from one neighborhood to the next, to the extent that urban mission has flown out of places of power, affluence, or cultural dominance, similar threats emerge that mirror what we might recognize as “colonized” motives in an international context.

Colonized urban mission can be seen in those megachurches that insist on being “for the city” by replicating ministry models from their affluent suburbs in historically marginalized city neighborhoods. It exists in networks and denominations that hold churches among the urban poor to the same financial standards and growth timelines as those in upwardly mobile neighborhoods. The colonizing mindset is evident in the well-intentioned “core team” of church members who move into the city yet, subconsciously, assume cultural superiority and are unwilling to share leadership with neighbors from different racial, cultural, or socioeconomic groups.

Urban mission can even be colonized by community churches that, having once been faithful pillars in the neighborhood, now cling to control in an attempt to return to the glory days of the past.

Mission, whether at home or abroad, is tempted by the snare of colonized motivations whenever it is a one-directional initiative by those with proximity to power and control. For this reason, the first step toward decolonizing urban mission must be to distance ourselves from power and to join in fellowship with those the world—and the church—have largely regarded as “non-persons.”

Following David Bosch’s work, neo-Calvinist missiologist Harvie Conn explained that the Church must forsake the temptation to theologize mission from positions of power and influence and instead become a “missionizing, minority church” in an “emergency situation.”⁵ Any church willing to renounce its privileges for the sake of the gospel will find its heart shaped by the pure motive of the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Conn suggested that such decolonizing work can only be done through long-term exposure and relationship with the poor. Those who minister in cities must “see the struggles of the world not as an observer, but as a participant. Power’s temptation seems clearer to the powerless. There those marginalized by ethnicity and economics can offer a new way of creating an agenda, not only for mission, but for theology also.”⁶

Through such exposure, the urban missionary learns to let go of metrics and expectations that attempt to force unrealistic outcomes. They learn that their motives are still twisted by prejudices they didn’t even know they had. They learn that ministry agendas must not be driven by numbers but by people. They learn that they are as much in need of dependence on Christ as others may be in need of believing in Christ.

The Urban Church Needs Gardeners, Not Harvesters

I screwed up our church garden before the first seeds were planted. With well-intentioned ambitions before me, I set to work not as a patient gardener but as a harvester, zealous for results.

Urban mission is set up for disaster when it is governed by colonizing motives and expectations. My neighbors have seen many well-intentioned pastors and churches come and go, the fizzling out of paternalistic ministries that looked down on the community, and the abuse and hypocrisy of congregations that want control more than they want Christ. It is no wonder that so few have any trust or respect for the institutional church.

The urban church doesn’t need fervent, misguided harvesters but patient, humble gardeners. We need women and men willing to learn, to try and fail, to observe, to make daily investments, and to receive as much as they are willing to give. For what are we but tools in the Lord’s hands? We may work the soil and plant the seed, but only God can give the growth (1 Corinthians 3:5-9).

Lord, grant that we might become a church not of cultural superiority but gospel humility, not of worldly power but of spiritual power, not of our affluence but of your kingdom. Raise up churches in your cities who embody and proclaim the reign of King Jesus and point toward the restoration of all things in his name. Amen.

1. David Bosch, Transforming Mission (Orbis Books: 2014), 1.

2. Bosch, 233.

3. Bosch, 5.

4. J.H. Bavinck, An Introduction to the Science of Missions (P&R: 1960), 282.

5. Harvie Conn, “Mission, Missions, Theology, and Theological Education” in The Urban Face of Mission (P&R:2002), 13.

6. Conn, 24.