Twenty-First Century Tents

“You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19).

I have recently returned from a visit to Ranchi in northern India. Ranchi is a bustling and cosmopolitan city, the capital of Jharkhand state. I met there with the leadership of a pair of Lutheran church bodies — dynamic bodies, numbering more than a quarter of a million souls. The churches trace their foundation to the ministry of the Gossner Lutheran Mission in the middle of the nineteenth century.

My Indian hosts repeated the story of the first encounter between their Oraon people and Gossner missionaries from Germany. The missionaries were lay people, for the most part; some knew how to farm. Upon arrival in the area, they pitched tents, planted a few garden plots, began to learn the language and to build a few friendships. It was 1845. By 1850, they had piqued considerable interest among their Oraon neighbors. In June of that year, a first handful came to faith.

Four Oraon friends approached the missionaries tents, I was told, and demanded to see Jesus. The missionaries had talked about this Savior for some while but had yet to produce him. The Oraons calculated that the missionaries must have hidden Jesus in their tents. So they entered the tents of the Gossner mission, searched high and low through missionary crates and boxes, I suppose and found nothing. Jesus wasn’t there. In the end, however, they found him in his Word — and the church was born.

The story impressed me as a metaphor for the challenge before us today. Jesus is still “hiding,” as it were, in western tents; we need to open the flap and show the world that he is not there. Our Savior is the Savior of the world. He is found in the word that we share across times, places, and cultures. He is not confined to the boxes and traditions we bring from Germany or America.

More than ever before in human history, our Christian fellowship is a truly global phenomenon. Almost one-out-of-five of our numbers is an African — fully eighteen percent of all Christians everywhere. A similar number is Asian — sixteen percent. North American Christians are approximately thirteen percent of the world’s total — and the percentage is headed downward.

Our future in mission — indeed, our future in any aspect of the Christian family today — will be ever and increasingly multicultural and transnational. While traveling in India, I read the current issue of the Journal of the India Missions Association. The lead article is entitled “India: A Mission Sending Nation.” India today, we read, sends some 44,000 cross-cultural missionaries! Most serve within the subcontinent; but more than 5,000 of this number are at work in 40 countries around the world. The author concludes that “the basic building blocks have been coming togetherfor a global missionary movement.” And how. (See the journal for yourself at http://www.imaindia.org. Click on “Magazines.”)

Jesus is not to be found in a western tent — if ever indeed he was. He is found in his word and sacrament, and in the gathered body of believers around the world. If we have a future in mission, it is among this global body. Here is our twenty-first century tent. Here are our partners. Here is our home.