N egotiating M ission : A C anadian S tance

Mission is, quite simply, the participation of Christians in the liberating mission of Jesus ... wagering on a future that verifiable experience seems to belie. It is the good news of God's love, incarnated in the witness of a community for the sake of the world. (1) Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things. (2) Mission is the church's agenda, its raison d'etre. Yet, what should mission be and do in the world of the 21st century? Like the church today, I am both fated and free, formed as both colonizing and colonized. I am shaped by missionary community and a white Canadian academic woman's privilege and constraints. (3) There are many ways in which to frame the future of mission for this century. In this paper I will take one focus and assert that God's mission for the sake of the beloved world includes healing ourselves with the solidarity of others, and that justice/love is the single standard for diverse discourses of mission. I frame mission in this way to explore how mission can be rethought as the relation between a particular understanding of church (as shaped by context and social location) and a particular understanding of the world, where both are governed by norms of justice/right relations. I will begin with a snapshot of the Canadian context of ministry and mission, which will include something about my own denomination, the United Church of Canada. Secondly, I want to problematize mission through the case of Canadian churches confronting the legacy of their complicity in the cultural genocide of Aboriginal peoples, to indicate how "right" and "relations" connect when justice is construed as healing transformation. Lastly I will reframe mission as practices Of solidarity that enhance justice/love of right relation. (4) Canadian context of mission: Crisis What shapes the Canadian context and its diverse population of some 30 million people? Canada is a colonized and colonizing nation in the shadow of the American empire and the profound shifts in late 20th-century capitalism, especially globalization. Ursula Franklin assesses globalization as "a war against people." (5) As a nation, Canada faces major debt and structural adjustment programmes, with foreign loans accounting for forty percent of our national debt. Traditional economies based on fishery and renewable resources have collapsed. The so-called restructuring of the Canadian economy means that many face the bankruptcy of family farms, the weakening of the food industry and health care systems, and the loss of many thousands of jobs as industries more to the southern United States, Mexico and other areas of the world. We have major federal and provincial cutbacks to health, education and social programmes. More and more people rely on food banks. Those who are most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS in Canada, as in Africa, are women, especially those facing homelessness, unemployment, prostitution and domestic abuse. (6) Violence against women remains a national horror. Many youth, even those with university education, are unlikely to have long-term jobs during the course of their lifetimes. Radical social theorists say that Canada increasingly bears the marks of a two-thirds world country, with a growing underclass and a more powerful elite. In short, with the global organization of the economy, Canadians especially experience both the demise of traditional church and community life as well as an unprecedented religious and cultural pluralism. On the one hand, fundamentalist Christians reassert the old notion of "mission as bringing the truth for civilizing alien cultures". On the other hand, old patterns of ecclesial domination--Christendom-style--are seen as a source of despair, and as colluding with newer forms of globalization that eviscerate persons, communities and the earth. …