Postmission: World Mission by a Postmodern Generation: World Mission by Postmodern Generation [Paperback]

Good design, varied content - a genuine response to a deep problem that hardly anyone else has even identified.

This is an exceedingly valuable book and should be compulsory reading for all mission executives and personnel staff.

"Anecdotal evidence of the personal experience of Generation Xers shows that we do not find it easy to fit into the culture and structures of much of the contemporary Western church, especially in its organisational forms such as mission agencies. If GenXers do world mission their way, what would it look like? Are new strategies, structures and methodologies needed or can the existing structures be changed to allow the Xer worldview to exist alongside others?"

So began the proposal for the Holy Island Roundtable, which resulted in a group of Generation X leaders in world mission meeting at Lindisfarne, Northumbria. This book is a summary of the issues raised there, and is written both for existing mission leaders and those who wish to bring change within their mission organisation as a response to culture change in the West.

Many of them had come out of paganism. They were not drawn to hierarchy nor to great structures. They lived close to a creation they loved. They were open to the empowering presence of the Spirit, and lived in the reality of signs and wonders. In their veins flowed a strange wanderlust, which they called "peregrinatio", a form of pilgrimage. They traveled over land and sea, sailing even beyond the boundaries of their imagined world.

These were the Celtic Christians who saved Western civilization. These passionate Christian Celts became purposeful wanderers who took the incarnated Gospel into every corner of their Emerald Island. They sent their young and old, women and men, in small bands who took the name of their beloved Christ into the ferocious tribal societies of the Picts (today’s Scotland), into major regions of England, over into what today is France, Switzerland, Italy, even to the Ukraine. Their structure was unstructured; they lived in community, equipped in community, sent out their evangelizing teams from the community, and later welcomed many of them back to tell the stories of the advance of the Gospel of Christ. Places like Iona and Lindisfarne (Holy Island) today are singular pilgrimage sites, but there are many other locations we could speak of.

It was no coincidence that in March of 2001, a small band of dedicated Christians, seventeen members of the younger generation radically committed to world mission, gathered on Holy Island. They came from England, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, the USA and Canada. Amongst them was a couple from an older generation, present as "elders", to listen, to speak when invited, to contribute to the worship and prayer and to the rich flow of discussion of those days. It was not coincidence that the Gen Xers in Mission Roundtable met at Holy Island, a tidal island saturated with sacred history; to this day devout Christians, indebted to their Celtic heritage, sustain many of these rich traditions, plumbing ancient wisdom to face the challenges of modern society and post-modern cultural changes.

As we evaluate this creative younger generation of mission leader, they share some similar characteristics to Celtic Christians. We pray they will make a mark on their own complex and textured multicultural world as the Celts did on theirs.

We’re not weird, and we don’t have horns.

Many Xers in mission agencies feel alone, or at best isolated, in the struggles and disillusion they feel towards the very structures that are meant to be supporting them in their work. This disillusion does not extend to Jesus Christ, nor to their sense of calling to Christian mission. But an increasing number of GenXer missionaries are coming to the conclusion that the struggle with the organisational culture and structures within which they are expected to work is just not worth it, and they are ‘opting out’, returning home, and finding new ways of serving Jesus Christ in their local communities.

From a mission agency perspective, however, these people are disappearing off the radar screen, and written off as ‘quitters’. There seems to be a painful lack of self-awareness among many of the ‘power-holders’ in the world mission movement, with few asking whether the problem might just be with them, not with the Xers.

One of the purposes of the small international get-together that we called the ‘Holy island Roundtable’ was to bring together some of those Xers who had not yet reached the point of no return. Most were still trying to find a way of making it work within the established mission agency structures. One of the most exciting things I heard during our first morning together, as we began to get to know each other and listened to one another’s stories, was comments like "I didn’t know other people felt like this" and "I thought I was just weird, and that it was all my fault". Aside from the therapy-group dynamics of these disclosures, they increased within us the awareness that these tensions are not just a temporary or isolated phenomenon, but are in fact manifestations of broader cultural changes in the West (and perhaps the world). And we are convinced that these changes are not just something external to the church, but are in fact something in which we all share and are deeply!
involved.