Imagining Mission with John V. Taylor

Cathy Ross

Description

The impact that John V. Taylor had on our contemporary understanding of mission is vast – his determination that mission should mean engagement across cultural boundaries has deep resonance today.
In 'Imagining Mission with John V. Taylor', leading missional thinkers Jonny Baker and Cathy Ross invite us into a vision of church, mission and society which takes John Taylor’s ideas seriously, seeking to imagine what Taylor’s insights might mean for these three areas in our contemporary context. The result is a clarion call to the church to take bigger risks and dream bigger dreams.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Missions
• Christian Ministry
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 30 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334059523
• Langue: English

Extrait

Imagining Mission with John V. Taylor
Cathy Ross and Jonny Baker





© Cathy Ross and Jonny Baker 2020
Published in 2020 by SCM Press
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-334-05950-9
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Intro
Part One – Church
1. Leap over the Wall or Perish
2. In the Name of Christ the Innovator
Part Two – Mission
3. An Adventure of the Imagination
4. Cherish the Weakness of Limited Means
Part Three – Society
5. Enough is Enough!
6. The Yeast of Nonconformity

Outro




To all those who have been on this adventure of the imagination with us in our pioneering training over the last ten years, and to all those still to join in.




Acknowledgements
There are various people we would like to thank. We are so grateful to Joanna Woodd, John Taylor’s daughter, who gave Cathy the treasure trove of her father’s travel diaries, which set us off on this journey of discovering more of Taylor’s writings. We would also like to thank Emily Swan, who carefully scanned the diaries so that we could access them electronically. Thank you to John Chamberlain who photocopied the CMS Newsletters for me so that we could remove them from the Max Warren Collection in the Church Mission Society’s Library.
Cathy would like to thank CMS and Ripon College Cuddesdon who agreed to her having study leave to focus on reading and sharing the material with Jonny. Thanks also to Ann Bartley and Judith Bright, the staff at Kinder Library, St John’s College in Auckland, where she spent several weeks reading the material. Thank you both for the supply of excellent coffee and to Ann who lent her car to rescue the crucial notes that had been left behind! Thank you to Ken Osborne, CMS librarian in Oxford, for answering many questions and tracking down various sources for us. Finally, thank you to colleagues, students, friends and family who have listened to much of this material and, like us, have lived with John Taylor over the years.




Intro: Everything to Learn
The idea for this book was born after I read John Taylor’s travel diaries. His daughter, Joanna Woodd, kindly gave them to me several years ago. I loved reading them. They are beautifully written and carefully crafted. They read more like a contemporary blog post than a mere list of names, dates and places. They are a fascinating mix of travelogue, political, social and cultural analysis and reportage, theological wonderings and spiritual reflections.
Taylor wrote these diaries when he was General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) from 1963–74. There are eight of them and they act as a sort of aide-memoire to enable him to write his reports on his return. 1 Reading them took me into other worlds, they introduced me to people of different cultures who were living out their faith in so many different contexts, and sometimes the descriptions were so vivid and detailed that I felt as if I was there among them. Taylor also has a wonderful turn of phrase and is a master of metaphor, as you will discover. His writings reflect his own sympathy and empathy with local cultures, his own profound missiological insights, and his acute perception of the issues of the day. The diaries testify to his constant interest and fascination in the local culture and context. When in Pakistan, for example, he particularly requested to see a typical Pakistani film, the plot of which he describes in some detail in the diary and which he greatly enjoyed. 2 When in Japan, he wanted to see how Japanese young people spent their evenings so he and his companion went to a ‘cellar coffee bar where kids in jeans and leather jackets were being entertained by a series of young beat groups’. 3 In Nigeria he attended a large open-air dance hall which was a popular spot in town. 4 In 1970 in Chicago he attended the musical Hair , which may have raised some eyebrows among more conservative CMS supporters. 5 He wrote thoughtfully about the impact the production had on him. These examples indicate his interest in popular culture and his curiosity about the world around him.
These experiences had an important influence on his thinking and writings, which are innovative and imaginative. He loved the arts and was a published poet and a musician. He was an improviser and a creative. His posture of humble listening, attentive curiosity and lively interest in the world around him made him an attractive person and mentor. This is what makes his writings so captivating and exciting for our day, over half a century later.
In his diaries, Taylor regularly referred to the CMS Newsletter that he was writing at the time. I knew about the CMS Newsletters but had not read many of them. They are a CMS ‘institution’, founded by a previous General Secretary, Wilson Cash (1926–41), and continued by Taylor’s immediate predecessor, Max Warren (1942–63). They were a personal communication from the General Secretary to CMS members and anyone else who wished to subscribe. I wondered if I should read these as well, so I spent my last sabbatical immersing myself in them. Taylor wrote a total of 124 CMS Newsletters during his tenure as General Secretary and they are a treasure trove of missiology. They reflect Taylor’s own missiological thinking, ideas and direction of travel. Essentially they are 1,500–2,000 words of accessible, current and creative missiological thinking and they always included a few reflections from his current reading that related to the topics addressed in the Newsletter.
During my sabbatical (in Aotearoa/New Zealand), I was sending photos of the exciting discoveries and new ideas in the Newsletters and diaries (72 photos in all!) to my colleague Jonny Baker, and we would have brief WhatsApp discussions, marvelling at the contemporary and challenging nature of Taylor’s writings. On my return to England we decided to write this book together because we wanted to share what we had learned from John Taylor’s creative wisdom and imaginative thinking. We have limited our reflection (mainly) to the Newsletters and travel diaries, although we have also invited other conversation partners to join the discussion. We are aware that Taylor has written much more, but we wanted to focus on this material, which is not so well known, as a springboard for reflecting on mission today.
We have loved delving into this material and have found so much of it challenging, innovative and pertinent for mission and theology in our day. By mission, we mean Taylor’s own framing of mission: ‘Mission means seeing what God is doing in a situation and trying to do it with him.’ 6 Theology for Taylor is living, functional and practical. His ten years of teaching theology in the Lugandan language in Uganda (1945–54) forced him to think in concrete terms. He wrote of teaching during that time: ‘This exercise instilled in me the realization that every abstract idea, including our idea of God, is derived from experience, and all revelation is given through things that happen. True theology has to be incarnational.’ 7 This had a profound influence on his understanding of theology and mission. Theology is living and emerges out of a dynamic encounter with the world. In fact Taylor later asserts that there is no such thing as safe theology!
Taylor uses missiological and Christological lenses in his writings and reflections. Put simply, it is all about Jesus and it is all about mission. Taylor unpacks this in stimulating, challenging and sometimes provocative and risky ways. Clearly it was his involvement in mission and in CMS that enhanced and deepened his prophetic insights. He encourages us to develop a posture of imagination, innovation and improvisation in mission. These are qualities that Jonny and I have tried to promote and develop in our Pioneer Training at CMS over the last ten years. Indeed, it is Taylor who first encouraged us to see that ‘the world through African eyes must involve this adventure of the imagination’. 8 This is what mission is all about – an adventure of the imagination, and that is what we explore in this book.
One of the inspiring things about Taylor’s writing is his boldness of speech. He has a freedom about him. It is not arrogant, but it does not feel as though he is overly concerned about what others might think. When Cathy was sending me photos of his newsletters from Aotearoa/New Zealand, I was preparing a paper on mission for a conference. And I found that, having read John Taylor, I was inspired to be free, to speak from the heart, to speak boldly. We have tried to carry that voice into this book and hope that you might experience the same emboldening through reading it.
The book is divided into three sections: Church, Mission, Society. These are the most common themes that emerge in Taylor’s writings. We decided to share the writing of this b