World Inquiry Purpose Process People Paradigm Emerging
Jesus said to his followers, in reference to God the Father: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Mt. 6:33a). Seeking the Kingdom of God results in personal and cultural transformation which has emerged as a unifying vision for the mission of the Church at the beginning of the twenty-first century. God is on a mission of transformation. A global transformation movement has begun. It's God's movement. This book reports on some of the contributions, the considerations, the context and conclusions regarding transformation as mission.
The thesis of this book is that God is calling His servants to act as catalysts in mobilizing the whole body of Christ to bless the nations through the transformation of people, churches and culture.
Almost three years ago I began a journey in the listening mode. The World Inquiry, short for Evangelizing our World Inquiry, was born out of a simple desire to hear what God was saying to his people. An e-mail in August of 2000 from Paul McKaughan, President of the Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies, prompted me to embark on this quest by a personal e-mail when he wrote:
I don't know of any time in my 35 years of mission experience that l has seen or felt mission executives readier and more willing to change and adapt. At the same time, l also doesn’t know of any period in my career that there is less certainty about what changes to make. The future is uncertain. We know it will be greatly different but are not sure in which ways it will be different. We know that the patterns of the past are showing "wear" and are in need of repair. In many ways the fit between our strategies and way of thinking does not fit our present reality well. We know that they probably won't move us into the future God has for us. Yet the new paradigms that help us interpret and organize our strategies for the future have not become clear. We seem to be in a time of parenthesis between what God blessed in the past and what He has not yet made clear for the future.
The interest in taking “the journey of the listening mode” was further enhanced during the final months of the year 2000. An abiding question in my own mind was: Where do we go from here in world evangelization? The encouragement of my fifteen-year accountability/support group led me to reflect on this question by means of a doctoral study at the former Fuller School of World Mission, now School of lntercultural Studies (Fuller) under the active and able oversight of Wilbert Shenk, Chuck Van Engen and Sherwood Lingenfelter. While looking through the lenses of the Scriptures, theology, missiologists, church history, global mission conferences, the AD2000 Movement and Christian leadership, it soon became clear that the focus of the dissertation, which was completed May 2002, would more appropriately be on informing the question, rather than seeking to provide answers.
And so, began a quest to know the mind of God through the burdens, visions and dreams of his people as we move into the future. A World Inquiry compressed the reflective process into a practical instrument. The World Inquiry started out as an exercise to probe the minds and hearts of evangelical leaders in the major cities of the world. The Inquiry began and has continued not as a rigorous, methodologically-driven research project, but rather a "listening venture" that sought to tune in to God's voice through His people, especially those voices and leaders who are now emerging onto their local, regional and national scenes in the Two-Thirds World. L was reminded of the words of John Stott in his book titled: Christian Mission in the Modern World, “Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened and some of our vast ignorance's diminished.”
As we listened to one another and sought God through His Word to hear what the Spirit was saying to the Church, we saw streams of church and mission emerging on the periphery of mainline ecclesiastical and mission structures; we shared the visions on the hearts of God's servants; and we heard from respected missiologists as to what fresh missiological paradigms are emerging.
Fuller Theological Seminary sponsored the World Inquiry, providing advice at various stages of the research, design and conduct of the inquiry process. It was conducted in collaboration with the Lausanne Committee on World Evangelization, with a view to a presentation of the findings at this World Evangelization Issues Forum. This brings this journey of the listening mode through the World Inquiry to an end. The preliminary findings were presented, reviewed and discussed in May 2003 in Seoul, Korea by an International Coalition of 120 missiologists, practitioners, and church and mission leaders chaired by Sang-Bok David Kim.
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