Sally's Story
Sally [ 1] was a successful modern languages teacher who wanted to serve God through using her talents to best effect. She often led assemblies and used them as an opportunity for sensitive sharing of her faith. She was having a huge impact in the lives of many pupils and not a few staff.
However Sally was still not sure she was in God's place. Was there another calling for her, particularly where her skills in modern languages would yield a greater dividend? She shared with her minister a sense that God might be calling her overseas. Immediately she was added to the church prayer diary. However, after months of praying with friends, Sally became convinced that her calling was to remain as a teacher in Britain. She was immediately taken off the prayer list.
Mission in Britain: cross-cultural ministry?
"many churches do not see teaching in Britain as a Christian vocation"
Sally's story is not unusual. I have worked with Christian teachers for over twenty years and have heard many similar tales. The reality is that many churches do not see teaching in Britain as a Christian vocation. The underlying assumption is that full-time Christian work is not something that can be undertaken when in the employment of a secular agency in Britain, like a Local Authority.
In recent years, the Church of England has been promoting a different way of thinking. The report Mission shaped church[2] claimed that the church in Britain is involved in cross-cultural mission in the same way as the overseas missionary. The authors rejected the idea that Britain is essentially a Christian country and asserted that the prevailing consumerist culture of modern Britain is as alien to the gospel as any found in an overseas context.
The report utilised ideas drawn from the mission concept of contextualization and described this in terms of "incarnational mission" which entails serving and transforming the culture around us. To do this is to imitate Christ's "loving identification" with his culture as well as "his costly counter cultural stance within it".
I have found that teachers respond to the example of Daniel in understanding what these ideas might mean. Daniel was a highly successful civil servant in the service of several kings, but he was not fully at home in his influential position because he was an exile taken by the Babylonians when they sacked Jerusalem. We might describe him as a resident alien, someone who was committed to a lifetime of service in a place where the culture and values were not the same as his Jewish faith.
Daniel became renowned for his particular skill in interpreting dreams. Daniel's loving identification with his culture was expressed through his willingness to serve the kings in this work and the skill that he brought to it. However he never undertook this in a way that compromised his Jewishness and always brought his own faith to bear in the way he interpreted the dreams. Indeed, Daniel transformed the Babylonian understanding of dreams by setting his interpretations within a Jewish world view. At times this counter cultural stance was very costly.
Teaching as Incarnational Mission: a case study
David Smith [ 3] is another languages teacher. In the early days of his teaching career he understood his role as a Christian teacher in terms of excelling at his job. Over the years he became dissatisfied with this idea and was particularly impressed with a story told by the missiologist Stephen Neill. Neill described an early mission to Iceland at a time when the people practised human sacrifice. How were the missionaries to respond to this? Clearly not by becoming more effective at the practice than those they were seeking to reach. Rather they taught a different understanding of the concept in terms of the importance of living sacrifice. Their loving identification with this culture meant that the missionaries did not condemn, but rather sought to affirm what they could. However their stance was counter cultural, and potentially costly, in that they challenged Icelandic values by seeking to transform their understanding of human sacrifice.
How, Smith asked himself, could he apply these ideas to his work as a languages teacher? He pondered his growing dissatisfaction with the underlying rationale for languages teaching in his school. His conclusion was that it amounted to little more than preparation for tourism. So Smith searched for an alternative, biblically-earthed rationale and found it in the value God places on hospitality to the stranger. He recast his lesson plans so that the underlying message was transformed from "languages help you get what you want" to "languages help you be a hospitable person". Smith's loving identification with his culture was expressed through his enthusiasm for the subject. His counter cultural stance was expressed through the transformation he effected in the rationale of the subject. Like Daniel he transformed the professional understanding.
[1] Sally is a real person, but I have changed her name.
[2] See Archbishops' Council Mission shaped Church, SPCK, 2004.
[3] David is now director of the Kuyper's Institute based at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
