What Comes after Mission Agencies? A Reflection on Four Decades in the History of the Berlin Mission

Abstract

T he history of Christian missions in the twentieth century reflects those emancipatory developments by which the peoples of the southern hemisphere have broken away from the North and the West. The conflicts and difficulties of mission organizations must be understood in the light of this context. All generations of missions have known that the gospel is transmitted through the submission of the transmitting persons. The goal of mission is to make itself superfluous. However, the question remains as to whether this justifies the current decline in some quarters of the missionary enterprise. There is no easy answer to this. Nevertheless, we must try to evaluate our experi­ ences, and the following is an attempt to do this. Since 1949 the location of the Berlin Mission Society has been in a socialist country, that is, the German Democratic Republic. The experiences of it and the other missions located there-the largest are the Leipzig Mission and the Gossner Mission-cannot be found anywhere else. The socialist October Revolution of 1917 determines there both societal life and power relationships. From the perspective of world developments this is a challenge that is relevant to mission history, since the liberation movements of the southern continents must give a large measure of the credit for their successes to the political situation created by the existence of the socialist states. A review of forty years of the Berlin Mission will show that incorrect assessments were inevitable. However, the mission also had to experience the consequences of "submis­ sion." I should like to account for this. Let us begin with a report.