An exploration of margins or boundaries discloses that they serve a triple function, each component of which has an essential purpose: to keep in; to keep out; and to serve as contact points, bridges, or meeting-places. To consider not only associated
8 Arnold van Gennep, (1908) The Rites of Passage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977); Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967).
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problems therefore, but real pastoral possibilities, we might begin by noting that every person is situated in a particular place or centre that is itself defined in relation to an edge, boundary or margin. Each of us is a microcosm within a macrocosm, and we live in a series of microcosms nesting within their respective macrocosms. Our own body is a microcosm, a little world, bounded visibly by our skin and invisibly by our social space. This microcosm encapsulates something autonomous and sacred: our personal physical integrity. But the bodily or physical microcosm is not an isolate in total independence; it exists in relation to a macrocosm, a bigger world beyond the boundaries of the self, in which other entities and other persons exist.
Each person here constitutes an individual microcosm existing within the broader macrocosm that is the physical reality of this room. But if we were to start walking around blindly, we would either bump into each other, or blunder into a table or a wall. We exist, in other words, within a web of boundaries and margins. There are personal boundaries, visible and invisible, between each of us; and structural boundaries – brick walls and closed doors – between ourselves and the world beyond this room. If these are negotiated appropriately, we can hope to live with dignity and harmony. Then we can assume responsibility for maintaining our personal integrity, and encounter others – or “the other” – in a wholesome and mutually respectful manner. Then, boundaries or margins, personal and interpersonal, serve a positive function of protecting human dignity and enabling wholesome interaction. But whenever something or someone inhibits the appropriate negotiation of personal and social boundaries or margins, people’s lives are endangered and their human dignity impugned. Then, either people exploit others’ physical integrity by failing to respect mutual boundaries or margins, or they constrain or restrain others within spatial or territorial boundaries, as in a prison or custodial area. Then, boundaries become the locus of rank injustice and oppression.
According to “Together Towards Life” (TTL), the recent Statement on Mission of the World Council of Churches, “Mission has been understood as a movement taking place from the centre to the periphery, and from the privileged to the marginalized.”9
This common understanding located the missionary, the one who was sent, at the centre, and “the other” or the recipients of the message, as marginal. But TTL does not pursue a highly significant point: that one who moves from the centre to the margin is thereby now located at, or on, the margin itself. Instead, it implies, without further development, a unidirectional movement, as a result of which, the marginal,
9 “Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes,” (World Council of Churches, 2013), paragraph 6.
WE ARE PILGRIMS: MISSION FROM, IN AND WITH THE MARGINS OF OUR DIVERSE WORLD
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or marginalised person (which is not quite the same thing), becomes assimilated to the centre. Had the point been developed, there might have been a consideration of the reciprocal movement whereby the person from the centre now becomes marginal, in two possible ways. First, by “contagion” or stigma: simply by being located among the people designated “marginal” (as in “He eats with tax collectors and sinners”); and second, by now being marginal oneself, relative to the people who, after all, occupy the centre of their own world, which the missionary patently does not.
Paragraph 6 ofTTL continues: “Now people at the margins are claiming their key role as agents of mission,” noting that “there is a shift in the mission concept, from ‘mission to the margins’ to ‘mission from the margins’.” This theme is then pursued and developed in Part Two of the document, and I have two thoughts about this.
First, to talk about margins and marginal ministry with any degree of relevance, we need to keep in the forefront of our minds that we do not simply minister “at the margins” or “to the marginalised.” Such phrases as “the marginalised” or “the privileged” reduce people to a category and can depersonalise and even dehumanise them, as do phrases like “the homeless”, “the poor,” or “prostitutes.” We cannot talk generically, because there are no generic people, only particular people: women, and men, and children. So our language needs to become sensitised to human persons as individuals and agents. “Homeless woman,” ‘unemployed man” or “marginalised people” is a more appropriate way of identifying our sisters and brothers. After all, ministry is, first and last, communication and relationship with real flesh-and-blood people, some of whom happen to be marginalised and to live, or subsist, at the margins. Second, according to this categorisation, we ourselves are not typical of such people – though each of us here can probably identify some situations in which we are, or feel marginalised, relative to church or society. Therefore, the marginal ministry we undertake implies and entails outreach across – or indeed at – whatever margins or boundaries separate or insulate us from those who are. Before returning to the matter of whether, and in what ways we ourselves might be or become marginal, however, I need to pursue the line of reasoning developed in TTL, which contrasts “mission to the margins” with “mission from the margins,” as a contemporary way of imagining mission.
Perhaps this pendulum shift – from “mission to” to “mission from” – is rather more dramatic than it need be. Is it too dialectical to be of the greatest practical and pastoral
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value? Perhaps a more analogical10 or balanced relationship between “mission to” and
“mission from” may be more realistic, more helpful, and better reflect the mission of Jesus. So to add “mission with” or “mission for” would highlight the mutuality or reciprocity mission in a global church requires. A most telling aspect of the mission and ministry of Jesus is that he came not simply to, but for and indeed to be with
the recipients of the Good News; discipleship is essentially collaboration with Jesus and responsibility for living and spreading the Good News: co-responsibility or co-missioning. A radical shift from “mission to” to “mission from,” might make us overlook the very locus of all missional encounters: at the margins themselves where I and Thou, Us and Them, can meet. We need to focus on those very margins, on marginal and marginalised people, and on the dynamics of the encounters taking place there, as people from both sides of the margin converge and are called to conversion. Unquestionably, we who have often spoken too much and too loudly and listened too little and too late need to be converted and to listen to the voices from the margins, especially the cries of the poor. But to move from speech to silence is not to facilitate conversation. Only when both parties listen attentively and speak sequentially is there conversation and dialogue. So when paragraph 38 of TTL speaks of mission from the margins as “an alternative missional movement,” my instinct is that it should be complementary rather than alternative. Then paragraph 45 says it very well: “Participation in God’s mission follows the way of Jesus … characterized by mutuality, reciprocity, and interdependence.” This avoids the polarisation or opposition between a variety of approaches to mission, as found, for example, in paragraph 41 which again opposes marginalised people “as recipients” rather than “active agents of missionary activity.” Each person should strive to be both a giver and receiver. If the world were only composed of givers, there would be nobody to receive, and vice versa. But in a world of interdependence, we must become both.