Técnicas para el procesamiento y análisis de datos

Mission, as we have reminded ourselves almost ad nauseam for 80 years, is not primarily our initiative or something we do as executives. Mission is God’s work and we seek to respond to God’s initiative as instruments of the Missio Dei, God’s eternal mission, still very active in our own particular times and circumstances. We try to respond to both the suffering and the smiling faces of God, particularly as they appear in people who are broken, silenced and marginalised. This, after all, was the way of Jesus and his preferential option for the poor was not merely optional but an urgent imperative. Therefore it is for us a choice that we must choose, as he did. In the words of Jacques Dupuis:

Jesus not only shows a ‘preferential option’ for the poor, he is not simply ‘on their side,’ but he personally identifies and associates preferentially with them: he is not simply ‘for’ the poor, but belongs to them and is with them.1

Since the word mission is simply one more inadequate label that we try to attach to the dynamic activity of God’s outreach and inreach, it applies to humanity only derivatively or by extension. Because we are made in God’s image, however, it can apply to us directly and legitimately if we are truly making the choices Jesus made. It is precisely as the incarnate one – Emmanuel, God-with-us, the human face of God – that Jesus shows each of us how to be authentically human. But if we are to grow towards the full potential of our humanness – theosis or divinisation (or, to use a vivid biblical word, restoration) – if we are to be restored rather than broken and unfulfilled, we must necessarily express, through our actions, that Godly dimension of our lives that we call missional.

Pastoral ministry has historically been identified with boundedness or the maintenance of an established community within fixed territorial boundaries, while mission has emphasised movement beyond or across boundaries. As a simplification there is some merit in this distinction, though pushed too far it evidently becomes false and

WE ARE PILGRIMS: MISSION FROM, IN AND WITH THE MARGINS OF OUR DIVERSE WORLD

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dangerous. But the common factor is the word “boundary” or margin and that is our present concern. It is one thing to approach a boundary or margin and then stop, and quite another to breach it. In each case the boundary or margin is seen negatively, as a barrier forbidding progress or challenging one, but boundaries and margins are themselves in-between places, ambiguous, liminal areas of both peril and potential: both dangerous and powerful. They are precisely the places where people exist, living or dying, subsisting or surviving, and are therefore the primary sites of the missional ministry of Jesus and therefore of all would-be followers.

Over forty years ago, Victor Turner was studying pilgrims and pilgrimages – but he might have been studying mission and missionaries. In a seminal article entitled “The Centre Out There,” he identified a pilgrim’s need to move from the usual centres of activity to find a more significant or relevant centre on the edge of previous experience, and, significantly, in the company of strangers who could become friends.2 _{A century}

ago, sociologist Georg Simmel had spoken of adventure as something that starts on the very periphery of one’s life but works its way to the very centre. In a classic essay he wrote that adventure is “a particular encompassing of the accidentally external by the internally necessary.”3 _{I understand the “accidentally external” to refer to whatever}

is contingent – geographical location or social circumstances – and the “internally necessary” to refer to an inner conviction, a sense of vocation or mission.4 _{He speaks}

of “a characteristic daring with which [a certain kind of person] continually leaves the solidities of life,” and the certain conviction of an “unknown and unknowable element in [that person’s] life. For this reason, to the sober person,” says Simmel, “adventurous conduct often seems insanity.”5 _{He then states that only youth are really adventurous}

and that “the old person usually lives either in a wholly centralised fashion, peripheral interests having fallen off and being unconnected with their essential life and its inner necessity; or the centre atrophies and existence runs its course only in isolated, petty details, accenting mere externals and accidentals.”6 _{Of course I disagree with}

this gloomy picture (painted by a mere 53 year old!), but do take very seriously the observation that certain people – not limited to the old – do live in a very centralised or self-focused fashion. The missionary movement calls young and old alike to seek

2 Victor Turner, “The Center Out There: Pilgrim’s Goal,” Journal of the History of Religions, Vol 12/3 (February 1973).

3 In Donal Levine (ed.), Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 187-98.

4 Levine, George Simmel, 191-192. 5 Levine, George Simmel, 194. 6 Levine, George Simmel, 198.

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the centre precisely at the margins. We may have been drawn into that movement, as Simmel suggests, when what began as peripheral worked its way to our life’s very centre, becoming “internally necessary.” Whatever our age or circumstances, however, our commitment must remain solid and serious.

I want to reflect on how Jesus lived and remained faithful to the mission, using him as an example of how mission and margins are intrinsically related, and of how commitment to both remains “internally necessary” for each of us today.