The Mission IN… not the Mission TO

Part of the “mission” out on the sign out front of All Saints Episcopal Church in Sunnyside…

It’s the Episcopal Mission IN Sunnyside: and NOT the Mission TO Sunnyside. This is important.

It’s important because a “mission TO” presumes that the missionaries have something that others lack. The project of colonization was founded—and still functions—on just this presumption. PLUS the presumption that the missionaries are “saved” and the people will be damned unless they accept what the colonizers offer them, unless the indigenous people become like the colonizers. The “mission,” in those terms, is to enforce conformity to a normative way of being.

That’s not our mission. The “mission” of the Episcopal Mission in Sunnyside is “that the whole world may see and know that things which have been cast down are being raised up, and things which have grown old are being made new.” It’s a mouthful, but it means that we are called to witness to the life-giving transformations that signal the presence of God, our mischievous liberator. We’re called to celebrate that, to join in with that wherever we glimpse it. We’re called to be faithful to that mission here IN Sunnyside—where God was doing good things among good people long before we got here.

There’s a lot in this distinction between TO and IN—and living into this distinction is the work of a post-colonial and de-colonizing church. But there are two aspects of that distinction that I want to stress here.

First, we don’t “have” anything that Sunnyside lacks. We are seeking to be faithful to a process that we don’t own and don’t control. In theological terms, we could call that process resurrection; in more general terms we could describe that process as the sometimes surprising flowering of new life that can occur when people have what they need to heal, and grow, and flourish. We yearn to be a part of that for others—especially people who have been marginalized or oppressed—just as we yearn for that new life within ourselves.

The second aspect has to do with change. In the colonizing sense of mission TO, only the indigenous people needed to change to become like the missionaries. The missionaries didn’t feel they needed to change, and most of them weren’t changed by the encounter with indigenous people. After all, they already “had” the goods, were already “saved.”

But in the sense of “mission” that we’re using here, “we” in the church expect to be changed. Let me speak more personally: I, Father Carl Adair am writing this. And I am being transformed by the relationships I am finding here in Sunnyside. My faith is being unmade and remade by the encounters I am having with neighbors, and by the daily effort to attend to the transforming and liberating work of God in this place. I don’t always love that process: it’s uncomfortable and sometimes destabilizing. I get cranky about it, but I sense that this the path of life. I’m working to keep my eyes and heart open, and I’m growing as fast as I can.

The upshot is, we’re not starting this new community of practice here because Sunnyside needs what we’ve got. We’re starting this new community of practice because we want to join with the loving, liberating, and life-giving work of God in this place because we want to rejoice with others who are experiencing new life. And because that’s what our own souls yearn for.