Migration as a Theologizing Experience

The suggestion by Hanciles that migration is a “theologizing experience” is the starting point for exploring the way in which mission in a western context, in partnership with non-western migrants, can be a mutually transforming experience. Hanciles suggests that non-western migrant people bring a new paradigm of mission which is radically different from the way Western mission has been done in the past because it offers itself in weakness, risk, diversity, and dependency. However, theologically and experientially, migration brings with it many ambiguities and creative tensions, which means that Hanciles’ analysis may need to be more nuanced. In particular the notion that migrants are involved in a “reverse mission” to the West “from below” which characterizes the new paradigm has a number of problems in reality. This is explored particularly in a British context, in which we find that the contribution of migrants to mission, though sometimes encouraging, is varied, and that issues which have mired western mission in the past are re-appearing “in reverse”. It is therefore suggested that a mutual inter culturality between migrants and indigenous Western churches from the very beginning of the encounter may provide the promise of a more transformative mission experience. They have more in common than they realize: the irony is that the western church finds itself also in a situation of “exile”, though in a very different sense. Marginalized, alien to the secular culture, in decline, with their religious identity no longer “at home”, the Western Christian experience of exile resonates with the migrant experience of exile, which is ground for a genuine partnership in mission. It is concluded that mission as a theologizing experience can work for transformative mission where there is genuine interculturality, and that this could mitigate the problems of thinking of migrant mission purely in terms of “reverse mission”.