Like a Mask Dancing:

Abstract

It was the Whitby meeting of the International Missionary Council, held in 1947, which powerfully gave currency to the concept of “partnership” as a way in which churches could engage together in the missionary task. It was an innovative and inspiring idea to a generation of missionaries who had begun their life’s work with the assumption that it would fall to them and their compatriots to provide leadership to the “daughter churches” which were emerging as a result of the work of the missionary movement. Their closeness to the emerging indigenous leadership ensured that it was, not always but often, highly rewarding for the expatriate missionaries to move to ancillary and supportive roles while able local Christians took up the leadership positions. For the latter it was no less inspiring. Having often grown up in a colonial context and in many cases having been involved in the struggle for political independence, it was a momentous and historic step for them to accept responsibility to lead their churches. In most cases the former missionary leadership and the new indigenous leadership continued to work together in close association for a generation or so. It was a revelation that they could be associated not on a basis of superior and inferior, parent and child, but on a basis of equality and mutuality. Hence the representatives of older and younger churches gathered at Whitby coined the phrase “partnership in obedience” to indicate this new understanding of the relationship in which they stood. The second half of the 20 century saw a one-way understanding of mission give way to one where “mutual relationships were seen to originate in obedience to the living Word of God in Jesus Christ.”