The Cross and the Three-Fold Task of the Missionary
Max Warren, 1904-1977, served long as the General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society. He wrote considerably on inter-religious dialogue, and mission theology, among others. He believed in the three-fold task of the missionary. I assume he drew it from the three-fold task of Jesus in Matthew 4:23
“Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people.”
One might surmise that Warren embraced an Incarnational view of the role of the missionary… or at least saw Jesus as the key model for the missionary. However, central to the task was Warren’s understnading of the Cross and of the Atonement. The following is an extended quote by F. W. Dillistone in “Into All the World: A Biography of Max Warren” (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1980). This excerpt quotes generously from Warren’s book “Interpreting the Cross.”
(a) In evangelism. “It is an inescapable part of the Cross in our ministry of evangelism, the Cross we have to carry, that we cannot persuade men that the Cross has a meaning.” “The Hindu, the Buddhist, the Confucianist, the Shinto devotee, and those who have abandoned those systems of belief but have retained their cultural forms, all alike have seen Christianity fundamentally as an expression of cultural aggression,expressed too often with scant respect for their own sensibilities. They have much to forgive. That is something Christians need to remember when they seek to interpret the gospel of forgiveness. It is not enough to know that God has forgiven us. We have to receive the forgiveness of those men of other faiths. This will mean an interpretation of the Cross in our ministry of evangelism which it will be hard to achieve. We can only seek forgiveness in the light of the universal relevance of the Cross. But how are we to convince the men of these other faiths that we all meet at the Cross and that we want them to forgive us there? That is the essence of the encounter that lies ahead.”
(b) In teaching. “Jesus Christ lived the Cross before he died upon it. His living was the teaching upon which the Cross itself threw the light of a vast illumination. Unless we can see this and understand that all Christ’s living was a dying, we shall not plumb the depths of what is involved for us in our ministry of teaching. For if the Cross stands at the centre of history, as Christians believe, if it is the central key to understanding the nature of God, the dilemma of man, the mystery of life and death: then we have to expand its meaning as the way in which all men are meant to live and die. This carries with it the implications that we too must live it if we are to teach it.”
(c) In healing. “Our ministry is to the whole man. To heal means to make every whit whole. We can be satisfied with nothing less than a full atonement in which the man or the woman is made one with God, with neighbour, with environment and with the inner self. Health, wholeness, integrity, holiness belong together.” And in a suggestive reference to Galatians 6:1-2 he points out that the verb translated ‘set him right’… is also the technical term used for setting of a broken limb. At-one-ment in the body becomes a model for the understanding of the At-one-ment which is the restoration of perfect harmony and wholeness. (Dillistone, pages 163-164)
