This short essay is an attempt to deal with the relation between mission and unity in the perspective of the ecumenical learning process that has affected the use of these terms so profoundly since the beginning of the twentieth century. Its point of departure is that it might be profitable to recall some aspects of this learning process, particularly those aspects that help us to link the Christian keywords mission and unity to the vision of the coming kingdom of God. Its aim is to consider how the MIU-approach to mission as credible and efficient witness of churches that are themselves reasonably united, and its focus on the overcoming of church disunity for the sake of mission, might be enriched by an eschatological emphasis.

That mission and unity belong together has not always been self-evident. In fact, it is not until halfway through the twentieth century that we come across a way of speaking about mission that is decidedly church-centred, and a way of speaking about church that is decidedly missionary. We will briefly analyse two impulses that led to this new ecumenical consensus, and then raise the question as to how the various factors that contributed to it look from the point of view of the present experience of a world that is marked by pluralism and globalization. Finally we will consider what all this might imply for a contemporary approach to the mission-unity connection.

The unity impulse from the missionary movement

Urged on by a spirituality of conquest, the modern missionary movement saw the world as one large field ready to be won and cultivated in the name of Christ. This sense of unity - oversimplified as it may have been - was one of its strengths; and it originated not from a strong church consciousness but from a marriage between grassroots Christian revivals and a typically "modern" perspective on the unity of humankind. It could not leave the divided state of Christendom unaffected: the new accessibility of the "ends of the earth" had to lead to a rediscovery of the church and of the importance of the search for its unity. This is indeed what happened: through a series of comity arrangements on the mission fields, and through a series of regional and worldwide mission conferences meant to produce structures for efficient consultation, particularly the famous "Edinburgh 1910", the movement became a major driving force behind the new ecumenical movement.

It remains important to see what this unity impulse is and what it is not. Even though the origins of the church unity movement can be traced indirectly to the missionary movement - one of the main architects of Faith and Order, Charles Brent, came from the "mission field" - the missionary conferences were not interested in ecclesial consensus. They aimed rather at practical cooperation and consultation without theological discussion. They did develop a church focus, but it was a different one from the church focus developed in Faith and Order. Faith and Order rediscovered the church as tradition and community; for the missionary movement the churches remained strategic units in a worldwide project.

The strength of the missionary unity impulse was its eschatology. The modern missionary vision brought God, world and church together into one dynamic: it saw the coming of the kingdom expressed in the going of the missionaries to the ends of the earth, and it saw the gathering of the first fruits of the pagan world as the sign of the consummation of history. Of course, to the extent that this implied the unsophisticated projection of images of faith on a world naively conceived as a field of darkness waiting for light, this eschatology is no longer convincing in our day. On the other hand, the connection of Christian eschatology with the modern experience of history and with the messianic hopes raised by the modern age - even though this connection is also under fire in a "postmodern" age - remains significant. At least it helps us to hear some of the overtones in the early ecumenical link between mission and unity.

Understanding church and mission in the perspective of Missio Dei

The second major impulse that led to a close linking of mission and unity in ecumenical discourse is related to the effort to create a worldwide network of churches called to become centres of witness, each in its own context. In the course of the first half of the twentieth century, ecumenical communication among churches became the framework for the understanding of mission. In this perspective, the non-Christian world could no longer be defined in an undifferentiated way as "pagan": the first world war had placed the world on the agenda as a problem of peace and justice; there was the self-affirmation of other religions; the emergence of a "secular" world civilization and economic inequality; nazism and communism raised the issue of "neo-pagan" ideologies. All this called for an understanding of world Christianity as the paradigm of a world society in the perspective of the kingdom of God; and this became the logic of the integration of mission and church, and of missionary movement and ecumenical movement.

There was also a more theological side to this impulse. Twentieth century theology made an effort to recover original aspects of biblical eschatology and to redefine its relation to modern culture. Dialectical theologians in particular sought to define the eschaton as the "limit" of human existence, as the point where the sovereign God touches human history in judgment and challenge. In connection with an approach to biblical theology that emphasized the history of salvation, this led to a positioning of mission "between the times": mission was not to be seen as an extension of church or Christianity but rather as an announcement of the coming kingdom. Both mission and church were seen as embedded in divine action, and this is precisely what the concept of Missio Dei intended to express. The divine plan of salvation is realized in the gathering of the people of God (church) and the establishing of signs of the coming kingdom (mission). Missio Dei sees mission as part of an encompassing, overarching action of God in which "world" and "kingdom" are held together.

The strong connection between church and mission that was the result of all this found expression in a variety of diverging theological approaches, but these agreed basically that mission belonged to the nature of the church, and that church and mission could no longer be conceived apart from each other. It remains important to see that this strong connection is linked to a specific understanding of eschatology and modernity. To put it briefly: modernity came to be conceived as a rival system, an alternative paradigm, that could only be kept in rapport with the eschaton through the presence of a witnessing church. It was this broad vision of the eschatological coherence of church, world and mission that became the foundation of the "christocentric universalism" that characterized the ecumenical movement in its heyday.

At the same time it should be noted that this development gave the ecumenical movement, as it came to visibility in the World Council of Churches, a definite church focus that eventually led to a certain loss of eschatological vision. The "ecumenical" connection between church and mission may have had a strong eschatological component, yet it also strengthened the tendency to reverse the perspective. In the reversed perspective, church unity is no longer regarded as a manifestation of a broader vision; on the contrary, the so-called "wider issues" (mission, social action) are now regarded as further items added to the agenda of church unity. Along this line, "mission" is understood as something that the church does among other things, rather than as a pluriform worldwide movement in which the church rediscovers and receives its identity. The Missio Dei concept turned out to be not strong enough to counter this tendency: its effect was not to link the church more strongly to the legacy of the missionary movement, but rather to give theological legitimation to the ecumenical emphasis on the church.

Assaults on the selfconfidence of modernity

Most current conceptions of the relation of mission and unity are construed out of the two impulses described above, and - it must be added - most of them are also characterized by loss of eschatological vision. Meanwhile, the contemporary experience of the world is radically different from the experience that was dominant at the time of the impulses. Neither eschatology nor modernity can be dealt with in quite the same way as half a century ago. Inevitably, therefore, we will have to reconsider conceptions of the relation of mission and unity that are linked, however implicitly and unconsciously, to these older approaches.

In the second half of the twentieth century, many varieties of third world theology developed that explicitly questioned the prevalence of western ways of thinking and the self-confidence of modern western culture in ecumenical theology. By claiming attention for local cultural and religious traditions as legitimate sources for theological reflection, these theologies in fact undermine the "modern" desire for a rational ordering of reality from a given centre, with a new emphasis on pluralism. Even Missio Dei thinking becomes suspect from this point of view: it is exposed as an attempt to order a complex world with the aid of abstract categories and to lift church and mission above the complexities of a plural and ambiguous human history.

At the same time, various "postmodern" trends, both in western culture as a whole and more specifically in western theology, strengthen this attack on modern ordering by encouraging distrust and suspicion with regard to "grand narratives" and by taking new experiences of pluralism as points of departure.

The postmodern treatment of pluralism is, of course, a serious challenge to any ecumenical conception of mission and unity. Two points can be made about this. First: pluralism can no longer be made subordinate to a preceding or overarching conception of unity. Pluralism - of traditions, of religions, of cultures - is basic, it multiplies itself, there is no hidden or final unity in view, except those unities that are one-sidedly imposed by one particular tradition, religion or culture. This leads to the second point: pluralism is not just an interesting mosaic of differences; it has an underside of violence, alienation and hostility; it is the end-product of an extremely bloody history, both within Christianity and among the religions and cultures of the world. It is full of unreconciled memories. The confident modern vision of an ultimate "unity of humankind" has become highly problematic.

In its outward appearance, the final stage of globalization that we seem to have reached promises precisely that: a unity of humankind. The new technology of traffic and communication is its finishing touch. The world is no longer made up of "contexts" that can be understood independently from each other; on the contrary, contexts have become "deterritorialized, hyperdifferentiated and hybridized" (Schreiter). Globalization presents itself as the secular realized eschaton of humankind: it promises universal and lasting salvation. Behind this façade, however, we observe the new dichotomies between rich and poor, the elite and the marginalized, and we observe the social Darwinism, the contempt for democracy, and the colonization of the primary relations of life. And we also observe the struggle of individuals and groups to create new cultural identities on the borderlines that have become insignificant in the process of globalization and in the gaps that this process has caused. In other words, globalization and a new, disorderly pluralism seem to go together. Although itself a product of modernity, globalization undermines the "modern" consciousness of clear identities and "missions", and in that respect it also signals the failure of the modern visions of unity which had been so important for the genesis of the ecumenical movement.

Effects on the understanding of mission and unity

The contemporary pressures of postmodern suspicion, pluralism, and globalization make it possible, in retrospect, to assess the degree to which ecumenical thinking on mission and unity has been captive to the project of modernity from the beginning of the twentieth century. The resulting uncertainty with regard to traditional ecumenical convictions manifests itself, of course, in a crisis of the ecumenical movement as a whole, but it specifically touches the self-understanding of churches that seek to remain faithful to the ecumenical consensus regarding the connection between mission and unity. Generally speaking, we can discern three reactions to the new challenges. Our sketch of these reactions is restricted to the Protestant churches, but analogies can easily be traced in other parts of Christianity.

The first reaction is prevalent among the "older" churches in the western world; it consists of a loss of missionary self-confidence, and of a tendency to redefine missionary work in the direction of projects of interchurch aid or "serving presence". This reaction is characterized by identity problems, not so much in relation to faith as such but in relation to the self-evident superiority of "our" faith. The "other" - traditionally the object of mission - has come too close, has become too much like myself. The influence of postmodernism, pluralism, and globalization in the daily lives of people does not diminish the concern for other human beings or the desire to participate in a faithful community, but it does weaken the strong sense of conviction associated with "heavy" words such as mission and unity in earlier times.

The second reaction consists in the stubborn persistence in the truth of the given tradition and in the "missionary" calling to persuade others of this truth. We can call this "fundamentalism" in a general sense, in that it refuses to accept the premises of both modernity and postmodernity and sustains an eschatology according to which the modern world as a whole will be brought to judgment. Fundamentalism, however, is not pre-modern; rather, it proposes an alternative modernity. It is an effort to attack modernity with its own weapons and to conquer it in the name of an idealized religious tradition. It seeks to emulate rather than to repudiate the project of modernity. Fundamentalism, of course, has been alive ever since the beginnings of the modern ecumenical movement; in the present situation of pluralism and globalization it obviously acquires a new strong appeal.

The third reaction - widespread particularly in the third world - is the spiritualization of the mission-church-eschaton triad, prevalent in Pentecostal movements (but not only there). This reaction, in a sense, individualizes eschatology: it replaces the traditional ecumenical Missio Dei coherence with an emphasis on the powerful witness of persons touched by the Holy Spirit. It saves mission at the expense of unity and eschatology. Outwardly, it has the capacity to accommodate to the requirements of pluralism and globalization; inwardly, it offers experiences that transcend the limitations of those requirements. In that way, therefore, it becomes a profoundly significant alternative to more traditional understandings of the mission-unity connection.

Saving the ecumenical heritage

All three reactions sketched above break more or less openly with the learning process of the twentieth century ecumenical movement. Or, more precisely, they implicitly understand this learning process to lead away from the peculiar combination of modern and eschatological thinking that has, in various ways, characterized the movement up to and including the Missio Dei consensus. According to this implicit understanding, the new pluralism - both within world Christianity and in the world of cultures and religions as a whole - and the postmodern experience of the world call for a new ecumenical theology: one from which the (Enlightenment) notion of the unity of humankind has disappeared, and in which a narrower focus on the church or on individual spirituality has become determinative.

The question is, of course, whether this is all there is; whether it is really impossible to stay close to the ecumenical heritage with regard to mission and unity and still do justice to the challenges of postmodernism, pluralism and globalization. As long as churches or denominational families make use of the key words mission and unity in the hope of constructing a significant identity and a coherent world view on the basis of those key words, a possibility to do just that seems at least to be presupposed. It is worthwhile to explore it. Such an exploration will have to deal with two major questions. First, on what conditions can the vision of a unity of humankind be maintained? And second, what do these conditions imply for the understanding of mission? We will go briefly into each of these questions.

Unity of humankind as reconciled diversity

The eschatology that is an inalienable part of the Christian faith speaks of the coming of God, of a final unambiguous divine self-revelation, of a judgment, of a final separation of good and evil, and of the redemption of the faithful. On the level of the individual it speaks of resurrection and eternal life; on the cosmic level it speaks of a new heaven and a new earth. All this has its foundation in the givenness of Christ, in his life, death and resurrection. The (derivatively so-called) "eschatology" of modernity offers a perspective of universal understanding, of a humankind beyond pluralism, at least beyond a pluralism that keeps generating misunderstanding and violence. This perspective is not annihilated by postmodernism, pluralism and globalization; it is, rather, implied with new urgency in the counter-experiences of unreconciled memories and continuing destructive alienation, and in the disappointments generated by the misleading façade of new global unities.

Combination of the two "eschatologies" has been attempted in various ways in modern Christianity, and, as indicated above, it has to a large extent created and determined the ecumenical movement. But it remains a precarious enterprise. The term "unity of humankind" - in ecumenical discourse clearly a fruit of this enterprise - has become associated with the project of modernity and as such has come under suspicion; it has been used and still can be used to disguise attempts to "unify" the world on the basis of a particular ideology. In addition, from a Christian theological point of view the term "unity of humankind" is often associated with the assumption that humankind can redeem itself, that the attainment of unity and reconciliation is an immanent historical process. Does it account adequately for the biblical notions of judgment and separation?

The notion that comes to mind here - originally generated in the church unity discussion - is "reconciled diversity". It takes the insight seriously that final and decisive unity is unthinkable apart from a reality-transcending perspective that always implies judgment. "Unity of humankind" should be understood to unite not only humankind in its present state, but humankind including its complex histories of alienation, misunderstanding, hostility, violence. Pluralism of traditions, cultures and religions contains these complex histories in itself. Unity, reconciliation, the redemption of pluralism in this broad sense can, therefore, only be conceived as an eschatological event that encompasses the whole world and all history; in other words: as a divine initiative. Faith in the "unity of humankind" is only realistic - so the Christian would argue - if it takes the form of surrender to the perspective of judgment and forgiveness. And in that sense - so the ecumenical movement would teach us - it is still indispensable for an adequate understanding of the mission and unity of the church.

Mission: a pilgrimage of learning and discovery

Mission in the context of the unity of humankind will no longer place a major emphasis on the conquest of the world by the Christian world view, nor on determined witness over against the "rival systems" - even though these elements will continue to play a certain role. Rather, it will seek to deal constructively with pluralism, practising and encouraging communication in the perspective of ultimate unity, and restructuring its own tradition and message in that light. That will require an honest awareness of the historical place and role of the Christian tradition in the present world of pluralism and conflict, and an acceptance of the relativity of that tradition. That is not the same thing as relativism. Acceptance of relativity corresponds, rather, to the notion of internal eschatological criticism which is present in the New Testament, and which becomes visible in Jesus' self-relativizing references to the coming kingdom of God as well as in the distinctions between provisional, partial believing and final, complete seeing.

Missionary thinking will illuminate the givenness of Christ from the point of view of an eschaton that engages all traditions, including the Christian tradition, in a permanent process of mutual learning, and in that way links them to ultimate unity and truth. For the Christian, of course, there is no eschatological faith without Christ; but precisely this eschatological faith - highlighted, emphasized and strengthened by the challenges of the contemporary experience of the world - precludes final answers to the question of his significance. Jesus Christ has entered into the history of a community, which is an ongoing history of remembering, interpreting, expecting and witnessing - and as such also a history of engaging in a pilgrimage, together with others, towards Christ.

Understood in this way, mission in the sense of "making Christ known to the world" is not incompatible with keeping alive the vision of an ultimate reconciled diversity in a process of learning with and from others. It is not incompatible, for instance, with the establishment of a conspiracy of wisdom, in which various cultural and religious traditions pool their resources for communication and reconciliation, and remind each other of a higher destiny of the world and of human beings than the one presented by globalization. For Christian theology, an argument for eschatology, pilgrimage and dialogue is an argument for an emphasis on the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the connecting link between the unity of humankind and the world of today, between the redeemed communion of the human family and the many unredeemed and unreconciled communities - including churches and denominations - in which humankind lives. Mission is the effort to make this connection visible and understandable.

Relating mission and unity to each other

Our glance at the learning process of the ecumenical movement has made clear that "mission" and "unity" are not innocent words. Using these words in an ecclesial or theological context means almost by definition, being drawn into a field that is already occupied by a host of meanings, discussions and references; and being challenged to choose a position in that field. More specifically, it implies a critical look at the "church focus", that is, the tendency to deal with mission and unity as items in a programme of ecclesial action or self-constitution. Using the words "mission" and "unity" in the sense in which they have been "charged" by a long ecumenical history means precisely that one is taken out of the limited framework of ecclesial or denominational organization; one is challenged to deal with the issues of ecclesial or denominational identity in the wider context of a learning process towards reconciled diversity that involves the whole of humankind.

This implies first of all that one avoids ecclesial shortcuts in the definition of missionary work, and instead begins to reflect on what is actually done or intended or implied when a community of Christians reaches out towards "others". How does the faith in which the community lives relate to the ways in which the community experiences the world? How does it articulate a vision that can establish such a relation? These profoundly missionary questions impinge upon the identity of a community, rather than the other way around. In this perspective, the unity of a given community is not something that precedes missionary activity, so that one could say a firmly established unity enhances the efficiency of missionary work; rather, unity is given as communities get involved in the learning process of mission, in which they rediscover Jesus Christ as the coming one and learn to appreciate pluralism as a promise. Unity means relating the faith and action of a community to the unity of humankind.

Prof. Dr Bert Hoedemaker is emeritus professor of Ecumenics and Mission at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and a minister of the Uniting Churches in the Netherlands. He has written extensively on mission in the context of secularization and globalization.