John's Missional Gospel

By Sung Chan Kwon

The Fourth Gospel has contributed to the Church’s thinking on several theological themes. This book studies the missiology of the Gospel by reading the Fourth Gospel from a missional perspective. The author does not seek to find a pre‐defined mission within the Gospel, but seeks instead to discover the central message of the Gospel from a missional point of view. Thus, the author reads the whole story of the Gospel from a missional perspective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnum Books International
• Release date: Sep 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781914454103

Sung Chan Kwon

Sung Chan Kwon is the Executive Director of GMF (Global Missionary Fellowship), an umbrella organization of ten different mission agencies. Sung Chan has been a member of Wycliffe since 1992 and has served in different roles in the community as a translator and community developer, including as Director of Wycliffe Asia-Pacific (2011-2016), after which he completed his Ph.D. at OCMS in Oxford. Sung Chan is married to Ja Hwa Kim and has two sons. He is an ordained pastor of a Presbyterian denomination in Korea, and has a passion to help the self-theologizing or missiologizing process of mission fields, in particular amongst Asian churches.

Book preview

Introduction

When I became a missionary in 1992, I thought that I knew what mission was about. After more than 25 years of experience as a missionary, I find that the more I participate in mission work, the less I know what mission is.

This project, a missional reading of the Fourth Gospel, is motivated by that struggle. C. S Lewis says, ‘What you see and hear depends a great deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.’ I see that my understanding of mission was not based on the Bible but based on what I was learning within various mission movements from the 1990s. The changes of my location through the years enabled me to come out of a movement-based mission concept and see different pictures of mission, and it was some questions raised from that journey which led me to read the Fourth Gospel from a missional point of view.

My missional journey could be divided into three phases; each phase raises different issues in mission, and these issues provide the backdrop against my missional reading of the Fourth Gospel.

Three Phases of My Missional Journey

Since I was accepted as a member of a Bible translation agency in Korea in 1992, I have served in different roles in that organization. In 1995, after attending a Summer Institute of Linguistics training in Singapore to be a translator and literacy worker, I went to a non-Christian South Asian country with my family, where engaging in any Christian religious activities was strictly forbidden. I was seconded to an international relief NGO in the country as a literacy worker and later became involved in a community development project, which I served for six years. In 2001, I came back to my home country as I was elected to be the director of my sending organization, Global Bible Translators (a Korean affiliated organization of Wycliffe International in 1992, which is now Wycliffe Global Alliance). As director, I looked after three domains, general administration including finances, member care, and mobilization. Since mission movements, including Adopt-A-People and Finishing the Task, were spreading in Korea during those years, there were many invitations to speak about missions in churches. Several mission education programmes, such as Perspectives, were being introduced and run in various cities, so I had many opportunities to teach and to share what I had experienced regarding mission. When I finished my service as director of Global Bible Translators in 2008, I was invited to join the leadership team of Wycliffe International (the organization name has been changed into Wycliffe Global Alliance since 2011) as Director for Research and Development for two years and then was asked to serve as the Director for the Asia-Pacific Area for six years. The organization was in the process of changing its paradigm from an international agency to a global mission community, together with various participants around the world. Thus, my role as an area director was mainly serving and challenging local participants, including church denominations and local mission agencies, to build their capacity for mission in their own countries and beyond. The capacity-building we focused on helped them start their own journey in mission. From those various experiences, I see three phases in my missional journey, each providing a different lens for me to form my missional understanding.

Task vs. Relationship

The first phase of my missional journey is the six-years’ period when I was in the country in South Asia with my family. Before I left, I had already spent ten years in training and committed myself to a translation ministry. I knew that I might not be able to do typical mission activities in this country, but I expected that, at least, I could give assistance to a minority people group in terms of literacy, education and even Bible translation through the skills I had acquired through my training. However, the situation in the country was worse than I had imagined.

Many unexpected things happened within a year after my arrival, including a change of regime in the country, the new one being a fundamentalist group of the major religion. It seemed that all of my training was in vain, as I was not even able to visit the minority people-group I was supposed to serve in a mountainous area. In addition, we had to send our eight-year-old son to boarding school in a neighbouring country. All doors were closed. I was filled with the anguish of my own inner conflict, wondering if I needed to be there at all. All I could do was go to a bazaar to sit and drink tea with the shop owners, join the local men and play football with them, or look after my local friends’ store while they were eating. People called me Adamkhan, which was just a common name in the country, like John or James in English.

Since I was not able to do any education work, a local friend and I began a team for a newly designed relief programme. We visited refugees in desert areas and distributed chickens for them to raise so they could have eggs for their malnourished children. After a few months, I got permission to visit the minority people group I had planned to serve and officially started a pilot community development programme among them. Through the programme, I was able to visit many different villages in a valley and a mountain area. Eventually I was also able to start a literacy programme in many villages.

These experiences helped me to rethink my understanding of mission. Of course, I am neither saying that I lived just as the local people did, nor that I identified completely with them. Rather, the gap between my local friends and myself was huge. However, as much as I was able, I endeavoured to eat lunch with local people every day while I was in their country. The day my family and I departed from the country to return to our home in 2001, the local friend who had worked with me from the beginning accompanied us to the border to say goodbye. After a moment’s hesitation, he told me that I was not his guest. I was surprised to hear him say that because it was an inappropriate farewell message. After a pause, he continued, saying, ‘You have been my brother.’ At that moment, and later as I reflected on the experiences I had in that country, I understood that I was not there to accomplish my own plans, but to be a brother or a friend to the people I served.

My reflection on these experiences showed me the