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Polycentric Missions: An Indigenous Engagement by Jay Matenga (WEA)
Coala2.5
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coalamovement
작성일
2026-05-13 02:13
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3
Prelude
Kia ora koutou katoa, e nga rangatira i hui hui nei,
(Life and wellbeing to all respected leaders),
Nga mihi nui kia koutou katoa. Tena koutou, tena koutou； tena koutou katoa.
(I bring you greetings； three times I respectfully acknowledge you).
He iti noa taku wa; na; me iti noa oku mihi.
(Space is limited and so must my greetings be).
I roto i te poto, kd aku whakapapa iwi kd Ngati Kahungunu ki Wairarapa, kd Ngati Porou, Ko Ngai Tahu oku iwi.
(To keep it short； I have just identified my tribal heritage).
Kb Jay Matenga toku ingoa;
(My name is Jay Matenga), Executive Director of the World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission. I’m a contextual theologian of indigenous Maori heritage.
Introduction
The second gathering of this emerging COALA network in Bangkok, Thailand (1–3 May this year), published a statement of “Recommendations for Mission Practice for the Majority World.” In that statement, paragraph three of the preamble reads, “many in the global church today recognize that we are now living in a new era of polycentric missions, wherein missions today is from everywhere to everywhere.”
To paraphrase, the statement goes on to speak of:
The primacy of the Holy Spirit.
The importance of the local and multi-church connections.
The need for missionary humility and service to the local church.
Contextual and cultural sensitivity.
Promoting growth in the depth and breadth of indigenized Christianity.
The careful use of outside resources for mutual benefit.
In the concluding call for unity and partnership, the statement reaffirms that our “era of polycentric missions” requires the development of all kinds of partnerships to bring resources together “into a powerful synergistic whole for world mission.”
Bravo!
Positioning The Majority World
COALA sits as the most recent iteration of Majority World missions initiatives. We’ve just concluded Lausanne 4. Did you know that immediately following Lausanne ’74, the World Evangelical Alliance established the Mission Commission as we know it today? A missions commission has always been central to the World Evangelical Alliance since the original in 1846, but in '74 the commission was given more autonomy and, under Dr. Clyde Taylor’s leadership, the first Executive Director of the Mission Commission was appointed in 1975.
She was Dr. Chun Chae Ok from South Korea. Dr. Ok had a distinguished service as a pioneer missionary to Pakistan for thirteen years. With her appointment, a new purpose was added to the Mission Commission’s remit. That was to become a “bridge-building body between the new Third World Missions and the traditional Western Missions so that help can travel in both directions in the furtherance of the Lord’s work worldwide.” This was 1975. Already the emerging Majority World missions force was apparent.
1988 was a significant turning point in cross-cultural missions with the genesis of the Third World Missions Association. It officially formed in 1989, chaired by Dr. David Cho with Jonathan Santos and Reuben Ezemadu alongside. This eventually became the World Link Missions Association, focused on training missionaries from new sending nations. I can detect the DNA of TWMA and World Link in the COALA vision and values.
But even as the Third World Missions Association diminished, a new Majority World missions movement emerged. In 2016, the Majority World Christian Leaders Conversation formed following a meeting of eleven missions practitioners. This quickly developed into regional chapters, but momentum was interrupted by the global pandemic. Peter Tarantal of Operation Mobilisation was central to the development of this movement and at the time was Chairman of the Mission Commission—the chairman who appointed me as Executive Director in 2020.
All that to say, COALA participants, you here are the latest in an honorable history of Majority World missions leaders seeking to promote fresh participation in God’s purposes throughout the world, and the WEA Mission Commission continues with you.
We represent a new generation facing a radically different global context and a diminishing interest in long-term foreign or cross-cultural missions—not just from the West but also the Majority World. If the change is not yet apparent in your context, it is coming. We can deny that all we want; we can pour resources into trying to change it. We can double down. As a missions mobilizer at heart, who literally helped write the book on the subject of mobilization (Mission in Motion), it pains me to recognize it. The old paradigms of missions are fading away. The Spirit of God is doing a new thing. As Mission Commission Deputy Leader Ken Katayama has paraphrased Isaiah 43:19, “Do we DARE perceive it?”
Polycentric Defined
Even though it’s the topic I have been asked to speak on, I have to confess that I do not believe the “new thing” God is doing is polycentric. Mission's obsession with polycentrism is perplexing to me. It's an overbaked term used in an underbaked way. The way it is being described bears very little resemblance to the meaning of polycentricity in social and political science. I know I’m stepping on toes here. You can use it if you want, and I think the COALA 2 statement is as good an application as I’ve seen, but we don’t need it.
No, the new thing God is doing is the exact thing the Spirit has been doing since Pentecost 1,931 years ago—incarnating and propagating the gospel in tribe after tribe, people after people, language after language, nation after nation. And as human beings turn to follow Jesus, to pledge allegiance to Him, we begin to participate as the people of God in the purposes of God by co-creating New Creation for the glory of God, everywhere.
In its technical sense, polycentric, polycentricism, or polycentricity has very little to do with "from everywhere to everywhere." I recall Allen Yeh saying something to the effect that Polycentric Missiology might not have been the best title for his 2016 book, and I agree. When it comes to World Christianity, it is probably best to consider it as pluricentric—the single body of Christ spreading throughout the world. One authority in many places.
Polycentric means many (poly) authorities (centers). It is all about where power and influence emerge within a given context. It is a term developed by political social sciences with a quite specific meaning. Polycentrism asks: where are the centers of power here and how can we best align those authorities to maximize the most benefit for all within a common system? Seen universally, the global Church has one center—that is Christ. But it has many expressions; it is plural, pluricentric. Set our sights on the local, however, and polycentrism emerges. We’ll come to that in a minute.
English semantics aside, I do not believe that we are anywhere near a polycentric missions era. Not yet. But it is emerging. We are not yet in it because the missionary initiatives born in the Majority World were and, in most ways, still are following Western missiology based on Eurocentric theological consensuses. There are varying degrees of cultural difference in the way missionaries and mission societies in the Majority World conduct missions, but in mainstream missions, we still have Eurocentric missions done with minor cultural nuances… and a lot of intercultural frustration. Global Evangelicalism is much more diverse than the industrial missionary complex typically models.
Take it or leave it, but I don’t think polycentrism is a helpful metaphor for discussing global missions. We can draw far better images from Scripture to capture what the Spirit of God is doing in the world today and how we can participate in it from everywhere to everywhere. Using these secular political models constrains us too much to an overly complicated industrial way of thinking. We can find better terminology as Majority World missiologists and missions practitioners; let’s not settle for co-opting highly academic technical phrasing.
Prioritizing the Center
If we are to talk of polycentrism in the true meaning of the concept, it can be helpful when it shines a light on the importance of the local—the indigenization of the gospel. This is my indigenous engagement with polycentrism. I have come to recognize that wherever the gospel is planted, there we need to acknowledge local authority for protecting, nurturing, and ultimately propagating it. Mature local Christian leaders need to be respected as guardians of the gospel for their people.
I am talking about local self-determination: self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-theologizing. But I would add self-giving to describe when an indigenous church participates as part of the global church—because no part of the body of Christ exists in isolation and we’re all to contribute to spreading the gospel. It is in the self-giving that we see the people of God participating in the purposes of God toward co-creating New Creation for the glory of God. In other words: missions. And if they cross culturo-religious boundaries, you can call it cross-cultural missions if you prefer.
If we dare perceive the “new thing” that God is doing right now, I would argue that it is the collapse of the hegemonic authority of Global North Christianity… and consequently its missions influence. The tide has well and truly turned. We all know that the demographic center of Christianity has shifted South. I am also perceiving Global North Christianity losing the moral authority to dictate what theologies emerge or disappear, how church should be conducted, or how we participate in God’s purposes in the world.
Obviously, historic and universal non-negotiables of the faith remain, but the meaning of the core tenets of the gospel and the theologies that enhance our relationship with and understanding of God need to be allowed to emerge from within, from the very dirt of a context, not imposed from outside. That takes time, but the newer churches in the Majority World are maturing into it.
While I don’t think we find true polycentrism within the global Evangelical missions movement yet, we do find it within local expressions of World Christianity, and it’s been there all along. Scholars and demographers of World Christian history have been arguing this for a while—including Allen Yeh, which is why his book would have better referred to World Christianity than missiology. Change-makers were local believers carrying the authority and the theology that emerged from their centers. They were not missionaries or senders of missionaries; they were indigenous church leaders like Bishop Azariah at Edinburgh 1910 and theologians like René Padilla at Lausanne 1974.
Polycentrism is not about the ‘where from’ but the ‘who’s there’. It’s about the indigenous authority of the recipients of the gospel. It is about the local, not the global. If we were to shift our lens to the local, to the insider, to the indigenous to a context, our strategies would shift because we are seeing from a different vantage point. We need to learn to see with greater empathy—to seek to understand their world and to repent of our superiorities and prejudices: our ethnocentricity.
We need to learn what it means to honor the local and let the locals lead. That’s not to say we outsiders don’t get involved or that we withhold our resources, but that we engage humbly and generously. We should acknowledge their authority—the power that God has given them as a people to shape their life and well-being, whether they know God or not. Yes, even if they don’t follow Jesus, they still have God-given authority. If we try to take that away and impose our culturally formed ideas of life and well-being, we diminish them. We subjugate them. We colonize them. We only end up suppressing the grace of God that lies latent within their cultures awaiting the gospel to awaken New Creation in their midst.
Polycentric Response
What should our response be then? Firstly, we need to acknowledge that globalization has impacted local contexts. This is an unavoidable fact. The local and global interact in almost every part of the world. But on whose terms? Usually the powerful, the ones with the most means. Money dictates methods. Sadly, this is also true with cross-cultural missions.
Multicultural groups represent an intersection of difference, and polycentrism can help insofar as it demands a certain equality of participation for mutual benefit within culturally mixed missions and local churches. From a biblical perspective, in keeping with the Apostle Paul’s theology, I believe this kind of Christ-following collaboration for Kingdom of God purposes can be seen as “co-creating New Creation.” Co-creating in New Testament Greek is synergeō (synergy), often translated as co-laboring. But we don’t need polycentrism to get us there. Are we not simply talking about intercultural Christian fellowship, koinonia? Is this not central to the power of the gospel, where the work of Jesus eradicates barriers of hostility between us and equalizes power?
For the 2023 Mission Commission Global Consultation (GC23), MC chairperson Ruth Walls and I set the tone in the very first plenary session. I said that in a transcultural gathering like GC23, no one should feel comfortable. If we feel comfortable, then we are probably participating from a position of power, not from the position of a learner. In a highly diverse context, even such as COALA, we should always be feeling discomfort as we try to understand and learn from our brothers and sisters from other backgrounds.
Ruth went on to say it’s like we’re all bringing our unique cultural ingredients into the kitchen to cook up some grand fusion of a banquet. Some delicacies from other cultures might not be to our taste, but they all add rich flavor to the overall recipe. Alone, some ingredients may not be to our liking—balut, durian, full-strength kimchi, or Vegemite. But added to the mix, oh, what a delicious feast!
Unlike GC16 in Panama, we did not mention polycentrism at all at GC23—by my design. Instead, we aimed to fire up the imagination of what it might look like to be more balanced in our appreciation of one another and more respectful of each other’s center of authority. We also sought to model making room for others to shine in their giftedness, from their positions of authority. For those who were there, I hope you sensed that. Apart from the introduction, I did not speak again but served. You would be working hard to find me in the GC23 group photo. That’s not shyness. That’s deliberate de-centering. Leadership from below. That’s not to elicit praise for me; it is just one small example of how we should be making room for others and maturing in the process, as Romans 12 beautifully illustrates.
Feeling mutually uncomfortable is all well and good in transcultural contexts where we convene international meetings to promote intercultural exchange. When it comes to local settings, the indigenous should feel comfortable. It is their context. It is their home, and we are the guests. It is only appropriate that we should defer to their authority. If the relationship is strong, we can expect to be able to speak into situations. That is what being part of the body of Christ is about, but we need to leave it for them to decide what to do with our input, if anything.
I should clarify here that I am not speaking of any kind of apartheid. I do not believe that God created nations so that they remain ethnically pure. That is an aberration of the truth and a perversion of the gospel. We must be authentic to who we are but willing to lay it aside in love and service of one another. It is self-determination with self-giving in community towards mutuality.
Whether we talk about it as a polycentric era or, as I would prefer, a World Christianity era, the most effective way for us to strengthen participation in God’s global purposes is to live according to the kenotic attitude of Christ, which Paul explains most clearly in Philippians 2:5–11.
Conclusion
God is doing a new thing. Do we dare perceive it? Do we dare honor the local and hold back from imposing our cultural Christianity upon them? Do we dare say to the Western missions paradigm, “Thank you for all you have done, but let us reset the drawing board, lay aside your assumptions, and find new ways forward from here, together”? Do we dare work in new ways to co-create New Creation in specific contexts, inspired by many voices from across the global church? Regardless of our backgrounds, do we dare look in the mirror and acknowledge our own ethnocentricities, our biases and prejudices, and repent? Let us beware of repeating the same colonial mistakes with a different skin tone.
Let us dare to commit to upholding the COALA 2 recommendations:
- The primacy of the Holy Spirit.
- The importance of the local and multi-church connections.
- The need for missionary humility and service to the local church.
- Contextual and cultural sensitivity.
- Promoting growth in the depth and breadth of indigenized Christianity.
- The careful use of outside resources for mutual benefit.
With God’s help, we will. Amen.
Executive Director, World Evangelical Alliance Mission Commission By Dr. Jay Matenga
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