Bishop Jari Jolkkonen, Committee for Global Mission

Dear friends in the service of Christ’s mission,

I wish you a warm welcome to Finland and the Sofia Centre. This week is important for us, and we have been anticipating it eagerly. We want to approach this week with an open mind and a listening ear. That means we want to hear your views on what the mission of Christ’s church entails. What are the issues with which the Church of Christ is currently struggling? How do you assess your collaboration with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland? Where have we succeeded, and where have we fallen short? Where are we perceptive, and where are we blind and deaf? How can we develop and improve our work in the service of Christ’s mission, alongside you as our partner? How can we support and encourage each other?

Our relationship with your churches is reciprocal. So we also hope to benefit from you: we want your visit to strengthen our church’s missionary work and thus leave a strong impact on our spiritual life.

The last time this event was organised was ten years ago. The mission given by Christ remains the same, but the world has changed. So we must also renew our thinking, develop our work, and make improvements in our lives. This attitude towards change is at the core of the gospel, as Christ’s public ministry in the Gospel of Mark begins with the call to “metanoiete”, to turn and believe in the gospel. This attitude of continually correcting our lives is at the heart of Lutheran faith, as it is the true message of Martin Luther’s first thesis – and thus of all 95 theses.

Before I tell you how missionary work is organised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland today, I want to bring one perspective to bear on the Church’s mission at a global level.

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It is the task of mission work to proclaim the gospel of Christ so that people may find saving faith in God, grow in love for their neighbour, and be saved eternally. The Lutheran reformers often spoke of the “pure” gospel: the true church is where the gospel is proclaimed purely. That little word “purely” may seem annoying or threatening to some. It may bring to mind a rigid theology that constantly focuses on minor details. Nevertheless, I believe it is a word that remains significant.

In Western countries the so-called Enlightenment narrative has long been cultivated, in which philosophers of secularism, alienated from religion, laid the groundwork during the Enlightenment era for stable democracy. In this narrative Christian missionary work is assigned the role of a hindrance to or even supporter of colonialism. It is clear that mistakes have been made in the history of Christian missionary work. However, the story of the Enlightenment as THE creator of stable democracy is seriously lacking.

 

In his article Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy, Robert Woodberry, an American researcher, demonstrates extensive theological, historical, and statistical evidence that the missionary work of

 

Conversionary Protestantism significantly influenced the emergence of stable democracies. Evangelical Protestants persuaded listeners in new mission areas to embrace faith, emphasising everyone’s right to read the Bible in their native language. This led them to advocate for religious freedom, organise mass education, and develop innovative printing practices. Consequently, newspapers emerged, followed by civic organisations and political parties – all essential prerequisites of stable democracy. They also protested against the exploitation of indigenous peoples, reported abuses to their western governments, and empowered native populations, thus achieving important colonial reforms (Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy – American Political Science Review, Vol. 106, No. 2, May 2012, 244–274).

Jesus said, “Each tree is known by its own fruit.” The pure gospel bears good fruit. If we consider stable democracy, justice, and equality as good fruits, we have much reason to thank the missionaries and missionary organisations of past generations who, by doing missionary work, also initiated important reforms in society in this temporal life.

Throughout the church’s history there has been a desire to either deny or steal the pure gospel of Christ and subordinate it to serve forces alien to the gospel. For example, communism wanted to ban Christianity, while fascism tried to steal it.

Today we see some wanting to manipulate the gospel to serve narrow national interests, extreme nationalism, xenophobia, islamophobia, and even racism. The way in which the Russian Orthodox Church speaks for Russian imperialism, or Trump speaks of his political rivals, or supporters of Christian Zionism talk about Palestinians is no longer pure gospel in my opinion.

On the other side of politics others thirst for justice and equality but want to divide people artificially into the oppressors and the oppressed. The thirst is thus no longer less for the common good than it is for an adversary or heretic who can be “cancelled”. The African-American professor John McWorther argues that the “woke” culture has features of religion: it has its own clergy and holy scriptures, its own conception of original sin and evangelism, its own apocalyptic vision, and its own inquisition, harnessed to seek out infidels and cleanse society of heresies.

Both mindsets present the boundary between good and evil as lying between individuals and groups. Lutheran faith asserts that the struggle between good and evil occurs within the heart of every person – that is, in MY heart. In that struggle we need God’s help and each other’s assistance through shared conversation and listening.

As Christians, I believe we must continue to contemplate what Christ’s pure gospel means today.

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This brings us to how missionary work and international diakonia are organised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland.

Today we have eight missionary organisations. They commit themselves to holistic mission: proclamation; service; advocacy; and inter-faith dialogue. In addition, Finn Church Aid carries out humanitarian work, or international diakonia.

All the organisations are independent. They have different histories. Some were founded in the 1800s; others were born in the upheaval of the 1960s. Some focus solely on missionary work; others work both as missionary organisations abroad and as revival movements in Finland.

The General Synod has defined the criteria for organisations and approved them as official contracting bodies. The Bishops’ Conference determines the church’s mission strategy for a period of five years at a time. The current strategy is Common Witness 2023. We would like to hear your views on this paper. The Bishops’ Conference oversees the organisations, ensuring that they operate in accordance with the mission strategy. The National Church Council enters into contracts for a period of five years at a time.

The joint body of the contract organisations, dioceses, and the Bishops’ Conference is the Committee for Global Mission. It was established by the Bishops’ Conference, which I chair. It includes representatives from all the dioceses and contract organisations.

At the national level of the church, daily missionary tasks are carried out by the Church Office for Global Mission, which operates at the Church House office. Its staff covers mission theology, training, inter-faith dialogue, church aid, and international relations. In practice its staff has organised these partnership negotiations.

All the contracting organisations commit themselves to the church’s mission strategy, although they do not agree on everything. For example, there may be different conceptions of women’s ordination. Our church first ordained women in 1986. Some of the organisations are reticent about the decision but allow different views among their members. The church does not require organisations to have a single concept of office, but all must act in accordance with the principles laid down by the Bishops’ Conference.

As a church, we respect the decisions of our partner churches in this matter and in general, and we do not seek to interfere with them with our own solutions.

As I said, our church wants to be a listening ear. So it is time to be quiet and to listen to what we can learn from you. Welcome!