My Pilgrimage in Mission.

Pierson, Paul E.

I had the privilege of being born into a strong Christian home. My father was the son of immigrants who helped establish a Swedish Baptist church in Forest City, Iowa, around 1870. After marriage he and my mother moved to southern California, where he worked in an industrial plant. I was the third of three sons, born into this Christian family and into the Baptist Church. The church had a strong fundamentalist bent, but I never felt the need to rebel, which I think was because of the integrity of my parents in the practice of their faith. Beyond the need for salvation in Christ, which my parents emphasized, I especially remember two other things they taught me: first, that the Gospel was for all peoples and thus that missions are essential, and second, that any kind of racism was wrong. When a Japanese family bought the house next to ours in 1937, my parents welcomed them as neighbors, soon took the children to Sunday School, and ultimately saw a Japanese Baptist church established partly as a result. And wh en our neighbors were taken to "relocation" camps after Pearl Harbor, my father took care of their property, received the rent, and sent it to them without accepting any payment. Years later a Japanese-American pastor told me that my father was the reason he was in ministry.

Facing the Mission Question

After brief navy service in World War II, I went to the University of California, Berkeley, to study chemical engineering. In my junior year I began to attend the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, where a remarkable pastor, Robert Boyd Munger, had a powerful ministry, especially among returning veterans. In his preaching I heard two primary emphases: first, that Jesus Christ was Lord, and if we were to be serious Christians, personal recognition of his lordship was essential. Second, Christ's concern was for the whole world, which clearly led to an emphasis on mission. Here I became part of a dynamic group of several hundred students studying the Bible and exploring these issues. Scores of my colleagues later entered ministry and mission.

My own spiritual struggle was over the issue of the lordship of Christ. I had been a believer all my life, but now the question was whether I was willing to embrace Christ fully as Lord of my life, wherever that might lead. I went through an intense struggle for nine months before I made that decision, quietly, with no show of emotion, in a worship service. With a fellow engineering student who had made a similar decision, I went to talk with Dr. Munger, wondering if that decision meant I should become a pastor or missionary. He wisely said, "Not unless God clearly calls you." I continued my engineering studies while my friend immediately changed his major and planned for missionary service. (He and his wife have spent over forty years in Pakistan.)

During my senior year I met Rosemary, a marvelous young woman in a Bible study group, and very soon decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. She and I were married a year after our graduation from the university. By this time I was working in Berkeley in my chosen profession, and she was teaching school. Then ten weeks after our wedding we received what I can only describe as a very clear call, a conviction that God was calling us into missionary service. We have always been grateful that the call came to both of us together. Our parents were surprised but very supportive of our change in direction. When my father heard of our decision, he told me he had always prayed that one of his sons would become a missionary. But he had never told anyone about that prayer!

In 1951 we went to Princeton Seminary, in New Jersey.

Rosemary taught in a nearby school while I studied in the seminary. The two professors with the greatest influence on me were John A. MacKay and Otto Piper. MacKay was one of the great missionary statesmen of the time. I can still hear him thundering in class, "The church that is not missionary is not truly the church." And Piper, who had courageously stood up against Hitler in the early 1930s and been exiled from Germany, gave me a new vision of redemptive history as the integrative principle for the Bible. Although I was admitted to Ph.D. study in New Testament under Piper, we decided it was time to go to the mission field and deferred further study.

Overnight from Student to Pastor

In 1956 we sailed to Brazil to serve under the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, USA. In language school, a Mennonite friend and I organized a study group among the students. The first book we studied was Donald A. McGavran's Bridges of God. Later, as secretary of the Commission on Theological Education of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil, I was able to bring McGavran to lecture in the Brazilian seminaries.

The agreement between our mission and the Brazilian Presbyterian Church was that missionaries would work mainly in the far interior, and after language study we were sent to Corumba, a small city on the Brazil-Bolivian border. (It is the scene of much of the action in John Grisham's latest book, The Testament.) There I became pastor of a group of twelve Presbyterians who had moved there, established a congregation, and built a small chapel. One week I was an inexperienced seminary and language school graduate, the next week I was a pastor! I spent many hours with the three key leaders in the congregation, drinking Brazilian cafezinho, sharing ideas, listening, praying, and planning. I also studied intensively the Book of Acts. I wanted to be sure that the message I was attempting to communicate was that of the apostles. I really learned to preach, not at Princeton, but in attempting to communicate the Good News to people in that church, in clearings in the jungle, and in the streets of the town. Very quickly I discovered that any effective work has to be based on the ministry and witness of the whole body of Christ. The other major lesson I learned was that the Gospel is power; it can transform lives lostin destructive lifestyles and despair. I learned much from those believers in Corumba, and I believe they learned something from me as we shared life together. The church grew rapidly, and we were able to open small congregations in other places.

Teaching and the Brazilian Crisis

We had planned to return to Corumba after furlough, but the national church and the U.S. mission asked me to teach in the Presbyterian Seminary in Recife. The position was in church history, so I returned to Princeton in 1960 to begin a Ph.D. in that field. In 1961 Rosemary and I, now with four children, arrived in Recife, the major city in Brazil's Northeast, one of the most poverty-stricken regions of South America. We had seen poverty in Corumba, but it was worse in the cities and interior of the Northeast. The state immediately south of ours registered 46 percent infant mortality one year. Such statistics were common. The area was a major focus of President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, and we became friends with a number of the USAID families, many of them strong Christians. I even had the unenviable task of preaching in the American church there the Sunday after Kennedy's assassination.

In Recife there were a number of issues to be faced. Most of our students came from the interior, with a faith focused primarily on personal salvation. As they came to the seminary in the city, they began to ask new questions. How was their faith to relate to the crushing poverty and political oppression? On one side were older church leaders who saw any such questions as dangerous, possibly leading to Communism; on the other side were university students and others who saw Marxism as the only alternative. Castro's Cuba seemed to be the model for many Brazilians, especially among the students. Communist-led peasant leagues were organized among sugar cane workers in the interior, threatening to march on the city. The seminary was in a time of turmoil, and to complicate matters, because of dissatisfaction with the Brazilian rector at the seminary, I was suddenly elected to that position by the Brazilian trustees. The Brazilian government seemed to be sliding toward anarchy, and in 1964 we saw tanks half a bloc k from our home, preparing to fire on the local police headquarters if it resisted the military coup in progress. If they had done so and missed, the shells would have landed in the middle of our seminary campus. To make matters worse, our most popular Brazilian faculty member, who taught ethics and theology, was accused of being a Communist by the far right, and we discovered there was an order for his arrest. Through a series of providential contacts we were able to keep him out of prison. I remember saying, as we took him and his wife to a remote hiding place for a few days, that I had not learned how to do that in Princeton!

And what about the relationship with the Roman Catholic Church, now that Vatican II was beginning? This was a difficult dilemma. Earlier in the century a Catholic priest had hired an assassin to kill a Presbyterian missionary physician/minister in our state. His Brazilian helper had been killed defending him, and that man's nephew was now an elder in a new church that I helped organize. But I accepted an invitation from Archbishop Dom Helder Camara to be the first Protestant on his newly organized Commission on Peace and Justice. After the archbishop's home was machine-gunned and one of his young priests murdered (by the military, it was believed), he felt it best to dissolve the group. Later, when I was in the south of Brazil, doing research for my dissertation, I discovered that I had been put under house arrest with an order for my immediate expulsion from the country as a subversive person. Providentially, through a series of contacts, the order was lifted.

A third issue we faced was that the theological curriculum was far too North American; it showed little awareness of the issues faced by the Brazilian church. Attempts at revision or contextualization brought fears of "modernism," but some changes were made, and an evening course was inaugurated for laypersons. We were able to oversee the construction of several buildings, which made it possible to more than double the student body. I also taught as a visiting professor in the Southern Baptist seminary in the city.

Alas, the Brazilian church and my Presbyterian board moved further apart on theological, ecumenical, and social issues, and we missionaries were caught in the middle. Soon it became clear that the church no longer wanted missionaries in its seminaries. At the end of 1969 my Southern Presbyterian colleague and I resigned, and I returned to Princeton. There I completed my dissertation on the history of the Presbyterian Church of Brazil.

Now what to do? I had become convinced in my doctoral studies that our method of selecting and training leaders was far too institutionalized and elitist and hindered the growth and ministry of the church. I also became more aware of the complexity of relationships between the national church, the various missions, and their sponsoring boards. I accepted an invitation to teach in a small seminary in Portugal and to help establish a program in theological education by extension there. But it soon became clear that the Portuguese churches--Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian--did not want such a program, and in 1973, after two years of frustration, we returned to the United States believing that our missionary career was over.

Facing the Inner-City Challenge

I was called to the First Presbyterian Church in downtown Fresno, California. It had been blessed with strong leadership, and my predecessor, who had left to teach at Fuller Theological Seminary, left the church with a strong college ministry and a group of committed and able lay leaders, both men and women. The downtown, however, was deteriorating rapidly. In my first few months the two remaining historic downtown churches closed, and their buildings were torn down. A nearby Baptist church moved to the suburbs. A colleague predicted our church would be gone within ten years. There were obviously challenges to be faced. One was to increase the focus on world mission. My predecessor had left a strong foundation, and by bringing in missionary friends to interact with the people, encouraging travel to mission fields, and by preaching and teaching, the mission vision was enlarged. A number of men and women entered ministry and mission. Today with strong pastoral leadership, the church is committed to creative mis sion projects in places as diverse as India, Albania, and France.

A second challenge was the inner city right around us. After some frustrating attempts trying to work out of our own resources, we were able to sponsor World Impact, an inner city ministry, whose workers live where they minister. After I left, through various initiatives, ministries were started with Southeast Asian refugees, and now two congregations have been established among them. With the leadership of InterVarsity staff some youth and families from the church have moved into the downtown area.

The Fresno experience was marvelous for our entire family. The church nurtured our children, I had an excellent pastoral staff, and we formed deep friendships. We had no desire to leave. But then, in the greatest surprise of my career, Fuller Seminary called me to become the dean of its School of World Mission. I had long admired Fuller, one of our key laymen had become a trustee there, and we had invited mission faculty members to speak on several occasions. But I had never contemplated teaching in a seminary in the United States.

Fuller School of World Mission

So in July1980, with a good deal of fear and trepidation but also anticipation, I became dean and professor of history of mission and Latin American studies in the School of World Mission at Fuller. I found a warm and supportive group of faculty colleagues. Donald McGavran and Arthur Glasser, my predecessors as dean, were still involved and very supportive. A second great blessing was the sense of cohesiveness among the faculty. Of course the major focus was church growth, but we agreed that if the church was to grow in a healthy manner, there were other issues to be addressed. I had become convinced that while seminaries and similar institutions had an essential function in mission, a variety of nonformal and informal methods of selecting and training leaders was essential if the church was to make its greatest impact in most areas of the world, especially where it was growing most rapidly. Thus we established a concentration in leadership selection and training with two faculty positions. Other new concentr ations focused on Bible translation, Islamics, urban mission, community development, and Chinese studies. Unfortunately, the latter was discontinued for lack of adequate financing. Greater emphasis was placed on biblical theology of mission, and primarily through the initiative of Arthur Glasser, a master's program in Jewish studies and evangelism was initiated. With our enlarged faculty we began a Ph.D. program in intercultural studies.

Our greatest controversy emerged in 1982 around the issue of "signs and wonders." Most missiological thinking had ignored the question of the miraculous activity of God in the present, while affirming it in the past. Although some of us had been involved in exorcisms and praying for the sick while overseas, we had not integrated such experiences into our missiology, perhaps because of post-Enlightenment cessationist theology or simply because of reluctance to deal with the issue. But many of our students came from cultures where the issue of power was central in religion--power over the spirits, power over sickness, and power for help in life's crises. That kind of power, clearly important in the Bible and the focus of traditional religions, strangely enough had been left out of Western theology and missiology. We found that many of our students had been converted, called to ministry, or healed from sickness through a dream, vision, or other clear intervention of God, especially those who came from non-Chris tian backgrounds. How were we to deal with such issues?

In 1982 we initiated a new course called Signs, Wonders, and Church Growth, taught by Peter Wagner, with the active participation of John Wimber. It received a great deal of attention and became the focus of controversy both inside and outside the seminary. Although the class was discontinued in its original form in 1985, the emphasis continues today in courses taught by Wagner and Charles Kraft, with consistently high enrollment. While not all our faculty would agree with every aspect of the original course, I believe all would agree that it resulted in permanent gain for the church and its mission.

Lessons Learned, Beliefs Deepened

How to summarize what I have learned, especially in the last twenty years? First, I am more ecumenical, with a deep appreciation of the variety of people and movements through whom God has worked throughout history. I have had the privilege of teaching and learning from students from over one hundred countries, representing a spectrum ranging from Pentecostals to an Egyptian Coptic bishop and charismatic Roman Catholics, while including all of the mainline denominations. I am more convinced than ever, from the study of both history and theology, that the focus of mission must always be the communication of the Good News of Jesus Christ, calling men and women to believe in him and to be gathered into worshiping, nurturing, serving bodies, which we call churches, and that these churches must be appropriate to their cultural contexts. Out of such churches ministries of compassion and social transformation can and should flow.

Second, it is clear that mission normally comes out of renewal, which begins with a new vision of the transcendent and holy God, and then a new experience of his grace that both motivates and empowers mission.

Third, I am impressed with the fact that such movements have nearly always begun on the periphery of the institutional church, whether at Antioch, Herrnhut, Moulton, a haystack, or Azusa Street. This fact teaches us to be open to the Holy Spirit, who frequently does his new work through unexpected people in unexpected places.

When we went to Brazil in 1956, the perception was widespread that we were nearing the end of the missionary era. How things change! Today the missionary movement is flourishing and is more multinational than ever before. We have moved into a postdenominational, post-Christendom, post-Western era. The mission boards on which I serve are multiethnic and multidenominational and work with a variety of churches overseas. Today the church is being reshaped to an extent not seen since the sixteenth century. And the challenges are great: how to engage in mission in the burgeoning urban centers; how to help provide better training for the two million functional pastors in Asia, Africa, and Latin America who have no formal preparation for ministry; how to meet the desperate physical and social needs of the world's poor while maintaining the focus on evangelism; how to affirm the validity of every culture but also recognize that each culture, including our own, needs to be transformed by the Gospel; and how can the ch urch in the West discover how to read the Scriptures with new eyes as we learn from the church in the rest of the world.

Last June, at the Communion service preceding Fuller's commencement, I walked up the aisle with a Korean trustee to take the bread and wine. In front of me was a woman of African descent, a member of the theology faculty. Around us were students and faculty, men and women, from a variety of nations and races, united as we celebrated the cross and resurrection of our Lord, united in our desire that the world might believe that the Father had sent him. The thought flashed through my mind, "This is the way it is supposed to be"--so that a fragmented world might see that in Jesus Christ lies reconciliation, unity, and life. That experience expresses my pilgrimage. I trust it is the pilgrimage of the church as well.

Paul E. Pierson served as a Presbyterian missionary in Brazil from 1956 to 1970 and in Portugal from 1971 to 1973. He was dean at the School of World Mission, Fuller Theological Seminary, 1980 to 1992, and continues on the faculty as Professor of History of Mission and Latin American Studies.