The Philippines, a former colony of Spain, are called after King Philip 2 of Spain. The king wanted to evangelise these people and sent missionaries. Brazil was a colony of Catholic Portugal, so it also became Catholic. The Kings of Spain, Portugal and France were the ones who organised mission work in their colonies.

Encouraged by the Jesuits, the Pope started in 1622 a new department in the Vatican that would be in charge of mission work, worldwide, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. For 400 years this Vatican Office put an enormous effort into mission to pagan countries, which became called MISSION COUNTRIES. Often that work was helped by the colonial powers in charge of these countries. The mission method was largely focused on schools and hospitals.

In Our SVD community there are two sorts of missionaries: The old, so-called colonial type and the new generation, trained for a very different mission. I myself belonged to the old fashioned colonial mission time, having come at the dying end of it. We went out to found new local churches, but we did not only preach the gospel and keep busy with saving souls. No, we also brought development: We were educating people, building infrastructure, farming, business and universities.

In Latin America, in huge parts of Africa and Asia, the Catholic Church was planted and grew. The mission of the French Missionaries of Foreign Missions was very successful in Vietnam. Korea became a protestant country and later on the Catholic Church came in also. So it was with the Pacific Islands, where protestant missionaries from the USA and England were the first main evangelisers, and then the Catholics followed them and took their share.

Papua New Guinea, where I worked, achieved independence in 1975, but this would have been impossible without mission work that was done by Lutherans, the London Missionary Society and the Catholic Church during the roughly 100 years prior to independence. Many of PNG’s first leaders came from mission schools.

Those 400 years of work by the Congregation for the spreading of Catholic Faith was hugely successful, but the human cost, was also huge and hardly ever is mentioned.

In Ghana there is a cemetery of missionaries and in the Amazon, the same. In PNG prior to World War II, the average time for missionaries to stay working was four years. It was only when the USA troops were in PNG during WWII that they came up with an antimalarial treatment. All missionaries after WWII lived long lives.

After the Second World War the United Nations forced the colonising powers to give independence to their colonies. There are no colonies any more. There is a new type of mission work. A new type of missionary arose - frontier missionaries. Many of the missionaries’ mother churches in Europe are dying. Mission work had to re-invent itself, find another paradigm – but it is forced upon as by the signs of our time.

During Vatican II the Church Fathers also discussed mission work. One very important new teaching was that the Spirit of God has from the beginning of humanity worked even outside the church(!) and is still working at present outside the churches. Salvation of souls can be found in other religions such as
Buddhism, Hinduism Islam etc.

What then is mission work today about?

1. Inter-religious dialogue: Religions have to learn to live together, work together and learn from one another. Our SVD Janssen Spirituality Centre in Boronia, Vic is a wonderful example of this interfaith activity. Many Christians have become better Christians because they started learning from Buddhist wisdom.

2. Justice and peace: the mission to the poor, conveyed so beautifully and emphatically by Pope Francis.

3. A new awareness that ‘Our’ mission is in the first place “GOD’s” mission.

What can you do for mission?
It begins by deepening our own faith, increasing our Bible knowledge, learning about respect and tolerance, openness, showing our faith (not hiding it) and being proud of it and explaining it. This will bring JOY. When Jesus sent out the 72 disciples out to the villages and towns ahead of him, the Bible tells us they returned in joy (Luke 10: 1-17).

As church, we can identify ourselves again with Christ sitting in the synagogue of Capernaum, when he opened the scroll and read Isaiah 61:1-2
And made his own mission statement:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me
for he has anointed me
to bring the good news to the poor.
he has sent me to proclaim liberty to prisoners
sight to the blind
to let the oppressed go free …”
Luke 4:18 (Isaiah 61:1-2)

This is our MISSION today.