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“A missionary is essentially a social martyr, cut off from his roots, his stock, his blood, his land, his background; his culture… he must be stripped as naked as a human being can be, down to the very texture of his being… (he must) divest himself of his very culture, so that he can be a naked instrument of the gospel to the cultures of the world.” (Fr. Vincent Donovan, “Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle from the Masai”)
“All authentic mission is incarnational mission. It demands identification without loss of identity. It means entering other people’s worlds, as he entered our, though without compromising our Christian convictions, values or standards.” (John Stott)
“We Christians are the only people on this earth who have the integrated worldview of matter and spirit that enables us to tackle sewer system development and the salvation of souls with equal gusto.” (Ray Bakke)
“Social work bodies, voluntary agencies, settlements and the institutional Church need constantly to be reformed so that they actually serve people, rather than simply maintain their life. Such reform needs the vision of those who have perhaps seen the system’s failures most clearly because they have stepped outside it. Some will find they can serve within such institutions; others can bring pressure to bear upon them. What they cannot afford to do, if they really want the well being of the big city, is to write off the institutions, or to believe that a revolution which destroys the whole system will by magic produce a better life. Revolution is only another sort of withdrawal because it refuses to attempt the hard grind of working out, persuading and sustaining, that real policies which help real people.” (David Sheppard, “Built as a City”, 1974.)
“A distinctive mark of the mission of Jesus Christ is the ‘good news’ that is proclaimed to the poor. Today’s poor can be described as the powerless. The Church of Jesus Christ must admit that it has not discovered how to convince today’s poor that the Gospel is relevant. It has failed to see that the Gospel implies involvement in tackling contemporary enslavements, by word and action.” (David Sheppard)
“Meanwhile our churches, like secular associations, are concerned with fund-raising, beautiful buildings, large numbers, comforting sermons from highly qualified preachers, while they display indifference to the poor, and to the pariahs of society - drunks, whores, homosexuals, the poor, the insane, and the lonely. Jesus himself would find no place in our all-too-respectable churches, for he did not come to help the righteous but to bring sinners to repentance. Our churches are not equipped to do that sort of thing.” (John White)
“Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves on the town garbage-heap; at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut, and thieves curse, and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died and that is what He died about that is where the church should be and what the church should be about.” (George MacLeod)
