There Is No Asian, Only Duty
Last Saturday, we dropped episode 3 of season 3 of our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians.
In that episode, Daniel and I looked at the theme of mission. The episode was an opportunity for me to share with Dan what I learned from my time in clergy formation in the Archdiocese of Sydney which I continue to apply in my current post in Wagga Wagga; it was also an opportunity for Daniel to speak about the relationship of mission to evangelisation.
Over the course of the episode, we looked at two influential presumptions of mission. On the one hand, we looked at the presumption of mission or duty as the main driver for mission, which was historically the primary foundation of clergy formation up till very recently. On the other hand, we looked at the presumption of relationship as the main context from which mission was currently understood. Put another way, mission grew out of a relationship, rather than a duty.
One overarching theme in the episode that Dan and I brought out is the way that these presumptions ended up bleeding into and influencing, often unintentionally, the content of our evangelisation. The first presumption of duty, while very noble sounding, has over the decades led to a form of evangelisation where the focus was on dispensing with duties. This in turn led to a perception of the Christian faith as primarily a series of obligations to be met. The second sounded saccharine on its face, until one realises that the pattern of relationship was one with God in the first instance, then the body of Christ in the second. We argued that this formed the more stable foundation for mission, and thus for the content of our evangelisation, for it is because of that relationship and the love of that relationship that one properly understands that sense of duty. Duties were subordinate to that relationship, and not the replacement for it that it eventually became.
And me, once again channeling my inner Opus Dei prelate, looked at St. Josemaria Escriva’s notion of divine filiation as the template for the proper understanding of both relation and mission.
We cover this and other points in our episode “There is No Asian, Only Duty”, which you can listen to in full on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts.
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