Abstract
Contemporary missiology can feel like a strange theological province for many theologians, tethered as it is to global missionary work. Missiological guilds also do not divide up into the customary institutional camps with mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox, on one side, and Evangelicals and Pentecostals on the other. The American Society of Missiology is an example of such a truly ecumenical guild, and its monograph series now includes Rosalia Meza’s Toward a New Praxis-Oriented Missiology. M. embodies the complexities of the field, since she is not only a Catholic theologian but also a religious educator and a former provincial superior for the Verbum Dei Missionary Fraternity (VDMF).
This book works primarily as integrative scholarship and as the beginning of a search for a renewed theology of missionary methods, an understudied area in missiology, especially for Roman Catholics. Interlacing the work of missiologist (and SVD priest) Stephen Bevans, educator Paulo Friere, and the missiological method of her own VDMF community, M. sees mission as a transformative process that must honor the agency and humanity of all parties. The book begins with an account of Bevans’s well-known prophetic dialogue approach to mission, which highlights a commitment to dialogue in mission, rooted in listening, vulnerability, and humility, but acknowledges that dialogue must also be prophetic. Listening surfaces the signs of the times, and that demands that missionaries announce God’s message and denounce injustice. M. worries about the tendency in mission to turn a flexible theological approach like this into a rigid set of techniques (she is right), and she sees prophetic dialogue as more a spirituality than a strategy (24). Her integrative argument then turns to Paulo Freire’s pedagogical notion of conscientização. M. gives a fresh read to this familiar concept by sticking close to Freire’s words (often in Portuguese) and his Brazilian context of illiteracy, military dictatorship, and neoliberal power asymmetries. We see clearly how Freire’s emphasis on freedom and liberation as the proper outcomes of education have developed and why dialogue matters so much to him. Ever mindful of the colonial power dynamics of mission in the past. M. again cites Freire’s insistent claim that the pedagogy of conscientização should not be reduced to a technique but must be reinvented in each context.
M. interlaces the work of Bevans and Freire to form a hermeneutical emphasis on process in missionary methods. In doing so, she attends especially to the transmission of faith. With the checkered colonial history of mission schools in the background, most missiologists shy from this aspect of mission and focus more on witness, proclamation, or the work of social justice. In M.’s perspective, Bevans and Freire demand we look at the experiential dimension of the transmission of faith, in a way reminiscent of Pope Francis. In the background here (though not explicitly identified) is the cognitive and doctrinal stress of many pedagogies of the New Evangelization, from the Catechism-obsessed Catholic high school curriculums in the United States, to seminary training in M.’s native Mexico, to the entrepreneurial media apologetics of Bishop Robert Barron. Her alternative approach to the pedagogy of mission, as in the work of religious educators like Thomas Groome (also influenced by Freire), seems more necessary than ever in the face of doctrinal pedagogies too often seen as the only way to address religious switching or disaffiliation in the Americas.
M. finishes her work of integrative scholarship by highlighting the approach to mission of her own Verbum Dei Missionary Fraternity. Founded in Spain in the early 1960s, this global missionary community of sisters, clergy, and married laity uses small faith communities as a locus for experiencing, internalizing (“assimilating” in their terminology), and sharing the Word of God as expressed in Scripture. While the work of the VDMF provides an interesting postconciliar take on mission, the reader feels the difficulty of a non-initiate trying to make full sense and fairly evaluate the community’s beloved approach. I myself would have preferred if M. had used VDMF mission work more like a case study rather than as a key theological interlocutor.
Nevertheless, M.’s deep engagement with Freire, her use of Spanish and Portuguese sources, and her discussion of the implications of this missiology for the working-class US Latinx immigrant communities her VDMF sisters serve as a good challenge for North American theologians still too enamored with Eurocentric theology. Some readers may be surprised by the detailed focus on integrative rather than constructive argumentation and the habit of enumerating points, but these are common stylistic choices in missiology. There are lacunae. For example, the link between personal and social transformation remains underdeveloped. I mostly envision this work as an important signpost toward the fuller constructive account of praxis-oriented missiology yet to come, perhaps one informed by Groome’s large body of pedagogical work.