Mission as Withness

Abstract

Spiral mobility or flow is a good metaphor for contemporary global experience. Today’s life is precariously shaped by incessant cyclical movement from apocalypse to ‘post-apocalypse’ and from one post-apocalypse to another. There is no indication of what may be expected of the future. The future is in chaos. It appears that we are living through chaotic end times rather than experiencing mere gestures of the end times. A perpetual apocalypse seems the best way to describe the current reality. Therefore, Covid-19 seems to have been nothing but a mere reminder that we are on a sinking lifeboat. This article argues that in such an ever-wounded God’s world, African Pentecostalism has to shift the gear from mission as witness to mission as withness. The withness missiology can help in the process of re-discovering the theological and missiological meaning of life in an ever-wounded world and alternative ways of intercarnating into one another for the sake of common basic good of flourishing. It concludes that God’s Church is pneumatologically intended toward God’s world.