Reconciliation as a Model of Mission

Abstract

CHANGING WORLD, CHANGING MISSION As we stand at the end of a century and of a millennium, the surge of events sweeping over us has become nearly more than we can comprehend. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, who did not think that a new age of hope and dignity would not soon be upon us? Confident proclamations of a “new world order” and even the “end of history” were sounded. Futurologists like Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt set forth visions of technological Gardens of Eden in which humanity would flourish and prosper. The dialectics of history seemed indeed to many to be in a penultimate phase, stretching toward a grand synthesis. But history in fact seldom proceeds so elegantly as history in theory. A global capitalist order has quickly succeeded the bipolar capitalistsocialist conflict that marked most of this century. It has, within a few years, reconfigured the economic map of the world. While enriching many, and creating new centers of wealth for the first time, it has also pushed the very poorest into even greater misery. The old economic system, which had inherited the center-periphery model of capital flow and production from the age of empire, was replaced with a polycentric model that distinguishes between those who are inside and part of the process from those who are excluded and forgotten. This new global economic system, a form of market capitalism, has carried with it a layer of homogenized hyperculture that has settled upon the many cultures where it now operates. The signifiers of this hyperculture are items of consumption: clothing, food, and entertainment. The global reach of this form of market capitalism is reinforced by a networked communication system that shrinks time and space; a single community of science and medicine and—increasingly—education. The grand uniformities of a globalized world are not the entire story, however. Precisely because of the polycentric character of this network—with its promise that new centers may begin anywhere—its