With the majority of the world’s Christians now living in the non-Western world, Christian mission has become a global movement. The mission of Western Christianity now faces the challenge of laying aside the preeminence and privilege it has long enjoyed in global Christian mission, and embracing a new role of servanthood in weakness alongside its sisters and brothers from Asia, South America, and Africa. Such a transformation in historic patterns in mission requires not just new strategies and techniques, but a renewal of its spirituality. How can the spirituality of Western mission be renewed? By learning from those non-Western Christians whose lives on the margins reveal anew the One who emptied himself of the prerogatives of glory on the cross to serve humanity out of utter weakness. Learning from the Least invites you to a journey among Palestinian Christians to meet radical peacemakers who are making courageous decisions to reconcile with those who are customarily reckoned as enemies. Their radical servanthood out of weakness is a prophetic challenge to Western Christians, a call to lay aside the prerogatives of power and wealth, to question triumphal theologies, and to discover again the vulnerability of the way of the cross.
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Elaine A. Heath is the Mc Creless Professor of Evangelism at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. She is also the Director of the Academy for Missional Wisdom, a non-degree program that equips clergy and laity to start and lead missional and new monastic communities, and is a program of the Missional Wisdom Foundation. She is the author of The Mystic Way of Evangelism (2008), Naked Faith: The Mystical Theology of Phoebe Palmer (2009), Longing for Spring: A New Vision for Wesleyan Communities (coauthored with Scott Kisker, 2010), We Were the Least of These: Reading the Bible with Survivors of Sexual Abuse (2011), and The Gospel According to Twilight: Women, Sex, and God (2011).Elaine is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church.