first adopted at the 1952 International Missionary Council Conference in Willingen, Germany. With this re-orientation of mission as a movement from God to the world came a re-orientation of the place of the church and the Kingdom of God. The church-centred mission that focused its main strategy on church planting and social provision of education and medicine became a limited understanding. Once the Triune God became the origin, source and primary actor in mission then the world took on a different perspective. The Kingdom of God came to be understood as bigger and beyond the church but which involved the church as sign, instrument and foretaste of the Kingdom.
2.19 What of the relationship between missio dei and partnership? The emergence of the two concepts so closely together at the 1947 Whitby Conference and at the 1952 Willingen Conference show a convergence of ideas at something of a kairos41 moment in mission history. Wider political changes taking place in the 1950s necessitated the re-thinking of old patterns of working in mission and the articulation of new theory and practice. The expulsion of the missionaries from China, which had been one of the largest of the mission fields, had occurred between 1949 and 1951 and this sent shock waves through the Mission Agencies, the churches and conciliar ecumenism. While partnership was the new articulation of the relationships between sending and receiving churches and other forms of missionary engagement, so missio dei was the articulation of a new theological understanding of the church in mission in relationship with the Trinitarian God and the God’s Kingdom.
2.20 Theologically the two concepts interweave and interrelate. Ross argues that, ‘partnership is an idea essential to the very nature of God … we see partnership in the Godhead … God is a community of three divine persons. God is also one God’.42 God is not self-contained but has, by God’s nature and love, to express personally and reach beyond itself. Mission is the self-expression of God for God’s creation or, as Bosch describes the Trinity,
‘a fountain of sending love’.43
2.21 John V. Taylor states, ‘Partnership between Churches in mission means also an apostolic concern from one to the other to help one another to present the likeness of Christ more clearly; being in travail for one another until we all are formed in the shape of Christ.’44
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