Sixty years after the close of the Second Vatican Council, the Mission Decree Ad Gentes offers a complex, frequently tension-laden approach to the topic of mission.

The document’s first chapter — promulgated Dec. 7, 1965, by Pope Paul VI — reveals a sore point: Ad Gentes does not present a unified understanding of mission, but must rather be read as the product of various theological currents and intra-conciliar compromises.

Such is the nature of council documents that emerged in times of ecclesiastical-political turbulence.

Nevertheless, Article 2 of the Mission Decree formulates a foundational statement that has lost none of its relevance today: “The Church is missionary by her very nature.”

The Council Fathers grounded the missionary nature of the Church in the Trinitarian act of sending. This Trinitarian anchoring of the missionary idea forms the theological foundation of the entire decree. Mission is not derived in an instructional or juridical sense from the so-called “missionary mandate” in the New Testament, but ontologically from God’s self-communication.

Incarnational and pneumatological considerations flow into a missionary ecclesiology in which the Church is understood as the ongoing mission of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

This makes mission an expression of the very essence of ecclesial existence — something Pope Francis has repeatedly emphasized throughout his pontificate, most clearly articulated at the beginning of his papacy in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium.

Mission as a dialogical process

How can the Mission Decree, formulated 60 years ago, be read fruitfully today? A productive approach may be to examine the central challenges the Church’s mission faces — very much in the spirit of the Council, whose central concern was aggiornamento: an opening of the Church to the contemporary world.

An important aggiornamento of the understanding of mission comes from a theological impulse in Asian theology, which moved away from the concept of missio ad gentes and instead coined the term missio inter gentes.

The shift from “to” (ad) to “among” (inter) marks a fundamental change: mission is no longer understood as a one-way movement from a center toward a periphery — or even from an active subject to a passive object — but as a relational event among people, communities and cultures.

This overcomes a missionary, colonial centrism. Mission develops into a dialogical communication process that opens spaces of encounter and challenges classic — including ecclesial — certainties.

Such a shift in perspective has concrete consequences, illustrated here through the overcoming of three forms of centrism: androcentrism (a worldview that sets the masculine as the norm), Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism.

Overcoming androcentrism

A key challenge for the Church in Europe — which understands itself as missionary by nature — is to find ways to overcome its structural and cultural lack of gender sensitivity and ongoing deficits in gender-equitable participation.

For the large majority of women and men engaged in the Church, it represents a barely acceptable anachronism that the Catholic Church in the 21st century fails to guarantee even the minimum standards of gender-equitable participation long since established in social practice, and continues to systematically marginalize women.

This structural shortcoming leads to a significant loss of ecclesial credibility, particularly where the Church understands itself as a prophetic-missionary actor in the service of justice and human dignity.

The overcoming of androcentrism concerns both the ongoing denial of women’s access to leadership and sacramental offices, and the rejection of modern gender concepts.

Today, the demand to overcome an androcentrism embedded in clericalized structures — and to achieve fair and equal participation for all people regardless of gender identity — represents an indispensable dimension of necessary structural and canon law reform processes.

Beyond this, a missionary Church faces the task of opening itself to diverse gender identities and forms of relationship in the spirit of gender-sensitive relationality.

Queer persons have long been invisible or explicitly unwelcome in ecclesial contexts. Yet the courageous commitment of many queer people to authentically discover and live their God-given sexuality could be understood as an impulse for all Christians to critically reflect on — and where necessary, helpfully expand — the culturally and theologically conditioned boundaries of their own understanding of sexuality.

Overcoming Eurocentrism

A relationally understood conception of mission and theology also implies the development and establishment of a relational ecclesiology in which the Church is conceived and structured not as a static institution, but as a dynamic network of mutual relationships.

Such a perspective represents, especially in an age of growing interculturality and global interconnectedness, a central precondition for developing ecclesial life in a future-oriented way, while taking seriously the diverse cultural and social contexts in which the Church exists.

A relational understanding of mission therefore emphasizes the importance of local churches and calls for cultivating new forms of dialogue among them.

The era is over in which representatives of European local churches could set their theological positions as universal norms without reflecting that these were often shaped by a Eurocentrism that future generations may well classify as European provincialism.

A relational, missionary ecclesiology is grounded instead in the insight that religious identity must not be fixed in rigid, ideologically charged doctrines communicated as binding. Rather, it understands identity in its fluidity as a dynamic process of growth — one that takes place in relationship to dialogical counterparts and is renewed through those relationships in lifelong processes of growth.

How such a relational ecclesiology can concretely take shape in the relationship between the universal Church and local churches has been explored in recent times especially through the concept of synodality.

Synods represent the modal principle of a universal Church understood in this way: they open the space in which local churches come together, exchange perspectives and enrich the unity of the Catholic Church through their particular characteristics. In them, the richness of the world Church becomes visible; in them, perspectives can be articulated that have not previously been thought or named.

The International Theological Commission elaborated on these theological dimensions of synodality in its 2018 document Synodality in the Life and Mission of the Church. It underlines that “the teaching of Scripture and Tradition testifies that synodality is a constitutive dimension of the Church, through which she manifests and shapes herself as the People of God on the journey and as the assembly convoked by the Risen Lord.”

At the center of synodal processes are not ecclesial structures as such, but the invitation to evangelization and mission — one that grows from a spiritual depth, opens the path of conversion and leads ecclesial action into a communally borne process of transformation.

Overcoming anthropocentrism

The ecological crisis — caused substantially by human action — calls into question the anthropocentric worldview that is deeply rooted in Western intellectual history and remains influential in the self-understanding of the Christian tradition.

The anthropocentrism that likely shaped the thinking of many Council Fathers stands in need of critical revision today, and where necessary, of significant qualification.

The environmental question became a central theological and church-political priority most recently under Pope Francis. He strengthened the Church’s missionary-ecological awareness and in 2015 published Laudato Si’, the first environmental encyclical in Church history.

In it, Francis developed a vision of intra- and intergenerational justice. He called for missionary action in the face of the climate crisis and criticized a “misguided anthropocentrism.”

He pointed to the “invisible bonds” that ultimately connect all creatures: together, all creatures form a “universal family” that should be shaped by a mutual attitude and culture of respect and humility.

The Asian impulse of missio inter gentes encourages us to reflect on questions of mission in a more relational manner and to overcome some almost narcissistic-seeming forms of centrism.

The missionary overcoming of androcentrism, the missionary overcoming of Eurocentrism and the missionary overcoming of anthropocentrism are examples of a missionary aggiornamento.

The deconstruction of these centrisms creates intercultural, ecclesiological and cosmological spaces that can be filled anew by a theology that serves life.

• Klaus Vellguth is a co-initiator of the research project The Second Vatican Council: Event and Mission, involving 150 theologians from around the world. They work in five continental groups (Africa / Asia / Europe / Latin America & the Caribbean / North America, Australia & Oceania) and are developing a new style of theology that aims to give voice not to the monolithic statements of individual theologians, but to the dynamic discourses of interculturally diverse scholars. As part of this project, a twelve-volume commentary on the Second Vatican Council is being published through 2027. The five volumes already published were presented to Pope Leo XIV in Rome on December 10.
• First published in https://katholisch.de/ Translated into English. Republished with permission.