Reconciliation, the Mission of God, and Our Shared Mission: An Interview with Dr. Michael Ortiz

Dr. Michael A. Ortiz, DTS’s vice president for global ministries and professor of missiology and intercultural studies, recently coedited the book Ambassadors of Reconciliation: God’s Mission Through Missions for All. The book collects a selection of papers presented at the 2022 Annual Conference of the Evangelical Missiological Society, held on the campus of Dallas International University. Dr. Ortiz has previously served as department chair of missiology and intercultural studies and a regional vice president of the Evangelical Missiological Society (EMS). He also serves as the executive director of the International Council for Evangelical Theological Education (ICETE). 

What makes reconciliation an important theme for missions?

If we look at the whole of the biblical narrative and begin to understand the mission that the Lord has laid out within the Scriptures from beginning to end, we see that it’s all about the redemptive plan of God. And if you understand God’s mission from a biblical, theological, even historical basis, how can you not respond through missions? That’s where we get the subtitle for the book: God’s Mission Through Missions for All. That’s something I try to emphasize to my students, that God’s mission must compel us to do missions, to reach across cultures, to reach across different barriers. One of those key barriers has to do with conflict and contested places that we find people living in all over the world. And so, how can we not include that within the redemptive plan that the Lord has for us?

The EMS committee that laid out the plan for the 2022 conference felt like we as an organization had not really touched on that in quite a while. At the same time, we saw—and still see—what’s going on within our context here in the United States. There’s still a lot of stuff that is unresolved, and so we felt like this is a topic that has not been addressed well enough. We also brought in the World Evangelical Alliance’s Peace and Reconciliation Network, which was a good pairing with neighbors. That led to the first two sections of the book, “Theology” and “Practices.” And then the third section of the book is “Case Studies.”

Is this a book primarily about missions, and specifically cross-cultural missions, or would any layperson in the church benefit from the content?

I think it’s a challenge within our churches today, that they don’t spend enough time talking about missions and what that means. If believers in the United States today are going to walk faithfully with Christ, they’ve got to see how Christ would be walking today. Part of that includes reaching across the different barriers that exist. So the first two sections of the book lay out a biblical theological framework for people to think about missions and reconciliation—and I use those two words purposefully because the first section especially contains material to help people understand: What is God’s mission, and what importance might that hold for me? As people grasp some of that within those first sections, then they’ll move into the question of reconciliation and crossing barriers that are difficult to cross sometimes, and hopefully those sections will give them not just a biblical understanding but also some practical examples of how to do that.

What kind of barriers and reconciliation does the book have in mind?

The initial thrust of the conference and then the book was to consider what are some of the barriers from racial conflicts and other things that are happening within culture and society that keep people apart. How do we begin to navigate those conflict-type barriers that place restrictions to crossing cultures? Some conflicts are most apparent and most obvious to people. But I think there are some other issues that are more beneath the surface that we don’t often think about. For example, you see someone, and you automatically generate in your mind a perspective about that person. Unfortunately, culture then reinforces that perspective. These phenotypic impressions create belief-shaping power without being verifiable. So I think if we can begin to raise people’s awareness of that, we can make some positive progress.

Reconciliation in a cross-cultural perspective doesn’t mean that everybody becomes culturally the same. That’s not the end goal, right?

Exactly. And as we think about moving in the direction of reconciliation, there’s also no question that not only is the process partially about learning about the other setting, the other culture, but I think the Lord does something within you personally, where you begin to learn a lot about yourself. So hopefully it’s a kind of bicultural process where you’re not just learning from or about the other culture but you’re also learning about your own background, your own setting, your own biases, your own things that are restricting your ability to relate well with others.

The annual convention for EMS has been hosted by DTS in recent years and will be here on campus again in 2025. For someone who has not attended this event before, talk about what they can expect.

You’ll be amongst missionaries and missiologists who bring a lot of cross-cultural experience. These are people who don’t see things quite the same as others in the American church might. It’s a wonderful blend of critical thinkers focusing on God’s missional purpose, and you’re able to interact with these brilliant people. Just come and sit and listen and watch, and I don’t think you can walk away the same, in terms of your appreciation for what God is doing in the world and what your role might be.

Students are welcome to submit an idea for a presentation at an EMS regional conference in the spring. They can come see me with the idea for a paper, and I’ll work with them to develop the paper, plan the research, make sure the information is well written, and then prepare a great presentation. Students who have not done a conference presentation before are frightened, but they do well. I’ve never had a student say, “I wish I hadn’t done that.” The people who come to EMS conferences are a group that roots for the students to do well.

What was the process of taking a set of conference papers and making them into a book?

A lot of reading. My other coeditors, Geoff Hartt and Manuel Böhm, and I created a grid to evaluate the papers. We had over forty papers to read, and we read everything. We could pretty quickly see which papers would work well for the book, knowing that we wanted about fourteen chapters total. Then we took the papers we selected and worked on the editing process with the original authors to be in the correct style for the book. At the end of the process, the book feels all of a piece, even though it started as those different conference presentations. And now that the book is out there, it can be a resource for people to think about reconciliation within the theological framework of the mission of God.

Purchase Ambassadors of Reconciliation here!