Last week we stood at the shoreline, listening to the coast as a metaphor for encounter — a place that shelters, unsettles, and reshapes.Â
We do not stand alone at this threshold. Sr Anne Falola’s voice reminds us that the future is not a distant goal, but something already stirring among us. It demands attention, care, and courage. Speaking from the heart of the African Church, she reminds us that fidelity to our founding charisms cannot mean retreat into what is familiar. It asks of us a courage equal to that of those who came before us, a courage we have traced in the letters, the histories, and the shoreline. A courage to encounter the new frontiers of mission in a world that is both profoundly beautiful and profoundly fractured. To remain awake to where we are being formed, unmade, remade.
It is a fidelity that listens first, that questions the structures we’ve inherited, and that seeks forms of presence shaped by justice, humility, and love.
Sr Anne offers a steady invitation to listen for what the Spirit may be asking of us now. Her reflection returns us again to the humility of presence, reminding us that the missionary call today must be held within a world far more complex than that faced by our founders.
This future will not emerge through strategy or vision alone. It will be shaped in the slow and costly work of relationship. Sr Anne Falola’s reflection names the questions that must be lived into: questions of belonging, of difference, of how we come to know one another in ways that neither dominate nor dissolve what is distinct.
She names something that cannot be bypassed: the reality that intercultural living is not a backdrop to mission, but part of its very form. It carries strain, resistance, and the demand for unlearning. It asks more than tolerance. It asks for transformation—not just of the other, but of the self.
There is no way to step into this future without being changed by it. The inheritance of mission, its burdens and its grace, must be held with humility. Where once the model was one-directional, today we are called to mutuality, to receive as well as to offer, to relinquish control in favour of co-creation. This is not easy. It exposes the limitations of what has been handed down. But it also opens the possibility of something more faithful.
There is no clean resolution. What is offered here is a recognition that we are still becoming. That fidelity to the founding impulse must now be worked out in forms our founders could not have imagined. That the future will be shaped as much by questions as by convictions.
To walk forward is to risk misunderstanding, to stand within tensions that cannot be smoothed over. It means holding space for language that is not our own, for wisdom that comes from elsewhere. It means seeing difference not as something to manage, but as something that may open us, unsettle us, re-form us.
Mission, in this light, is not what we do but how we live. It is found in how we listen, how we stay, how we learn to be part of a community that does not begin or end with us.
What remains is the call to presence. Presence as availability. As willingness. As deep attention to the other. And to allow that this encounter, if we let it, might reconfigure our very sense of what it means to be faithful.
The coast continues to call us, and we, in our imperfect and unfolding way, are still asked to respond. We stand upon its edge together.
Part 1: At the Edge of the Shoreline
Part 2: The History of the SMA and OLA Mission in Africa
Part 3: The Coast as a Metaphor for EncounterÂ
Part 4: The Future of Mission from the African PerspectiveÂ