Month: August 2020

When considering Christianity and Islam, interfaith discussions often address issues of similarity and difference as definitive categories. Some suggest that the differences between the two are minimal and that the similarities must be emphasized for peace to be imaginable. Others claim radical disparities between the faiths and are convinced that the differences must be promoted to protect the integrity of the respective truth claims. Two recent books, Who Is My Enemy? Questions American Christians Must Face about Islam—and Themselves (2011) by Lipscomb professor Lee Camp, and Allah: A Christian Response (2011) by Yale professor Miroslav Volf, help us grapple with these issues profoundly and faithfully. On the surface, Volf can be seen as emphasizing similarity and Camp can be seen as emphasizing difference. While both acknowledge the faiths’ substantial similarities and irreconcilable differences, a comparative analysis of the books actually helps point the discussion beyond similarity and difference per se, toward respectful dialogue, mutual understanding, and genuine missional encounter. Despite the different purposes and emphases of the two books, the authors agree that peace initiatives between the communities do not require pluralistic compromises of core convictions or denials of the missional impulse, and both advocate a posture for Christian-Muslim dialogue that is defined by the Golden Rule and love of neighbor.

Introduction

“So you see, there are only a few degrees of difference between Islam and Christianity.”

That’s what our Turkish guide said as he led our group to the apse of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, that magnificent structure that was once a church, then a mosque, and is now a museum. The Hagia Sophia was built in the sixth century and served as the central church of Eastern Christendom for the better part of a millennium. An altar once stood in the center of the apse marking the fact that the entire building pointed toward Jerusalem. In May of 1453, however, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquered Istanbul (then Constantinople), he went directly to the Hagia Sophia and declared that the thousand-year-old church was now a mosque. Over time, various Islamic elements were added to serve the new Muslim worshipers. For example, the altar was replaced with a mihrab (prayer niche) found in all mosques that indicates the direction of Mecca and thus the direction of Islamic prayer. From Istanbul, Mecca is located only seven degrees farther south than Jerusalem, so the mihrab was installed a few feet to the right of where the altar once was, thus slightly off-center as one faces the apse (see the picture above). For the next 500 years, therefore, Muslim worshipers lined up with the Mecca-facing mihrab, and thus slightly diagonal to the original Jerusalem-facing orientation of the building. Our guide was a master at telling this story, but he also couldn’t help but share his theological conviction that the spatial proximity of the altar and mihrab reflected the theological proximity of the two faiths, thus “there are only a few degrees of difference between Islam and Christianity.”

Interfaith discussions often cast issues of similarity and difference as definitive categories. Some suggest that the differences between Christianity and Islam are minimal (e.g., a mere seven degrees?) and that the similarities must be emphasized for peace to be imaginable. Others claim radical disparities between the faiths (e.g., a full 180 degrees!) and are convinced that the differences must be promoted to protect the integrity of the respective truth claims. Of course, whether one sees accommodating similarity or whiplashing difference is largely affected by one’s cultural and theological location. As an Islamic friend of mine once mused, Mecca and Jerusalem may be geographically separated by seven degrees when standing in Istanbul, but there is a full 180 degrees of separation between the two when standing in northwestern Saudi Arabia (and the political and theological analogies were not lost on us!).

Two recent books, Who Is My Enemy? Questions American Christians Must Face about Islam—and Themselves (2011) by Lipscomb professor Lee Camp, and Allah: A Christian Response (2011) by Yale professor Miroslav Volf, help us grapple with both the remarkable similarities and the profound differences between these two major world faiths. A full review of the books is not possible in the space provided, but I will offer some specific points of comparison between them that are important for interfaith dialogue. In the end, I will suggest that both help point the discussions beyond issues of similarity and difference per se, and toward respectful dialogue, mutual understanding, and genuine missional encounter.

Contexts and Objectives

I will begin with representative quotes from each book:

“To the extent that Christians and Muslims embrace the normative teachings of Christianity and Islam about God, they believe in a common God,” Volf declares.1 And again: “If . . . Christians and Muslims have a common God . . . they will have . . . overlapping ultimate values . . . [and] a common moral framework.”2

“The narrative logic of the Qur’an and of the New Testament are not ‘basically the same,’ ” Camp states. “The fundamental storyline of the two differs.”3 And again: “The founding narratives of Christianity and Islam are different . . .[they] proceed from two very different narratives.”4

Both Volf and Camp are theologians who write from the perspectives of personal faith and with the hope of contributing to respectful dialogue and peaceful relations between Muslims and Christians. Based on the quotes above, however, one could surmise that Volf highlights similarity between the faiths while Camp argues for difference, and those characterizations would be true up to a point. But such an observation also easily becomes a caricature that misses the rich nuances and deeper invitations of each book. Neither is a monolithic presentation of similarity or difference. For example, in his presentation of theological similarities, Volf also notes that “Muslim and Christian beliefs about God significantly diverge at points,”5 reflect “ineradicable differences,”6 and reveal “two rival versions of the Master of the Universe.”7 Likewise, as Camp describes “fundamental differences” between the two stories, he also displays deep appreciation for the “clear parallels between Jesus and Muhammad” especially with regard to shared convictions about the sovereignty of God and shared concerns for the poor, for justice, fairness, equality, and peace.8

To assess their distinct contributions, it is first critical to recognize their different contexts and objectives. Neither book claims to be a comprehensive comparison of the two faiths. Rather, each stems from a specific impetus. For Volf, Allah was written as part of a series of interfaith discussions that evolved especially after Pope Benedict XVI’s controversial 2006 Regensburg Address.9 In that speech, the pope implied that the “inner nature” of Islam reveals a posture of violence that reflects an antirational capricious God diametrically opposed to the rational peaceful God of Christianity. Volf asserts that such a dichotomy fails to stand up to scrutiny.10 This sets up his thesis that the God of the Bible and the God of the Qur’an are “sufficiently similar” in descriptions and commands so as to conclude that they are the same God (see more below). But it is crucial to understand that Volf presents these arguments as an exercise in “political theology.” In short, he is not focused on issues such as salvation and the world to come as much as he is seeking to build bridges that might help Muslims and Christians live together more peacefully in this world.11

Camp’s Who Is My Enemy? was written as part of a personal journey triggered by negative reactions to several lectures he delivered on interfaith dialogue.12 To his surprise, some claimed that his lectures undermined Christian faith and reflected dangerous naïveté about the violent and dominating intentions of Muslims. The reactions created in him the desire to investigate the issues with greater diligence, which eventually led to the writing of the book.

As with Volf’s book, Who Is My Enemy? is also a work of political theology, but one with different starting points and ending points. Building on his earlier book Mere Discipleship,13 Camp presents a political theology influenced by John Howard Yoder that promotes a turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and sharply contrasts the nonviolent suffering love of Jesus with the notions of “just war” and “redemptive violence” that developed in post-Constantinian Christendom. In Who Is My Enemy? Camp finds Islam to be a fascinating external dialogue partner in these otherwise Christian debates about war. After all, a common assumption is that Islam, like post-Constantinian Christianity, supports ideas of justified war and measured retaliation against enemies. In fact, from a Yoderian perspective, Camp provocatively suggests that mainstream, post-Constantinian Christian notions of just war are actually more Muslim than Christian. In more precise words, there is a “fundamental political difference” between the logic of Jesus and the logic of Muhammad, so that “the normative of Christian tradition, with its just war tradition, looks more like the Muhammad story than the Jesus story.”14 Camp implies that one must make a choice: one must either embrace the idea that Jesus followers are called to a life of radical pacifism, or admit that Jesus and Muhammad are significantly similar in their approach to war and justice. It is important to note that Camp is not advocating the kind of crass comparisons that pit Islam as a religion of war or justice versus Christianity as a religion of peace. But he does advance the idea that the “founding narratives” of Christianity and Islam present two fundamentally different means for achieving the shared goals of peace and justice: one shaped by the suffering love of one on a cross, the other shaped by the equitable leadership of one with a sword.15

Assessments of Camp and Volf

Is Camp’s analysis accurate? An assessment of the argument invites at least two caveats. First, as Camp is fully aware, a radical Yoderian-type pacifism is an influential yet minority position in the history of Christian thought and practice. In fact, theologians of the stature of Augustine have regularly insisted that war against enemies, while always lamentable, can actually be a form of just peacemaking and thus an expression of love for enemies.16 Secondly, Islamic history includes its own influential minority traditions that have promoted principled nonviolence.17 Consider, for example, the nonviolent activist movements of early-twentieth-century Kurdo-Turkish scholar Said Nursi in Turkey18 and Abdul Ghaffar Khan (the “Frontier Gandhi”) in India19 and the international movements currently inspired by Fethullah Gülen, who calls for Muslims to act “without hands against those who strike you, without speech against those who curse you.”20 One might even detect Yoderesque logic in the influential Sudanese reformer and martyr Mahmoud Muhammad Taha who opposed the legalistic and militant traditions that have developed in Islamic history and located Islam’s original and ideal vision (“founding narrative”?) in the inclusivist and nonretaliatory Meccan passages of the Qur’an.21 While Camp recognizes pious Muslim individuals who display remarkable commitments to peace,22 he does not adequately address movements and schools of thought such as these. The operative question, then, is this: Do these reform movements challenge Camp’s portrayal of Islam’s “founding narrative” and its political vision?

Volf casts a wider net than Camp, but at one point in Allah he also focuses on issues of war and retaliation against enemies. Like Camp, Volf acknowledges the prominence of just war ideas in Christian history and promotions of nonretaliatory kindness to enemies in Islamic history. All things considered, however, Volf finds the normative Christian command to “love enemies” to be, even in its just war forms, more definitive and proactive than in normative Islam, which tends to be more protective and defensive.23 I think similar nuance is also valuable when comparing the radical reform movements of both faiths.24 In a sense, therefore, Volf confirms Camp’s distinction at least as it relates to the love of enemies, but only as a sub-point within his wider appeal to the theological similarities between the two faiths. This is not to suggest that the point about war is less theologically significant to Volf than it is to Camp, but rather that Volf has wider objectives in his book.

What, then, can be said about Volf’s wider objectives? A primary philosophical challenge of his thesis relates to the concept of “sufficient similarity.” How does one determine whether the similarities between Islam and Christianity are “sufficient” to support the idea of a common God? What is sufficient? Where are the lines drawn, and who draws them? In many ways, such questions are unanswerable and can easily fall victim to semantic tail-chasing. But Volf remains focused on the normative traditions and employs persuasive historical and philosophical arguments to support the “same God” position.25 Volf also presents a deep theological argument that, if true, has profound implications for interfaith dialogue. Echoing the “Common Word” document, Volf underscores a teaching that is central to the three Abrahamic faiths: the twin commands to love God and to love one’s neighbors. This teaching is clear in the Shema and other parts of the Torah, in the teachings of Jesus and his promotion of the “greatest commands,” and in the teachings of Muhammad as recorded in the authoritative hadith.26 Unfortunately, history is filled with examples of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim individuals and communities that have failed to be faithful to such teachings. But if this central point of commonality is accurate, Volf claims, the consequences are “momentous” for the prospects of peace. In short, it means that a deep commitment to the distinctives of the faiths “no longer leads to clashes; it fosters peaceful coexistence.”27 Said another way, peaceful coexistence does not require pluralistic compromises of core convictions or denials of the missional impulse.28

On his side, Camp emphasizes the call of Jesus-followers to faithfully practice nonretaliatory suffering love to all, including enemies, regardless of the situation or whether peaceful coexistence or justice results.29 Volf would certainly agree with such an emphasis, but for Camp this is precisely what makes the Jesus story different from both the Muhammad story and the Christian just war traditions. Nevertheless, Camp can also plead with his just war “brothers and sisters” at least to apply the principles of that tradition thoroughly and rigorously, and thus avoid the violent abuses that have been so common in Christian history.30 He concludes that just war advocates, and by implication mainstream Muslims, who are motivated by “love of neighbor” can “serve an immensely positive role in peacemaking in our world.”31

Love of neighbor, therefore, becomes a hermeneutical key in both books. It is a litmus test that allows Camp to affirm peacemaking possibilities for just war traditions despite his strong Yoderian convictions. It also serves as one of the key theological litmus tests for Volf’s idea of sufficient similarity and the same God thesis. Volf further implies that the embodiments or practices of love of neighbor are more significant than what different communities might believe or say about God or one’s neighbors. From this, Volf delivers a thought-provoking twist of logic that I also find reflected in Camp’s presentation:

Are the Crusaders and the terrorist worshipping the same God? A Crusader shouts Christus dominus (“Christ is the Lord”) while cleaving the head of an infidel. A terrorist shouts Allahu Akhbar (“God is the greatest”) as he pulls the fuse of the bomb strapped around his waist. They are naming God very differently, and yet they are, alas, worshipping the same god—a bloodthirsty god of power, not the God of justice and mercy of the normative Christian and Muslim religious traditions.32

Said another way, Christians who strive to worship God by loving their neighbors have more in common with Muslims who do the same than with other Bible-reading, church-going Christians who embody a posture of animosity, violence, or fear-mongering. Volf concludes with a provocative nuance to his overall thesis: “No simple yes or no is possible in answering the question of whether Muslims and Christians worship the same God. Some do, and some don’t.”33

Conclusion

Much more should be said when attempting productive comparisons between Christianity and Islam.34 But Camp and Volf both provide helpful reference points for navigating the faith’s substantial similarities and irreconcilable differences. Both also advocate a posture for Christian/Muslim dialogue that is defined by the Golden Rule and love of neighbor.

In conclusion and from a Christian perspective, love of neighbor in Muslim/Christian interactions finds specific support in Jesus’ well-known parable of the Good Samaritan.35 In many ways, Samaritans were to the Jews of Jesus’ day what Muslims are to many Christians today. The parallels are striking. Jews and Samaritans, like Christians and Muslims, share complex historical connections to one another, and each claims to be the true worshipers of God.36 Samaritans, like Muslims, embraced only selected parts and idiosyncratic interpretations of the Jewish scriptures. Samaritans directed their faith toward a different “mountain” than the Jews.37 Furthermore, the Samaritans of Jesus’ day were often mistrusted and feared as terrorists and infidels. And yet when a lawyer questioned Jesus about “eternal life” and the living out of the “greatest commandments,” Jesus chose a merciful Samaritan to represent such a life in contrast to the social and religious purities of a priest and a Levite. In short, being neighborly and showing mercy gets at the heart of Jesus’ message in ways that religious identity and piety cannot on their own. Jesus could have made this point without bringing to mind the sensitive mixture of differences and similarities between Jews and Samaritans. But that is exactly what he chose to do and thus he forced his hearers to grapple with the surprising reversals of the kingdom. Jesus said to his Jewish audience, in effect, “Do you want to be a good God-fearing Jew? Then behave as did this merciful Samaritan.” I can imagine him saying today, “Do you want to be a good, faithful, missional Jesus-follower? Then behave as a merciful Muslim.”

As Volf and Camp illustrate, discussions about the degrees of similarity and difference, and all missional encounters, should begin there.

John Barton is a professor of philosophy and religion and currently serves as the Provost of Rochester College in Rochester Hills, Michigan. He and his family lived and worked in Jinja, Uganda, East Africa, from 1994 to 2002 as part of a church-planting mission team. While in Uganda, John completed a PhD in philosophy at Makerere University in Kampala. Barton has special interest in the study of world religions and is specifically active in initiatives related to Christian-Muslim interactions. Recent publications include articles in Philosophia Africana, Missiology, and Turkish Review.

Bibliography

Akyol, Mustafa. Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Camp, Lee C. Mere Discipleship: Radical Christianity in a Rebellious World. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003.

________. Who Is My Enemy? Questions American Christians Must Face about Islam—and Themselves. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2011.

Griswold, Eliza. The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.

Gülen, M. Fethullah. Toward a Global Civilization of Love and Tolerance. New Jersey: The Light, 2006.

Jenkins, Philip. Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses. New York: HarperOne, 2011.

Kelsay, John. Arguing the Just War in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Kurtz, Lester R. “Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Nonviolent Jihad.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice 23, no. 2 (June 2011): 245–51.

Lewis, Bernard. The Multiple Identities of the Middle East. New York: Schocken Books, 1998.

Patel, Eboo. Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007.

Prothero, Stephen. God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter. New York: HarperOne, 2011.

Saritoprak, Zeki. “An Islamic Approach to Peace and Nonviolence: A Turkish Experience.” The Muslim World 95, no. 3 (July 2005): 413–27.

Stassen, Glen H., and David P. Gushee. Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context. Downer Groves, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003.

Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks. “Religion and Gender.” In The Religion Factor: An Introduction to How Religion Matters, ed. William Scott Green and Jacob Neusner, 149–65. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996.

Volf, Miroslav. Allah: A Christian Response. New York: HarperOne, 2011.

Missionaries debate the legitimacy of so-called insider movements. Insiders are people who confess Jesus as Lord yet pray in a mosque or temple. Insiders may retain many religious practices yet pray in the name of Jesus. The debate is couched in a classification system devised by John Travis. This article suggests that the classification system limits the debate, constrains self-theologizing, and supports an institutional model of Christianity. The system reifies the legitimacy of Western missionary institutions and safeguards prepackaged dogma. The debate over insider movements is the Achilles’ heel of the system and presents an opportunity for indigenous people to overcome hegemonic theological and philosophical frameworks, revolt into new theological spectrums, and open new forms of organization not centered in the West.

“Insider” Movements and the C1–C6 Framework

Years ago, I sat with a few Muslim friends who spoke a language called Chiyao. Dressed in whatever garments resembled prayer robes, many of the men wore lacy, Victoria’s Secret negligees purchased at the local market—a last stop for used clothing from the West. At the time, we were sharing a meal after a Friday prayer service. My language teacher, a respected imam, had preached and then requested for me to say a few words. After the liturgy, we had retired to a member’s home for food and conversation. Since my sermon had referenced the prophet Isa, the discussion evolved into a comparison of Christianity and Islam as understood by my friends. They discussed scriptural references and one imam remembered a text found in the New Testament that discussed how God was one. From the vaguely remembered Scripture, the man suggested that since God held the world together, surely the two sacred scriptures represented paths that approached the great mystery of God. This was no relativistic gesture to all religious forms but an admission to a perceived overlap among the two texts of Qur’an and Injil (gospel).

These same imams who orally sift the rationality of textual theology also live in a world that is deeply bioregionally biased. The fears and hopes of their neighbors further define the context of their religiosity. Many Yao imams push the limits of orthodox Islam and use Arabic scripts as objects imbued with spiritual power. I’ve seen Arabic texts soaked in water and drunk as a tea to ward off insanity. I’ve been offered textual firebreaks, in which Arabic prayers of protection inscribed on paper are put in a perimeter around residential spaces.

The comical scene of discussing the relationship between Islam and Christianity with men dressed in Victoria’s Secret gowns is made more strange for Westerners when the narrative turns away from talk of religious doctrine and is directed to the daily ministerial needs of people. The situation is conceptually ineffable to Western taxonomic systems. What religion is this? What are the central beliefs? For many missiologists, these situations are labeled syncretistic or folk. This missiological label has always been a dumping ground for people who do not fit within traditional religious groups.1

My initial dialogue and relationship with the mosque was not without consequence. Many people discussed my religious identity. I distinctly remember one day when I sat with a good neighbor who introduced me to a family member as “one of us, a Muslim.” The statement took me by surprise. It is always an interesting experience to be introduced. What will people say? How do they view me? Is the description accurate? What did my neighbor actually mean by labeling me as a Muslim? How would you have responded?

Recent dialogue concerning these issues of religious identity has circulated through evangelical magazines.2 However, a framework for classifying the situation has been developed and refined within evangelical mission organizations such as Frontiers—a missionary society targeting Muslims. In 1998, the pseudonymous author John Travis, a missionary among Muslims, wrote an article for the Evangelical Missions Quarterly that has continued to frame the discussion about contextualization and so-called insider movements to this day.3 Travis suggested six different categories to organize the response converts have to the gospel and the way the church is structured as the movement grows. Coming from a strictly Islamic context, Travis’s framework is rooted in regions where Muslims live within a society that is saturated with not only the religion of Islam but the culture of Islam as well.4 Travis labels his categories from C1 to C6 in which the ‘C’ denotes “Christ-centered communities.”

Essentially, Travis differentiates each group by separating religious belief and practice from supposedly secular culture and by categorizing believers along a gradient of ecclesiological structure. Assent to the core elements of the gospel is static through all six categories.5 A comparison between C4 and C5 reveals how insider movements are classified.

C4 communities actually incorporate religious elements into cultic practices. Consequently in Muslim contexts, C4 adherents may avoid pork, pray in an Islamic posture or use certain Islamic theological terms. Members of C4 communities will not be viewed as Muslims within the larger context but will call themselves “Followers of Isa.” For example, among some Muslim Yaos in Malawi, missionaries would organize all day events in which the Injil (gospel) would be read publicly, imitating the Islamic way of reading the Qur’an.

C5 communities differ from C4 in one key respect. These communities dissolve back into the local religious and social structure. In Islamic contexts, adherents maintain a Muslim identity, can attend the mosque, and critically practice other aspects of the local cultural-religious context. These members reject or reinterpret beliefs and practices that do not align with Christianity and actively share their faith with others. Other Muslims accept their presence but often view them as a bit “odd.” C5 communities describe what missionaries now call “insider movements,” in which members work within the religious structures of the mosque or temple.6

Proponents of insider movements suggest faith in Jesus can be expressed and contextualized in multiple ways.7 Again, as long as orthodox faith is attested by consistency of the core elements of the gospel, then faith can find fruition within the walls of a mosque.8

In 2000, Travis more fully explained the C5 model.9 The article focused entirely on the Islamic context and debated issues such as whether believers could say the shahada, whether they could attend the mosque, and whether missionaries could claim to be Muslims. In the article, Travis suggested that the majority of Muslims will never switch religions since “even nominal Muslims tend to see Islam as a single fabric weaving together tradition, culture, and customs related to dress, diet, family life, morality, worship, and in some contexts, even economics and politics.”10 Travis assured the reader that Muslim Christ-followers have a true evangelical faith but refrain from being called Christian.11

Additionally, Kevin Higgins tried to further refine the insider movement by looking at examples in the Bible to develop key points that differentiate these movements from syncretistic movements.12 Higgins suggested that missiology could redefine insider movements as:

A growing number of families, individuals, clans, and/or friendship-webs becoming faithful disciples of Jesus within the culture of their people group, including their religious culture. This faithful discipleship will express itself in culturally appropriate communities of believers who will also continue to live within as much of their culture, including the religious life of the culture, as is biblically faithful.13

From this definition, Higgins declared a healthy, orthodox insider movement could be ascertained by key spiritual indicators including prayer, breaking bread, and promulgating the apostolic truth. Further, Higgins believed the four “selves” should also be used to indicate a fully functioning movement.14

Fifteen years after Travis’s landmark article, insider movements continue to be debated. In a recent Christianity Today article, Timothy Tennant suggests the current debate over the validity of C5 communities centers around five questions: (1) Is there biblical precedence for C5 groups? (2) How does personal salvation relate to public identification of conversion? (3) Is it ethical to encourage followers to retain a Muslim self-identity? (4) Is this a new phenomenon or rooted in the Protestant Reformation? (5) Are C5 groups transitional or permanent communities?15

Critique

Critics and proponents of insider movements accept Travis’s taxonomy and do not consider folk religionists, who make up a large portion of all the world religions. However, even most Muslim authorities would scoff at the leaders and followers of Islam in northern Mozambique. Adherents of the world’s religions, such as Christianity and Islam, tend to marginalize the syncretist, and snub the overt mixture of religious systems, the lack of doctrinal knowledge, and the general illiterate, magical consciousness found in folk religion. The ritual speech acts such as the shahada, or “Jesus is Lord,” are foundational components of official religion that values doctrinal knowledge. Though a magical consciousness may undergird these verbalizations,16 they are embedded within a coherent, institutional system. But the performative, participatory world of the folk religionist is charged with magical ignorance. Travis’s classification cannot work with a non-systematic aggregation of practices and beliefs. Though I find the phenomenological description of insider adherents to be worthy of reflection, more critical assessments of classification models such as Travis’s framework must develop. Though open to self-theologizing, proponents of insider movements refuse to allow foreign adherents to meddle with the basic recipe of Christianity that has been franchised by Evangelicalism. A proponent of insider movements, Rick Brown, assumes all biblical interpretation leads a person to a singular conclusion: “When Muslims come to understand biblical truth, it is usually because they have been enlightened by God’s Word and been led by God’s Spirit, not because they have learned a body of doctrine. So it takes time for them to reach orthodox understanding.”17

In other words, true conversion is an unavoidable process that funnels people to a specific orthodoxy defined by the West. However, orthodoxy is far from homogenous, and evangelical dogma is founded on questionable bedrock.

Negatively stated, the current debate among missiologists about insider movements reveals a Western obsession with taxonomy that categorizes disputable concepts such as religion, Christology, and ecclesiology. Undergirding all discussion among evangelicals concerning insider movements, the discussion is based on an assumption that the world can be carved into religions, that assent to ontological doctrinal statements about Jesus—found in documents such as the Nicene Creed—are a sign of salvation, and that an ecclesiology is understood in mainly institutional form.

Positively stated, the syncretic process in which Jesus is adapted into new contexts, such as insider movements, represents a deconstruction of religious institutionalization, offering the West a chance to witness a Christology that is not obsessed with ontological pronouncements of being but a Christology that is postured to an oral, phenomenological way of being. The nomenclature of insider provides a helpful lens to review the nature of God’s kingdom, thereby flattening institutional religion and cultivating a people who do Christology in the way of faith instead of mimicking ontological belief statements shaped in the tradition of Western Christology.

Critique: Religion is not real

Ultimately, the heuristic device devised by Travis is laden with Western bias. Assumed within his framework, Christianity is a kind of institutional religion that can be divided into a separate sphere away from other religious ideas. From such a perspective, Jesus is the founder of religion. For this reason, C5 communities are debated since insider adherents blend two religions. The insider movement raises a fundamental question: what is the relationship of Jesus to religion? Instead of locating Christianity in opposition to other religions, insiders bring Jesus to pray in the mosque.

Religion is neither a useful concept, nor a practical reality; Christianity as a religion is a modern construction that confuses the role of Jesus as the Messiah. Many historians suggest Jesus was merely a revolutionary; Paul was the builder of the religion. We are so comfortable with the idea of religion, we assume the natural result of Jesus’ ministry was a new religion. However, recent scholarship has questioned not only the legitimacy of the concept of religion, but also the absence of a religious framework in Paul’s theology.

William Cavanaugh persuasively reveals the historic roots of religion as a concept that originated during the wars of the late Medieval era.18 By blaming war on “religion,” the political state managed to overthrow the power of the Roman church and create a secular space. Cavanaugh suggests:

What is at issue behind these wars is the creation of “religion” as a set of beliefs which is defined as personal conviction and which can exist separately from one’s public loyalty to the State. The creation of religion, and thus the privatization of the Church, is correlative to the rise of the State.19

Consequently, the concept of religion was created by the State to disenfranchise the authority of Christendom. Before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religion only referred to the practices of monastic orders. Cavanaugh cites Thomas Acquinas’s view that as a virtue, “religio is a habit, knowledge embodied in the disciplined actions of the Christian.”20

Religion as a modern concept was given a twofold meaning. First, by universalizing historical manifestations of religio, religion became a specific interior posture. Second, religio, as an interiorized disposition, could be categorized as a system of beliefs. With the rise of the secular State, the evolution of religion was defined as an interior assent to a system of beliefs that must be sufficiently benign not to challenge State authority. Religion was privatized. Referencing Thomas Hobbes, Cavanaugh suggests the Church was swallowed up by the State, thereby causing martyrdom to be impossible.21

I wish to dwell on Hobbes’ idea of martyrdom as it pertains to our present discussion. The Travis framework sits on a foundation that characterizes modern religion as a system of beliefs. All the various “C” groups can be called “Christ-centered communities” since they have “accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior.”22 Hobbes denies the possibility of martyrdom because simple doctrinal statements such as “Jesus is Lord and Savior” are without content. As a pronouncement of a privatized belief, it does not give the State a need to kill. Martyrdom is reserved only for individuals who hold practices and beliefs subversive to State authority. Ironically, it is Islam that befuddles Western missiologists with a seamless unity between mosque and State. In many Islamic countries, the idea of a distinction between State and religion, or culture and religion, is absurd and confusing. Is it any wonder Travis’s framework was developed in the Islamic context? A system of classification was needed to understand how Christianity could be franchised23 into the Muslim world. C1–C6 communities only work if we accept the validity of a concept called “religion.” If religion exists, then we can divide the world into religious and secular values, religious traditions, and cultural practices. Only with religion can we differentiate C4 and C5 communities.

Further, the system only gives lip service to the self-theologizing principle. As a religion, the recipe (system of beliefs) used in the franchised kitchen of evangelical Christianity must be maintained and protected. It is upsetting to me that the doctrinal recipe maintained is like a fast-food menu devoid of nutrition. Like a McDonald’s hamburger that tastes the same in New York City or Moscow, so formulaic doctrinal religion cultivates a global network of homogeny. Upholding the ontological Christology of Jesus as the cornerstone element of a system of beliefs, Western Christianity can remain without performative content and works to serve a way of life that is private—subservient to existing institutions of worldly power.

Critique: The church is not an institution

With the advent of Christendom via the great councils, the seeds of modern religion germinated long before the Medieval period. Though a secular state was not created until the seventeenth century, the church was infected with worldly, institutional power during the great ecumenical councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon, which in turn cultivated a demand for the secular. Since these councils, the Christian tradition has maintained a dominant thread of religious institutionalization. The advent of timeless creedal formulations was authorized by a Christological ontology.

Mary Douglas defines institutions as conventions that categorize the world by an ontological legitimation.24 First, conventions are groups that agree to rules for consistent coordination. Conventions offer the gears for momentum in production and social structure by creating stable boundaries and laws. As a form of differentiation, conventions require boundaries for regulation and outsider identification. Second, conventions are institutionalized by ontological legitimation. Ultimately, conventions become institutions by rationalizing a framework through abstraction to the ontic; the institutional culture is universalized. Practically speaking, the institution grounds its beliefs, values, and behaviors (i.e., conventions) into an explanation of the way the world is at bottom. Moreover, the authority of the institution is unified with this ontological essence and is universalized for all cultures and perspectives.

For centuries, the church has functioned as an institution. In fact, many may wonder why this is an issue to discuss. The church-as-institution runs counter to a kingdom ethic performed and announced by the wisdom of Jesus. However, in the current stage of the argument, the issue is how institutions—such as the church—classify the world around them. Institutions classify the world and funnel thought into specific categories. Again citing Mary Douglas, the institution squeezes “ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent” and “systematically direct individual memory and channel our perceptions into forms compatible with the relations they authorize.”25 The act of classifying is akin to brand creation within the world of marketing. By dividing the world into ontologically grounded labels,26 institutions hide their dominating presence. Citing Ian Hacking, Douglas describes how the process of classification runs “from people making institutions to institutions making classifications, to classifications entailing actions, to actions calling for names, and to people and other living creatures responding to the naming.”27 Consequently, institutions create a universe through taxonomy:

The instituted community blocks personal curiosity, organizes public memory, and heroically imposes certainty on uncertainty. In marking its own boundaries it affects all lower level thinking, so that persons realize their own identities and classify each other through community affiliation.28

Douglas provides a concrete taxonomic example that we can use analogously for our current discussion.29 The French classification of wines is a bioregional system. Wine is bottled as Bordeaux or Medoc, indicating a region. Without going into detail, the French system begins with a general region and divides down to the level of Chateau. The regions—defined as categories of geography—encapsulate grape varietals, winemaking traditions, and blends. More importantly, the taxonomy hides an institutional structure based on the small chateau. The system serves and protects local, historical institutions within the bioregion. In contrast, California wines are classified according to the varietal type. With the lack of local regulation and the advent of free trade, the wine industry in California is marked by the process of production and its quantification. Consequently, these large-scale industries do not wish to confine classification to local custom. Rather, classification is divided into types of grape: Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, or Syrah. Again, the system of taxonomy hides the institution; in this case, the institution is structured along free-market, large-scale industry. The California-based institution classifies by varietal, and thereby maintains an industry that does not support local production but modes of production that overcomes geography. Though the French institution maintains taxonomy, it cannot universalize since the institution is limited by a bioregional boundary. The California system, via ontological classification (i.e., varietals), provides an unbounded institution that is universalizing.

Many missiologists think we have overcome the institutional injustice of colonialism, which had more to do with state power than the gospel. However, when converts are organized into a classification system such as Travis’s, the colonial institution is hidden behind the taxonomy. By relying on false categories such as secular and religious, Travis’s categories rely on an institutional framework that pushes the way of Jesus into the private world by calling it religion. Furthermore, missiologists that support the institution of evangelicalism promulgate a type of taxonomy that reifies a system of quantification and levels all fields of theological diversity. Adherents must be defined, like wine varietals, as ontological types and not according to the local, bioregional systems already existing. In this sense, Travis’s framework provides a classification that stabilizes a non-indigenous church institution. The framework does not accept the inherent bioregional diversity of people but forces a world of quantification based upon a grid of evangelical theology. Similarly, the C5 category is nervously debated not because the adherent’s theology is wrong, but because the American missiological institution funded by evangelicalism finds difficulty in quantifying hidden believers. In essence, evangelical missiologists are like the large-scale, industrial-size California wineries; cultivation of adherents must be categorized by the varietal of believer or type of adherent for easier quantification and marketing. With a magical slight of hand, the C1–C6 paradigm redirects a dialogue away from self-theologizing. In so doing, modern evangelical missions resembles a franchising process in which the theological recipe is universalized, consistency of organization and taste are maintained, and choices are limited to marginal decisions that create an impression of freedom. By allowing clients to choose which type of condiment they want with their Christian Big Mac, the institution is reified and maintains authority.

A Constructive Response

I have spent most of my space critiquing the Western parameters of the insider movement. Briefly, I wish to affirm aspects of the insider movement that will lead to a way of Jesus that cuts across institutional religion. These comments are meant to be a proposal for further reflection. Put succinctly, insider movements represent creative spaces for reimagining traditional Christianity not as a religion but as people shaped by performative Christology and centered on the celebration of the kingdom of God uniquely symbolized in the act of hospitality.

Not a religion, but a people

Many theologians in the postliberal camp have suggested that a proper understanding of missions should be centered not on religion but on the formation of a people.30 For my purposes, I merely want to allude to Douglas Harink’s work in Paul among the Postliberals.31 Harink develops two key issues for our discussion. First, the Reformation doctrine of “faith in Jesus” needs to be, ironically, reformed. Gathering current scholarship, Harink suggests a better translation of pistis Christou as the “faith of Jesus” which makes sense of Paul’s larger theological paradigm.32 In this light, Jesus’ faith or loyalty to a way of life, to the bitter end, has soteriological significance. Said differently, the way of Jesus—his parabolic words of wisdom and shape of life—is justified via resurrection by his loyalty to the kingdom’s impossibility. Jesus’ loyalty revealed a Way of Life. Consequently, the modern soteriology of confessional assent to a rigid doctrinal statement is skewed; an anthropological reading of “faith in Christ” cultivates a human-centered focus on the person of Jesus and the human’s ability to “accept” him. Rather, soteriology must be reformatted away from a non-localized, abstract confession to a life pattern that is analogous to the way of Christ.

Second, Harink suggests Paul’s own mission of converting the Roman world did not include an understanding of religion. In other words, Paul did not see his work as converting people from one religion to another new one. Rather, Paul’s task was to form a people out of the local context. The cultivated people bears witness to Jesus by the “shape of its life.” Harink suggests the shape of this life is a culture formed, “in which social order and material goods are redescribed by being reinscribed within another, scriptural narrative and another cruciform, social practice.”33 In contrast, “faith in Jesus” works as synecdoche for a whole religious system of beliefs that effectively cognitivize the way of Jesus and maintain a religion instead of a skill-based discipline that forms people in the local context.

Not a human institution, but the kingdom of God

Is the above description still a kind of institution? During institutional periods of transformation, translation, and growth, authorities often attempt to disseminate a body of material that identifies the institution. For example, franchising a restaurant is ultimately concerned with strict adherence to the sacred recipes guarded in the ancestral center located and replicated through structures of authority. Likewise, religious institutions such as churches, mosques, and temples work to promulgate a consistent cosmos across diverse regions. From a human institutional perspective, insider movements represent two possible functions. First, such movements use guerrilla tactics for conversion and competition by disrupting another religious institution from the inside. This perspective hopes a fresh Christian movement will disrupt and destabilize the mosque or temple. Though there may be room for marginal contextualization, adherents assume the insider movement is a step towards proper ecclesial being34 and organization. Accordingly, the insider movement is risky. Members must maintain a strict, orthodox dogma with a veneer of foreign religiosity giving time for the movement to gain momentum. Nevertheless, there is the fear that unorthodox ideas and practices will infect the emerging movement and slow the momentum towards outward ecclesial being. The second perspective assumes the borders of the institution are interior to the believer. As long as a rigid confessional faith is maintained, then the borders remain within the heart. The adherent can still be counted as a type of Christian as long as orthodoxy is given assent.

Both views of insider movements are based on maintaining proper religious boundaries. However, a people shaped by the way of Jesus have a kind of anti-institutional ethic that runs within them. Beyond this essay there are rich resources for deinstitutionalizing Jesus, though for now I refer to my favorite source for uncovering a deconstructive ethic in Jesus. John Caputo asks, “Does the kingdom of God have borders or a border patrol?”35 Indeed, the parabolic word of Jesus upturns or turns inside out the institutional borders we create. Caputo suggests the hospitality of Jesus’ parable in Luke 14:12 exemplifies the genus of parables in which the “borders of the kingdom become porous, wavering in a kind of ‘holy undecidability’ ” by dissolving our categories such as Christian, Jew, and Muslim.36 The hospitality of the kingdom is like what I experienced among my Yao friends as we ate together; invitation of outsiders as insiders upturns our sense of institutional membership. In fact, membership to the anti-institutional framework of the kingdom requires a performance of hospitality that moves beyond cultural and religious boundaries.

In this light, insider movements reveal the possibility of kingdom upheaval. Religious taxonomists endanger the movement by classifying it and trying to control it. Much like a dead animal that is lifelike in the hands of a taxidermist, the taxonomist endangers adherents by forcing a classification on them that will suck out their lifeblood leaving only a lifeless form to quantify and nail onto the wall of the Western missiological hunting lodge. Christianity has much to learn from Islam. If we allow insider movements to self-germinate without the overshadowing theological dogma that is couched in abstract, religious language, then we may perhaps hear the kingdom of God come out of the mosque and rebuke our insider hubris.

Not ontological Christology, but performative Christology

The last ingredient I would suggest is rooted in orality. I would like to briefly sketch key areas for missiological reflection in scholarship on the divergent worldviews of orality versus literacy and on how the oral universe of many Folk Religionists may approach Christology. Though global, literate society is quickly overtaking oral culture, I still believe a majority of Folk Religionists operates in a non-textual worldview that literate society can learn.

First, the work of Walter Ong is well known and wide in scope. The characteristics of oral people provided in Orality and Literacy are helpful to gauge and uncover the cognitive difference between oral and literate people.37 Two aspects of orality interest me here. First, people who depend on the spoken word, and do not depend on the written word, live much closer to the “human lifeworld”38 and show a more situational, less abstract perspective.39 Powers of rationality are directed towards the concrete problems of life without the need of abstract classification systems. Without abstract analytical categories, knowledge is maintained via apprenticeship and not stripped from its locality. Further, knowledge professed is rooted in experience. Oral people are great phenomenologists.

Second, oral people have a more participatory framework, and this is exemplified in communication that is agonistically toned.40 As I write this essay, I am afforded a peace with my own thoughts. Able to work out my argument free from attack, I must only occasionally direct my writing towards counterarguments that I am consciously aware of. In the oral universe, communication is strongly participatory. Consequently, proverbs, sayings, and parables operate as counterstatements to a message that has already been pronounced. My own preaching in the mosque was most readily celebrated and accepted when I structured riddles and arguments into my oration. In effect, people would spill out of the mosque still debating the words spoken. There are clear connections here to Jesus’ way of communication in which he spoke to goad people into participation instead of preaching for audience assent.

These two aspects of orality are integrated in Ong’s basic premise—spoken words are sounds that “are not things, but events.”41 For a literate mind, this is most unusual. We are used to viewing our words as they are typed on a screen. We have so thoroughly ingrained chirography into our logic, we often visualize our thoughts as written words. Moreover, when we view our words as things, we can objectify them. From this one move, a process of objectification occurs and induces an ontologizing bias of ideas. For the oral mind, words are an event of participation. The event opens up a nonrepetitive moment when thoughts collide and the world becomes. As sounds, words fade off the echoing cliffs of our ears. Words happen in time, not space. In this light, orality foster a phenomenology of becoming, while literacy is one of being; words perform while texts exist as objects. It does not take much of a conceptual leap to see how a Christology of text focuses on the being of Jesus, while a Christology of sound performs Jesus. If the Word marked the beginning of the world, then the Word is first a spoken word, not a written word. We cannot objectify the Word by inscribing the sound and gazing at the naked scratches we have created on paper.42 In my mind, a concrete place to reimagine missiology is to develop a Christology that is centered on performance instead of abstract objectification of the written word. The oral folk religionists of the globe who do not fit into Western taxonomies are surely capable of helping us with such a task as they perform the Way within their own landscapes.

Conclusion

The way of Jesus not only deconstructs the ideological fences, doctrinal barbed wire, and institutional cattle guards of franchised Christianity—like the toppled Temple of the first century—but also rebuilds a technique of living that cuts through Western classifications by turning them inside out. Those who take the parabolic Word of hospitality into the mosque are practicing Christology by opening up Jesus’ wisdom, which cuts across the human institution. If the Word of God is a spoken word, then it is an event—not a doctrine nor an abstract thesis of the divine. Analogically, those who speak the Word of God in the mosque, temple, or church will invite the narrative of Jesus into their experience. Consequently, the C5 community is not a static state of being, but a becoming. The Word as event shows the inability to institutionalize, grab, ground, or inherit the kingdom. Does Jesus not show a christology instead of defining one? Does Jesus not embody the kingdom of God that refuses to maintain the boundaries of our limited religious imaginations?

In reflection on my own experience, I wonder: am I a Christian missionary who converted to Islam? Can I accept the label “Muslim” given to me? Perhaps I am one of those disciples that went to the mission field and lost my faith in Christianity but deepened my loyalty to the Way of Jesus. Named Muslim in Yao, I discovered a place where a people could be formed and inscribed with the sacred event of hospitality. All attempts to classify the event of the kingdom of God are crumbling towers of Babel. Perhaps now we may begin to postulate an insider movement within Christianity.

Kyle Holton worked for nine years in northern Mozambique among the Yao helping initiate a natural resource community center called Malo Ga Kujilana. In 2012 he and his family returned to the States. Kyle is a high school teacher in Little Rock, Arkansas. He has an MA in Intercultural Studies and an MS in Environmental Science, and his research interests involve interreligious dialogue, orality, and cultural ecology.

Bibliography

Abram, David. Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Caputo, John D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana Unviersity Press, 2006.

Cavanaugh, William T. “ ‘A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House’: The Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State.” Modern Theology 11, no. 4 (October 1995): 397–420.

Clapp, Rodney. A Peculiar People: The Church as Culture in a Post-Christian Society. Downers Grove: IVP, 1997.

Corwin, Gary. “A Humble Appeal to C5/Insider Movement Muslim Ministry Advocates to Consider Ten Questions.” International Journal of Frontier Missions 24, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 5–20.

Daniels, Gene. “Worshiping Jesus in the Mosque.” Christianity Today 57, no. 1 (January/February 2013): 22, http://christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/january-february/insider-movement-islam-wheres-jesus.html.

Douglas, Mary. How Institutions Think. Frank W. Abrams Lectures. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Harink, Douglas. Paul among the Postliberals: Pauline Theology beyond Christendom and Modernity. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003.

Higgins, Kevin. “The Key to Insider Movements: The ‘Devoted’s’ of Acts.” International Journal of Frontier Missions 21, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 155–165.

Kelber, Werner H. The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul and Q. Voices in Performance and Text. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983.

Lindbeck, George. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Posliberal Age. Louisville: Westinster John Knox, 1984.

Ong, Walter J. “Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation.” Oral Tradition 3, no. 3 (October 1988): 259–69.

Ong, Walter J., with John Hartley. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. 30th Anniversary ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Parshall, Phil. “How Much Muslim Context Is Too Much for the Gospel?” Christianity Today 57, no. 1 (January/February 2013): 31, http://christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/january-february/too-much-context-may-harm.html.

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Tennant, Timothy. “The Hidden History of Insider Movements.” Christianity Today 57, no. 1 (January/February 2013): 28, http://christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/january-february/hidden-history-of-insider-movements.html.

Travis, John. “The C1 to C6 Spectrum: A Practical Tool for Defining Six Types of ‘Christ-centered Communities’ (‘C’) Found in the Muslim Context.” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 34, no. 4 (October 1998): 407–8.

________. “Messianic Muslim Followers of Isa: A Closer Look at C5 Believers and Congregations.” International Journal of Frontier Missions 17, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 53–59.

________. “Why Evangelicals Should Be Thankful for Muslim Insiders,” Christianity Today 57, no. 1 (January/February 2013): 30, http://christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/january-february/jesus-saves-religion-doesnt.html.

The Chattahoochee Valley Church in Columbus, Georgia commissioned the “Missional Church” series after Mark Woodward presented a series of lessons. I had done a few smaller projects for earlier themes the ministry staff had presented to me.

Each of the posters is purposefully simplistic and relies on symbols to portray the statements in a way that expands upon each of the ideas. It’s great to have the opportunity to use artwork to inspire, encourage, and develop the church in a way that will hopefully get them thinking more missionally. I hope that these images will serve to communicate to everyone from longtime Christians to newly reborns. It’s my hope that these images are able to constantly preach, every time someone views them. For example, if they remember the image of the church building with its walls felled and pointing outward, then imagine how they are to bring Christ to the world outside those four walls, I would deem the purpose of the images a success.

I hope the message received is that the whole church body, not just its leaders, is tasked with sharing the gospel to its neighbors, coworkers, and friends. I’m struck by how quickly the early church was able to spread the gospel, even through persecution, because all had taken on the duty of spreading the good news. They were excited about it. I’m not sure what steps need to be taken to stop the pervasive cultural misconception that mission work is “not my job” among the church members. We’ve assumed the roles of spectators and performers rather than a unified cause for Christ.

Aaron Sparks is a former youth minister who moved to the UK in 2010 to attempt vocational mission work and is now starting a career in social care work for young people. He has a beautiful wife, a five-year-old Star Wars fanboy, and a three-month-old Princess Leia in training. He is most likely found in a coffee shop reading a good book.

Jean Johnson. We Are Not the Hero: A Missionary’s Guide for Sharing Christ, Not a Culture of Dependency. Sisters, OR: Deep River Books, 2012. 335pp. $15.99.

Missionaries strive to leave healthy, indigenous churches that are relevant to their host cultures and lead by local leaders. These dreams fall short, however, as they settle for planting unhealthy churches that are too dependent upon the missionary’s skills, resources, and Western ways of “doing church.” Missionaries unintentionally leave behind unsustainable models of church growth, leadership, and development that the local church cannot hope to emulate. What is needed is guidance and coaching to ruminate on the challenges associated with indigenous church planting.

In her first book, Jean Johnson provides a catalyst for rethinking missionary methods. Johnson previously spent sixteen years as a missionary in Cambodia, and she currently works as a leadership coach and consultant for both missionaries and indigenous church leaders with World Missions Associates. As she reflected on the history of Christianity in Cambodia, as well as her own challenges and failures on the mission field, Johnson came to a realization: although the mission churches she had helped plant were “healthy” and had good attendance, they were not able to multiply and grow effectively. These churches were, in essence, too Western in their worship, preaching, evangelism, and leadership development. They depended upon Western funds to sustain their outreach and church programs. With this realization, Johnson began to adjust her efforts in order to plant effective indigenous churches run by Cambodian leaders. Johnson challenges the reader to a “premeditated” missiology that focuses on “multiplication, indigeneity, and sustainability among the respective people groups” with whom they work (13). Using stories, parables, and case studies from her own time on the field, as well as those of other missionaries, Johnson seeks to share her new missiological understanding with her readers.

Johnson’s mantra throughout the book is, “Day 1 affects Day 100” (64). Missionaries often focus much of their time, effort, and energy on how to enter the culture. Even more important, however, is for the missionaries to focus on how to phase themselves out of the work. Sustainability must be worked into the DNA of the church from the first day, in the way that we reach out to the community and conduct evangelism. Indigenous evangelism focuses on relevant cultural forms: stories and songs, parables and poetry, etc. When the gospel is shared in culturally relevant ways, Christianity is no longer seen as a “foreign religion” and the new converts can easily share what they have learned.

Shockingly, Johnson calls missionaries not to plant churches. When missionaries begin planting churches, they unknowingly import Western forms of church: singing translated Western songs instead of using indigenous melodies; preaching expository sermons instead of telling stories; training through seminary classes rather than coaching and modeling. Instead of planting churches, Johnson calls the reader to plant the gospel:

Allowing the gospel (God’s presence and transformational work) to take root within a community in such a way that the community expresses and spreads its faith in an organic manner. . . . This organic expression may look very different from the cross-cultural communicator’s church experience. (241)

In order to build a sustainable evangelistic movement, missionaries must be intentional in every action they undertake. From the very beginning, missionaries should do evangelism with reproduction in mind. If the local leader cannot reproduce the missionary’s efforts and materials, and in turn teach others to do the same, then these methods must be rethought.

According to Johnson, every aspect of the missionary’s method and lifestyle must be rethought in light of the receptor culture.

Johnson’s book is broken into three parts and an introduction. In the introduction, Johnson calls missionaries not to think of themselves as heroes, which comes with an air of superiority and colonialism. Instead, she challenges missionaries to enter the culture humbly as learners and servants, walking alongside the contacts or Christians as a guide. Part 1 reveals the need for indigenous, self-reliant church movements that create disciples. Johnson uses the history of Christianity in Cambodia to highlight the need for multiplication, sustainability, and self-reliance. Part 2 helps the reader reflect on how to plant healthy, indigenous churches in which local leaders take the lead in all aspects of worship, evangelism, teaching, and expansion. Part 3 is more practical, helping the missionary conceive how these ideas can be put into practice. My only complaint with the material is in its organization. Parts 2 and 3 should have been integrated into one another in order to provide a cohesive flow. Also, at times the ideas of multiplication and sustainability overlap, and these areas could have been addressed together. Overall, however, the book was incredibly insightful and convicting.

Two sections were very thought-provoking. First, Johnson focuses on the differences between oral and literate societies in chapters ten and seventeen. Western communicators learn through bullet points, outlines, diagrams, and abstract concepts. Seventy percent of the world’s population consists of primary or secondary oral learners, however, which necessitates a different approach to communication, teaching, and evangelism. Johnson calls this type of communication orality. “Orality is a method of communicating truth by dressing it up in parables, poetry, riddles, stories, drama, dance, and song” (158). Johnson calls us to focus on the values and worldview characteristics of oral cultures by emphasizing community, working with heads-of-households, and using examples from everyday life in order to best communicate the gospel. She also reflects on ethnomusicology (“heart music”) as the best manner to convey biblical truths. Johnson’s insights into oral cultures are important areas of growth for most missionaries.

Second, Johnson calls the missionary to take the lesser role in ministry and instead work as a “shadow pastor.” Mission works often start with the missionaries as the leaders and then go through a process of nationalizing, in which local leaders are raised up and trained to take over these roles. Instead, Johnson calls us to practice indigenizing, coaching local leaders from the beginning and allowing them to succeed (and sometimes fail) in leadership as they learn to grow and thrive (247–48). The missionary keeps the focus off of himself/herself and instead mentors these new leaders behind the scenes, which allows local leadership to thrive faster than in traditional models.

Johnson’s book challenges the readers to rethink their missiological practices in light of what is best for the culture of their receivers. It would serve as a great textbook for an upper-level missions class or for missionaries who are strategically planning their work on the field.

Daniel McGraw

Community Life Minister

Houston, Texas, USA

W. Ross Blackburn. The God Who Makes Himself Known: The Missionary Heart of the Book of Exodus. New Studies in Biblical Theology 28. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012. 238pp. $17.00.

Ross Blackburn’s study contributes to the recent rise of attention given to the theme of mission in the interpretation of Scripture. His purpose in this monograph, an iteration of his doctoral thesis written under Christopher Seitz at St. Andrews, is to argue that mission is the governing theme of the book of Exodus. At first glance this aim may strike the reader as peculiar, if not backward: how is mission the driving theme of Israel’s story of liberation and constitution? Anticipating such a question in the introduction, Blackburn defines his use of the word mission as God’s desire to right what is wrong, principally through God’s commitment to be known among his people and, through them, among the nations. Blackburn proposes that, when read as a coherent narrative within a canonical framework, Yhwh’s missionary impulse explains his motivation in each major development in the story and resolves some thorny hermeneutical issues therein.

After an introduction (ch. 1), Blackburn divides his treatment into six chapters. In chapter 2 he builds the case that the primary theme in Exod 1–15:21 is the revelation of Yhwh’s name/identity as redeemer. Through the burning bush, the plague cycle, and deliverance of the people from slavery, Israel and Egypt (to a lesser extent) come to know Yhwh’s redemptive character, Yhwh’s supremacy, and that Yhwh’s identity and mission is tied up with Yhwh’s goodness toward Israel.

Both chapter 3 (15:22–18:27) and chapter 4 (19–24) explore how the provision of torah/teaching carries forward God’s missional intention to make his name known. Blackburn argues that the sequence of wilderness trials serves the purpose of training (better than the commonly translated “testing”) Israel in the knowledge of her new sovereign. The giving of water, food, and security seeks to instill trust in Israel as preparation for Sinai. Chapter 4 casts Israel in a priestly role for the sake of reflecting the character of God before the watching nations. The law’s essence is a revelation of the character of God; thus, Israel’s holy imitation of Yhwh (by keeping the covenantal demands) aims toward the larger goal of mediating knowledge of God among the families of the earth. Israel’s witness pulsates out from her distinctive conduct.

Blackburn next turns to the dense tabernacle legislation in chapter 5 (25–31). The instruction detailing the materials to be used in the tabernacle’s construction and its accoutrements communicates the sanctity and kingship of Yhwh, dwelling in Israel’s midst. Moreover, within Israel, the tabernacle was a palpable, microcosmic symbol of Yhwh’s orderly, macrocosmic reign over the universe. The presence of Yhwh among his people in the tabernacle is an end in itself, but the purpose of the tabernacle was not limited to this end. Rather, the tabernacle pointed in nuce to God’s missionary desire to reign in similar fashion among all the nations.

Chapter 6 wrestles with how Moses’ petitions persuade God to forgive Israel’s transgression committed in the golden calf debacle (32–34). Blackburn persuasively argues that Moses succeeds in his remonstrations by appealing to Yhwh’s honor among the nations. In short, Moses defends God’s reputation before God. Thus, Yhwh restores Israel because Yhwh’s name among the nations is at stake. Yhwh’s judgment and mercy emerge from the same motivation—to be known among the nations. Yhwh’s forgiveness restores the plans for building the tabernacle (35–40), which Blackburn treats briefly in chapter 7. The construction of the tabernacle signals that forgiven Israel can now fulfill her commission to be a priestly kingdom and holy nation. God dwells in her midst—this is both the object and method of Israel’s missionary vocation.

The main body of the work is well written, well researched, and for the most part well reasoned. Blackburn’s commitment to reading the text in its canonical presentation as a coherent narrative pays rich exegetical dividends, especially in tracing underappreciated connections to the larger Exodus story in the wilderness narratives and Moses’s appeals to God in Exod 32–34. So too, Blackburn’s insistence that the minutiae of the tabernacle legislation carry theological, even missiological weight brings a welcomed corrective to traditions that devalue priestly texts. Because his work is in an evangelical series on biblical theology, Blackburn rounds out each chapter (and sometimes begins them) with reflections on texts outside of Exodus, mostly connecting his emphases to New Testament motifs. While this move helps further elucidate themes under discussion in some chapters (e.g., his parsing of the relationship of gospel and law in ch. 4), in others it feels more like an appendage that provides too terse a treatment. Blackburn concludes his work with four brief observations concerning how mission in Exodus informs the mission of the church. Because this is precisely the kind of theological payoff needed by churches (and so often lacking in rigorous works of biblical theology), the book could have been enhanced significantly if this chapter were longer than a thin five pages.

Blackburn’s book is a solid attempt to show how a missiological hermeneutic opens up the interpretation of a central Old Testament book. Yet, the book suffers on two accounts. First, Blackburn is in danger of instrumentalizing Israel’s election. His appreciation of God’s larger purposes undersells the promises to the patriarchs as a reason for the Exodus and creates some unnecessary tension with the subsequent history of God with Israel. For example, how does Israel’s future interaction with the nations (e.g., Canaanites) make sense of the missionary bent of Exodus, if this is indeed the governing theme of her root narrative? The conquest, which itself draws on themes from Exodus, fits this trajectory with difficulty. Israel as a “missionary people” may fit some of Isaiah’s prophecy—a prophet who draws liberally on Exodus themes—but is this the most apt theological backdrop for, say, the oracles against the nations? Moreover, what does it mean for the nations to know Yhwh? Is the acknowledgement expected of the nations on par with Israel’s acknowledgement? As a work of biblical theology, I would have liked these questions addressed with more rigor. Second, and related, Blackburn’s definition of mission will strike many as too narrow for biblical theology. He rightly stresses that in Exodus Yhwh’s presence is what makes Israel holy—attending to Yhwh’s presence is to make Israel distinctive, thus mediating knowledge of God. But does this fulfill the book’s subtitle: The Missionary Heart of the Book of Exodus ? The missional theology of Exodus is chiefly centripetal, and I am not certain it is the heart of the book, that is, the central theme giving life to all else. Nevertheless, I recommend the book for students and scholars alike, and I look forward to future works from Blackburn.

Nathan Bills

Assistant Professor of Old Testament

Lipscomb University

Nashville, Tennessee, USA

A. Scott Moreau. Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2012. 432pp. $22.03.

Certain subjects linger in a state of cumulative chaos, waiting for the right scholar to create a sense of order. The discussion of contextualization among evangelical Christians is such a subject, and Scott Moreau has proven equal to the task of systematizing its diverse parts into a balanced presentation. The undertaking requires both a comprehensive understanding of a multifaceted debate and the methodological rigor necessary to avoid reductionism. In Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models, Moreau combines these qualities in an orderly, economical rendition of the issues.

A. Scott Moreau has taught missions at Wheaton College for more than two decades. In addition to authoring or editing a variety of missiological works, he has been the editor of Evangelical Missions Quarterly since 2001. A prominent evangelical missiologist, Moreau aims to “map” evangelical models of contextualization. Some prominent treatments of contextualization have lumped evangelical contextualization into a single category among a more theologically liberal array of options. Thus, the impetus behind his endeavor is the need for a truly representative analysis of evangelical perspectives. Moreau hopes his cartography will help readers explore the diverse regions of the evangelical “continent” of contextualization in order to make informed judgments about particular proposals.

The book bears a popular academic style that does not shy from technical content but consciously avoids scholarly wordiness. The real key to the book’s success, though, is its systematic and restrained exposition. The body comprises two sections of nearly equal length. The first section illuminates Moreau’s methodological concerns, and the second section is the substance of the proposal itself. Though Moreau’s descriptive endeavor is potentially fraught with subjectivity, in the first section he so thoroughly explicates the assumptions and criteria at work in his map that there is hardly any cause for uncertainty. Moreover, he manages to introduce working assumptions, such as the meaning of “evangelical” or the place of holism in contextualization, convincingly, without bogging down in topics that could be books unto themselves.

The proposal trades on Moreau’s credibility rather directly. He classified 249 examples of evangelical contextualization from published sources, according to seventy-nine criteria. In this process, he “discovered” six initiator roles (195). Moreau utilizes these six roles as his models of contextualization, cross-referencing them with other criteria to define exemplars of each model and their respective tendencies. The selection of these models, as well as the definition of the various criteria, is completely Moreau’s prerogative despite the clinical feel of his data analysis. By section two, though, the reader is convinced that Moreau is anything but arbitrary in his procedure, and his credentials certainly merit the benefit of the doubt. The skeptical reader may wonder, nonetheless, whether the source material could be organized into different categories, as Moreau cannot defend his choices in a work this size.

Moreau’s map seems to represent the major regions of evangelical contextualization. His models are Facilitator, Guide, Herald, Pathfinder, Prophet, and Restorer. One problem with these categories is that some examples fit equally into multiple models. Anticipating such objections, Moreau clarifies that his intention is not to communicate “that the individual never takes on other roles or that the method is constrained by that role” (175). Taken as typical rather than definitive, and in relation to the many other variables in Moreau’s dataset, the models are a powerful tool for “locating” contextualization efforts on the evangelical map.

One question lingers, primarily regarding the Restorer model. Although “the restorer comes to heal or deliver from bondage of any type,” most of Moreau’s examples have to do with spiritual warfare. Curiously, the evidence suggests that “evangelicals consider demons qua demons somehow immune to contextual or worldview considerations” (299). “A criticism of initiators as restorers,” states Moreau, “is that practitioners rarely discuss their methods as explicitly contextual” (307). The question, then, is why Moreau considers this a model of contextualization, when its presuppositions are acontextual on average and nearly anti-contextual at worst. It seems that the Restorer is a model of mission work rather than a model of contextualization. And this observation highlights a concern for the other models to a lesser extent. Approaches to mission that deal with issues in their contexts (such as spiritual bondage) are not thereby necessarily contextualized, as per Moreau’s own definition of contextualization (36). One danger of being as impressively thorough as Moreau has done is to be overly inclusive to the detriment of a limited notion of contextualization.

Because Moreau intends to systematize existing proposals rather than rehash them, the specific processes of contextualization in his models are never in view. He stays at a bird’s eye view of each exemplar, leaving the reader wishing for a more concrete understanding of each one, which would help clarify why each one is in fact an example of contextualization rather than just missions methodology. The book would be far more lengthy with that provision, though, and the bibliography is available.

A couple of other peculiarities are noteworthy. One, Moreau’s definition of evangelical appears to exclude Majority World evangelicals. There are a few exceptions, and he is aware of the issue (320–21), but it is clear that American evangelicalism is in view. This is due primarily to the use of published exemplars, of which there are far fewer from the Majority World. The point here is not that Moreau would chose to exclude Majority World exemplars given an alternative (although his definition of evangelicalism does have roots in American culture wars), but the fact that he cannot represent them severely limits the representativeness of his map. As with Europeans’ “discovery” of the Americas, once readers venture off the map, they may find the second half of the world—or more, in this case. Two, large portions of the book read as an extended exchange with Charles Kraft. Kraft is an influential and controversial missiologist whom Moreau could not wisely marginalize in these discussions, but at times it seems as though evangelical contextualization comes down to Kraft’s proposals and their dissenters.

One of the key successes of the book is that it makes evident the occasion of the contextualization discussion. The urgency of talking about particularly evangelical contextualization, and to a large extent the urgency of the dialogue with Charles Kraft, is a symptom of the ongoing shift within conservative Christianity toward critical realism. The mapping of contextualization models among evangelicals is fundamentally about establishing an epistemological continuum on which to locate contextualization efforts. Though evangelicals will need to move beyond Moreau’s descriptive contribution into critical and prescriptive proposals, they can now do so with the profound yet accessible insight he has provided regarding what is truly at stake.

Greg McKinzie

Missionary

Arequipa, Peru

J. D. Payne. Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration and Mission. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012. 206pp. $10.91.

J. D. Payne serves as the pastor of church multiplication for The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama. Prior to his current position in Birmingham, Payne was a domestic missionary with the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention and an Associate Professor of Church Planting and Evangelism at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also directed the Center for North American Missions and Church Planting.

Payne’s book, Strangers Next Door, has a twofold purpose: (1) to educate Western evangelical churches on the large-scale global migrations that are taking place as the peoples of the world move to the West as long-term and short-term workers, students, refugees, and asylum-seekers (18); and (2) to challenge Western evangelical churches to reach, equip, partner with, and send the least reached people living in their neighborhoods to return to their peoples as missionaries (19). Payne’s book is neither a theology of mission nor a practical guide to missional living, though it includes elements of both. Rather, it is an impassioned plea and a vision, calling for evangelicals in the West to notice and act on a unique missional opportunity of the twenty-first century: the presence of migrants from least reached, unreached, and hard-to-reach people groups in Western countries, living right next door to us.

After defining his terms and outlining his theological assumptions in chapter one, Payne uses half of the book to make his case first that migration is occurring in the modern era on an unprecedented scale (chs. 2, 6, 7, and 8) and second that many of these migrants are moving from unreached or least reached areas of the world to Western countries (ch. 3), by which he means the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many of the countries commonly referred to as Western Europe. On both accounts, Payne demonstrates his claims very persuasively with extensive statistical data. However, with regard to his second claim, Payne reveals a significant theological bias that obscures much of his data, namely, he considers people groups comprised of less than 2 percent evangelicals as unreached. He borrows his definition of evangelicals from the Joshua Project (55), but based on which countries he labels as unreached, Payne clearly excludes most, if not all, members of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and mainline Protestantism, among others. For example, he lists France, Portugal, and Spain as among the most unreached countries in the world (60), three countries known for substantial Catholic populations. Although this bias does not diminish the importance of Payne’s overall thesis and argument, it does limit the usefulness of the book in determining which countries and peoples are unreached for one who operates with a more inclusive understanding of Christianity.

The rest of the book focuses on what Payne calls “diaspora missiology,” which brings migration research to bear on missiology. In chapters four and five, he demonstrates from Scripture that God has constantly worked through migrations to accomplish his purposes in the world. In chapter nine, he shares inspiring stories of people who have acted on this vision to reach the unreached through migrants. Finally, chapters ten through twelve offer guidelines and a strategy for accomplishing the task of reaching, equipping, partnering with, and sending migrants back to their home countries as missionaries to reach the unreached peoples of the world. Payne suggests helpful missiological insights in these chapters, but due to the nature of his book as a vision-casting plea, these suggestions remain surface level and brief. For example, his section on contextualization is three paragraphs long. Anyone wanting to learn about how to contextualize the gospel in migrant communities in their neighbors will need to look elsewhere for advice.

Payne’s overarching vision, that churches in the West should focus their efforts on reaching migrants in their neighborhoods from unreached or least reached countries, with an eye towards partnering with and sending those migrants back to their home countries as missionaries, is worthy of attention and consideration for all, including non-evangelical churches in Western countries. I recommend this book to any church leaders and lay people willing to re-envision their task of sharing the gospel with the nations. As Payne argues, for those of us living in the West, the nations have come to our doorstep and we are now confronted with an exciting missional opportunity to proclaim the gospel to them without ever having to set foot on a plane.

Garrett Matthew East

Missionary in Training

ACU Halbert Institute for Missions

Abilene, Texas, USA

Bryan P. Stone and Claire E. Wolfteich. Sabbath in the City: Sustaining Urban Pastoral Excellence. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. 168pp. $15.60.

Stone and Wolfteich challenge the missional reader with the reminder that “while the Bible begins in a garden, it ends in a city” (90). Sabbath in the City: Sustaining Urban Pastoral Excellence records the discoveries of 96 urban pastors who are given the opportunity, through the Boston University School of Theology and the Lilly Endowment, Inc., to examine their missional approaches to ministry. The project seeks to answer two questions: “What constitutes pastoral excellence in the urban context? What sustains it?” (ix). Excellent urban pastoral leadership requires a unique approach to ministry, one that involves serving the city as well as serving oneself. “If your . . . soul and spirit is not growing and at peace with God, the sheer intensity of urban problems will overwhelm and crush you” (63).

While defining four needs of urban pastors—partnership, spiritual renewal, Sabbath, and study—the authors specify each need as an individualized spiritual discipline. Spiritual friendships are to be interpreted as one enjoys Christ as a friend: a life-giving addition to pastoral ministry. Spiritual renewal is found in embracing spiritual disciplines that continually refocus one’s energies on the purpose and presence of God. Sabbath, a challenge for an overworked and understaffed urban pastor, is a reminder that the work of God can find completion while the man or woman of God carves out mandatory rest. Study allows the pastor to contemplatively hear a sermon for the people as well as a sermon for oneself while lounging in the Word.

Through their partnership with urban pastors, the authors discover that excellent urban pastors know and love their cities. This means that they also know and love the people:

To know and love the people of the city and to practice a solidarity with them creates a space for confession, pardon, and forgiveness. To know and love the people of the city is to treat no one like a heathen, a demon, or an outcast, and this honoring of ‘the other’ we encounter allows us first to hear them; second to serve them; and third, to be open to allowing them to creatively transform our ministries. (xiii)

A warning repeats throughout the book, from authors as well as pastors, that if urban pastors overlook the practice of Sabbath, they will not effectively serve the city. Urban ministry presents many needs and few resources. With the focus on required renewal, the participating pastors also receive a four- to eight- week compensated sabbatical. “We cannot talk of sustaining pastoral excellence without talking about the pastor’s ongoing spiritual renewal, for receptivity to God’s Spirit precedes any work of ministry” (63). Sabbath not only includes rest, but play, setting higher boundaries, and a fresh commitment to one’s family. Counsel from one pastor’s spiritual director reminds her that, “Just because you have the time to do something doesn’t mean you should do it” (55). Rest is a requirement for renewal.

The honest voices of the 96 urban pastors should be heard by all pastors, not just those in the urban setting. Sabbath in the City should inform the students in seminary who begin with a vision of excellence and are often extinguished by exhaustion and frustration. The stories of the participants will powerfully inform future decisions for current readers.

Missional ministry requires one to go and serve incarnationally, fulfilling the missio Dei. Being a sent people requires preparation, partnership, and pauses throughout the journey. Urban pastors are by their very nature missional, since many have moved into the city to serve with decreased funds and increased functions. The practical guidance detailed in Sabbath in the City will enhance the journey of any seminary student, pastor, or layperson who seeks to serve. Stone and Wolfteich have gone into the city, found the hearts of servants, and are striving to replicate their beat through their excellent voices of wisdom.

Kate Sullivan Watkins

Doctor of Ministry Student

Lipscomb University

Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Dr. Barton is a professor of philosophy and religion and currently serves as the Provost of Rochester College in Rochester Hills, Michigan. He and his family lived and worked in Jinja, Uganda, East Africa, from 1994 to 2002 as part of a church-planting mission team. While in Uganda, he completed a PhD in philosophy at Makerere University in Kampala. Dr. Barton has special interest in the study of world religions and is specifically active in initiatives related to Christian-Muslim interactions. Recent publications include articles in Philosophia Africana, Missiology, and Turkish Review.

How should mission affect interfaith interactions?

This question surfaced in a unique way in the days following the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. On December 16, 2012, two days after the tragic event that claimed the lives of twenty first-graders and six adults, local and national leaders gathered with the traumatized community for a nationally televised, interfaith prayer service. Among others, President Barack Obama and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy participated, along with religious leaders from various denominations and faith traditions. Collectively, they prayed for peace and healing for the world, the nation, the community, and especially the victims and their families. Rev. Rob Morris, the young Lutheran pastor of Newtown’s Christ the King Lutheran Church, who lost one of the members of his congregation in the shooting, led the closing benediction at the prayer service. Within a few days, however, after mounting criticism from members and leaders of his Missouri Synod denomination, Morris offered a public apology for participating. Doing so, it seemed, violated the denomination’s prohibition against “joint worship” with other religions. Many believed that the young pastor’s participation in the multi-faith service unintentionally endorsed false teaching and condoned false religions such as Islam and Bahá’í.1

This was not the first time that such an issue had surfaced in the denomination. Following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Missouri Synod pastor David Benke participated in the huge interfaith prayer service in Yankee Stadium. It was later determined by denominational leaders that his participation in the service constituted syncretism and a breaking of the First Commandment (“I am the LORD your God”) by worshiping with “pagans” including Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus. In that case, Benke refused to offer the requested apology and was subsequently suspended from ministry for a year. Recently, Benke offered his support for Newtown pastor Morris. He said “I am on the side of giving Christian witness in the public square and not vacating it; if we don’t show up, who can receive our witness?” Significantly, Rev. Matthew C. Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and one of the key leaders who had called for Pastor Morris’s apology, actually offered a follow-up apology to Morris and the public for the way he handled the Newtown situation. “I handled it poorly, multiplying the challenges,” he wrote. “I increased the pain of a hurting community.”2

Whatever else can or should be said, this case clearly demonstrates the sensitivity of discussions about Christian mission and interfaith interactions. Challenging and overlapping questions surface such as the following:

• How should disciples of the Christ interact and work with people from non-Christian religious traditions? What guidance does Scripture provide?
• To what degree can we share in the religious life of a person whose doctrinal convictions are opposed to our own?
• Where are the lines to be drawn between authentic witness and compromising syncretism?
• Must interfaith interactions and friendships involve an evangelistic “end game”?
• Can we discern the truths of God in non-Christian religious traditions?
• Is there a moment, in interfaith dialogue, when we should “shake the dust from our feet”? How is that moment discerned?

We would be foolish to think that we can easily untangle the many strands of these questions and provide clear, precise answers that settle all the issues. We would be equally foolish to ignore or evade the questions out of fear or in hope that they will go away. Increasingly, authentic Christian living in today’s global environments requires a wrestling with the realities and implications of religious pluralism.

This issue of Missio Dei addresses issues of mission and interfaith dialogue specifically among the Abrahamic traditions. It does so through a collage of voices and considerations that collectively is more impressionistic than precise. It is hoped that these voices will stimulate thought, challenge assumptions, and provide theological resources as we all seek to discern and faithfully participate in God’s mission in contexts of religious diversity.

The issue begins with four articles of Missional Theology. In the first, Old Testament scholar Paul Watson draws our attention to the wide and complex contours of God’s mission in the Old Testament, balancing the themes of Israel’s distinctiveness with God’s deep concern for “the nations.” Watson explores how these themes inform an understanding of Christian mission in today’s pluralistic world. Next, Rabbi Mark Kinzer provides key excerpts from his groundbreaking book, Postmissionary Messianic Judaism (Brazos, 2005). Kinzer, a leading scholar of Messianic Judaism, offers theological insights for Jewish-Christian relations and identities that are as provocative as they are grounded in a careful reading of Scripture. His conclusions concerning an understanding of church identity and mission will be “unsettling” to some, but he provides a unique and faithful voice that should be taken seriously. In the article that follows, I consider Christian-Muslim interactions and provide an exploration of the faith’s “substantial similarities and irreconcilable differences.” By comparing and contrasting the contributions to Christian-Muslim dialogue offered by Yale’s Miroslav Volf and Lipscomb’s Lee Camp, I seek to provide tools to help us faithfully and lovingly navigate the issues. In the final installment in this section, Kyle Holton provides a challenging and potentially controversial look at the much-debated issue of “insider movements.” Based on his own long-term ministry in Muslim-majority areas of Mozambique and his critique of John Travis’s influential classification system for assessing insider movements, Holton seeks to “cut through Western classifications” and “(de)franchise” missions through an event-oriented understanding of faith and hospitality. While not all will agree with his conclusions, the article brings a level of insight and critique that is needed in these delicate and important discussions.

Three contributions form the section on Missional Praxis. In “Mission and Dialogue: An Analysis of Abrahamic Faith in the Academy,” Pepperdine professor Dyron Daughrity analyzes the interrelationship of mission and dialogue. Through a comparative analysis of thinkers such as Paul Knitter, Lamin Sanneh, and Father Vincent Donovan, Daughrity explores these issues in the context of his own work and interfaith developments at Pepperdine University. In a similar vein, professor Keith Huey describes what he calls a “Laboratory for Christian-Muslim Dialogue” currently taking place at Rochester College. The laboratory is in the form of a class co-taught by Christian and Muslim professors seeking not only to analyze interfaith dialogue but to practice it in the educational community. Huey describes the challenge of such an experiment, and the kinds of growth and frustration that the mostly Christian students experience as they seek to understand Islam and practice dialogue. In the end, Huey proposes that such processes challenge and clarify faith convictions and are mutually beneficial to those of both faith traditions. Next is an excerpt from Lee Camp’s important book Who Is My Enemy (Brazos, 2011). The excerpt explores the significance of shared hospitality and the way the hospitable kindness of some Muslim hosts informed and helped frame Camp’s own reflections on interfaith dialogue.

The Reflections section includes interviews of two significant Christian leaders of interfaith initiatives. Brad East, a PhD student at Yale University, interviews Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School whose ground-breaking work in Muslim-Christian interactions is reflected in several places in this issue. The interview provides insight into the development of Volf’s thinking since the publication of his book Allah: A Christian Response (HarperOne, 2011). In addition, Sara Barton of Rochester College interviews Lynne Hybels, author and co-founder of Willow Creek Community Church, whose reconciliation efforts among Israelis and Palestinians in the Holy Land reminds us not only of the fragile difficulties of such work, but also the call for all of us to be ministers of reconciliation who embody humility and practice the disciplines of listening and prayer. The section also includes a piece by Alan Howell not directly related to interfaith discussions but relevant for cross-cultural ministry in general.

Finally, the issue concludes with a section of Book Reviews. Josh Graves, author and lead minister at the Otter Creek Church in Nashville, reviews Carl Raschke’s provocative book GloboChrist: The Great Commission Takes a Postmodern Turn (Baker Academic, 2008), which, among other things, offers a reading of Muslim-Christian interactions, and Ben Howard reviews Graves’s most recent book, Tearing Down the Walls (Self-published, 2013), which analyzes the relationship between Christians and Muslims in the United States. The section also includes reviews of Dyron Daughrity’s Church History: Five Approaches to a Global Discipline (Peter Lang, 2012) and Fujino, Sisk, and Casiño’s edited volume Reaching the City: Reflections on Urban Mission for the Twenty-First Century (William Carey, 2013).

Through these various articles, reflections, and reviews, we hope to provide challenge and inspiration that assists and guides as we all seek to understand and embrace God’s mission, Soli Deo Gloria.

Vulnerable Mission, as the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission articulates it, comprises important missiological concepts. These concepts are not new to missiology, though they have often been under-practiced. Vulnerable Mission is thus a welcome call to more conscientious and thorough application of sound missiological principles. Yet, at least in the Latin American context, some questions remain as to the universality and absoluteness with which missionaries should apply Vulnerable Mission methods.

Clarifying the Contrast Between Vulnerable Mission and Mainstream Missiology

The Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM) is promoting a conversation that Christian missionaries can ill afford to ignore. I am grateful that Abilene Christian University, through the initiative of Dr. Chris Flanders, has brought the conversation into the realm of missiological reflection among Churches of Christ. I wish to respond to the proposals of Vulnerable Mission (VM) from my particular location.1 The reader might triangulate my location with a few key coordinates: I write as an Anglo-American, trained missiologically in an a cappella Church of Christ university, serving as a missionary in urban Peru. From this vantage point, the basic impulse of VM looks beneficial. The AVM homepage states:

“Vulnerable mission” may be seen as part of the movement toward contextualization of the Gospel of Jesus, which we regard as the theory of many and the practice of few. We would like to see more people take the risks of contextualization and vulnerability in order to reap the rewards that only come to those who value local resources and invest in local languages.2

The notion that there is a disconnect between mission theory and practice is plainly true. The bifurcation exists on a variety of levels: academy versus ministry, missiology versus missions, ideals versus realities, goals versus potentialities, and the list goes on. The fundamental issue is how to overcome the divide, and VM is attempting to provide a solution: “VM does not propose different goals than mainstream mission and missiology. We are arguing that the mainstream methods of reaching those goals are not achieving them very well.”3 To be clear, though, the problem is not that mainstream missiology (just “missiology” hereafter) has failed to provide methodological direction.4 While there are still cross-cultural workers who are not cognizant of missiology, I believe this conversation, directed at an audience that attends missiological conferences and reads missiological journals, must really be about the best practices that many missionaries know about but find difficult to implement.

“Contextualization and sustainability are widely preached; imperialism and dependence are widely practiced,” states Stan Nussbaum with salutary directness.5 The criterion by which we can evaluate VM, then, is its effectiveness in bringing about contextualization and sustainability where missiology has failed. VM’s intention, in other words, is to provide a practical handle for actually propagating the “three selves” that have been missiology’s Sisyphean task for over a century. In Nussbaum’s taxonomy, that practical handle consists of three methods: local language, local resources, and local thinking style.6

Nussbaum grants that there are “major improvements to the ethnocentric model” found in “partnership methods.”7 He lumps “most advocates of partnership,” represented especially by Mary Lederleitner at the ACU conference, with “missiologists.” Lederleitner’s book Cross-Cultural Partnerships is a popular-level example of the way missiology brings anthropological study to bear on cross-cultural interactions.8 Thus, it is not fair to missiology that Nussbaum represents the alternatives to VM as either (1) the “ethnocentric model” or (2) a partnership model that would use English as much as local languages and would opt for a simplified message instead of considering local modes of thought:9

Goal	VM methods	Partnership methods
Contextualized	Local language	English or local
Sustainable	Local resources	Prime the pump, or top up local resources
Missional	Local thinking style	Simplify the message

If the contribution of VM hinges on its ability to achieve what missiology has not, it is absolutely necessary first to grant missiology its full qualifications, in order to see what VM’s practical difference really is. And historically, missiology has taken local languages, resources, and thinking styles as the key to the self-realization, if I may use that term, of the indigenous church.

To tease out what is really at stake, we must think about the nature of the goals that missiology and VM admittedly share. Self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation cannot mean partial self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation. “Self” does not mean some outside resources or some foreign modes of thought and speech. Rather, whereas VM is apparently advocating the method of permitting no foreign resources, languages, or thinking styles from the beginning of a missionary endeavor, missiology has historically made allowance for getting to the self-realization of the indigenous church by degrees. And it is only fair to note that by degrees is, from a missiological standpoint (rather than a blindly imperialist one), a deliberated compromise rather than a justification for easy, self-serving methods.

Furthermore, the introduction of no foreign resources, languages, and thinking styles, to the degree possible in a cross-cultural relationship, is a logical corollary of the goal. If the end is self-support, for example, the most direct means is quite obviously not to introduce foreign support. To take a well-known representative with a Latin American outlook, in 1953 Melvin Hodges was able to quote a missionary in Colombia as saying:

No money for [national] preachers and [national] churches is not a handicap nor hindrance; it is a challenge to missionary ability and a policy that, if adopted generally and more rigidly, would save many a heartache and produce a stronger, more humble church in the foreign field.10

Advocacy of “no money” as the means to self-support is not novel; VM is not proposing new methodology but rather agreeing with extant missiological wisdom by which Hodges felt sixty years ago missionaries should “generally and more rigidly” abide. While the difference between Hodges and VM on this point seems to be that Hodges was willing to say, “The right use of money has its place in missions,” we still have to acknowledge that Hodges was advocating throughout his book—as a methodological outworking of Roland Allen’s proposals—the introduction of no foreign funding.11

Moreover, the infamous “moratorium on missions” last century was “not because of liberal theology or anti-Western bias, and it was not intended to signal the end of missions” but was an attempt to foster “an alternative to remaining dependent on foreign funding and personnel.”12 We might understand so drastic an approach as the recognition that there is no way to use only local language, resources, and thinking styles as long as foreign missionaries are present. The only way to avoid compromise on some level is to dissolve the cross-cultural relationship altogether.

Because missiology assumes the necessity—and the benefit—of the cross-cultural relationship, it is dedicated to mitigating cross-cultural challenges and increasing the missionary’s capacity for contextual discernment. One can imagine easily that, given this purpose, missiology would advocate the use of local languages. If mission history is rife with examples of missionaries using colonial languages or depending upon translators, we need not confuse that fact with missiology’s own perspective. The goal is the self-realization of the indigenous church, and one method for everyone concerned is the use of local languages. David Hesselgrave states in his influential volume Communicating Christ Cross-Culturally:

Almost without exception, missionaries will be well advised to learn the language of their respondent culture. . . .

If one wants to communicate Christ to a people, he must know them. The key to that knowledge always has been, and always will be, language.13

Or consider the position of linguist and missiological luminary Eugene Nida:

As regards a very high percentage of the social and religious culture language is an indispensable instrument for transmitting not only the outward forms but the inner content and subjective evaluation. Perhaps the best evidence of the essential function of language as a transmitting mechanism is seen in the almost total failure of meaningful cultural contact when effective communication is lacking. . . . If a culture cannot and does not transmit its own concepts except by language, how can missionaries expect to inculcate wholly foreign concepts without using the only language which the people really understand?14

What is even more noteworthy, though, is the quantity of Nida’s work that simply takes for granted the missionary’s use of local languages.15 Local language is missiology’s presumed method for even the initial communication of the gospel. How much more so for the self-realization of the indigenous church? On this point too it seems as though VM is not proposing a new method but rather suggesting that missionaries actually employ the method missiology knows to be so indispensable.

That brings us to the final VM method, local thinking style. It is especially important for this paper because it is Nussbaum’s addition to the VM agenda.16 He states, “A paradigm is a tool that an analytical thinker uses to compare two or more systems. Non-analytical (oral) thinkers do not use that tool because they never undertake that task. They simply do not look at their worlds that way.”17 He explains further, quoting John Walsh:

“When people routinely assume that the opposite of orality is literacy, they are making only a superficial contrast. The real contrast is not oral vs. literate. It is oral vs. analytical.” In other words, an oral style is a story or narrative or holistic style of thinking as opposed to a conceptual style that breaks everything down into pieces and then connects the pieces. Oral thinkers apprehend whole ideas; analytical thinkers comprehend them one piece at a time.18

Orality is therefore a way of looking at the world that is non-analytical and holistic. As Nussbaum mentions in a footnote, accounting for this sort of local thinking style is not methodologically novel. First, authors such as Duane Elmer and Sherwood Lingenfelter have dealt with “holistic thinking” in popular missiological publications—and they have done so by placing holistic thinking in relation to a much larger complex of cultural variables that more amply characterize “local thinking” in its sundry configurations.19 Second, as Nussbaum hinted, the bigger issue is the way local people “look at their world”—their worldview. It is an immense understatement to say that missiology has been concerned with worldview. One prominent representative is sufficient for our purposes here. Paul Hiebert’s Transforming Worldviews is a thoroughgoing overview of worldview theory, including sections on various kinds of logic and narrative epistemology and a whole chapter on “Worldviews of Small-Scale Oral Societies.” He also presents a chapter on “Methods for Analyzing Worldviews”—which moves well beyond the suggestion that we should use local thinking to methods for doing so, including the analysis of wisdom literature (including proverbs) and aesthetic culture (including music and festivals).20 These are not best characterized as “quirky interests of a tiny minority.”21 There is undoubtedly only a small portion of the missionary force that undertakes rigorous worldview analysis, but in the context of a discussion about what methods missiology offers for achieving its goals, that is hardly the issue. These are mainstream methods. They are well-developed, widely published, and accessible.

If these methods have been at missionaries’ disposal for so long, why then have they continued to use foreign languages, resources, and thinking styles? The answer, I believe, is that the complexities and difficulties of cross-cultural cooperation require mutual discernment and, often, ad hoc decisions. This reality is hardly an excuse for the many poor decisions that have led to dependency and paternalism. At the same time, doubling down on the counsel to use exclusively local methods is not a practical solution to the complexity of cross-cultural relationships that has prevented missionaries from doing so long since. Thus, in my own historical and cultural location I am left with a number of questions that challenge VM.

Problematizing Vulnerable Mission

What About Urbanization?

VM gives the impression that it has rural contexts in view. The idea of local language quickly becomes problematic in areas where urban migration is a factor. The urbanization of Latin America is a well-known phenomenon. I live in Arequipa, Peru, a city of about a million inhabitants. In Arequipa, there is a confluence of Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara—the three official languages of Peru. Spanish, of course, is the dominant language; that of the conquerors and colonizers. But it is, as a matter of historical reality, the first language of most urban inhabitants. It is the language of the school system, business, government, and the transcontinental social construct called “Latin America.” In Arequipa, Spanish is colonial and local.

The indigenous persons who migrate to Arequipa do so for a variety of reasons. In general throughout Latin America, “industrialization and the introduction of capitalist modes of production in rural areas from the 1930s onwards triggered a process of concentrated urbanization that seventy years later had led to a majority of the societies in the region crossing the urban threshold.”22 Although rural to urban migration had tapered off in many countries by the 1990s,23 in Peru no few fled the countryside in the wake of Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path) during the 1980s and 90s. Droughts during the same time period also precipitated urban migrations. Currently, urban migration tends to be a matter no longer of industrialization per se but of its cousin modernization, driven primarily by the same economic impulses that marked earlier patterns of urbanization. Yet, it is not truly representative to characterize urban migrants’ motives as purely economic. In a study by the Wellbeing in Developing Countries Research Group, researchers developed a culturally specific model of wellbeing that identified the most important and most frustrated life aspirations of Peruvians. Regarding analyses specific to migrants, James Copestake summarizes the study’s findings:

Overall, what emerges from both the quantitative and qualitative evidence is the complexity of the personal wellbeing trade-offs entailed in migration. For many, the main cost of searching for a more secure livelihood was not delaying starting a family but being forced to live in a more insecure and uncertain environment. Migration behaviour is also revealed to be more than a movement of individual workers driven by real wage differentials or even the outcome of diversified household livelihood strategies: it is also part of a life-cycle process of seeking independence from and often then negotiating interdependence with relatives, particularly parents. An understanding of the relational dimensions of migration should not be regarded as a useful supplement to a separate understanding of more important material dimensions. Rather, material, relational and indeed emotional effects of migration are profoundly interrelated.24

One area of the wellbeing paradigm, called improvement from a secure base (ISB), was of special importance: “In-depth interviews revealed there to be a strong positive ISB motivation for migration to urban areas, particularly Lima: this being associated with terms like ‘betterment’, ‘superación’, ‘improving life conditions’, ‘securing the future’ and ‘upward social mobility.’ ”25 In fact, three ISB goals were statistically the standouts for disparity between aspiration and achievement: “Perhaps the most distinctively ‘Peruvian’ aspect of [the results] is the low satisfaction with achievement of highly ranked status goals for education, salaried employment and professional status.”26

Copestake notes, “The ISB goal can be viewed as corresponding closely with the Western idea of development, and suggests a desire to be part of a modernization process, subject to not taking excessive risks.”27 Certainly, there are among Arequipa’s urban migrants those less voluntary participants in the city’s modernized social arrangement—refugees from natural disaster or insurgent violence. But we can safely postulate that the vast majority of first generation rural to urban migrants, whose primary language is Quechua or Aymara, desire to be in the city precisely in order to participate in the opportunities modernization affords, to which the dominant Spanish-language criollo culture plays host.28 They endeavor, often at great risk, to enroll their children in a Spanish-only school system, to participate in the local urban economy, and to attain status as defined by urban Peruvian culture.

Especially regarding the Spanish-only school system we may recognize dynamics at work that are important to VM.

Whereas, in the past, formal education was exclusively Spanish in medium of instruction and urban and Western in content, the last quarter of the 20th century brought a shift in both policy and practice toward greater inclusion of indigenous language and content, usually under the label of bilingual intercultural education.29

Peru, in other words, made a legal requirement the use of both the local language and Spanish in the classrooms of indigenous communities. As the quotation intimates, the use of local language is necessarily a change not only of medium but also of content. And while the simultaneous use of Spanish might mean that “interculturality” is “simply a new guise for the ‘same old’ enlightened assimilationism that yet maintains the hegemony of Spanish as the language of writing, of formal communication, and of power,” it is also possible that the recourse to local language affords “a genuinely new intercultural ideology that seeks to incorporate indigenous languages, cultures, and ways of knowing into a new national identity.”30 Here we have, for the indigenous peoples themselves, the opportunity to choose, at least to some degree, their local language and local thinking style. In the urban context, we must therefore reckon with the decision of migrants to uproot their families partly in order to place their children in Spanish-only, urban, Western schooling. Second generation migrants usually speak their parents’ language poorly if at all and typically do not use it outside the family context. But why should they, when their parents have sacrificed so much to assimilate to the urban environment?

The question for the missionary in urban Peru, then, is what local language and thinking style to use. The difference between Spanish and Quechua, as well as the difference between indigenous and urban worldviews, is every bit as significant as VM asserts. Yet, is it the missionary’s place to overrule the indigenous migrant’s intention to live in the linguistic world of her second language? If she speaks Spanish but still “thinks” Quechua, need the missionary insist upon a Quechua approach—or is this even a realistic view of language? Nida notes the complexity of what he classifies as “a heterogeneous society with included face-to-face constituency”:

When a single over-all social structure involves not only a dominant group but an included face-to-face constituency, it is essential to recognize not only their differences of structure, but also their interrelations. One of the most serious mistakes in missionary work has been to imagine that Indians in the Americas, for example, should be reached as a separate constituency and developed as an isolated community, when all the time they are in highly dependent relation to the urban center.31

Nida points out that it is more common to err in the other direction, when the missionary “lumps them together without regard to their different structures.”32 So, even in this urban nexus VM provides a corrective when it provokes the sub-cultural sensitivity to which the melting pot can numb the missionary. But I emphasize Nida’s point about “interrelations” here because VM seems to disregard the complexity of the urban environment with its local-only formula:

In a heterogeneous society with an included folk culture there is always the acute problem of dealing with people in a state of transition. How are they to be ministered to—in terms of their rural circumstances, or in their city setting? In a sense, it all depends on where they are and how they view themselves.33

The point here is to juxtapose the urban Latin American scenario with Jim Harries’s rural African context, from which much of the VM perspective apparently arises:

Presumably the content of African languages arises from the content of African lives. Does learning of another language “magically” result in a change in way of life? Or is the widespread use of English making people dependent on what they do not understand because it is not a part of who they are? If we had examples of non-European languages ‘succeeding’ [as the medium of enlightened advanced education] then perhaps we could say that the choice of a European language for an African student is a free or arbitrary choice. As it is, if it is a choice at all, then it is a choice that largely precludes taking the African person’s own context seriously. This default option for African students handicaps them for the rest of their lives.

For example, consider the contrast between monism and dualism. English is “at home” in dualistic communities. When used by dualistic people, it can be extremely productive, because the way it is used fits the contours of life of the people concerned. But if used by a monistic people, it loses its moorings. Its implicit categories are no longer the right ones. It serves a monistic people very poorly. This is the case unless they adapt English so as to use it in their way. Such “adaptation” of English defeats the original intention—that English be a means of easing communication with the wealthy and powerful international community and a means of achieving development and prosperity on Western lines.34

The parallel is strong. Spanish is the colonial language and the “means of achieving development and prosperity on Western lines.” But the practical issue is Harries’s theory of language, which the Peruvian urban migrant’s intentions challenge. The logic of Harries’s argument is that the context (“the content of African lives”) is what determines their language. This is unidirectional, though, because in his view their context actually determines their worldview (monism) first, and their language is merely the manifestation of their worldview. Language is a surface element, which means that learning a new language cannot result in a new worldview (dualism). The context is still determinative, therefore the new language will be employed (adapted) only in terms of the existing worldview.

To this view, the urban migrant essentially poses the question: What if I change contexts? Is it possible for the Quechua speaker to see the world differently enough that her use of Spanish does indeed cohere with the native Spanish speaker’s use? The missionary’s expectation that every person’s worldview can be transformed into that of Jesus and VM’s expectation that the missionary can effectively adopt local language and thinking styles both require an affirmative answer. The oral thinker can learn to think analytically—they “simply do not look at their worlds” analytically, but they can do so every bit as much as the missionary can learn to think orally in order to “use local thinking styles.”

It is clearly paternalistic to require non-Westerners to conform to a Western worldview, but it is equally paternalistic to deny non-Westerners the agency to use non-local languages, non-local thinking styles, and non-local resources should they so choose. It is paternalistic to opt against partnership because potential partners may find it “very difficult, if not impossible” to “understand that the resources provided by the Western mission body to support the spreading of the gospel are not the gospel.”35 The methodology of using only local language, thinking styles, and resources, rigidly applied in urban Latin America, stands to become one more way that Western missionaries say, “We know what’s best for you, whether you realize it or not.”

Another way of putting this is that my context reveals the peculiarity of VM’s stated aim, to seek “more perspectives on VM from Majority World people whose contact with the West has not persuaded them to approach mission like Westerners.”36 I must ask, instead, why not equally seek the perspectives of Majority World people whose intentional contact with the West defines their reality in terms of interculturality and hybridity? The mestizo voice should not be marginalized here as well.37 It calls out a challenge to the notion of local culture as static and closed. It asks missiology to consider new, dynamic configurations that are oral and analytical, narrative and propositional. It seeks dialogue, discernment, compromise, and provisional decisions appropriate to contexts that are in flux.

What About Theological Education?

With the mestizo voice in my ears, then, I want to discuss the question of what language and thinking style to use from within the concrete (though diverse) situation of theological education. There are three principal issues that shape the conversation: (1) the nature of theology, (2) the extant voice of Latin American theological scholarship, and (3) the inevitability of cross-cultural interactions in the globalized world.

The Nature of Theology

There is no doubt that the dominant current of theological reflection in Christian history is part and parcel of the various Western church traditions. The recent overhaul of church history mentioned by Dyron Daughrity in the present issue implies a recovery of previously subdued non-Western theologies as well. Backing away from this development for a wider perspective, Western theology has already been in a long process of self-criticism, intensified by postmodernism, in which the idiosyncrasies, foibles, and blatant deficiencies of Enlightenment streams of Christianity have been laid bare. To some degree, Christianity finds itself in a theological malaise induced by an uncertainty about what to do after the assertion that theology is culturally conditioned. The instruments of communication that might potentially span the gap are themselves subject to the deconstruction of Western imperialism: rational discourse that assumes a particular rationality; communication media embedded in globalization; the practical need for linguae francae that finds a path of least resistance in formerly colonial languages; the written word, which excludes a variety of oral and grassroots theologies—not to mention academic standards such as peer review that further delimit publication. Paralysis results in theological ghettoization.

Personally, I hail from a theological tradition that drank deeply from the Enlightenment well and developed a hermeneutic that programmatically denied the possibility of theological pluralism, cultural or otherwise. Thus, along with the rest of Western Christianity, sectors of the Churches of Christ have been in a period of profound introspection, after which we see clearly that our culturally conditioned ways of talking about God are not universal and definitive. For all that, I maintain a commitment to the primacy of Scripture that must, for the Churches of Christ, be the point of departure for a discussion about the nature of theology.

There is vast diversity among literate cultures; conflating literacy with Western thought will never do.38 Yet, the VM advocacy of only local thinking styles among oral cultures runs up against theological education that makes Scripture central. Nussbaum contends that the contrast between orality and literacy is superficial, but superficial or not, illiteracy is a component of orality. To concretize the issue, what should theological education look like for my illiterate or functionally illiterate Arequipeño brothers and sisters?

Scripture stands as a testimony to the people of God’s enduring, trans-cultural impulse to center theology upon the written word. We may make historical caveats about the illiteracy of the majority, the priority of narrative, and the variety of cultural patterns that mark the reception of the text, but these do not obviate the nature of Scripture as scripture. Moreover, the rabbinic and Hellenistic modes of theology canonized in the New Testament demand to be met on their own terms by readers of every culture. At this point, it hardly needs saying, the cultures of the Bible stand at tremendous distance from US, Latin American, and African cultures alike. How could missionaries who focus upon Scripture not introduce foreign thinking styles? The use of local language in missiology intends to mitigate the distance, but as Nida said, the purpose is still in virtually every context “to inculcate wholly foreign concepts.”

The Western tradition’s historical-critical tools may be indelibly marked by the culture(s) in which they developed, but it is something else to say they are irredeemably compromised. Christopher Wright says:

There is no point, it seems to me, in swinging the pendulum from Western hermeneutical hegemony and ignorance of majority world biblical scholarship to the fashionable adulation of anything and everything that comes from the rest of the world and the rejection of established methods of grammatico-historical exegesis as somehow intrinsically Western, colonial, or imperialistic.39

At their best, historical-critical tools allow us to meet biblical cultures on their own terms. If the choice is between attempting that cross-cultural encounter with the text or subjugating it to the autonomy of a local thinking style, theological education should choose the former in every context. As a scholar who has spent much of his career giving the Latin American context a voice to critique and improve Western hermeneutics, René Padilla’s words on this point are weighty:

It has been argued, however, that . . . the grammatico-historical approach is itself typically western and consequently not binding upon non-western cultures. What are we to say to this? . . .

No interpreters, regardless of their culture, are free to make the text say whatever they want it to say. Their task is to let the text speak for itself, and to that end they inevitably have to engage with the horizons of the text via literary context, grammar, history and so on. . . .

The effort to let Scripture speak without imposing on it a ready-made interpretation is a hermeneutical task binding upon all interpreters, whatever their culture. Unless objectivity is set as a goal, the whole interpretive process is condemned to failure from the start.

Objectivity, however, must not be confused with neutrality.40

Similarly, as a twenty-first century American, my encounters with Irenaeus, the Cappadocian Fathers, Anselm, Calvin, or Karl Barth are all cross-cultural. Theological education actually seeks to challenge the student’s local thinking style, not to place it in a reservation.

Latin American Theological Scholarship

Vibrant theological scholarship already exists in Latin America, though its scale is modest relative to the number of churches it serves. Latin American theological scholarship bears certain prominent traits that present difficulties for VM methods. First, theological leaders think of themselves in terms of Latin America and therefore undertake their task internationally in Spanish or Portuguese. Entities such as the Latin American Theological Fellowship and the Evangelical Association of Theological Education in Latin America represent this characteristic most prominently.41 Second, they are participants in the theological discourse of the global church. Prominent leaders such as Samuel Escobar and René Padilla have played vital roles in the Lausanne Movement, for example. They participate in this global scene, as well as publish, in English.

The weight of these simple observations increases in proportion to the degree that theological leaders of the dominant criollo culture do indeed represent their diverse national contexts. This is not to say that local languages should be ignored—the principles of sound missiology stand. But even in indigenous communities in Latin America, “in the pedagogical process and in the development of an integral formation both languages are necessary and complementary”:42

The educational process, within the framework of the religious conscience is decisive in a socialization which will allow the aboriginal people and other participants to elaborate critical and constructive relations with the society in which we are living. The contrary, within current conditions, would inevitably lead to one form or another of the extermination of minority groups. In this sense, the proposal which certain anthropological currents uphold, to “maintain the indigenous cultures in a state of purity” simply brings on the same tragic consequences that the destruction/absorption plans have produced. . . .

The aim of a school in the aboriginal context is a double one: on one hand, to rescue and affirm the values of their own culture, language, identity, religious cosmovision; and also to offer adequate training so as to enable participation on a level of equality in a multi-cultural society, which at the same time is a dominating and vicious one towards certain sectors.43

If it is necessary to introduce Spanish-language theological education into the indigenous community rather than maintain a purely local-language theology, how much more must Spanish-language theological education be the right approach in the urban context, where indigenous migrants have made dominant-culture socialization their goal? It is invariably best to bring students’ culturally and linguistically determined thinking styles into dialogue with Spanish-language theology, first because balance is necessary in order not to perpetuate marginalization, and ultimately because the “promotion of inter-religious and intercultural dialogue for an improved mutual integration into a pluralistic society” is one of the goals.44

Considering Latin American theological leadership, it is important to note that Nussbaum sees the charismatic movement in Latin America as an example of Jim Harries’s “VM approach to theological training.”45 It may be that we see here the contrast between largely analytical mainstream theological scholarship in Latin America and that of supposedly oral charismatic Christianity. Yet, charismatic Christianity in Latin America is notoriously marked precisely by a lack of theological education, not an alternative “oral” model of it.46 And while many “grassroots” groups have certainly developed without foreign funding, it is not the case that they demonstrate a particular care for local languages—in fact, in Arequipa there are a significant number of native Quechua speakers participating in Spanish charismatic church services. Here as well, urbanization is determinative, and charismatic churches flourished first and foremost in Latin American urban environments.47

If it is right to describe the widely diverse charismatic movement in terms of Nussbaum’s conception of orality, then there is no doubt that the movement’s chief characteristic in regard to thinking style is not local indigeneity but socio-economic marginalization, along with which goes a lower level of education. José Míguez Bonino summarizes various sociological descriptions of Pentecostalism’s emergence:

A series of diverse hypotheses arose, but with a common denominator: They saw Pentecostalism as a movement which found its space in Latin America’s transition from a traditional society to a modern one, or more specifically, in the transition from a largely agrarian society to a partially industrialized one, from a rural to an urban society.48

The socio-economic implications of this transition are well known. The connection is clear between the indigenization of Pentecostal churches and the nationalist stirrings that accompanied the rural to urban transitions of poor, oral, uneducated populations.49 It is, however, difficult to demonstrate that a principle of orality was the cause of indigenization. It is perhaps a simpler explanation that lack of education, and therefore continued orality, became endemic in transitional groups precisely because marginalization prevented them from completing the transition they intended, which in turn led to a break with the wealthy, educated, analytical culture that marginalized them. They did not indigenize because they were oral but remained oral because they indigenized through conflict at a time when their identity was shaped by limited access to education.

To put it this way highlights the fact that one notion of education is regnant in Latin American urban society. There is no romantic notion of local indigenous education at work here. Rather, there are systems of urban poverty that perpetuate a divide between those with greater educational opportunity and those without. In this context, an “oral” rather than analytically trained mind is indeed the default mode of cognition, but it is hard to imagine idealizing such orality as an equally beneficial thinking style in a society that functions economically, legally, and politically in a more analytical mode. Indigenous migrants know as much and for that very reason seek every opportunity to integrate.

Furthermore, it is similarly difficult to think that such orality in the church context should not be challenged by the analytical theological mode that is itself indigenously Latin American and understands its context in the socio-economic terms pertinent to the urban reality of uneducated oral communities. There are strong links here to Paulo Freire’s conscientization—part of a pedagogy for marginalized groups that focuses on “critical literacy,” dialogue, and engagement.50 Freire’s influence on Latin American liberation theology, which much of Latin American evangelical theology has appropriated to varying degrees, finds expression in mainstream Latin American theological scholarship in the tendency toward discourse and interculturality. This disposition is especially concerned to empower the voice of the marginalized, yet it certainly expects theological education to be dialogical rather than monologically “local.”

Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Globalized World

Theological education cannot afford to treat local cultures as closed systems; especially in urbanized contexts, attempting to treat them so is futile. The world is plugged in, and there is no going back. Harries says, “The responsibility is on the West to communicate and interact inter-culturally.”51 That is a justifiable challenge to the ethnocentric Western missionary force; a historically reasonable corrective. Especially because the missionary enters the local culture to instigate the cross-cultural relationship, the burden to assume an incarnational posture is hers. Yet, when it is a matter of the local Christians’ theological education, to insist upon banning non-local thinking styles handicaps the resident of the globalized urban setting. What is more, to place the responsibility of the cross-cultural relationship solely upon the West is, inversely, to advocate the ethnocentricity of local Christians.

Were Western missions to achieve a moratorium on ethnocentric short-term missions and cut all “dead aid,” local Christians would nonetheless need the capacity to self-theologize (a self unmentioned in Nussbaum’s proposal) in dialogue with the global community.52 This precludes the local-only thinking style—or perhaps, more accurately, redefines the local in relation to the global. Of Harries’s context, Mercy Amba Oduyoye said twenty years ago—just before the hyper-acceleration of globalization through the Internet:

We short-circuit the cultural context of Black Africa if we forget that the contemporary culture, except maybe in the remotest of villages (and how many do we have left?), is fast becoming an amalgam of Arabic, European, technological, and African cultures. The context is today as it has been shaped by yesterday, and continues to interact spatially within a world of changing cultures.53

Missiologically, there is little to gain by ascribing moral value to globalization. It is not intrinsically good or evil; it affords opportunity for both. More importantly, it reshapes local realities regardless of our judgments. The missionary who judges it negatively may choose, to the extent possible, not to be an instrument of globalization. But globalization will change her context in any event. Therefore, the missionary task of contextualization must account for that change:

For some missiological reasons, traditional indigenization has been enthusiastic about preserving our Indian culture, especially in Indian dialects. This indigenization has been to a large extent romantic, in the sense of looking to the past and glorifying the noble savage without seriously taking into consideration the present, much less the future. Contextualization is asking for the incarnation of the gospel, not in a traditional and static culture, but in the struggle and agony of the people in search for a new culture, namely, a better way of life for them and their children.54

Beyond the inevitability of globalization, the bare fact that Majority World churches are engaged in cross-cultural mission throughout the world is enough to bring local-only thinking under scrutiny. Just as VM (and missiology) calls Western missionaries to respect local thinking styles, missionaries from oral cultures must learn to meet more analytical cultures on their own terms.55 This critique becomes all the more urgent given that theological leadership of the global church must begin to arise from the Majority World. On this point, no one speaks more eloquently than Andrew Walls:

It is inevitable that the religio-cultural transformation of the 20th century will place Africans and Asians more and more in positions of leadership in world Christianity; the more so since the Great Reverse Migration will ensure that the United States and Europe become more consciously multi-religious as well as more secular entities, and as the once axiomatic identification of the West with Christianity becomes more and more problematic. But any leadership needs to be an informed leadership; it is incongruous to have Western intellectual and theological leadership of a non-Western Church. That Africa will bring gifts to the church is widely recognized, and many see those gifts as including zeal for Christ, unembarrassed witness to him, energy and delight in worship, and fervency in prayer, all of which will bless the wider church. But Africa and Asia must bring other gifts too. Intellectual and theological leadership of the Church must increasingly come from Africa, Asia and Latin America. As a result, theological adequacy, rubbing along, is not going to be enough. There must be excellence, world-quality capacity for leadership. Africa, Asia and Latin America will increasingly have to be the powerhouses of Christian thought.

If we translate this into academic terms, it means that Africa, Asia and Latin America must first become centers of creative thinking, world leaders in biblical and theological studies. And theological and biblical studies may be one of the few disciplines, possibly even the only one, in which this will be true for much of the area. Economic and other factors will always give Europe, North America and East Asia the edge in scientific and technological disciplines, and in many branches of the humanities and social sciences. But for the sake of the Christian Church worldwide, Africa, all Asia and Latin America, home to so many Christians, must pull their true theological weight.56

This is not to reduce theological studies to Western modes of academia. There is much that other cultural modes of study and reflection can bring to balance and correct Western scholarship:

It may again be time for Christians to save the academy. And it may be that salvation will come from the non-Western world; that in Africa and Asia and Latin America the scholarly ideal will be re-ignited, and scholarship seen as a vocation. To follow a calling means putting other things aside as distractions, laying aside every weight; and the scholarly vocation may be best fostered by breaking with some of the Western models; developing new structures that encourage the community of scholars, rather than their competition. And in theological scholarship—the area in which Africa and Asia and Latin America have to excel for the sake of the worldwide Church—this will mean scholarly communities that maintain a life of worship and are in active relation to Christian mission.57

By itself, the Western church’s need for an intelligible, dialogical corrective from Majority World theological leadership is a powerful reason not to establish local Majority World churches with a purely self-oriented vision of ecclesial existence. The resistance to dependency and paternalism that powerfully compels the conscientious Western missionary should not engender a reactionary methodology that ultimately blinds the local church to God’s global mission. Theological education of local Majority World churches for global theological leadership cannot be reduced to Western academia, but it must certainly encompass Western modes of theological reflection.

What Is Vulnerability?

I affirm the need for vulnerability in mission. The narrative of Jesus’ incarnation, life, and death provides the theological imperatives for mission.58 Nonetheless, those imperatives need nuance. It rings true that Western missions has often compromised its own missiological principles because of the temptation to work from a place of strength and convenience. At the same time, it is not clear that mission in weakness and vulnerability can be flatly equated with exclusive localness.

On one hand, Jesus certainly did not leave humanity to its own resources. As Mary Lederleitner puts it, “Jesus is the ultimate high-powered and highly resourced partner in global mission. . . . I am glad Jesus didn’t say, ‘You know, there is such a big gap between what I can do and what you can do. Why don’t we just work separately?’ ”59 I get the sense that the VM response to this point is that it was the Holy Spirit rather than Jesus who brought these “outside resources” to bear, and that missionaries have relied on their own resources rather than the Holy Spirit. Yet, the analogical mode in which incarnational theology issues its imperatives for mission also permits us to compare Jesus’ power and authority with whatever resources the Creator has placed at our disposal. Taking for granted a biblical worldview, what resources would a missionary actually arrogate to herself, as her own strength?

On the other hand, there is nothing more vulnerable than the attempt to negotiate cross-cultural partnership in the most faithful and beneficial way in our postcolonial reality. The missionary who seeks to prevent dependency and facilitate sustainability is far more vulnerable to frustration and failure when she serves in a mode of genuine mutuality and intercultural dialogue rather than avoiding the complexity of the cross-cultural relationship and the reality of the globalized world. Absolute local-only methods may take missiology to its logical conclusion, but in abstraction from local realities, they may serve as oversimplified answers to questions whose difficulty makes us truly vulnerable.

An Appreciative Comparison

I conclude with a comparison between VM and the mission work I am a part of in Arequipa, Peru. There are two facets of the work in Arequipa: church ministry and development ministry. The missionaries conceive of both together in terms of kingdom sowing, but for practical and heuristic purposes they may be separated. I limit my comments to church ministry.60

Historically, Churches of Christ have tended toward a building-oriented strategy in Peruvian (and Latin American) urban church planting, whether renting or building facilities in order to establish a congregation or beginning in homes with a view to renting or building facilities. In either case, raising funds from US churches has been normal. Our intention to establish churches in poor urban communities caused us to doubt the appropriateness of such an approach. We concluded our study of the context:

Naturally, in the context of the poor, the rental or construction of a building is neither reproducible nor often sustainable. For churches intended to multiply themselves, it is not an acceptable model of church planting. Practically, churches that would choose to train leaders capable of growing congregations large enough to reproduce the building model will stifle the potential for church multiplication. This leads to a second point—that of leadership training. Building-centered strategies are virtually always locked into a pastor-laity dichotomy fostered by the institutional structure of the church. The assumed roles and tasks of church leadership professionalize ministry to the detriment of church-wide equipping. The assumed goal of growing large further removes the possibility of “ministry” from many would-be spiritual leaders and frustrates even natural leaders’ best efforts. Furthermore, the quality of the church communities that have had the most growth is contingent on the dynamics of small groups that have no need for a building. Lastly, the building of church buildings among Peru’s poor, as well as the leadership style it assumes, fails to contrast strongly enough with the religiosity that spiritually impoverishes nominal Catholic believers. Such an approach cannot adequately redefine and reconstitute “church” for new Christians. On each of these points, a building-centered strategy is at odds with the contextual factors uncovered by the best of Latin American missiologists and sociologists.61

Thus, we bring new Christians into a house church network. The use of local resources is not our only concern, but our critique of standard strategies does have some similarity with Nussbaum’s discussion of the financial implications of the “analytical church”:

Biases that go with assuming a mature church must be an analytical church

1. Professionalization—the leaders are the best analysts; laity tag along.
2. That kind of leader needs special schooling for analyzing the Bible.
3. A congregation must be big enough to support a professional pastor.
4. That size of congregation will need a building.
5. The building, the schooling, and the pastor all require major funding.62

These assumptions are generally typical in my context as well. Yet, the issue is really professionalization—a particular model of theological education—not a particular thinking style.63 Because theological education in the urban Peruvian church must take into account the nature of theology as dialogue with the historical church, dialogue with extant Latin American theological leadership, and dialogue with the global church within the globalized world, we are searching for an alternative model of theological education that does not professionalize students and conforms to the economic reality of Arequipa. Nussbaum’s proposal is suggestive:

Alternative model if a mature church can be an oral-thinking church

1. The laity can be involved in developing the theology of the group.
2. Special schooling not required for leaders; they can be apprenticed.
3. Congregations can thrive and sub-divide though too small to support a pastor.
4. Buildings are optional.
5. Little or no funding required.64

Practically, apprenticeship is the model of theological education for Nussbaum’s oral-thinking church. The rest are implications of refusing to professionalize ministry or otherwise grow congregations into large budget-maintenance mechanisms—implications that are also the goals of an alternative theological education model in Arequipa. The question, then, is whether apprenticeship will be sufficient to equip theological leaders to serve the urban Peruvian church. We affirm the essential commitment of VM: to foster an ecclesial existence among poor urban communities that is truly Peruvian (self-governing), economically sustainable (self-sustaining), and reproducible as the Peruvian church participates in God’s mission (self-propagating). Nonetheless, we must also promote the “fourth self”: self-theologizing.

Self-theologizing in the urban Peruvian context must not be a detriment to the economic sustainability of the church. In fact, because theology is done by the church, the nature of the church as contextual, sustainable, and missional should provide strictures for its self-theologizing, including the equipping of those gifted to be theological leaders. Therefore, it is unreasonable that theological education would entail costs incommensurate with the local economy or require foreign subsidy.

At the same time, theology is the point where historical, social, and global dialogue become indispensable. While the trappings of the Western academic edifice are both unsustainable and unnecessary for the education of poor Peruvian theologians, there may be some vital components that are more costly than the local church can afford. For example, one area where we have departed from a local-only resource methodology in Arequipa is the acquisition of Spanish theological texts. Books are more expensive in Peru than in the US, despite the relative weakness of the Peruvian economy. Therefore, US Christians have donated texts to the church in Arequipa. Is this the slippery slope of dependency, or is there a place for cautious, deliberate collaboration?

Discussing the “western captivity of theology,” Andrew Kirk, a theological educator in Latin America and other Majority World contexts, articulates the basic problem that theological education faces in contexts such as Arequipa’s:

Theological education is restricted in many instances to those who have reached a particular level of academic achievement, who can lay hands on sufficient financial resources for study and who share the cultural background of the educator. How is theological education to be made available to people who inhabit a “non-book” culture, i.e. for those who have not succeeded in meeting the expectations of the normal educational process? Present patterns of theological education will probably continue to reinforce the Western Church’s alienation in deprived, urban areas. How is it possible for existing Western theology, given its cultural assumptions, to equip a genuinely indigenous leadership in all strata of society?65

Both local resources and local thinking styles are at issue when we decide to make the theological library a component of education. It is not a decision to make lightly. Of course, the same can be said about the decision to translate, mass publish, and disseminate the Bible. Even if we hold firmly to VM convictions, when practical benefit outweighs idealism we must discern legitimate compromises. Undoubtedly, Christianity can thrive and expand without access to theological texts. But what is most beneficial for the urban Peruvian church: absolute economic independence or access to historical, social, and global dialogue? This is a situational dilemma that cannot be reduced to a choice between right and wrong but instead requires discernment of the contextually most beneficial option—which in turn makes us vulnerable to error. We must pose such questions prayerfully and humbly. And it is perhaps best to reiterate that our commitment to missiological principles already excludes Western academic institutionalism, ministerial professionalization, and economically unsustainable church forms.

I believe interculturality is the best mode for Latin American theological education—and probably for the global church of the twenty-first century. In Peru, at least, it is already an intelligible pedagogical framework. In this dialogical mode, which fosters theological interdependence, hybridity, and “a new level of partnership that is fully bi-directional,” it is a legitimate compromise for wealthy churches to put theological tools at the disposal of under-resourced churches.66 The use of those tools in a contextually appropriate educational framework will require creativity, experimentation, a permanently repentant heart, and attention to Latin American theologians who are already leading the way.67

VM seems to look at such a compromise with the expectation of impending dependency and paternalism because the history of Western missions justifies pessimism. Western missionaries have long felt empowered to compromise where it seemed expedient without regard for the imperative of vulnerability or the long-term cost of “strength.” Looking upon a global missionary movement prone to compromises that have undermined missiological principles, it seems reasonable to feel a more radical position is the only alternative for real change. My call for discernment and cautious compromise can appear to be just another path back to colonialist practices. I have great sympathy with the VM perspective and great appreciation for its intention to be consistent. In many cases, missiological principles need simply to be carried to their logical, hard conclusions. Yet, missiology also gifts us the fundamental insight of contextualization: there are no universal formulas. Urbanization and globalization are not excuses for missiological delinquency, but they are realities that complicate our notions of local, create new opportunities that are both risky and possibly constructive, and, ultimately, may require more than a local-only methodology.

Greg McKinzie (http://gregandmeg.net/category/greg) is a missionary in Arequipa, Peru, where he partners in holistic evangelism with Team Arequipa (http://teamarequipa.net) and The Christian Urban Development Association (http://cudaperu.org). He is a graduate (MDiv) of Harding Graduate School of Religion. He can be contacted at gemckinzie@gmail.com.

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