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Month: August 2020

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Vincent Donovan’s Christianity Rediscovered [1978]

Donovan, Vincent J. Christianity Rediscovered. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 1978.

Donovan’s book is a critique of colonial missions methods in Africa. He critiques those strategies as imperialistic and out of step with the gospel principles of St. Paul. His direct mission to the Masai is an attempt to deviate from those early strategies. Instead, Donovan champions a process of inculturation that takes the gospel and cultures seriously.1 Moreover, there is no such thing as an unchanging and pure culture, for all cultures have always been in dynamic flux. Donovan was convinced that missionary work is better undertaken by those who respect the uniqueness and diversity of human cultures.

Forty years after its publication, Donovan’s book has been widely read and acknowledged by academicians and missiologists who claim to have been challenged and transformed by it. Over all, the book has missiological and theological breadth that reflects Donovan’s years of missionary work among the Masai in Tanzania.

Donovan’s discovery began with his critical evaluation of an earlier mission work that was based on the Eurocentric and oppressive European colonial rule. Unfortunately, a few of the Western missionaries operated in tandem with that rule and as a result lost their mandate. While a majority of the missionaries did not operate openly in that fashion, they were somewhat complicit.

The major challenge facing the first missionaries to East Africa was slavery. Arab slave traders and their European supporters brought moral confusion and unimaginable misery. The Arab raiders went far inland to hunt for slaves, to be sold in Bagamoyo before they were transported to Zanzibar and beyond. There was scarcely a section or a tribe of East Africa that was not affected by it (4).

The early missionaries encountered all this havoc when they landed in East Africa and sought to intervene by buying and resettling slaves in mission compounds. In fact, the buying of slaves and evangelizing them became the principal method of the early Christian missions both in East and West Africa. The cases in point are the resettlements in Free Town, Sierra Leone, and Frere Town in Kenya. The money was solicited from the missionaries’ home churches or missionary societies and antislavery societies in Europe and America (4). Donovan sympathizes with the missionaries’ good intentions, but questions whether buying the products of that system was the best way to fight the evil of slavery.

After the independence of many African countries in the 1960s, missionary efforts shifted to development and nation building. Vatican II supported some of those efforts and went a step further in support of true freedom of conscience and tolerance for other religions. A new definition of missionary work that involved development was emerging: “A new breed of missionaries appeared—behind the plow, laying pipes, digging wells, introducing miracle grains, bringing progress and development to the people of the Third World—a kind of ecclesiastical Peace Corps” (12). Donovan failed to understand how these development efforts differ from those of agents of socio-economic systems such as the United Nations or the British Foreign Office.

Having lost faith in his predecessors, Donovan opted to chart his own strategy. A letter to his Bishop lays out his growing concerns at Liliondo Mission Station, which ran four schools and a hospital. He recognized the material help that the missionaries offered to the Masai, but he was concerned that there was little to show in the way of conversions. At this point, he asked permission to break away from the schools and the hospital to go directly to the Masai in their villages (15). That was a radical departure from the traditional Catholic procedure, which had assumed that it was impossible to preach the gospel directly to the Masai because they were considered the hardest of all the pagans. Donovan, however, chose to take that risk with neither theory nor strategy but confidence in himself and God.

A Lutheran missionary introduced him to the classic writings of Roland Allen. In his book Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours?, Allen argues that modern missionary methods had strayed far from those of the early church. Echoing Allen, Donovan insists that any action taken in the name of mission should be measured by the Bible (33). On that basis, he understood the task of evangelization to be a temporary work in any given place, for once a Christian community is established, the missionary moves on, as per the example of Apostle Paul.

Donovan commenced his new mission strategy of direct evangelization in Chief Ndangoya’s village—one of twenty-six villages of the district of Loliondo. He had given himself a five-year target to evangelize the entire area. The process was simple. He would introduce a religious theme or topic and ask to hear their opinion on it, and then he would tell them what he believed or thought on the same subject. In the first week of instructions, he asked the Masai to tell him what they thought about God. For the Masai, there is only one God, Engai, who goes by many names. When God is kind and propitious, they call him the Black God, and the Red God when angry. Sometimes they call him rain or the God of the Blue Stomach. Regardless of the descriptive, colorful names, God is always the one Supreme God, the Creator. Donovan understood this to be quite similar to God’s many names in the Bible—fire, breeze, and rock. In this sense, God is neither male nor female but certainly embodies the qualities that exist in both genders.2

Furthermore, Donovan introduced the Masai to another tribe in the Bible—the Hebrew tribe or the Israelites—and their knowledge of the One God. However, he was careful not to let God be trapped in one tribe. Finally, someone asked Donovan if God speaks to his tribe or whether Donovan had known God, to which he responded with humility: “No, we have not found the high God. My tribe has not known him. I have come a long distance to invite you to search for him with us. Let us search for him together. Maybe, together we will find him” (46). I think in this statement, Donovan was trying to show his vulnerability and humility as a fellow traveler searching for the divine.

It seems clear that Donovan had come to the understanding that the gospel claims had been compromised when it was exported alongside the Western culture and often as synonymous with Western culture. Fortunately, some scholars have recognized that goodness and holiness do not reside exclusively in one culture or tradition and have proposed an alternate approach through dialogue.3

Like many missionaries, Donovan was confident in relating the biblical stories to the Masai. However, upon listening the Masai interpreted the stories differently. For example, they complained that the creation story, with the garden and the command to till the soil, sounded agriculturally biased. For them, tilling the soil is repugnant. Only a farmer—a barbarian (olmeg)—would cut open the thin layer of topsoil of the Masai slopes, exposing it to the equatorial sun and gradually turning it into a desert.

Donovan followed the story of the garden with a seemingly worse one, the story of Cain, the first farmer, who murdered Abel, the first cattle herder. With some justification, they questioned whether the Bible was a colonial plan against cattle herders. “They began to wonder if that book I held in my hands with such great reference, was not some kind of an agricultural or government plot against them” (57). He admitted to have never retold the story.

While evangelizing the first villages, Donovan noticed a man on the outskirts who belonged to another Masai village. He seemed poorer than the average Masai. He later found out that the man had broken certain taboos and was ostracized. The recourse would be for his father to go to the mountains, ask for the “spittle of forgiveness” so that he could forgive his son, and bring blessings on the village once again. This was so since it was thought that spittle was a “very sacred element of a breathing human” and “was considered to be the sign of forgiveness” (59). When sin occurs between communities, reconciliation is attained by the two communities agreeing to share the holy food (endaa sinyati) accompanied by the rest of the community. Donovan used these existing principles to explain the salvation story.

To explain the gospel further, Donovan drew on Jesus’s parables, and for the illiterate Masai, no other method could better serve the purpose. He captured their pastoral imagination when he told them that from the first day he became an elder, Jesus spoke about the land of green pastures that God is preparing for God’s people of the earth. God is the shepherd of that peaceful land, and it is for the poor, the meek, the humble, and the little ones. God will be merciful to them, and they will be blessed. To bring it home, Donovan contextualized it and pointed out that the pastures of God are like a wedding feast or a circumcision feast where there will be dancing and singing and sugarcane for the children and beads for the women and tobacco for the elders to chew on and milk and meat and honey beer. Like any major Masai ceremony, many will come from as far as the Serengeti Plains.

Another biblical story that captured the Masai imagination was the story of Abraham and his two sons Isaac and Ishmael. One son is depicted as a good brave warrior and the other a lazy herder who ran away in disgrace. This is similar to the story of the Masai father going up on the hill each night to ask for the spittle of forgiveness for his wayward son. When the son finally returns, the father goes to meet him. The most popular story of all is the story of the good Samaritan—an olmeg or a barbarian whom Jesus identified as the neighbor we must love.

After he had explained the gospel as best as he could, Donovan was convinced that his job had been accomplished and what was left now was for the Masai to respond by either accepting or rejecting the gospel. “First, they must believe in all that God had done, and in Christ, then they must be sorry . . . be forgiven . . . and begin again a new. They must not keep all this to themselves, they must go forth in the Spirit and witness to the good news . . . letting others see the meaning of it all, by their words and by their lives until the time that Jesus comes again” (82).

From his initial contacts with the particular Masai group under chief Legwanan, Donovan had discovered that the Masai operated as a community, and therefore he expected them to respond to the gospel as a community. He gave them time to think and discuss among themselves. Clearly, Donovan’s method deviated from the traditional method geared to individual conversions. He believed that the church’s mission and catechetical practice is based on that premise. After a week, they had arrived at their decision and were ready to respond. The chief Ndangoya spoke for his people: “From the first day, I have spoken for these people. And I speak for them now. Now, on this day one year later, I can declare for them and for all this community, that we have reached the step in our lives where we can say, ‘We believe’ ” (92).

In preparation for the baptisms, Donovan asked them to consider selecting their new names. That would be in line with the Masai who usually change their names at any important life-changing event. As Donovan stated correctly, the church needs some saints with names like Ole Timbau, Ole Kiyiapi or Kurmanjo in the litany of Saints. All of the men and women of Ndangoya’s Community chose new Masai names except Ndangoya, who took the name of Abraham because the original Abraham had left everything and led his people from the worship of a tribal god in search of the Unknown High God. Now, with the whole neighborhood and visitors watching, Donovan poured water from the stream over his head according to the Roman Catholic tradition. He baptized Ndangoya, son of Parmwat, with his new name, Abraham. The next step was to find a Christian name that is parallel to the Masai age-set system to correspond with his new Christian initiation. After considering several names, they settled on Orpororo L’Engai, which means “brotherhood of God.”

After such a success in Ndangoya’s community, Donovan felt confident to move to the next community and repeat the same formula. After a year of instructions in that community, Donovan left for a week to give them time to decide. When he returned, he found them waiting in the place where they had met every week. He asked for their decision on the gospel, and the chief spoke first: “We have heard what you mean by the Christian message. . . . We thank you for coming to us. We think we understand what you have said about Jesus Christ. But we cannot accept it. . . . We do not want baptism. Forgive us—our answer is no!” (107). Donovan was devastated by the rejection. He wondered how they could follow instruction for a whole year and then reject it. He saw himself as a total failure. Donovan, however, was able to learn a very important lesson that day—that Christianity by its very essence is a message that can be accepted or rejected.

In his next evangelization effort, Donovan developed a different approach. He would work with someone in a given community who seemed to understand the message better than the others. That person would summarize the previous lesson before Donovan started new instruction. That strategy seemed to work well until he met a brave Masai, Ole Sikii, to whom he had been introduced as a religious man in the Masai sense of the word.4 Donovan shifted away from his previous approach. He instructed Ole Sikii and baptized only him. In turn, Ole Sikii instructed and baptized his own people.

The celebration of the Eucharist in Ole Sikii’s community signified a critical step in Donovan’s efforts to inculturate the gospel among the Masai. It is considered a taboo for Masai men to eat in the presence of women, but in the Eucharist both men and women shared the meal in line with what St. Paul stated in Galatians 3:28, that “there is no longer Jew and Greek…slave or free…male and female; for all of you are one in Christ.” Donovan recalls “the first time when I blessed the . . . gourd . . . and passed it on to the woman sitting closest to me, told her to drink from it and then pass it on to the man sitting next to her. I don’t remember any other pastoral experience in which the sign of Unity was so real” (121). Donovan further attempted to teach the Masai that the Eucharist was not an act of magic accomplished with the saying of a few words in the right order but rather that the Eucharist is their whole life—family raising, herding, milking, and working. If the life in the village had been less than human, then there was no Mass. Similarly, if there had been selfishness, hatefulness, or lack of forgiveness, then the body of Christ had not been achieved. If someone or some group in the village had refused to accept the ritual grass5 as the sign of the Peace of Christ, there would be no Eucharist.

The most compelling aspect of Donovan’s book is its noble attempt to present the bare gospel unencumbered by Western culture. He understood the missionary as one called to divest himself of his culture so that he can be a naked instrument of the gospel to the culture for which he is called. He highlighted the Apostle Paul’s example to be “all things to all people” (1 Cor 9:19–23). At the same time, he was unimpressed by the colonial government’s civilizing efforts later to be promoted by both government agents and missionaries, an agenda that masqueraded as “nation building” by the independent national governments. Donovan was not against all development. His primary concern was when development consumed too much of the missionary’s time, leaving the work of evangelization undone. What he called for was a fresh assessment of the church’s mission to bear fruit in a joyful sharing of the gospel with the poor. He believed that when that assessment is done, the people will respond to the gospel on their own terms, and they will produce their own theology and social action that is authentically theirs.6

Although Donovan was so affected by the negative approach of the missionaries that preceded him, he did not dismiss missions altogether. In fact, he affirmed cross-cultural missions. He appreciated the process of inculturation, in which the gospel confronts human cultures in a positive and respectful manner.

As he prepared to leave Africa, Donovan wrote, “It is missionary evening in Africa” (161). The interpretation is that missionaries are no longer needed. This idea is not new. In fact, a few Christian leaders in the majority world had been concerned that their development to maturity as Christians was hampered by the dependence on the Western churches. In 1971, the General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa shocked his audience when he issued a call for a moratorium on foreign missionaries and foreign funds.7 The moratorium call was meant to reduce dependency and challenge economic imperialism or neocolonialism that had become the pattern of missions. Almost a century earlier, Henry Venn, Secretary of the Church Missionary Society (1840–72) coined the term “euthanasia of mission”8 to describe the vital process by which a foreign mission can produce a national church that is self-supporting, self-governing and self-propagating.

Whatever else Donovan had in mind, his notion of a missionary sunset seems to ignore the evidence of the Spirit in the explosive growth of Christianity in Africa today. Evidently, the creative vitality of the church is realized in the mainline churches founded by the missionaries as well as in the new movements of African independent Churches. Christianity is truly being rediscovered. Missionary mistakes could not prevent the work of the Holy Spirit and the spread of the gospel through cross-cultural missionaries and indigenous leadership.

Samuel K. Elolia is Professor of Theology and World Christianity at Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Milligan College (Tennessee).

1 Inculturation is a recent term coined by the Jesuit scholars to replace the previous terminologies such as Adaptation, Indigenization and Reformulation. The term denotes an honest attempt to make the gospel understood by people of every culture. This process has been taking place within Christianity from its inception. For further details see John Mary Waliggo, Inculturation: Its Meaning and Urgency (Nairobi: St. Paul Publication – Africa, 1986) 11–14.

2 Feminist scholars including Rosemary Ruether, Mercy A. Oduyoye, and Elizabeth Johnson would appreciate the contributions of pastoralists like the Masai in the God-talk conversation in relation to patriarchal influence.

3 Noted proponents of religious dialogue include Paul F. Knitter, One Earth, Many Religions: Multifaith Dialogue and Global Responsibility (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995); Jacques Dupuis, Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2002); S. Mark Heim, Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995); Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Marjorie Suchoki, Divinity & Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003); Clark Pinnock, A Wideness in God’s Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992); and Peter C. Phan, The Joy of Religious Pluralism: A Personal Journey (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2017).

4 Religious people are those who venture beyond the confines of the mundane in order to unlock the secrets that hold the mysterious. They close the gap between the sacred and the mundane. They include medicine specialists and diviners who provide the means of healing and the prevention of looming dangers in the society.

5 Ritual grass is a bunch of green grass often used by religious people to bless people at particular events such as child naming, weddings, circumcision, healing, and forgiveness. In recent years, the same ritual grass has been contextually appropriated by the church in Christian ways similar to rituals like baptism and the holy communion/Eucharist.

6 Since the late 1950s, Africa has produced its own theology that seriously examines the relationship between African traditional religion and culture in relation to Christianity. E. Bolaji Idowu’s Olódùmarè: God in Yoruba Belief (London: Longman, 1962) and John Mbiti’s Concepts of God in Africa (London: SPCK, 1986) helped set the stage for the development of African theology that embraces the African culture in understanding African Christianity. Kwame Bediako summarizes in his book Christianity in Africa: The Renewal of Non-Western Religion, Studies in World Christianity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995) what it means for Africans to express their faith within the African culture. In South Africa, theologians have reflected on their faith in relation to their culture and the added challenges of racism.

7 See Gerald H. Anderson, “A Moratorium on Missionaries?” Christian Century 91, no. 2 (1974): 45; Robert Reese, “John Gatu and the Moratorium on Missionaries,” Missiology: An International Review 42, no. 3 (2014): 245–56.

8 Jehu Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 23–42.

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Donald McGavran’s Bridges of God [1955]

McGavran, Donald. The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2005. 174 pp.

In 1986 when we began mission work in Italy, our goal was to involve as many people as possible in individual Bible studies. Initially we worked to surface contacts through teaching English using the Bible, interesting them in Christ, and leading them to make personal decisions to become followers of Jesus. Eventually, we became so swamped with the sheer numbers of people interested that we decided to insist on group studies. Suddenly our potential converts were meeting together, forming friendships, and sharing deep conversations about faith with people just like themselves. The church began to grow as people came more quickly to a decision to follow Jesus.

In some respects, our experience is a microcosm of the greater picture of Christian missions that McGavran addressed. Fueled by Western individualism, missions during the Great Century tended to extract would-be believers from their communities one soul at a time. Their changes in life, values, and worldview led to social ostracism. They were cut off from their own people and gathered in protected communities known as “mission stations.” In Bridges of God, McGavran underscores the need to bring people to Christ without destroying their cultural identity and connections. His conviction was that Christian churches grow much more rapidly when people move to Christ together with their social networks intact.

Biography

Donald A. McGavran (1897–1990) was born and raised in India where both his parents and grandparents were missionaries.1 After completing degrees at Butler University, Yale Divinity School, and the College of Missions, he and his wife, Mary, served as missionaries of the Disciples of Christ in India. They worked as educators, evangelists, church planters, and missions administrators from 1923 to 1954.2 After their second term of mission work, Donald obtained his PhD from Columbia University. By the 1930s his attention turned to research. Inspired by W. Pickett’s Christian Mass Movements in India, McGavran became consumed with the question, “Why do some churches grow, and others do not?”3 While serving as secretary for the Indian Mission, McGavran cooperated with Pickett in researching the phenomenon of group conversion in central India. They discovered that when families were allowed to become Christians without breaking ties to their extended networks of relatives and friends, church growth was more rapid and healthy. McGavran’s peers in the Indian Mission disregarded his findings and failed to elect him to another term as secretary. For the next two decades, he evangelized among the low-caste Satnami people, bringing around one thousand people to faith and establishing fifteen fledgling congregations.4 The response could have hardly qualified as a “people movement,” but his experiences and insights gained in evangelism during that period led to the eventual publication of Bridges of God (1955). Recognizing that McGavran was becoming a forward thinking expert in missions, his sponsor, the United Christian Missionary Society (UCMS), sent him to continue his study of church growth in more than a dozen countries on five continents.5 In 1965 McGavran accepted an invitation to move his newly founded Institute for Church Growth from Northwest Christian College to Fuller School of Theology where, together with other outstanding scholars such as Alan Tippett, Charles Kraft, C. Peter Wagner, and Arthur Glasser, he extended his greatest influence on missiology.6

Summary

In Bridges of God, McGavran asks and answers one basic question, “How do peoples become Christian?”7 His predominant thesis in response to the query is that families, clans, and tribes more quickly and completely become followers of Jesus when they are encouraged to maintain their cultural identity and nurture their existing social and familial relationships.

The author begins by outlining the problem of slow church growth among a rapidly growing world population and the insufficiency of existing explanations for explosive growth where present. During “a period of cataclysmic change,” McGavran calls readers to recognize that the world will find unity and peace either in secular materialism or in Christian fellowship (3). Since the former leads ultimately to despondency, only the later solution will heal the world’s ills. McGavran affirms that societal upheaval is creating an opportunity for conversion unequaled in centuries, yet despite its widespread global presence, the Christian faith has stagnated. Miniscule percentages of the largest populations of Asia and the Islamic world adhere to Christianity. Missionaries must discover how peoples become Christian. The Nevius method of unpaid national evangelists and the centrality of Bible study, outreach to animistic tribes, and persistent work over long periods of time have indeed garnered modest results in a few places, but these approaches fail to furnish a universal solution to the challenge of moving peoples to Christ (5–6).

McGavran traces the contemporary paralysis of the Christian movement to Western individualism, which promoted independent decision as the pervasive norm for conversion. Blinded by their preference for autonomy, evangelists have overlooked the importance and power of community life and even communicated that the choice to follow Christ is more virtuous if done in solitude or against the will of one’s family. Individualized conversion may have become the norm in the West, but this is not so in the rest of the world. “To Christianize a whole people, the first thing not to do is to snatch individuals out of it into a different society” (10). Personal conversion is certainly necessary but should not be done in isolation or divorced from one’s family ties. Mission leaders need to “see life from the point of view of a people to whom individual action is treachery. Among those who think corporately, only a rebel would stride out alone, without consultation and without companions” (11). In much of the non-Western world, a person does not think of oneself as a “self-sufficient unit, but as part of the group” (11). Peoples become Christian when, thinking as a group, they move together as a “chain reaction” (12). This sociological phenomenon, when understood properly, becomes the lens through which the Great Commission can best be put into practice. The aim is to “disciple” “peoples” in such a way that individuals are united around the conviction that they must abandon other idolatrous affections and bind themselves loyally to Christ (14). Christ must be acknowledged as their only sovereign Lord.

In the next two sections, McGavran seeks to illustrate and legitimize the people movement principle through an examination of biblical and historical examples. McGavran attempts to demonstrate that such large numbers of people came to Christ among Jews, Samaritans, and gentiles, that no convert was completely ostracized upon conversion, because the Christian community was too large. In fact, the Jews turned to Christ in such large numbers that McGavran’s contemporary critics would have probably rejected the validity of their conversions. The followers of Jesus multiplied from 120 to 3,000 to more than 5,000 as “families came in, not individual men” (19). As Christianity spread geographically, Jews took the new belief with them so that in every town, there were Christ-followers in each synagogue. McGavran observes, “It shows that peoples become Christian fastest when the least change of race or clan is involved” (23). The first gentile convert, Cornelius, was isolated from his extended family by distance, otherwise his conversion would have begun a people movement. At Antioch, where a people movement across cultural lines did occur, there were anonymous Christians who served as bridges between the Jews and Greeks (24). In Antioch Paul learned a reproducible method of spreading the movement. McGavran writes, “He was shown which Gentiles the Holy Spirit had prepared for conversion, and how the Jewish Movement to Christ was the bridge across which the Christian Faith could spread to the Greeks” and suggests that the Antiochine Christians wanted to reach their relatives on Cyprus and the mainland (27).

Citing Paul’s many connections as seen in Romans 16, McGavran maintains that Paul sought to preach and expand Christianity by working through this kinship network that extended all the way to Rome and by turning away from places that were unlikely to respond positively. In contrast with the missionaries of McGavran’s day, he did not linger for a hundred years where people were not becoming Christians. “On the contrary, going to relatives and kinsmen, to show who could and did become Christians, was the habitual procedure” (30). “He did not choose fields. He followed groups of people who had living relations in the People Movement to Christ” (31). Paul succeeded in extending the message through “Gentiles on the bridge” who had connections with Christianity through the synagogue (34). In this section McGavran sees through the lens of his church growth paradigm through which all mission work demonstrates the truth of the people movement principle. If the church grew, it did so by utilizing this truth. If it failed, the principle had been ignored.

McGavran then turns to surveying the spread of Christianity down through the centuries. In the first four hundred years, people either made individual decisions with low cultural identity that resulted in the stagnation of the movement, or the movement became a “one-people” church as in Alexandria, Egypt. Northern Europe witnessed group movements to Christ that only changed loyalties without the perfecting of life. During the Reformation, “Luther, Calvin, Knox were not content to expound a purified faith and then let all who wished to enter to do so one by one. . . . Their leaders made the choice, partly on religious, and partly on political grounds, and the population followed their leaders” (40).

In the chapter “The Characteristic Pattern of the Great Century,” McGavran provides a comprehensive explanation for the development of the ineffectual and ubiquitous missions-station approach. When the Protestant missionary movement began to take wing in the early 1800s, missionaries attempted unsuccessfully to span the cultural and economic gulf created by the West’s privileged status compared to the rest of the world that was not yet enjoying the same degree of wealth. Living arrangements, standard of living, and the color of skin contributed to the missionaries’ inability to “melt into the generality of the inhabitants of the land as Paul could” (43). White missionaries who were especially susceptible to disease isolated themselves from the people to whom they brought the message. There were a few exceptions among the most successful Westerners who learned the language and formed meaningful relationships with the people. Of this period, McGavran comments, “Casual contacts may win a few individuals to a new faith, but unless these individuals are able to start a living movement within their own society, it does not start at all” (45). In an attempt to adapt to this situation, the missions-station method evolved. Originating out of an individualism that called converts to “come out and be separate,” converts left their homes and moved to a newly founded colony. McGavran writes, “To gather a compound full of Christians out of a non-Christian population seemed a good way to proceed” (46). What should have been a temporary phase eventually produced one of two results: either new Christians were isolated from their own people and the movement stagnated, or the missions station happened to be established among a highly receptive people and experienced moderate growth. In either case, the missions-station approach was intended to be an initial stage to a larger growing movement. However, “conversions were mainly out of the tribe, out of the caste, and indeed out of the nation” (49). Converts were not just joining a new religion, but a foreign way of living. When missionaries experienced little response with this approach, rather than make disciples of converts, they institutionalized and turned to educational and medical work. An unintended but inevitable consequence resulted in churches becoming a smaller part of the missions station. The mother station was bigger than what local churches could sustain and supply and created “the idea that to be a Christian is to receive aid from institutions rather than to live a Spirit-filled life” (59). Although the products of this work often became national leaders and led to “national rebirth” in some locations, Christians were not the only ones offering schools and hospitals anymore, and their influence was waning (62). The stations had come to offer little spiritually, only the “material without a soul” (66).

Nevertheless, mission stations have occasionally produced people movements among such peoples as the Karens of Burma, Churas of Pakistan, and the Batak of Indonesia where “almost every activity of the station contributes to the conversion of chains of families” (75). McGavran argues that contrary to criticism, such movements now numbering in the millions are not nominally Christian. Just because people come to Christ in large numbers does not necessarily mean their commitment is weaker. He also observes that rapid growth and overwhelming challenges create conditions that further fuel the expansion of the movement. When foreign missionaries are swamped, they must entrust preaching to nationals, who usually remain unencumbered by material wealth and the financial burden of maintaining the edifices of the mission station. McGavran observes, “It is generally agreed that the less physical and financial support the missionary gives the indigenous Christians and the congregations, the better” (78). These swiftly expanding movements enjoy the advantages of being naturally indigenous and independent of Western missions that spawn the formation of locally led churches. “Being a Christian is seen to mean not a change in standard of living made possible by foreign funds, but change in inner character made possible by the power of God” (91). McGavran argues that holy living and strong dedication do not guarantee growth. What is needed is contact. “Christianity, like electricity, flows best where there is good contact” (93).

In the remainder of the book McGavran focuses on the implementation of a new strategy that prioritizes the reallocation of financial and human resources to receptive fields among people movements. He describes the approach, provides the reasons for it, and advocates for much-needed research to advance it. McGavran describes the strategy simply as co-operating with growing churches. He states, “The era has come when Christian Missions should hold lightly all mission station work, which cannot be proved to nurture growing churches, and should support the Christward movements within Peoples as long as they continue to grow at the rate of 50 per cent per decade or more” (109). Growing churches are those organized cells in which members convert without social dislocation, marry without entering a new marriage market, and interact without betraying kindred. The real test, writes McGavran, is whether men and women are accepting baptism in groups that maintain ties with relatives at home. Aspects of this strategy include staffing missionary stations lightly and optimizing those stations which operate among responsive people movements by developing positive attitudes toward group conversion, focusing on the people group that is most winnable, and embracing the realities of tribe and caste. New work established among people movements should: (1) establish self-government from the start; (2) entrust infant churches to the work of the Holy Spirit; (3) delegate discipline to the new church rather than being imposed by missionary; (3) train missionaries to work not paternally over the people movement but submissively as servants; (4) nurture social improvement as it comes from the new church as the “normal fruit of the Spirit”; and (5) encourage systematic giving. McGavran suggests specific ratios of workers under this new system reckoned not by missionaries to non-Christians, but “missionary assistants” to the number of new Christians. Among mission stations there should be one missionary to 3,000. Among most people movements one to 500, and among the most vigorous movements one to 200.

In this last section of the book, the author offers his most practical reasons for the adoption and implementation of the people movement strategy. He argues that for far too long non-growing churches have consumed all our mission efforts and these non-functioning bridges should transfer money, support, and workers to growing churches. McGavran contends, “If winning men for Christ and the establishment of Churches is the goal of missions, then such transfers need to be considered most seriously by leaders of Christian work” (145). Since not all missions activity should be assigned the same level of importance, existing funds should be used to do the greatest good. Mission stations are too expensive and should be placed, in a simplified and sustainable form, in the hands of nationals. Proponents of the status quo might object, “What about the people who have never heard?” McGavran replies that if they are unresponsive, then works among such people “veer away” the proclamation of the gospel where it is most effective. McGavran believes that the best way to reach the unreached is not by foreigners working in hostile environments but by seeking people movements (119).

Bridges of God concludes with McGavran’s call to increase research in church growth in order to define the new strategy’s objectives and to measure its achievements. Separate records for people-movement and mission-station approaches should be kept and compared. Research questions should include: (1) Is it possible to predict growth rates? (2) What degree of growth constitutes a healthy movement? (3) How can faith be transmitted from one culture to another? (4) What are the causes of arrest to people movements? and (5) How much training do workers need? McGavran anticipated that his book would be aggressively attacked but that proper research would bolster his arguments and approaches.

Contribution

With the publication of Bridges of God, Donald McGavran called into question the prevailing mission method and sought to replace it with a completely new paradigm with far-reaching effects. As he himself acknowledged, at the time of writing of his book, the missions-station approach was universally accepted, unquestioned, reigned supreme, and dominated practically all missionary thinking (100). McGavran changed all that. Although some mission compounds persist by riding the momentum of a century or more, these efforts are now patiently tolerated rather than actively promoted among missiologists and informed missionaries. He carried the ideas of Rufus Anderson, Henry Venn, and Roland Allen to their practical and radical implementation.8 He effectively advocated a less compassionate, more objective, yet painfully necessary weaning of mission stations from foreign resources that needed to be redeployed where people movements were growing. McGavran’s new approach would guide missionaries to abandon one-by-one conversions, open their eyes to see the power of group identity, and appreciate the valuable insights provided by anthropology and sociology.9

The timing of the publication of the book in 1955 was providential. Countries were rejecting foreign domination and seeking independence. Emerging nations were declaring, developing, and obtaining independence. Racial tensions and cries to end segregation dominated American domestic concerns. McGavran’s approach required cultural sensitivity, respect for existing social networks, and humility by missionaries who were to work as partners, servants, and assistants. The new missionary replaced domination with servanthood, institutions with relationships, and isolation with incarnational presence. McGavran’s work provided a necessary corrective to the “moratorium on missions” and a resurgence of cross-cultural evangelism.10 McGavran’s writing called mainline Protestant churches to a revitalization of evangelism and introduced conservative evangelicals to principles of anthropology. Finally, among the many other important contributions of Bridges of God to the cause of Christian missions is Donald McGavran’s insistence that careful research be conducted to discover the primary determining factors to church growth. This publication together with his church growth research over the next decade and the gathering of preeminent mission scholars at Fuller contributed in a major way to the “restoration of Christians missions as a serious and viable subject of study and research.”11

Relation to Contemporary Thought

It is difficult to calculate the degree to which McGavran’s writing and work have affected contemporary missions. His work provided the foundational principles and impetus for the Church Growth Movement, incarnational missions, the Church Planting Movement, and Discovery Bible Studies. Megachurch leaders, such as Rick Warren, trace much of their success to the modern application of McGavran’s principles. Today’s churches cannot operate like nineteenth-century mission stations that sought to attract adherents out of their socio-cultural contexts. Instead, today’s missionaries must honor existing social ties and strive to share the gospel in culturally relevant ways.12 According to Warren, he began to rethink how to do evangelism while working as a student missionary in Japan when he stumbled across a magazine article discussing McGavran’s Bridges of God. Seeking to find the answers to McGavran’s church growth questions provided the direction for Warren’s work with Saddleback Church.13

Today some of McGavran’s principles continue to be controversial. According to McGavran, churches reach people more quickly when they take advantages of “natural bridges of family, clan and culture.” Monocultural churches draw immigrants who are reluctant to join Caucasian churches. These churches may grow faster, but unless they become multicultural in practice and theology, they can harbor prejudice, racism, and segregation.14 Some statements in Bridges of God are alarming when heard through North American ears today. For example, “people like to become Christians without crossing racial, class, or linguistic lines” is a statement that sounds racist by today’s standards.15 In light of God’s desire to abolish racial barriers (Eph 2:12–16) and make Christians of all races “one in Christ” (Gal 3:28), McGavran’s homogenous unit principle may be a good strategy, but it is poor theology. Today’s critics concede that people may come to Christ without crossing racial boundaries, but they need to quickly be exposed to the multicultural essence of God’s kingdom.16

Conclusion

McGavran’s Bridges of God established the dominant missions and church growth philosophy for the last half-century, but today’s world presents a different set of challenges and opportunities. Today, inactive, cloistered, and self-absorbed Christians, not mission stations, present one of the greatest hindrances to the growth of the church. Today’s churches suffer, in some respects, the same maladies as the traditional missions station, including isolation from surrounding contexts and a focus on one-by-one conversions. The growth of global Christianity, generated especially by the mission work of non-Westerners, has narrowed the number of receptive untouched fields. Today, the presence of large people movements among unreached populations no longer corresponds completely to our reality. The vast majority of the unreached are in countries that are predominantly Muslim. These unreached are more resistant to offers of the Christian gospel and are frequently hostile to it. There are some people movements to Christ among Muslims, and remnants of McGavran’s principles continue to steer evangelism among quickly growing churches.17 Prayer, sacrifice, and courage, however, will also be needed to propel the church into the most resistant and untouched fields.

Shawn Daggett is the Director of the Center for World Missions at Harding University. He and his wife Donna served as missionaries to Bergamo, Italy, from 1986 to 1996 after which he began teaching at Harding. From 2000 to 2003, while studying at Boston University, he and Donna worked with the church in Natick, Massachusetts. They continue their connection with Christians in the Northeast through directing Gander Brook Christian Camp each summer in Raymond, Maine. Shawn has taught courses in missions history, missionary anthropology, mission strategies, the Gospel of John, and other missions and textual courses.

1 Gary L. McIntosh, Donald A. McGavran: A Biography of the Twentieth Century’s Premier Missiologist, Kindle ed. (Boca Raton, FL: Church Leader Insights, 2015), loc. 665.

2 George G. Hunter, “Donald A. McGavran 1897–1990: Standing at the Sunrise of Missions,” in Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of Leaders of the Modern Missionary Movement, ed. Gerald Anderson, et al. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), 516.

3 “McGavran, Donald A(nderson),” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald Anderson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 449.

4 Gary L. McIntosh, “Celebrating Donald A. McGavran: A Life and Legacy,” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 51, no. 4 (2015): 425.

5 Hunter, 516. See also, McIntosh, “Celebrating.”

6 McIntosh, “Celebrating.”

7 Donald Anderson McGavran, The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions (New York: Friendship Press, 1955), 1.

8 Rufus Anderson, To Advance the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Rufus Anderson, ed. R. Pierce Beaver (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967). Henry Venn, To Apply the Gospel: Selections from the Writings of Henry Venn, ed. Max Alexander Cunningham Warren (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971). Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962).

9 McIntosh, “Celebrating,” 430.

10 Hunter, “Donald A. McGavran,” 521. National church leaders, such as John Gatu of Kenya, rejected the authoritarian and paternalistic practices of Western missionaries and called for a “moratorium.” Among mainline Protestant churches, this resulted in a near halt of mission involvement and evangelism altogether. See A. Christopher Smith, “Moratorium,” in Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, ed. A. Scott Moreau (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 659.

11 Hunter, “Donald A. McGavran,” 518.

12 Jonathan Mahler, “The Soul of the New Exurb,” The New York Times, March 27, 2005, 33.

13 Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 29.

14 Douglas Todd, “Churches with One Culture Troubling,” Toronto Star, November 29, 1997, M22.

15 George McHendry, “Who Started Megachurches Anyway?” Daily Camera 2008, 33.

16 Todd, M22.

17 See David Garrison, A Wind in the House of Islam: How God Is Drawing Muslims around the World to Faith in Jesus Christ (Monument, CO: WIGTake, 2014). For a discussion of possible people movements among Buddhists see Todd Pokrifka-Joe, “Prospects for Indigenous People Movements in the Buddhist World: A Call for Collaborative Local and Global Theologizing,” International Journal of Frontier Missiology 33, no. 4 (2016): 149–156.

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Eugene Nida’s Customs and Cultures [1954]

Nida, Eugene A. Customs and Cultures: Anthropology for Christian Missions. New York: Harper & Row, 1954. 306 pages.

Original Context and Author Bio

Despite the widespread impact of this book, when people remember Eugene Nida today, they rarely think of him as a cultural anthropologist. He was an ordained Baptist minister, a renowned linguist, one of the primary agents behind the publication of the United Bible Society’s Greek New Testament, and arguably the most influential person in the world of Bible translation in the twentieth century. As the father of the dynamic equivalence theory of translation, Nida brought about a paradigm shift in how we think about the task of Bible translation.

Nida was born on November 11, 1914, four months after the beginning of World War I, a conflict that officially ended on his fourth birthday. As a child, he made a commitment to Christian missions and thereafter became a dedicated student and natural scholar, graduating summa cum laude from UCLA with a BA in Classics. Thirsty for more, he completed a Masters in New Testament Greek at the University of Southern California in 1939 and a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Michigan in 1943. That same year he was ordained, married Althea Lucille Sprague, and joined the American Bible Society.

During his time at UCLA, he joined a Bible club where he learned of the work of Cameron Townsend, who had founded the Summer Institute of Linguistics in 1934. After graduating in 1936, Nida began taking summer courses through SIL and the following year used his then rudimentary training in linguistics to teach courses in morphology and syntax. This became a regular summer activity for sixteen years.

Nida began his work with the American Bible Society as the Associate Secretary for Versions and worked in that capacity for two years. He was then promoted to Executive Secretary for Translations, a position in which he remained until his retirement in 1984. His accomplishments were considerable. In 1946, he was the American Bible Society’s delegate to the initial conference of the United Bible Societies. In 1949, he founded the journal The Bible Translator and then served as the editor for the next ten years and on the editorial board for another decade after that. In the early 1950s, he began recruiting young scholars to act as translation consultants for Bible translation projects around the globe. His book Customs and Cultures: Anthropology for Christian Missions came about partly because he saw the need for greater cultural awareness among his recruits. In 1953, he helped launch another journal, Practical Anthropology, which merged with the journal Missiology in 1973. In 1964, he published Toward a Science of Translation in which he first proposed his theory of dynamic equivalence. Later he worked with Charles R. Taber to further develop this theory in The Theory and Practice of Translation, a text that became the standard primer for anyone pursuing a career in Bible translation. Having already persuaded the United Bible Societies to publish the Greek New Testament as a foundational text for Bible translators, he went on to work with Johannes P. Louw and Rondal B. Smith to create a Greek-English lexicon based on semantic domains. This only scratches the surface of his numerous publications and enormous influence in the world of missions and Bible translation over a forty-year career. His friends described him as a man obsessively driven by his call to mission. His incredible intellect, ecumenical spirit, and indefatigable resolve created an impact whose reverberations will continue to be felt for decades.

Nida’s wife, Althea, died in 1993, shortly before their fiftieth wedding anniversary. In 1997, he married Dr. María Elena Fernández-Miranda, another brilliant linguist and translator. He died at the age of ninety-six on August 25, 2011.

Summary

While a book on cultural anthropology may seem to have been peripheral to Nida’s focus on Bible translation, it was really his own budding theory of translation combined with his deep understanding of the nature of language that led him not only to write a book on cultural anthropology but also to establish the journal Practical Anthropology around the same time. Nida was convinced that all translation had to be receptor-based. If a translation did not seem clear and natural to the listener, then the listener would either misunderstand it or rapidly stop trying. Language is an expression of culture. One cannot simply take an English word like “bed,” locate its exact equivalent in a target language, and move on to the next word. He realized that exact equivalents between languages were rare, if they existed at all. Word meanings are tied to how their referents function within a culture. Does this “bed” have legs? Is it made of wood, stone, fabric, or some other material? What components of meaning differentiate a “bed” from any other kind of platform? Do people sleep on it, eat off of it, sit on it, offer sacrifices on it, or use it for other purposes? Who can use this bed? Does it elicit positive or negative feelings? Are there taboos associated with it? The goal of translation is to create a mental and emotional impact on the target recipients similar to what was experienced by the initial recipients in the original language. Clearly, this is impossible to achieve if the translator is ignorant of the culture for which he or she is translating. Nida realized that people, by default, understand the meaning of events and objects in the way they think of them in their own context and irrationally assume that everyone else agrees. It takes extra effort and awareness to ask what these things mean in someone else’s culture (xi).

Nida saw himself not only as an American Bible Society administrator and a linguist but also as a teacher. In order for the American Bible Society to be effective in the work of Bible translation, the people he was recruiting to oversee that task needed the proper training and tools. The insights gained from the study of cultural anthropology belonged in that educational toolbox.

Nida wrote Customs and Cultures in a mere six weeks. He had flown to Brazil to participate in two workshops that were two months apart. The first one was cancelled and it was too expensive to fly home before the next workshop, so Nida checked into a hotel and began writing. He had spent over a decade observing people around the world and keeping meticulous notes. This was his opportunity to pull all of his research together and focus on this project alone.1

As an anthropology textbook, it is unlike the systematic works of more recent scholars like Charles Kraft, Paul Hiebert, and Brian Howell. If one were to sum up Nida’s main point, it would be that people everywhere think and act differently, and here are the examples to prove it. Nida structured his book more like a linguist than an anthropologist. Much like what he, Louw, and Smith did with the Greek-English lexicon, he took all of his notes, sorted them into semantic categories, added a bit of alliterative humor, and built the book on that framework. His technique was to state a theme, such as aesthetics, then give examples from dozens of other cultures that show how they think about aesthetics and how it differs from our culture. He intentionally avoided scholarly jargon. He was not writing for the academic anthropologist; he was writing for missionaries who needed to understand the complexities of culture if they were going to be effective in sharing the gospel or translating the message. Since these were examples from a limited number of cultures, the implication was that every situation was unique and that it was the job of the missionary to investigate how his or her host culture dealt with each subject.

It was Nida’s contention that the point of cultural anthropology was to answer three questions: “What makes a culture click?”, “What makes a particular member of society act as he does?”, and “What are the factors involved in a culture’s stability or change?” (27). It was not enough for a missionary merely to describe what was visible to the eye. The effective missionary must delve into the meanings, motivations, and functions that lay behind those objects and activities. We must examine each culture on its own terms. Any assumptions or shortcuts are potentially misleading.

At the end of the second chapter, Nida sums up three major lessons that cultural anthropology teaches us. First, “the behavior of people is not haphazard, but conforms to a pattern” (52). If people do something that we find offensive or shocking, there is going to be an underlying reason, most likely associated with their worldview and not ours, that has led to that behavior. There is logic to what all groups do and think, even if it makes no sense to us. The differences between cultures have more to do with their cultural assumptions than the type of logic they use. Therefore, if people assume that illness has spiritual causes, that assumption will lead them to certain types of consistent behavior. If, on the other hand, they hold to a worldview that places the blame for illness on microbes, that will lead them to other behaviors.

Second, “the parts of the pattern of behavior are interrelated” (52). Nida reached this conclusion at a time when other social scientists were starting to look at a systems approach to psychology and sociology. Actions are never isolated; they are connected to other actions. If you try to change one part of a culture, it is almost certain to have ramifications in many other parts of the culture—a valuable insight for any missionary.

Finally, “the life of a people may be oriented in many different directions” (53). Americans have historically glorified individualism and self-determinism. Other cultures may be more group-oriented. Some cultures may honor youth, others hold the elderly in highest esteem. Western missionaries would be wise to examine their own cultural values in light of the gospel before trying to impose those values on others.

After introducing the kinds of surprises other cultures hold for Western missionaries in chapter 1 and laying out the importance of the study of culture in chapter 2, Nida goes on in the following seven chapters to look at various cultural themes and provide anecdotes of various ways different groups around the world have operated. He inundates the reader with examples from dozens of people groups, nearly all of which he observed first hand during his visits to over fifty countries on behalf of the American Bible Society. Whether he was writing about matters of race, technology, aesthetics, marriage, or malevolent spirits, he had a penchant for finding the most remarkable and even bizarre behaviors to illustrate what a missionary might encounter. The message is clear: be ready for anything and withhold judgment until you understand it at a deep level.

In the final chapter, Nida addresses his missionary audience more directly. The major difference between successful and unsuccessful missionaries has to do with how effective they are at identifying and communicating with the people. There is no substitute for living with a group of people, coming to understand their way of thinking, and learning their language. This very action communicates love and acceptance. Furthermore, he states, “it is not primarily the message but the messenger of Christianity that provides the greatest problems for the average non-Christian” (250). Even our comparative wealth is not a great barrier as long as we are able to communicate concern for the people. Missionaries must avoid any appearance of condescension and encourage the development of an indigenous leadership of the church as early as possible in spite of any perceived risks that may entail. We must remember that all peoples share the same basic needs—physical, emotional, aspirational, relational, and spiritual. Those constitute our true points of contact with others. In the end, God’s Spirit is responsible for the results of our labor.

The book concludes with a useful appendix that lists sources for further study and culture-learning strategies for the new missionary. While the reader may learn a great deal about the diversity of the world’s cultures from this book, Nida regarded it as merely a first step in becoming an effective missionary. As he said in the book’s opening sentence, “Good missionaries have always been good ‘anthropologists’ ” (xi).

Contribution

This book brought about a new era for missionaries and missiologists in several ways. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, missionaries co-existed uneasily with anthropologists and other social scientists. The object of anthropology was to observe and record. Social sciences in general were taught from either an agnostic or an atheistic perspective. Even though they frequently used missionaries as informants for their research, anthropologists often regarded them with suspicion, believing that they interfered too much and created change in cultures that should have remained pristine.2 It was not until the mid-1920s that Edwin W. Smith and a few others proposed using the insights from cultural anthropology to advance their own missionary agenda. Nevertheless, the research itself remained under the purview of secular anthropologists.

Nida’s book ignited a new direction in primary missiological research in which Christian missionaries and scholars made use of anthropological methods. The Bible Societies, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the School of World Mission at Fuller, and Catholic Theological Union in Chicago all emphasized ethnographic research as a part of their programs in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mission scholars came to see that worldview differences created a major obstacle to the communication of the gospel—not just those between western culture and “primitive” cultures, but also between any modern culture and the cultures that produced the biblical texts.3

For Bible translation in particular, Customs and Cultures made translators aware that meaning is fully connected to context. To translate Scripture or any other text apart from an intimate knowledge of the target culture would almost certainly create disastrous misunderstandings.

After the publication of Customs and Cultures and the establishment of the journal Practical Anthropology, there was a marked upsurge in the number of missiological articles and books dealing with the relationship of anthropological research to missions. Today, no reasonable person would question that the two belong together.

Relation to Contemporary Thought

One would think that any book on cultural anthropology based mainly on anecdotes is going to become dated after a few years. Since the publication of Customs and Cultures, the world has changed dramatically. Governments have fallen. Technology has given us instant access to information and to one another. The Cold War has ended but the world now seems plagued with threats from religious extremists. Globalization has spread Western values and business models like a virus around the globe. Mass movements of immigrants and refugees have turned people with widely disparate beliefs and practices into neighbors. Cities in the Bible Belt now host mosques and Buddhist temples. Christianity has become the religion of the Global South instead of the West. We live in an entirely different universe from that of 1954.

But Nida’s work, dated as it might be, was prescient in many ways. Even though anthropology emphasizes the relativity of meaning, Nida warned against a growing preference for relativizing truth, particularly the truth of the gospel (22). The postmodern tendency to regard all religions as equally valid attempts to relate to God would find no advocate in Eugene Nida.

However, Nida did believe that the church would benefit from listening to and learning from people of other faiths. Indeed, there is much we can learn from others, and opening ourselves to learn those lessons might, in itself, build bridges between cultures and break down barriers to the gospel (13).

Beyond globalization, one of the biggest issues in modern missions has been the rise of the city. Once again, Nida observed this pattern long before the population of cities comprised the majority of the world’s people. As is now evident, urbanization, along with its potential financial and educational benefits, also leads to the disintegration of cultural values and traditional relationships. Nida addresses this problem almost as if he were speaking to us today (ch. 9).

Finally, Nida’s technique of creating an inductive text based on hundreds of examples serves to make this book timeless. It may be that the cultures he mentions have changed. Perhaps the people no longer behave or think in the same way. It does not really matter. The point is for the reader to experience the diversity. The mere fact that people everywhere think and act differently will always apply. Missionaries still have to take the time to observe, question, and learn to understand a culture before they can communicate the gospel effectively.

Conclusion

Customs and Cultures is a remarkable book written by an even more remarkable man. With this and his other works, Nida set off a revolution in the world of missiology. His influence has been immeasurable. We would do well, even today, to spend some time sitting at his feet and absorbing the lessons of this pivotal text. You never know what new thing you might learn.

Michael Sweeney is an associate professor of World Mission and New Testament at Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan College. Before joining the faculty at Emmanuel, he served as a Bible Translator and Translation Consultant with Pioneer Bible Translators in Papua New Guinea from 1991 to 2006. Michael also served as an Honorary Translation Advisor with the United Bible Societies and the Bible Society of Papua New Guinea. He is married to Linda, and they have two grown sons.

1 Philip C. Stine, Let the Words Be Written: The Lasting Influence of Eugene A. Nida, Biblical Scholarship in North America 21 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2004), 98.

2 Charles R. Taber, To Understand the World, to Save the World: The Interface between Missiology and the Social Sciences, Christian Mission and Modern Culture (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2000), 95–96.

3 Ibid., 97.

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Christ Has Laid Hold of Me: A Review of Newbigin’s The Open Secret [1978]

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Open Secret. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978. 214 pp.

Introduction

Lesslie Newbigin is one of those names that immediately got my attention as a young seminary student. I remember the class I was in my first year into my MDiv when I first heard of Newbigin, and I remember feeling that the second and third year students in that Mission Theology class were light years ahead of me as they casually discussed Newbigin’s contributions with our professor and friend of Newbigin, Charles Taber. I felt out of the loop, angry and embarrassed that I had not been introduced to him already. I went immediately to the seminary library and started pulling Newbigin’s works off the shelves. It was a whole new world; one in which I am glad to have been walking around for the last twenty years as a college professor preparing future missionaries. I have needed Newbigin to do this task, for his contribution is so great that it would be hard to imagine teaching classes like Mission Theology without him. His works have influenced all of the great missiologists and many theologians of our time. The title for this article comes from something Newbigin was fond of saying, discussed in detail in his book, Sin and Salvation.1 For him, all further theological discussions were rooted in the reality that “Christ has laid hold of me,” and so we start there.2

Bio

James Edward Lesslie Newbigin was born in England on December 8, 1909, and received his education at a Quaker boarding school and later at Cambridge University. By the time he had finished his education with the Quakers, he had “abandoned the Christian assumptions of home and childhood.”3 But his time at Cambridge introduced him to the Student Christian Movement. He began to read the Bible as a seeker for the first time in his life and soon felt that he had found what he would need to guide him the rest of his life. “From that moment on,” Newbigin mused later, “I would always know how to take bearings when I was lost. I would know where to begin again when I had come to the end of all my own resources of understanding or courage.”4 Christ had indeed laid hold of him.

He served as secretary of the Student Christian Movement in Scotland for a few years. During that time he married Helen Henderson, the woman who interviewed him for his job as SCM secretary. They were soon commissioned by the Church of Scotland as missionaries and left for India in 1936, where they spent nearly 40 years. He quickly became fluent in Tamil and began work as a village evangelist.5 Eleven years after arriving in India he was appointed as Bishop of the newly formed Church of South India, at age 37. Throughout his life he wrote 30 books and hundreds of articles; he served as the General Secretary of the International Missionary Council and Associate General Secretary of the World Council of Churches. Between 1951 and 1953, Newbigin served on the WCC’s “Committee of Twenty-Five” theologians who were preparing for the WCC’s 1954 conference. The committee included Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr.6 Never truly retiring, he returned to England from India in 1974 and served the rest of his life in ministry and teaching theology at Selly Oak Colleges. He and his wife Helen were married over 60 years and had 4 children. He died in 1998.

Newbigin’s later life was marked by a passion for the engagement of the church with Western culture. One of the defining moments that led him to that passion is well-documented. In brief, it occurred while still in college and volunteering with a poor group of Welsh miners at a camp organized by the Society of Friends. The men got drunk and rowdy and Newbigin felt “unable to cope,” and when things settled down he went back to his tent feeling defeated. He laid awake and a vision came to his mind of the cross stretching from heaven to earth, reaching all of human misery but promising victory and life. This incident fueled his passion for engagement with culture throughout his life. He is thought by many to be the father of the missional church movement. Upon receiving the news of his death the WCC issued this statement: “The loss of Bishop Newbigin will be felt throughout the Christian World, his legacy will live on and continue to shape the ecumenical vision for the new millennium.”7

Context

In 1978, Newbigin finished The Open Secret while giving lectures at Selly Oak to men and women preparing for the mission field. It was a book four years in the making, written to help future mission prospects “reach as much clarity about the mission on which they are going” (vii). Actually, Newbigin had already briefly sketched out the ideas for the book in a pamphlet for the World Council of Churches several years prior. Upon publication of The Open Secret, he was an assistant bishop in the church of England, the moderator of the general assembly of the United Reformed Church, and a leader with a lifelong commitment to the World Council of Churches The Selly Oak lectures and publishing of The Open Secret inspired him, in “retirement,” to begin a new career at the United Reformed Church at Winson Green, Birmingham. His passion for the post-Christian West propelled him to service for another 20 years.

Summary of The Open Secret

The Open Secret is not only the title but also the thesis of the book. For Newbigin, the title describes every Christian’s mission: the message of the gospel is open to everyone, but getting that message to everyone relies on those with eyes of faith. And therein lies the dilemma: how do we faithfully pursue this God-given mission that is the central calling of the church under the missio Dei? Specifically how do we do this if post-Christendom churches don’t realize they are missionary churches? This book attempts to answer that question.

Newbigin brilliantly begins by tracing the history of mission from Acts to the present day. He pays a significant amount of time detailing the problem of the church losing ground and influence in the West. This section still describes perfectly the place where many churches and the majority of mission work from the West remain. “Most notably, the traditional sending agencies have, in general, totally failed to recognize that the most urgent contemporary mission field is to be found in their traditional heartlands, and the most aggressive paganism with which they have to engage is the ideology that now controls the “developed” world” (10).

After addressing the contemporary concerns and criticisms regarding anthropologists’ (and others’) view of missionaries and the “right” missionaries have to change people, Newbigin takes up the issue of authority. Under whose authority do Christians go into cultures and preach the gospel? This is a paradigm shift from the days of colonialism when missionaries often did not question the fact that they were “doing God’s work” and used that as a blanket pre-approval for anything on the mission field. Newbigin then turns in the next several chapters to the subject of the missio Dei, the concept that “the mission is God’s” and that the church is essential in carrying it out (18).

Mission of the Triune God

Because this is a book born out of lectures to students preparing for the field, Newbigin is ever-mindful that first things are first. If one answers the question, “Who gives missionaries the authority?” with “Jesus,” then one must know who Jesus is. Newbigin contends that Jesus, the one who is acknowledged as the Son of God and is anointed by the Spirit of God, is who introduces and announces the coming of the reign of God (Mark 1:1–15) (21). This mission is not separate from the Triune nature of God. This Trinitarian framework then is obvious in the titles of the next three chapters: “Proclaiming the Kingdom of the Father: Mission as Faith in Action,” “Sharing the Life of the Son: Mission as Love in Action,” and “Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Mission as Hope in Action.” He concludes this section appropriately, “This threefold way of understanding the church’s mission is rooted in the triune nature of God himself. If anyone of these is taken in isolation as the clue to the understanding of mission, distortion follows” (65).

The Gospel in Context

In the remaining chapters of the book, Newbigin (ever the missionary trainer) discusses the practical issues and problems that a missionary may encounter. Once again he challenges the reader to ask themselves an essential question before proceeding: “What is the gospel?”. He spends some time discussing election, making sure that young missionary readers understand that election is in no way elitist or promoting of a privileged status. Instead, the gospel is good news to all. He reminds readers that Christians do not possess the truth but bear witness to the truth. It is in these concluding chapters that Newbigin’s balance of theory, theology, and praxis really set him apart. He brilliantly discusses opportunities, challenges, and historical pitfalls in the areas of social justice, church growth, working with other religions, and culture in general. His insistence on dialogue was a game changer for me as a young theology student.

On the basis that has been laid down, one can speak briefly of the purpose with which the Christian enters into dialogue with people of other faiths. This purpose can only be obedient witness to Jesus Christ. Any other purpose, any goal that subordinates the honor of Jesus Christ to some purpose derived from another source, is impossible for Christians. To accept such another purpose would involve a denial of the total lordship of Jesus Christ. A Christian cannot try to evade the accusation that, for him or her, dialogue is part of obedient witness to Jesus Christ. (182)

Contribution and Relation to Contemporary Thought

It is impossible to measure the contribution of this book, and more so, Newbigin’s life. The Open Secret continues to be used as a formative text all over the world by new generations of missionaries, missions professors, and missionary trainers. Despite being forty years old this year, it remains so timely that I read excerpts from this book and ask my classes to guess when it was written. Rarely, if ever, has anyone guessed the 1970s. The message is so applicable to our world today. The approaches to dialogue with other world religions with humility, respect, and openness is still a message we need to hear. The understanding that this open secret is the message of the gospel entrusted to the faithful and that the faithful need to figure out how to proclaim this message when they are in the position of weakness is completely relevant. Newbigin sounded a clarion call to the churches of post-Christendom that Trinitarian and Christocentric theology must be the foundation of the modus operandi for mission. At stake is the risk of Christianity being relegated to the periphery of relevance. This message has informed the Gospel in our Culture Network and Missional Church movement and is repeated in countless books, lectures, and conferences today.

Newbigin’s chapter on justice feels just as fresh. He states:

Love and justice are distinct concepts, but where justice is denied love is certainly denied. If the economic order is such that the owners of land and capital can and do exploit and oppress the workers, then the commandment of love must mean more than marginal acts of personal charity; it must mean action to end exploitation. It must mean actions for liberation of which the Exodus is the model, and this must mean taking the side of the exploited and fighting against the exploiter. (97)

But for me what is really the test regarding relevance to contemporary thought is how Newbigin’s understanding of culture in the chapter entitled “Church Growth, Conversion and Culture” continues to resonate with students. To say that this section is still relevant is an understatement—I have read and heard theologians recently who still do not understand culture and contextualization the way Newbigin did in 1978:

It is the urgent need of the hour that the ecumenical fellowship of churches should become so released from its present dependence upon one set of cultural forms that it can provide the place wherein we are able to do theology in the only way that it can be done properly—by learning with increasing clarity to confess the one Lord Jesus Christ as alone having absolute authority and therefore to recognize the relativity of all the cultural forms within which we try to say who he is. (159)

His impact is still substantial for mission in the twenty-first century, and he deserves every bit of the consideration given to his work in mission classrooms around the world. Newbigin’s biographer, Geoffrey Wainwright, considers him as more than bishop and leader in mission theology: he is every bit an equal to the early church fathers “by nature of his heart and mind, pastoral work, ecumenical endeavor, missionary strategy, social vision and comprehensiveness of his ministry, and his sheer stature as a man of God.”8 Such is the stature of this giant of missionary faith.

Conclusion

“For all that has been, thanks.”9 These are the parting words of J. E. Lesslie Newbigin, spoken to his friend on his deathbed. Many agree with Wilbert Shenk, who wrote of Newbigin’s legacy in 2000 in the International Bulletin of Missionary Research:

Lesslie Newbigin was a frontline thinker because of an uncommon ability to sense the emerging issue that must be addressed at the moment. This trait is not to be confused with the pursuit of fads. He abhorred faddishness. What captured his attention were the issues that impinged on the future of the church and its obedience in mission: the nature of the church in relation to unity and mission, the relevance of the Trinity, the Gospel and the religions, the meaning of contextualization, conversion, pluralism and Christian witness in a culture that has rejected Christendom. Time and time again Newbigin led the way in introducing an issue that would become a dominant theme in the ensuing years.”10

I cannot help but wonder what Newbigin might contribute to contemporary issues today, but by revisiting his timeless works there will forever be application opportunities for his outstanding missiological work as every missionary stands on his shoulders and looks on.

Kendi Howells Douglas is the Program Director and Professor of Intercultural Studies at Johnson University, Florida, and Senior Editor at Urban Loft Publishers.

1 Lesslie Newbigin, Sin and Salvation (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2009).

2 Geoffrey Wainwright, Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 29.

3 Ibid., 30.

4 Ibid.

5 Christopher B. James, “Newbigin, J(ames) E(dward) Lesslie (1909–1998): British Missionary Bishop in India, Theologian, and Ecumenical Statesman,” BU School of Theology, History of Missiology, http://www.bu.edu/missiology/missionary-biography/n-o-p-q/newbigin-james-edward-lesslie-1909-1998.

6 James, “Newbigin.”

7 Eleanor Jackson, “A Tribute to Bishop Lesslie Newbigin,” ACNS: Anglican Communion News Service, February 18, 1998, http://www.anglicannews.org/news/1998/02/a-tribute-to-bishop-lesslie-newbigin.aspx.

8 Wainwright, 390.

9 Jackson, “A Tribute.”

10 Wilbert R. Shenk, “Lesslie Newbigin’s Contribution to Mission Theology,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24, no. 2 (April 2000): 59, http://www.internationalbulletin.org/issues/2000-02/2000-02-059-shenk.pdf.

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On the Necessity of Reengaging Mission Classics (Editorial Preface to the Issue)

Chris Flanders is Associate Professor of Missions at Abilene Christian University (Abilene, Texas).

What are the most important works in English literature? If I asked you this question, no doubt you could immediately begin constructing a list. Surely, you would include something from Charles Dickens. Perhaps you would consider works from Brontë, Poe, and Melville. Oh, and don’t forget Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Robinson Crusoe? Absolutely. Your mind would scan countless options and you would make difficult choices about which to include and which to exclude. You would likely change your mind as you recall a book you had forgotten, taking some off your list and including others. Exercises like this are fun and typically produce energetic debate. To be included in such a list is to become a part of a canon, a measuring rod by which we judge other works. It is to become a classic.

Have you ever thought about what makes a particular work a “classic”? It seems that for a book to become a classic, it must have enduring value and be noteworthy for reasons a particular community has judged significant. Therefore, classics are rarely recent works, as they must pass the test of time to demonstrate they are not simply riding the crest of a trendy wave of popular sentiment. A classic also must have broad impact. It must be generally thought to “matter.” It is weighty. To be a classic means that the work cannot be ignored—it must be taken into account when discussing the particular area it addresses. There are likely other important criteria, but these suffice to demonstrate that to become a classic is no small feat and is to a great degree a matter of reasoned judgment and debate rather than scientific precision and attaining an absolute standard of some kind.

So, what are the classics in missions? What would be your list of required reading, your Top 10, your canon for mission literature? To construct such a list would require the same discernment, debate, and deliberations as is necessary for English literature. There is no absolutely certain answer that would satisfy every person. Yet, in the area of mission studies and missiological literature, it is certainly possible to construct a canon of important works that have influenced mission theory and practice. Though not absolute, this canon of classics is discernible, albeit debatable.

In this issue, we highlight ten works we have deemed “classic.” These selected works we see as part of the missiological canon, particularly those works that have been written during the past fifty years. By doing so, we are not claiming these works are an all-time Top 10 of the most important missions texts. We are not attempting to be exhaustive or normative. There are many significant missions works we did not select. Rather, those we have selected we believe to be acknowledged classics—texts whose profound impact on mission practice and theory no informed missions educator or practitioner would question.

For each of these ten classic mission texts we have invited an esteemed missions expert and educator to reread and reevaluate them. Rather than simply note them, we wish to reengage these missions classics. We have asked our reviewers to dip back into a missions classic and help us take a fresh look, providing compelling commentary on the history and enduring significance of each classic work.

To reengage classics in such a way is a critical part of the ongoing work of any vibrant community. The passage of time means the changing of contexts. And, if missionaries and missiologists are about anything, it is our developed capacity to pay attention to context and culture. We, above all guilds and all communities of practitioners, are attuned to how changing environments impact our own evaluations.

No work is perfect, even if it has become an established classic. Indeed, it is often the passing of time and a new set of eyes that allows the imperfections of an important work to become more obvious. This is why, for any community of scholarship or practice, it is critical to occasionally engage in the self-reflective act of reengagement.

As missiological debate ensues, we recalibrate our assumptions and commitments, and we often see much more clearly both the glory and the warts of any book. By bringing into focal attention those texts and works that have significantly shaped our discipline, we can examine the assumptions, arguments, and conclusions of those classical texts and see if they stand the test of time, or we might instead find them wanting. That is, in this act of reengagement, we sometimes come to see that some of our critiques may have been based more on caricature than an actual close reading. Similarly, we may find how we now consider inadequate, or even patently wrong, the grounding assumptions that made a work popular and important at a particular time.

To reengage classics is also an act that reminds ourselves that we have a history—our mission theory and our mission practice do not exist ex nihilo but emerge out of a long-standing conversation that has been shaped by many works, including these ten we highlight here. So, we think this practice of going back to the wells of seminal works to reengage those texts is a necessary and healthful practice.

Such a practice is especially important for those of us who work within Stone-Campbell churches. Our history as a restoration movement has, by definition, made us religiously reactionary, seeking to reset what we have deemed deficient in the surrounding religious environment. Such a reactionary posture, coupled with our strong attention to Scripture, has often led us to be extremely reticent to pay attention to what other Christian groups were reading or writing. This has been less so among Disciples of Christ but has often been a characteristic of Churches of Christ and Independent Christian Churches. While this has certainly kept our fellowships grounded in Christian scripture, it has often meant that we have paid insufficient attention to the significant scholarship from those around us. Indeed, until only recently, it would not be uncommon for some Church of Christ or Christian Church missionaries not to have read nor heard of many of the texts that we highlight in this issue. To reengage the mission classics is also, therefore, a call for us to remember that much missiological wisdom exists outside of our smaller fellowships.

So, let the reengagement begin.

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Donald McGavran’s Understanding Church Growth [1970]

McGavran, Donald A. Understanding Church Growth. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990. 314 pp.

In a 1986 survey of the development of the Church Growth Movement and the impact of Donald McGavran, Peter Wagner observed that Understanding Church Growth “remains an irreplaceable textbook for any serious study in the field of church growth, and it is already acclaimed as a mission classic.”1 That was only sixteen years after it was published, but what about a half a century later? This missions classic continues to influence how we understand the importance of socio-cultural context for the growth of churches.

The Author and Context

Donald A. McGavran (1897–1990) was born in India and served as a missionary in India for the Christian Church from 1923 to 1955. His maternal grandparents were sent to India as missionaries from London in 1854, appointed by William Carey’s Baptist Missionary Society. The parents of his paternal grandmother (the Gaftons) were early participants in the Stone-Campbell Movement and gave a farm to Alexander Campbell—on which Bethany College would be built. It was the president of that college who influenced McGavran’s father to become a missionary for the Christian Church in India in 1891. With degrees from Butler, Yale, and Columbia, as well as possessing gifts of debate, analysis, and teaching, he was a natural for directing the educational ministry of the mission in India. His experiences generated the defining question of his career—why do some churches grow and others do not? This curiosity resulted in a paradigm shift after his research with Waskom Pickett on mass movements in India (1933). This shift created a deep passion for disciple-making and a “demotion” to a mission assignment for 17 years among the Sitnamis, a sub-caste of Chamars in rural India. Two more decades of field research followed with the publication of The Bridges of God (1955), several case studies (in Puerto Rico [1956], Philippines [1958], Jamaica [1962], and Mexico [1963]), and books on group conversion (1956) and how churches grow (1959). With a rich family legacy in missions and momentum to change the paradigm of Christian missions, the “Father of the Church Growth Movement” published his magnum opus—Understanding Church Growth (UCG)—in 1970.2

Three Editions

In the summer of 1968, while recuperating from an operation, McGavran wrote twelve hours a day on the manuscript published in 1970 as Understanding Church Growth (382 pages with 104 bibliographical entries).3 It became a classic in missiology with the progression of thought regarding the growth of churches and influence of three editions (1970, 1980, and 1990).

In 1980 McGavran published an expanded edition of UCG with 480 pages and 164 bibliographical references. This edition extended the impact of the first volume from global missions to church growth within the USA. Most of the new bibliographical material reflected publications on church growth from McGavran since the 1970 volume. It added resources on church growth in the USA (from authors like Win Arn, Art Glasser, George Hunter, Lyle Schaller, and Peter Wagner), which surged to a new level of influence in the 1980s with the expanding programs at Fuller Theological Seminary, new organizations, and a multiplication of books.

McGavran added three chapters to the second edition. The chapter on “The Marvelous Mosaic” incorporated the typology of E-1 to E-3 evangelism from Ralph Winter and George Hunter.4 In the chapter on “Stream Across the Bridges,” he identified the factor that has the greatest influence on numerical growth in group-oriented societies as the strategy “to evangelize the natural fringes of the existing church.”5 The third chapter on “Setting Goals” offered tools for an assessment of growth rates (which was deleted from the 1990 edition since Wagner published a handbook on this in 1984).

In 1990, Peter Wagner, by this time an author of 30 books on church growth, published a revision of the 1980 edition, reducing it to 314 pages, deleting 49% of the bibliography and adding 127 new references. The additions reflected the growth in literature since 1980 with books by Win Arn, Harvie Conn, Eddie Gibbs, Art Glasser, George Hunter, Donald McGavran, Wilbert Shenk, Alan Tippett, Peter Wagner, and Wayne Zunkel. In the preface, Wagner expressed his desire to avoid presenting his version of McGavran since he had enough books published to accomplish that but sought to streamline the previous edition, update the material, and add a chapter on divine healing. One place Wagner failed to preserve McGavran’s perspectives came early in the book. In the first two editions, McGavran wrote: “Among other characteristics of mission, therefore, a chief and irreplaceable one must be this: that mission is a divine finding, vast and continuous. A chief and irreplaceable purpose of mission is church growth” (1970:32; 1980:24). However, in the third edition, Wagner changed it to “The chief and irreplaceable purpose.” (21).

What did McGavran discover about church growth?

1. The missio Dei leads every church to find seekers and nurture them to become responsible members of the body of Christ. He wrote (in all three editions) “In this world, mission must be what God desires. It is not a human activity but missio Dei, the mission of God, who himself remains in charge of it” (20). This view of mission calls for qualitative and quantitative analysis. He welcomed sociological, anthropological, and statistical resources to evaluate the execution of the mission. He struggled to justify massive expenditures in the mission station approach that did not produce viable new churches.

McGavran’s insistence on evaluating numerical growth and setting goals should be understood more as a conscientious effort to execute the missio Dei than as mere pragmaticism.6 He reacted to wasted resources, apathy toward status quo, and rationalization for non-growth in the face of global opportunities for evangelism. I have appreciated his strategic pragmatism as his way of equipping church leaders to be accountable with better tools for assessment.

Before judging McGavran as too pragmatic, listen to his prayers. When he taught a class, he would clip his prayers to his notes. Vern Middleton, a friend and colleague of McGavran in India, has published a biography of his earlier years. He collected a hundred of McGavran’s prayers—many from the classes he taught. Here is a prayer attached to notes that became chapter seven in UCG (1970):7

Gracious and loving God, our heavenly Father: We so easily work ahead in our own strength. We so readily forget your almighty power and your constant presence. We think of the work as ours and so quickly the transient things of life pass and we see so dimly the things that are eternal. As we bow here in your presence, pour on our consciousness the sense of your wonderful nearness to us. You are our Father, we are your children. You are the Real: we are the unreal. You are the Master; we are the servants. If we are missionaries of the Gospel, it is only because you are the Gospel and ceaselessly search for lost men. Be reconciled with God. . . . In Christ’s name we pray, Amen.8

2. The great obstacles to conversion are social, not theological. Theological obstacles are real and pervasive, but the social obstacles seem to be Satan’s first line of defense. Many of McGavran’s germinal perspectives relate to his boldness in addressing social realities. For example, he explained how the caste system created more obstacles than doctrinal differences.

Confronting these socio-cultural realities of disciple-making drew some of McGavran’s strongest criticism: Forrester characterized McGavran as “theologically inadequate,” and Huebel said he was “long on sociology and short on theology,” with no discussion on the doctrine of the church.9 William Abraham expressed concerns about a perceived gap between theology and praxis, between evangelism and the kingdom. Compelling evidence for the inability of church growth theology to address this can be found, according to Abraham, in the fact that the “competing and even conflicting doctrinal traditions have been able to embrace church growth theory without shedding any theological tears.”10 He was not alone in concluding that sociological considerations were more foundational to McGavran than theological considerations. While there is some validity to the critique, we must also ask what the theologians have to offer in response to the socio-cultural realities McGavran observed throughout the world. Missionaries can have good theology but weak methodology. His research led him to some of the following principles for making disciples in the real socio-cultural context that challenged the growth of churches.

3. “People like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers” (163)—also known as the Homogeneous Unit Principle (HUP). Harsh resistance to this principle came from people who did not understand its application. The principle relates to those outside the church, not to those within the diverse mosaic of the family of God. McGavran understood interethnic unity as a product of sanctification, not a requirement to become a disciple.11 If it were a requirement, then accepting Gentiles into the kingdom would have been required of Jewish believers in Acts 2, not left to spiritual maturation where the Spirit is allowed to transform—as in Acts 15. This principle does not condone racism in the church. He clearly stated (in all three editions) that: “My own considered opinion is that, in the United States, the refusal of any congregation to admit blacks as members is a sin” (174).

4. Fluctuating factors of receptivity must be studied extensively as they affect every aspect of world evangelization (179). Some of the causes of receptivity listed by McGavran would be new settlements, returned travelers, conquest, nationalism, religious change, and freedom from controls (182–86)—all examples of national and local contextual factors impacting growth.

5. If we win the winnable while they are winnable, then our mission strategy will focus on the masses more than the classes—with a sense of urgency (203–8). Western missionaries from middle-class backgrounds tended to create middle-class churches. “The strategy of winning the upper classes first has not worked. They will not be won. The middle classes have it too good” (204).

6. When “the church is established among the masses in the world, again and again, [growth] is stopped dead in its tracks” through redemption and lift (209–11). As new believers experience socio-economic lift with new access to medicine, education, fellowship, and better leadership they become sealed off from their former associates and church growth stops. So McGavran asks: “How then can the church lift and redeem Christians and yet have them remain in effective contact with receptive sections of society that they can influence? How can we keep goodness and educational advance from creating separation” (213)?

Rapid conversion of nominal believers or clusters of non-growing churches would not be a good response. He proposed using “a pattern of church growth that is indefinitely reproducible with the resources available to a given church” (218). Mission institutions, ministers employed through mission funds, and church buildings commonly challenge the reproducible potential of churches. “In short, the congregation should be of such structure and pattern that common people can operate it and multiply it indefinitely among the masses” (219).

7. The kingdom grows through people movements. This dynamic accounts for two-thirds of all converts in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. McGavran contrasted a Western methodology of “one-by-one-against-the-tide” that takes a single person out of their social context to become a Christian (244) with what he called “multi-individual, mutually interdependent decisions” with post-baptismal care (247). He wrote: “A people movement results from the joint decision of a number of individuals all from the same people group, which enables them to become Christians without social dislocation, while remaining in full contact with their non-Christian relatives, thus enabling other segments of that people group, across the years, after suitable instruction, to come to similar decisions and form Christian churches made up exclusively of members of that people” (223).

8. “If we are to understand church growth we must always assume multiple causes for each spurt of growth or period of retardation” (116). In the third edition of UCG Wagner included a valuable introduction to contextual and spiritual factors along with the institutional factors (19).

The Impact of Understanding Church Growth

At the first International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland (July 1974), McGavran gave a keynote address in which he repeated many of the themes from UCG: receptivity, evangelize the masses, methodological dimensions of E-1 to E-3 evangelism, and people movements.12 In the second Lausanne Congress in Manila in July, 1989, Thomas Wang, the director of the congress, affirmed the influence of McGavran. He observed that “since the ‘people group’ idea was popularized in the seventies through McGavran, Winter, and the Lausanne Movement, world evangelization suddenly became the ‘talk of the town’ and considered entirely possible.13 Elmer Towns observed that receptivity for church-growth concepts was “heightened by the 1970 publication” of UCG, along with Alan Tippett’s Church Growth and the Word of God and Ralph Winter’s The 25 Unbelievable Years: 1945–1969.14

In the second edition of The Complete Book of Church Growth (1985), the influence of McGavran and Wagner appears in the first line of the chapter on “Research and Scientific Analysis”: “Again and again in the writings of McGavran and Wagner it is affirmed that church growth is ultimately the work of the Holy Spirit and the sovereignty of God. But their position urges churches to open their eyes and see the facts of growth as God has given them to us.”15

Wagner identified four “vehicles” that McGavran used to create the “Church Growth Movement” in the 1980s: (1) voluminous correspondence with Christian leaders all over the world, (2) publication of Bridges of God and Understanding Church Growth, (3) personal appearances that promoted church growth principles, and (4) founding the School of World Missions and the Institute of Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary.16

McGavran documents the expanding influence of the Church Growth Movement as reflected in the enrollment of 277 students at Fuller in 1985 from 72 nations and the granting of 22 PhD degrees in missiology and 151 professional doctorates in missiology.17 The multiplication of graduate programs in missiology also reflected his influence at Columbia Bible College, Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Trinity Divinity School, Concordia Seminary, Biola University, and Westminster Theological Seminary, where UCG would be used as a textbook for many years.

Time magazine ran a cover story on Christian missions in 1982, observing that “the most important change in Protestant missionary strategy in the past 10 years has been to identify and seek to contact some 16,000 tribes and social groups around the world that have been beyond the reach of Christianity.”18 For Wagner, “The intellectual seed for all this can, of course, be traced to McGavran’s Understanding Church Growth.”19

Still Relevant

Relevance makes a book a classic. UCG may not be reprinted in fifty years but it will continue to have relevance to the making of disciples among all nations.

  • McGavran’s call for “hard bold plans” in his last chapter still rings true. “In understanding church growth it is not enough to see the faulty assumptions that prevent maximum multiplication of sound churches. We must go on to devise and operate intelligent and adequate plans for establishing church after church through whole populations” (286). He challenged every generation to be intentional and strategic in the stewardship of their resources and gifts for the discipling of the nations.
  • Approximately 95% of all churches in North America are monoethnic in a world that is becoming more diverse, urban, and multiethnic. UCG offers fundamental principles for churches that are led by the Spirit to reach beyond their own kind of people. Because these churches are tempted to become exclusive, McGavran equips them to cross the bridges that God can create with the understanding that “the missionary obligation of each segmental church to evangelize across the linguistic, class, and race gulfs that surround it should be heartily emphasized” (263).
  • My experience in church consulting over the past few decades raises the importance of asking the right questions. The initial contact begins with a concern for stopping a decline, breaking the “200 barrier,”20 managing a conflict, or becoming more effective—all practical local institutional factors. Asking the right question determines the outcome. Is the issue the growth of the church or kingdom? Are we executing God’s mission, making disciples, or growing churches? Is the concern church growth or health?21 Is the source of growth God, the leaders, or the context? Should disciples of Christ give priority to redeeming lives, growing churches, or transforming their community? Influenced by UCG, I have found myself continually challenging churches to get on mission as followers of Christ Jesus and ask tough questions.
  • The purposes of God will be found in the multiplication of churches nurtured on the Bible and full of the Spirit as they make disciples among all nations. McGavran believed that “church growth follows where the lost are not merely found but restored to normal life in the fold—though it may be a life they have never consciously known. Faithfulness in folding and feeding . . . is essential to lasting church expansion. . . . Faithfulness in proclamation and finding is not enough. There must be faithful aftercare. Among the found, also, there must be fidelity in feeding on the word. Quality goes hand in hand with quantity” (6).
  • Churches will always be challenged to define their mission, a task that will keep UCG relevant. Churches typically turn inward—a tendency many of his critics missed.22 McGavran defined mission in tension with a secular worldview that involved schools, hospitals, healthcare, and attempts to “make the world a better place to live.” “But missions which proclaim Jesus Christ as God and only Savior, and persuade men and women to become His disciples, seem to secularists a fanatical sectarian process.”23 He coined the term “church growth” in the 1950s in response to the baggage that “evangelism” had by that time.24
  • A major generational shift we encounter today can be reflected in a deeper desire to know Jesus but reject the church. McGavran sought to bring the church back to the center of God’s mission in an era when parachurch organizations assumed that responsibility. He responded to these critiques in a chapter on “What is Mission?” and in a series of lectures at Westminster Theological Seminary (later published as Effective Evangelism: A Theological Mandate).25

UCG made a lasting contribution to understanding the task of discipling the nations, reaching unreached and neglected people groups, the contextualization of the gospel, urban missions, a church growth movement in North America with academic training, and an explosion of new literature on the subject. Other movements, like the missional church, provided a necessary theological supplement, but may also experience a “shelf-life.” The number of books with “church growth” or “missional” in the title has peaked, and courses offered today at seminaries would indicate a transition to something else.26 Classics like UCG enrich our understanding of the complexity of God’s involvement in history among his people through the power of the gospel.

Evertt W. Huffard is Professor of Leadership and Missions at Harding School of Theology and Facilitator of Church Equipping at Mission Resource Network.

1 C. Peter Wagner, Church Growth: The State of the Art (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1986), 24.

2 Donald A. McGavran, Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970).

3 Gary McIntosh, Donald A. McGavran: A Biography of the Twentieth Century’s Premier Missiologist (Church Leader Insights, 2011), 209.

4 E-1 evangelism would be to people outside a church but within the same culture, E-2 within a different but similar cultural background, and E-3 to people in a very different culture.

5 Donald A. McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 410.

6 Critics seem to miss the difference between an insistence on numerical growth and using numerical data as one indicator of congregational effectiveness and faithfulness. See D. J. Hart for a critique of what he perceives as an emphasis on numbers in “Understanding Church Growth,” Calvin Theological Journal 18, no. 1 (April 1983): 99. Restricting the definition of “church growth” to numerical growth misrepresented McGavran and created false dichotomies. Jonathan Campbell proposed an alternative to the “pragmatic paradigm” in the Church Growth Movement with a “translational paradigm” in “Appropriate Witness to Postmoderns,” Appropriate Christianity, ed. Charles Kraft (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2005), 462.

7 Unless noted otherwise, as in this case, “UCG” will refer to the third edition of Understanding Church Growth.

8 Vern Middleton, Donald McGavran, His Early Life and Ministry: An Apostolic Vision for Reaching the Nations (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2011), 304–5.

9 Duncan Forrester, “Understanding Church Growth,” Scottish Journal of Theology 37, no. 3 (1984): 421–23; Glen Huebel, “Understanding Church Growth,” Lutheran Quarterly 6, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 99–101. For him, “Lutheran theology of the cross clashes irreconcilably with McGavran’s theology of glory” (100).

10 William Abraham, The Logic of Evangelism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), 80; ch. 4 critiques UCG for not addressing more theological issues than search vs. harvest theology (79).

11 Donald A. McGavran, Ethnic Realities and the Church: Lessons from India (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1979).

12 Donald A. McGavran, “The Dimensions of World Evangelization,” in Let the Earth Hear His Voice, ed. J. D. Douglas (Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1975), 94–115.

13 Thomas Wang, “The Great Commission Decade,” in Proclaim Christ Until He Comes, ed. J. D. Douglas (Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1990), 358.

14 Elmer L. Towns, ed., A Practical Encyclopedia of Evangelism and Church Growth (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1995), 294.

15 Elmer L. Towns, John N. Vaughan, and David J. Seifert, The Complete Book of Church Growth (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1985), 190.

16 Wagner, Church Growth, 23–25.

17 Donald A. McGavran, Effective Evangelism: A Theological Mandate (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 1988), 101.

18 Richard N. Ostling, “The New Missionary,” Time 120, no. 26, December 27, 1982, 52.

19 Wagner, Church Growth, 30.

20 The “two hundred barrier” refers to the phenomenon in a single-cell church that is unable to grow numerically without changes in organization, communication, decision making, and leadership.

21 Eddie Gibbs, “How Appropriate Is the Church Growth Paradigm in Today’s Mission Contexts?,” in Appropriate Christianity, ed. Charles H. Kraft (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2005), 294. Gibbs prefers “growth” to “health” as it continues to keep two fields in tension—ecclesiology and missiology.

22 I. D. Bunting, “Understanding Church Growth,” Churchman 97, no. 2 (1983): 180–82, identifies the most severe challenge to McGavran as his narrow definition of mission; also, Lawrence R. Harris, “Understanding Church Growth,” Homiletic 6, no. 1 (1981): 30, critiques the single focus in mission that will “set aside the caring principles of Christian mission and witness.” Sabas J. Killian, “Understanding Church Growth,” Theological Studies 33, no. 1 (May 1972): 182, also challenged the narrow definition of mission: “If one continues to look at Church growth exclusively as saving souls and at theology as feeding the people with the one formula allowed, one can hardly speak of an understanding of Church growth today. In a diaspora situation, numbers reveal nothing at all.” Jeffrey I. Myers, “Understanding Church Growth,” Theology Today 38, no. 4 (January 1982): 496–97, challenged McGavran’s presentation of mission as either service or evangelism without reconciling the two. Kucnheria Pathil, “Understanding Church Growth,” Journal of Dharma 6, no. 4 (December 1981): 426–29, critiqued a narrow view of mission by encouraging Evangelicals to consider “the other point of view which sees mission and evangelization in the context of the total activity of God in the world.” A. J. White, “Understanding Church Growth,” Dialog 21, no. 4 (August 1982): 318–19, asked for a better definition of church and witness.

23 Donald A. McGavran, “What is Mission?” in Contemporary Theologies of Mission, ed. Arthur Glasser and Donald McGavran (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 24.

24 Towns, Practical Encyclopedia, 5.

25 McGavran, “What is Mission,” 15–29; McGavran, Effective Evangelism.

26 I could not find any reference to church growth on the website of Fuller Theological Seminary.

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Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? [1912]

Allen, Roland. Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? American ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962.

Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? was first published over one hundred years ago, in 1912 (and a second edition in 1927), by Roland Allen (1868–1947). Since that time, authors have written volumes about methods of appropriate and “right” ways of accomplishing mission. The conversation was important then and continues to be argued and controversial today. Few scholars or ministers leave behind such an outstanding, persistent legacy, and Allen’s influence has only grown over the decades. While controversial at the time of its writing, the “rediscovery” of his work in the 1940s occasioned his greatest contribution to modern mission.

Allen grew into ministry during a time of both awakening and questioning in the Church of England and also among the newer evangelical movement. This was the time influenced by the expansive practices of John Wesley and the questioning practices of Charles Darwin. Allen’s mother, Priscilla, was the daughter of a Vicar of Awre in Gloucestershire and is said to have been a woman of strong evangelical conviction. Allen was orphaned at an early age but obtained an education at St. John’s College, Oxford, and at the (Anglo-Catholic) Leeds Clergy Training School. While at St. John’s College, he was near the Pusey house, a center for Tractarian research and study. In spite of his close relationship with R. E. Brightman and his future work with Thomas Cochrane and Sidney Clark of the Survey Application Trust and World Dominion, he continued to have difficulty with the Evangelical approach to the Bible. He held a high view of sacraments, which were a feature in Allen’s writings.

In 1892 he was ordained a deacon, and the following year he became a priest in the Church of England. As a priest in the Church of England, he served as a missionary in China with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in its North China Mission from 1895–1903. Later, while preparing to lead a new seminary in Peking (Bejing), Allen was trapped, along with other foreigners, in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 until he was rescued by foreign troops, which he wrote about in The Siege of the Peking Legations (1901). Having returned to England on furlough, he married Mary B. Tarleton. With his wife and child, he returned to China, expecting a longer ministry. However, he soon became ill, and he and his family had to be sent home. Back in England, Allen took a parish where he served until 1907 when he resigned in protest. He objected to the church’s requirement that he baptize children whose parents were not practicing church members. He also objected to the practice of providing a Christian burial service for those who had not claimed Christ during their lives. During his tenure in China, he enabled the church there to exercise discipline among their own members, but in England the practice was completely different. Having officially resigned, which meant resigning his livelihood, Allen served on a volunteer basis and supported himself and his family by his writing and lecturing until his death in Kenya in 1947.

Allen was a missiologist long before the term was popularized. He was radical for his time, as well as radically shaped by his experiences in life, ministry, and education.

When Allen’s book was first published, it had little impact on the current missions community. However, in the 1960s, when the revised edition was released, it made a lasting impression on many. By stressing such things as finances and oversight, authority and discipline, his readers were challenged to examine their own agencies and missions.

The author methodically examines the nature of Paul’s mission strategy between AD 47 and AD 57 in particular. Allen asserts that as Paul worked through the four provinces of Galatia, Macedonia, Achaia, and Asia, he was satisfied with the work he had accomplished and that the missionary work he had intended to do was complete. In 2 Tim 4:6–8 (NIV), Paul says to Timothy, “It will soon be time for me to leave this life. I have fought a good fight. I have finished the work I was to do. I have kept the faith. There is a crown which comes from being right with God. The Lord, the One Who will judge, will give it to me on that great day when He comes again. I will not be the only one to receive a crown. All those who love to think of His coming and are looking for Him will receive one also.” Paul knew, of course, that there was much more work to do. Allen emphasizes, however, that we can surmise from the text that Paul saw his work as completed and was smoothing the way for those who would follow him. Paul seems to hope that his successors will be truly successful and not overshadowed by work that he has done. Allen spends much time in his text examining Paul’s role in inspiring and enabling the local church to be themselves without the oversight of outside supervisors.

The book is divided into five parts. In Part 1, Allen examines the context and conditions Paul faced. Many have previously argued that Paul’s success was due to advantages of birth, education, call, and his relationships to his hearers (4). Allen rebuts this argument eagerly by pointing out that Paul was not the only one using the method that he was using—establishing churches, empowering the local church, depending upon the Holy Spirit, and relying on local authority within the church. His disciples were also ministering in the same way with success. Allen continues to assert that Allen’s contemporary missionaries should have had a tremendous advantage over Paul in the printing press and the availability of the whole New Testament in many languages, where Paul had only the Old Testament in Greek. “It is only because he was a supreme example of the spirit, and power with which it can be used, that we can properly call the method St. Paul’s” (4). The argument that Paul had an advantage over contemporary missionaries does not hold up under scrutiny.

Chapter 3 addresses the assumption that the existence of a particular class of people to which Paul might have special appeal made a difference in his success. Allen asserts that although Paul’s pattern was to preach first in the local synagogue, then in homes of people of good reputation (23), “the majority of St. Paul’s converts were of the lower commercial and working classes, labourers, freed-men, and slaves; but that he himself did not deliberately aim at any class” (24).

Chapter 4 examines whether Paul’s converts had special advantage due to the fact that they were influenced by the Roman Empire. Allen’s conclusion was that they most certainly did not, due to slavery, the games, the temples, and the magicians, and all the spiritual evil connected therein (37). Paul’s converts were not advantaged and were born into a time when they were not better, and in some aspects were much worse off than Allen’s contemporary China and India (26). The impossibility of arguing that Paul’s converts were easily converted because of their class is clearly important to Allen.

Part 2 examines the miracles, finance, and the substance of Paul’s preaching. “Miracles are recorded of St. Paul in five towns in the four provinces” (41). Chapter 5 looks into the miracles connected with Paul’s work and determines that Paul did not use miracles to “induce people to receive teaching” (42). He also did not use miracles to convert people by working a miracle on them (43). Rather, miracles were used to gather crowds, comfort those who already believed, and to provide evidence of Divine confirmation of his message. “St. Paul’s miracles illustrated the doctrine of release, of salvation” (46). Allen concludes that it was not the miracles that mattered but rather the empowering Spirit of God who also provides contemporary missionaries with “powers sufficient to illustrate in act the character of our religion, its salvation and its love, if only we will use our powers to reveal the Spirit” (48).

Finance is the focus of chapter 6. Allen tackles a continually testy topic in addressing finances and examining how St. Paul and his contemporaries approached the matter. Allen asserts that (1) Paul did not seek financial help for himself; (2) that he took no financial help to those to whom he preached; and that (3) he did not administer local church funds (49). Allen addresses the concern that securing property can provoke local opposition; it can load missionaries with secular affairs; it can cause a misrepresentation regarding the missionary’s purpose for being in the area. “All men everywhere judge the inward spirit by the external form, and are attracted or repelled by it” (55). Bringing in materials from outside paupers the local people and makes it extremely difficult for the local people to succeed in the footsteps of the foreign missionary. Christianity is not an institution but a principle of life (55).

Chapter 7 details Paul’s preaching, which (1) appealed to the past from which this truth arises, (2) was a statement of facts of Jesus’s life, death, burial, and resurrection, (3) clearly answered the objections of the wisest minds of Paul’s listeners, (4) appealed to the spiritual needs and to the need for comfort and peace, (5) issued a grave warning that the rejection of God’s message comes with dire consequences (63). Allen was concerned that preaching in his time had lost much of the stern doctrine seen in Paul’s messages (70).

Part 3 approaches the training of converts. Allen asks, “How far was St. Paul’s success due to the teaching which he gave to his converts? And how far was his success due to his method of preparing his converts for Baptism and ordination?” (79). Chapter 8 characterizes Paul’s teachings as clearly providing facts concerning the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and having given converts the rudiments, they would, filled with the missionary zeal of the spirit of Christ, begin to “bring back lost souls to the Father” (93). Allen asserts that with this firmly in place, Paul would move on, expecting the churches to be self-propagating (94).

Chapter 9 explores the institutionalized acceptance and lengthy training of candidates for baptism. This was a heartfelt concern for Allen, since the topic was central to his resignation from formal priesthood in his earlier ministry.

Part 4 examines Paul’s practices in the area of established churches. Chapter 10 asks the question, “How far was St. Paul’s success due to his manner of exercising authority and discipline?” (109). Chapter 11 asks how he succeeded in maintaining unity. Allen notes that Paul’s exercise of discipline and authority is extraordinarily restrained. His typical approach was to appeal to logic and persuasive approaches, presenting facts and differentiating between his own view and that of the Lord. Allen asserts that Paul depended greatly upon the Holy Spirit’s role in the church’s application of his teaching. Allen recognizes the brilliance of this approach in that it requires the church to undertake responsibility for itself, noting “infants can only be taught truly by exercising their infantile faculties. Dependence does not train for independence. . . . St. Paul looked at his converts as they were by grace” (125).

Allen asserts that Paul did not preserve unity by transplanting rules from a central church in Judea, nor did he set up a central administrative authority over all churches. He declined to establish “a priori tests” of orthodoxy, and he refused to allow the universal application of precedents (131–33). Instead, he taught unity by taking it for granted and used his position as intermediary between Jew and Greek. He maintained unity by initiating and encouraging mutual acts of charity and encouraged constant communication (134–35). Paul allowed for learning and growing in the setting in which the fledgling church found itself.

Conclusions are offered in part 5. In chapter 12, Allen focuses on a sincere critique of the modern missions of his day. He observes three disquieting issues: (1) “everywhere Christianity is still exotic” (141) instead of being a natural and accepted part of the local community; (2) “everywhere our missions are dependent” (141), looking to foreigners rather than soundly existing on their own, and (3) “everywhere we see the same types” of foreign dependent churches (142) rather than seeing the church grown into a mature and self-descriptive independent community. Allen encourages, as a solution, two practices that he sees as underlying all of Paul’s practices: (1) that he was a preacher of the gospel, not of law, and (2) that he must retire from his converts in order to give a place for Christ. The spirit in which he was able to do this was the Spirit of faith. (148). When we believe in the Spirit, we teach our converts to believe. The Spirit will not disappoint. As our converts believe in the Spirit, they will be able to face all difficulties and dangers. “They will justify our faith” (150).

Chapter 13 sets out five clear applications of what Allen calls “rules of practice” (151). According to Allen, the key to successfully using the Pauline method is “the trust which begets trustworthiness” (152). Therefore, missionaries should always prepare for their own departure without setting up strict rights of succession, by working within the community of believers, allowing them to govern such things as finances, baptism, appointment of ministers and discipline within the congregation itself. Allen also asserts that operations of the congregations should be left increasingly in the hands of the believing community by extended travels and absences of the missionary. Since Allen ministered from a Church of England context, he was concerned about the absence of sacramental rites that the missionary’s absence would entail but considered the maturation of the church to be worth the cost.

Throughout his book, Allen points out unashamedly the contrast between the missionary methods he saw in his own day and those he found in St. Paul’s ministry. Allen was determined to present Paul’s principles and apply them to contemporary issues. He believed in the work of the Spirit and trusted the Spirit to succeed in all settings, to lead, to transform, and to grow the body of believers. Chapter 14 offers a final argument in the form of a narrative of two missionaries, one following modern methods, the other following St. Paul’s methods.

Allen himself acknowledged his critics’ two main points of contention: (1) “the gulf between us and the people to whom we go is deeper and wider than that between St. Paul and those to whom he preached”; and (2) “he could rely upon converts from the synagogue to preserve his churches from dangers only too plain to us” (vii). Allen pointed out that his critics clearly thought that what was possible for St. Paul was impossible for contemporary missionaries. While it is true that Allen’s writings had little impact on the mission agencies of his day, “his influence has been felt widely because of the way the fledgling Pentecostal missions movement adopted key Allen ideas.”1 His radical demand that nonprofessional believers be encouraged to take the worship of God, Eucharistic practices, and discipline out of the institution of the formal church and into their everyday lives and to express that ministry in local terms was an investment in trust, both of the people within the new church and of the Holy Spirit.

By his examination of St. Paul’s work, Allen sought to help missionaries break out of relationships of dependency.2 Regarding both finances and education, Allen paved the way for leadership of the local church to rise from the midst of the laity without depending upon foreign direction. “Once colonialism ended in the mid-twentieth century, one might assume that the principles espoused and explained by . . . Allen would become standard procedure. . . . In spite of lip service to their ideals, mission practice has lagged behind.”3 Wilbert Shenk attributed this to “the Anglo-American bent toward pragmatism and disdain for theory. In other words, this reflects a cultural trait that values action over reflection.”4

The handing over of church authority and responsibilities were radical ideas during Allen’s time. His pioneering thought has contributed to the trend not only of contextualizing in theology and church life but also in many other areas of ministry. One of those trends is partnering across the cultural and global boundaries of churches and mission organizations. It is no longer acceptable for foreigners to decide what is appropriate for the local church and hand it the answers. Nor is it fully acceptable to leave new Christians to develop their own church in their own way. Partnership of the magnitude we are currently seeing is only possible with today’s trends and technology.

Kenneth Scott Latourette famously dubbed the nineteenth century “the Great Century of Missions.” The twentieth century ended up being “the Great Century of Ecumenism” (or, if one were to be negative, “the Great Reversal” or “the Great Century of Secularism”). But the twenty-first century is shaping up to become known as “the Great Century of World Christianity” or “the Great Century of Partnership,” as Christianity has regained its status as a truly global religion with Two-Thirds World churches exploding in number (quantity) and developing in maturity (quality). This is why the four selfs are needed: self-propagating and self-sustaining contribute to their quantity; self-governing and self-theologizing are necessary for their quality.5

Churches and agencies can partner across cultural and political boundaries to uplift the church in a way that allows for each to speak into the expectations and needs of the whole. Expectations, including language, discipline, conflict resolution, finances, decision-making, mutual accountability, and theological distinctives can be discovered and shared in partnerships that edify the whole.

Allen’s contribution to current missiological theory may extend more from the fact that he was not a systematic theologian but a prophetic and inspiring scholar. Direct application of his suggested practices for new mission efforts, so clearly outlined in this book, have been few and far between, but his influence can be measured by the critical examination of best mission practices and careful attention to dependency issues seen so commonly in mission agency applications today. Allen’s simple and effective comparison and contrasting of his contemporaries’ practices lays the foundational methodology for today’s effective globalization of Christ’s church, inspiring both independent thinking and cooperation across boundaries.

Linda F. Whitmer, PhD, is the Dean of the School of Intercultural Studies at Johnson University, Knoxville, TN, and 2018 President of the Association of Professors of Mission. She earned a BS in Biblical Studies from Kentucky Christian University, an MA in New Testament Exegetical Studies from Johnson University, and an MA and PhD in Intercultural Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary. Linda served as a missionary in Zimbabwe from 1981–2002 and continues to volunteer with Pioneer Bible Translators and other organizations.

1 Wilbert R. Shenk, Changing Frontiers of Mission, American Society of Missiology 28 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 111.

2 See, e.g., Stephen Corbett and Brian Fikkert, When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Moody, 2014), as an example of current trends in approaching dependency.

3 Robert Reese, Roots and Remedies of the Dependency Syndrome in World Missions (Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2010), 35.

4 Shenk, 35.

5 Allen Yeh, Polycentric Missiology: Twenty-First-Century Mission from Everywhere to Everywhere (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2016), 216.

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Review of Review of James K. A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor

James K. A. Smith. How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. 148 pp. Paperback. $16.00.

Our secular age is “haunted” according to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in his monumental work, A Secular Age. How we came to inhabit such a world, filled with echoes of transcendence amid a “disenchanted” and immanent universe, is a complex phenomenon. Taylor offers a “zigzag account of causal complexity” (41) to explain the emergence of new conditions for belief. His unique third definition of secular (which he identifies with the label “secular3”) rejects the oft posited and tacitly accepted “secularization thesis.” It pushes back against an understanding that requires the subtraction of transcendent faith in the face of modern advances.

Taylor offers an original and prescient narrative that clarifies the clamor of subtle, pressing belief and unrelenting, inescapable unbelief, amid the chaos of the existential pressures of the Western world. He writes nearly 900 pages of sweeping intellectual and cultural analysis to elucidate his alternative narrative, “a genealogy of the secular and an archaeology of our angst” (ix)—900 pages that are at once intimidating, complex, and heavy.

Enter James K. A. Smith, another Canadian philosopher, who, in How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, provides readers with an articulate and accessible entry point into the dense and nuanced thought of Taylor. Smith provides a “commentary on a book that provides a commentary on postmodern culture” (ix). He mediates and condenses Taylor for a broad audience; telling a story about a story. It is an “existential map” (2) for all who live in this secular age. Smith’s work is directed primarily towards, but not limited to, “practitioners”: from the pastor or church planter to the atheist or agnostic, and all manner in between. Smith moves beyond Taylor, reflecting on the importance of Taylor’s work for the church and for ministry, critically interacting with and drawing out pragmatic meaning. Hence the implied-action-required of “how (not) to be secular.” Smith makes practical the intellectual, relevant the historical.

Smith maps out Taylor’s argument, which answers the fundamental question, “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?” (19). Smith begins by using contemporary novelists and popular music to articulate a nuanced sense of the “secular3.” His goal is to show what the haunting immanence and doubting transcendence that presses in on all who inhabit the present feel like. In the messy complexity of a world where what is “believable” has changed, a “society is secular3 insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable (and contested)” (22).

Here, the reader is provided with the first glimpse of Smith’s missional premise. The world has changed, and the church must first understand and then engage this change in order to be effective and faithful witnesses. However, the change that occured is not one we easily recognize, nor acknowledge. It is a change in the conditions of belief, this sense of the secular shaped by historical and cultural forces that undergirds the summary of Taylor that Smith offers. Smith’s Reformed (neo-Calvinist) theological position is apparent throughout this work, most notably in his defense of the Reformation over the more critical perspective offered by Taylor.

The first half of How (Not) to be Secular engages the “existential nature” (71) of significant cultural and philosophical shifts that occurred in the last few centuries. Smith focuses on how the conditions of belief changed, resulting in the emergence of “exclusive humanism” (22) as a viable option. The immense “cross-pressure” of innumerable beliefs caused the eventual “nova effect” (62) of fragilization and fragmentation. The latter half of the book fleshes out the implications of living in our doubting and haunted secular3 age amid the fragilization of belief. For Christians, this fragilization must be embraced in order to be authentic.

Smith’s work is vital to the church and its mission. His understanding of the nova effect and its impact on the contemporary world opens a new field of vision. It allows, argues Smith, for the emergence of the “spiritual but not religious,” which on the one hand is a substitute for faith and belief in traditional religion, while on the other reveals a desperate longing for something more. This can serve well as an entry point for contemporary conversations. Moving beyond the entrenched, standard didactic or evidential and certain response to those who believe differently, a thicker, fluid, and more experiential-based invitation may well offer possibilities. It is perhaps a matter of function over form, for it is often the form (of church or religion or apologetic) that is perceived as not enticing.

We are all secular, insofar as we live in a world where belief is contestable. This account of the present age that is “not concerned with what people believe as much as with what is believable” (19) helps us to understand that we are “caught between myriad options for pursuing meaning, significance and fullness” (62). And as Smith explains, if Christians are caught among these competing options, so too is everyone else. The “secular age” is, simply put, the suffocating air we breathe—the same air of Christians and those who believe otherwise alike.

Smith traces Taylor’s argument that the loss of an enchanted cosmos charged with transcendent meaning “that was open and vulnerable” (27) was replaced by a closed universe. An “immanentization” occurs, which gives rise to a new location of meaning, the individual mind (29). This results in a newly constructed social space, “the immanent frame,” which precludes transcendence and is emptied of intrinsic meaning. We live then in a closed, material world, where meaning and significance are determined by the immanent, the here and now. Smith aptly gives language to the malaise of inhabiting “a self-sufficient immanent order, even if we believe in transcendence” (93) and locates us within it. Christians are haunted by doubt. We feel the cross-pressures. However, if those who still believe in transcendence are haunted by doubt, those who believe differently are haunted by the ghost of a transcendent otherness being lost.

The question for the church and its mission then “isn’t whether we inhabit the immanent frame, but how” (93). This is a valuable perspective as the church seeks to find ways to “interpret” and engage the world, and itself. The faithful witness of the church must be critiqued against the allure of the immanent. Perhaps most significant is Smith’s critique of apologetics. In defaulting to “the modern apologetic,” which “excarnates” (or un-fleshes) Christianity, effectively removing experience in order to answer the new atheists, the church has lost focus. If we are to be faithful witnesses, listening, learning, and storytelling must become a part of our common vocabulary. Believers, and more specifically the church, need to appropriate an embodied narrative. Moving beyond mere acquiescence towards belief systems or argumentative apologetic postures, a contemporary form of “apologetics” must be rooted in experience, feelings, and imagination. Those who believe otherwise just may hear the echoes of transcendence. The secular3 age is existential. It is felt. It is experienced.

Smith’s work is essential. It simplifies the paradigm-shifting thought of Taylor while offering interpretative critique. It raises questions for the church today that relate directly to the church and its mission. How can we (not) be secular? How can we find a voice in a world where many different ways of believing is the norm? What points of contact allow for deeper and more meaningful conversations?

We are reminded through Smith’s practical and challenging questions of the necessity of faithful witness, where apologetics must be re-imagined, grounded in experience and relationship. We are reminded that we must not recoil in fear, but creatively lean into the cross-pressures of desperation and angst that suffocate. The mission of the church today must be grounded in an honest assessment of our social reality, remembering that this secular3 age is not characterized by disbelief but many ways of believing. The church itself must bear witness to transcendence. It must be always-reforming, seeking ways “not” to be secular in the immanent frame. We need to engage those around us with open hands, acknowledging our own doubting, in hopes of offering a glimpse of transcendence in the messiness, and an invitation to journey together.

Marnie Hoetmer

Adjunct Professor of Theology and Philosophy

Alberta Bible College

Calgary, AB, Canada

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Review of Michael J. Gorman, Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission

MICHAEL J. GORMAN. Becoming the Gospel: Paul, Participation, and Mission. The Gospel and Our Culture Series. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015. 351 pp. Paperback. $28.00.

Michael J. Gorman is professor of Biblical Studies and Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary & University (Baltimore, MD) and has authored several works on Paul, participation, and mission. This volume builds upon the theological groundwork laid in two previous works1 to argue that participation in the character of God cannot be separated from participation in the mission of God. In short, being cannot be separated from action, so that such participation is “the starting point of mission and is, in fact, its proper theological framework” (4).

To argue his central thesis that the apostle Paul “wanted the communities he addressed not merely to believe the gospel but to become the gospel” (2), Gorman begins (chs. 1 and 2) by considering Paul’s view of the missio Dei as bringing salvation to the community of faith, humanity, and ultimately the cosmos. Such an expanded view of “salvation” invites (or demands) missional participation as reflected in seven features of Paul’s letters, such as his “co-” language (Greek: syn-). The difficulty, however, with asserting the missional nature of Paul’s teaching arises from the apostle himself in that direct commands to evangelize are rare in the Pauline letters. Nonetheless, it is clear that Paul expects his churches to embody the mission of God because, though not all are called to become “evangelists” of the gospel, all are expected to become the gospel (42–45). Gorman argues that biblical reading must be shaped by a missional hermeneutic which broadens our conception of mission and evangelism to include participation in the character and mission of God.

After establishing the conceptual and theological framework of his thesis, Gorman turns to demonstrate how this missional participation unfolds in the Pauline letters. First Thessalonians presents the Pauline triad of faith(fulness), love, and hope, which manifest as virtues of the Father, the Son, the Spirit, and Paul, their apostle (ch. 3). The Thessalonians are called, then, to embody these same characteristics found in these exemplars (90). This embodiment means expressing virtue through action, so that the church becomes “public, holy, and full of faithfulness, love, and hope” (102). In his letter to the Philippians (ch. 4), Paul appeals to the “master story” in his recounting of the Christ hymn (Phil 2:6–11), which serves as “a missional Christology for a missional people” (109, 116, 121) and encourages them to continue striving in the face of suffering. The kenotic example of Christ serves as the foundation of their faith and the paradigm for their present and public action.

From here, Gorman turns to examine a less explored, though no less significant, aspect of Paul’s theology: peace. Chapter 5 offers an overview of the Pauline corpus, where peacemaking creates communities of reconciliation and provides a missional imperative. This concept is more fully explored in Ephesians (ch. 6), a letter which centers around peace and nearly transforms the Pauline triad to faith, peace, and love in its final prayer (Eph 6:23; on authorship see 183). This letter reveals a community that has been shaped by the peacemaking work of Christ and is called to enact this mission in the world so as to become “the gospel of peace” (6:15).

Chapter 7 shifts to justice, a prominent concern in the prophetic tradition, to ask whether Paul’s use of dikaiosynē speaks primarily of justification or of justice. This question is explored through various reflections of justice in Pauline thought, culminating in an abbreviated analysis of the Corinthian correspondence. The reader is reminded that for Paul, “God is the God of justice, and the church is a community of justice; justice is both a divine trait and an ecclesial practice” (258). Chapter 8 takes up a topic explored in previous works by Gorman, which argue that theosis—“becoming like God by participating in the life of God” (261)—is the focal point of Romans. Glory is presented as a divine attribute in which the church, “as the missional community, sought out for salvation by God and sharing that salvation with others” (285), is able to participate. Each chapter above concludes with a brief look at practical examples from modern communities who are creatively enacting such missional participation.

Gorman’s writing throughout is clear and his arguments plainly presented. The work aims to be accessible to scholars, pastors, and leaders (10), and the book provides material for each. The main body cogently introduces Gorman’s primary arguments while the ample footnotes offer resources for further engagement, and the extensive indices aid in locating subjects, authors, and specific texts. The volume’s greatest strength is its theological foundation, as it is through-and-through a theological exposition on the missional calling of the Christian community. As such, for those seeking practical or strategic advice, it is lacking, as Gorman himself admits: this book “is not a handbook for mission but a foundation and a stimulus for it” (15). Additionally, it may be noted that while the participatory nature of Paul’s theology is well supported, the author at times (unnecessarily) pushes his reading of periphery texts too far (e.g., his argument that Paul’s anxiety for his converts evinces their public participation in mission; see 75 and elsewhere). The presentation would be strengthened by allowing the principal texts to stand on their own strength and by not coercing less amenable passages as secondary evidence.

Gorman’s volume provides a broad theological interpretation of the Pauline letters which produces the seemingly simple thesis that, “because the cross reveals a missional God, the church saved and shaped by the cross will be a missional people” (9). As Paul’s own letters attest, this was not a simple task for the earliest recipients of this message, and it remains just as challenging for the church today. Gorman helpfully reminds us that being a “missional” people means more than “winning souls,” but instead becoming a people who enact the missio Dei in our individual and corporate lives.

Zane B. McGee

PhD Student, New Testament

Emory University

Atlanta, GA, USA

1 Michael J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul’s Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001); Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009).

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Review of Tod Bolsinger, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory

Tod Bolsinger. Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015. 247 pp. Paperback. $18.00.

In Canoeing the Mountains, Tod Bolsinger, assistant professor of practical theology and vice president and chief of the leadership formation platform at Fuller Theological Seminary, offers “a guidebook for learning to lead in a world we weren’t prepared for” (13). Bolsinger believes that for many ministers, a seminary education has “trained them for a world that is disappearing” (13, 15). He wants his readers to be ready to face the challenge of leading into the uncharted territory of a post-Christian age. The early American explorers, Lewis and Clark, serve as guides in this study of leadership, and their journey of discovery is used as a lens to explore the situation facing Christian leaders today. Bolsinger also draws on his own personal history in pastoral ministry and denominational leadership to connect theory and practice.

The book’s first section addresses “Understanding Uncharted Territory.” Following the conventional wisdom of their day, Lewis and Clark expected to find a waterway that would connect the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. What these explorers found, though, was not a flowing river, but the Rocky Mountains! They had come prepared to explore via canoes, but had to ditch those plans and lead their crew off their “map” to safely cross the mountains. Bolsinger notes that “just as Lewis and Clark functioned under a set of geographical assumptions, leaders of the church in the West today have been operating under a set of philosophical, theological and ecclesiological assumptions” (27). He argues “that leadership—and especially leadership development—must be dramatically different than it was during Christendom” (30). In this new environment, paths for thriving (or even simply surviving) will not be found by trying harder or having greater technical skill related to the solutions of the past. Instead, what is required is a “spirit of adventure” and an ability “to look over Lemhi Pass and let the assumptions of the past go” (33).

In the second and third sections, Bolsinger discusses “The On the Map Skill Set” and what “Leading Off the Map” requires. One of his important refrains is that no one will trust someone to lead them off the map until they have proven their ability to lead on the map. In these sections, he unpacks this core concept from earlier in the book: “transformational leadership lies at the overlapping intersection of three leadership components.” It “begins in technical competence . . . is validated in relational congruence . . . and becomes transformational through the integration of adaptive capacity” (43–44). Bolsinger thoughtfully and effectively addresses each of these three parts of leadership and how they build on each other. Other notable items in these sections were some inspiring and challenging descriptions of Lewis and Clark’s leadership partnership (62, 68–70), an examination of the power that organizational culture has over strategy (73, 77), and a discussion of the necessity for leaders to have conviction that “the mission trumps” all other questions and should be more important than preferences, personalities, or programs (125).

In the fourth section, Bolsinger explores “Relationships and Resistance” by looking at the ways organizations fight against change and encourages leaders to expect sabotage and address it effectively (174–77). In the fifth and final section, Bolsinger focuses on “Transformation.” He weaves in the story of Sacagawea, the young, nursing mother who saved Lewis and Clark’s expedition, and connects that example and others to transformational leadership by reminding us that “those who had neither power nor privilege in the Christendom world are the trustworthy guides and necessary leaders when we go off the map. They are not going into uncharted territory. They are at home” and can help us find our way (191). He challenges leaders to be better listeners by including the wisdom of other voices into the decision-making process (196–7) as well as to experiment with different leadership structures that could better fit what a given context demands (200–1). Finally, he emphasizes that “leadership into uncharted territory requires and results in transformation of the whole organization, starting with the leaders” and reminds us that “God is taking us into uncharted territory to transform us” (217).

Overall, I found Bolsinger’s approach and argument compelling. As a missionary serving in what could be conceived as a “pre-Christian” society, there was much that I resonated with as well. I found myself often nodding along in agreement—that the world he was describing was one strikingly similar to where I find myself in ministry. I was pleased to see Bolsinger’s argument for including marginalized voices from within the West (196–200) but it made me wish he had included a push for more voices from outside the West as well. I think their perspective could help us understand what life and ministry outside of Christendom could and should look like. Bolsinger used the Lewis and Clark narrative so strategically and sparingly that it did not overwhelm the aims of the book. Instead, it was such rich source material that I wished he had included even more of their story. I appreciated his use of sidebars to summarize essential themes and ideas in each chapter. He packed the book with dozens and dozens of memorable quotes on leadership from both the business and church spheres. On a few occasions, though, these became a distraction, with back to back to back quotes in the text, as if the author was trying to make sure to squeeze in all his favorite leadership aphorisms. Those minor critiques, however, do not diminish my appreciation for this well-written book on how to do leadership in the post-Christendom West. It serves as a wake-up call to recognize our new environment and as an insightful introduction to leadership in uncharted territory. Like Lewis and Clark, it thoughtfully explores and clears a new path for us, and I hope it paves the way for further reflection on what leadership looks like in the wilds outside the bounds of Christendom.

Alan B. Howell

Missionary serving the Makua-Metto people

Montepuez, Mozambique