Kirby Laing Centre and A Review of Becoming A Missionary Church: Lesslie Newbigin and Contemporary Church Movements
One of the most enjoyable parts of becoming a Missiologist has been the opportunity to meet other men and women from all over the world who, like me, are deeply interested in the Mission of God. I have especially enjoyed becoming part of The Kirby Laing Center for Public Theology (KLC). I am compelled by KLC’s purpose and am especially grateful for the ways their purpose enhances my calling and role in FamilyLife. I’d invite you to check out their website and try out one of their events.
At KLC, Public Theology means the joyful and rigorous attempt to explore and provide answers to the question how then shall we live?
Following Lesslie Newbigin we believe that “Christ is the clue to all that is.” This means pursuing Christ-the-clue in all of life.
As an academic research centre concerned with public theology we seek to do rigorous scholarship across the disciplines addressing the great issues of our day from a Christian view point. We also seek to foster and nurture Christian scholarship that is rooted in spirituality and practised in community, all with Christ-the-clue at its heart
Over the course of the last nearly two years, I have attended various events that center around contemplative prayer, the Arts, and lectures regarding fields of study like Theology, Philosophy, Missiology, Science, and Ethics. Last fall I participated in a reading group of sixteen people from different parts of the world as we engaged in rich conversations around Margaret Silf’s Landmarks. Recently, KLC hosted an event celebrating Michael Goheen and Timothy Sinclair’s new book, Becoming a Missionary Church: Lesslie Newbigin and Contemporary Church Movements. I had the opportunity to respond to their book along with Dr. Hugo Herfst. I’ve included my review of their book here.
I am also facilitating the launch of a research hub focusing on Missiology. If you are interested in hearing more, feel free to contact me.
Response & Review
Goheen, Michael W. and Timothy M. Sheridan. Becoming A Missionary Church: Lesslie Newbigin and Contemporary Church Movements. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022.
The authors describe their book as primarily an exercise in contemporary historical theology wherein they discuss three significant church conversations that have emerged in the during the first decades of the twenty-first century. These conversations, the missional, emergent, and center church are placed in dialogue with Lesslie Newbigin and his missionary ecclesiology.
The authors describe themselves as “missional neo-Calvinists” and provide a brief description of the historical development of neo-Calvinism—a Calvinism that emerged in the context of Enlightenment humanism. This provides an excellent base to start from.
A brief outline of the book includes:
The first section provides a contemporary historical account of the development of Lesslie Newbigin’s missional ecclesiology from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century
The second section highlights three contemporary conversations that emerged out of this historical trajectory, the different theological visions that emerged for the missionary church in NA, and how each, in one way or another, is connected to Newbigin.
The last section sketches Newbigin’s legacy for a missionary church for today.
Importantly, the authors describe a missionary ecclesiology as more than the need to evangelize or to be involved in mercy and social justice, is more than finding novel structures or devising church growth tactics, it’s more than making the gospel relevant for today. Missionary ecclesiology is no less than a comprehensive recovery of the public and creation-wide truth of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is no less than a commitment to the Bible as the true story of the whole world, and an urgent call to the church to embody and live into this story across the whole spectrum of life and culture.
I. Primary Strengths:
1. Their attention to historical theology as it pertains to the International Missionary Council meeting held in Tambaram in 1938 leading up to the meeting at Willingen in 1952. The history of the IMC in general is little-known and this account provides the reader with an informed understanding of each of the contemporary church movements discussed here, and the significance of the meetings in Tambaram (1938) and Willingen (1952) and the work that transpired during that fourteen-year period. I would add that there’s much more to mine from the work that began with the IMC.
2. Another strength is the attention they give to Newbigin’s missionary ecclesiology and their emphasis on the true story of the whole world. Their analysis provides clarity regarding the comprehensive reign of God and the consequent missionary nature of the church and frees up unnecessary dichotomies and reductions of the gospel. This, I believe, is very significant “on the ground.” The church is not merely God’s instrument but is a sign and foretaste of God’s kingdom.
4. Another strength regarding their treatment of contemporary historical theology was their attention to Newbigin’s theological framework as it unfolds, is challenged, and solidified over the course of his entire adult life. Additionally, the authors’ own stories illustrate the fact that the story and the conversation continue today that and our theology and missiology develops over a lifetime.
5. Highlighting these three conversations is timely. The authors accomplished their goal of demonstrating the ways these three conversations draw from and perhaps miss aspects of Newbigin’s work. I appreciated their posture as well. Overall, these sketches were quite informative and helpful. I’ll briefly comment on the ECC and Center Church first:
II. Three Conversations
Emergent Church Conversation
The authors highlighted the strengths of the ECC, which include their attention to mission practices, people on the margins, and the inherent value of spiritual formation. They also show concern for the prevalence of an anti-institutional posture, the tendency to dismiss the church as an institution (likened to the Hoekendijkian Spector), and the potential for disunity. They also encourage a more careful and considerate approach to the authority of Scripture. Most of my experience with the ECC has been in my role in Cru and FamilyLife. Elements of the ECC played a decisive role in compelling me/us to develop a more robust theological framework.
Center Church
This chapter is compelling. I was only cursorily aware of Newbigin’s influence on Keller and found the author’s discussion around Keller’s theological framework. They highlight the so-called “flaw” in Keller’s interpretation of Newbigin that emphasizes neo-puritanism and systematic theology over neo-Calvinism and the priority of the true story of the whole world. This provides the reader with a new lens for reading Keller.
Missional Church Conversation
Newbigin’s “gauntlet” provides the impetus for each of the three contemporary church movements, including the MCC, and spurs the conversation still ongoing today: “It would seem, therefore, that there is no higher priority for the research work of missiologists than to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel as this modern Western culture.” My theological framework and introduction to Lesslie Newbigin has been influenced in large part by Craig and Mike’s work, members of the GOCN, and the broader MCC conversation.
The Gospel in Our Culture Network (GOCN) started as a quarterly newsletter in the mid-1980s that George Hunsberger edited and sent out. This was sparked by Newbigin’s Foolishness to the Greeks published in 1986 following his Princeton Lectures.
The author’s note the contribution of the GOCN and the publication Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) as that which “coalesced” as a missiological consensus and a plumb line of sorts that led to a larger MCC conversation. They point out that the GOCN generated three major points of contribution and consensus:
Mission of the triune God—God is the starting point for mission
Missionary nature of the church derived from the nature and sending work of God
Missio Dei and the missionary nature of the church must be worked out in the context of Western culture
With these points of consensus in mind, the authors identify general trends and themes in the MCC; connect them historically to Newbigin and probe his missionary ecclesiology to critique and enrich the current conversation.
First, in my opinion, it is important to differentiate between the GOCN conversation and what grew into a larger MCC conversation. The authors highlight strengths and offer critiques primarily related to the MCC that developed in response to Missional Church. Here they note the “fruitful development” of various practices within the MCC and highlight the contributions of Alan Hirsch, Michael Frost, Michael Breen, Tim Chester, Steve Timmis, Ed Stetzer, and Reggie McNeal and others, noting their contributions to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the development of Missional Communities and emphasis on Spiritual Practices.
What I found missing in this section was the significant contribution of the GOCN that, as the authors state, provided the impetus for the “missional” conversation. By conflating the GOCN into MCC into one conversation we miss the depth and breadth of the GOCN’s contribution. In fact, most of the critiques set forth in this volume are taken up in detail in Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile’s, The Missional Church in Perspective: Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation. Their well-thought-through critique of their own work in Missional Church would add considerably to the conversation today.
Also, the authors only briefly consider the topic of the sending trinity/social trinity. They seem to dismiss the important work done by the GOCN on Social Trinity Theology, which developed more fully after the publication of Missional Church. I would suggest that the GOCN’s work demonstrates both the sending and social nature of the trinity. They also draw from Newbigin’s work by addressing the triune God in story and in community in more depth than seems to be represented here, evidenced in various GOCN’s publications starting as far back as the 1990s.[1]
Finally, the suggestion that the ecclesiology found in Missional Church is Anabaptist caught my attention as it appears to me that there are several ecclesiologies represented in the book, which unfortunately the authors did not integrate in relation to Newbigin’s ecclesiology. The authors do
note the challenge of representing various church traditions, which is also addressed in The Missional Church in Perspective.
In preparation for this response, I did a quick chronological overview of the work done by the GOCN. This birds-eye point of view reminds me of Newbigin’s influence on their development of a theological framework that emerged before and after the publication of Missional Church. Notably, significant contributions regarding the salient points of missionary congregations are made in several GOCN’s publications.[2]
Conclusion
Overall, I appreciate the rich and enduring theology of the triune God, the missionary church/congregation, and the gospel encounter with the West. This excellent publication serves to remind us of the significance of Newbigin’s contribution and underscores the importance of these topics that are remarkably as pertinent now and necessary as they were over 80 years ago. This book by highlighting these three conversations, continues to keep Newbigin’s wisdom, insight, burden alive and even provides an opportunity to glean further insights from the GOCN’s incorporation of Newbigin’s work.
Endnotes
[1] Publications include: Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile’s The Missional Church in Perspective: Mapping Trends and Shaping the Conversation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011); George Hunsberger’s, The Story that Chooses Us: A Tapestry of Missional Vision (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), and his Bearing Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Cultural Plurality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Darrell Guder’s later work, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000); Van Gelder’s The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit(Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007) takes up a rich vein of this discussion as do Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile in Participating in God’s Mission: A Theological Missiology for the Church in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), and in particular, “Part Three: Participating in the Triune God’s Mission” adds texture to this important conversation.
[2] Darrell Guder’s The Incarnation and the Church’s Witness (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2005); George Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder’s The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), perhaps the seedbed for Missional Church; Craig Van Gelder’s The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), addresses congregational structure, leadership, and gives substantial credit to the establishment of the church, the rich history of Christianity/Christian mission; Alan Roxburgh’s Missional: Joining God in the Neighborhood (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2011).
