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Editor-in-Chief: R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

Executive Editor: Russell D. Moore

Editor: Stephen J. Wellum

Associate Editor: Brian Vickers

Book Review Editor: Robert E. Sagers

Assistant Editors: Daniel L. Patterson Brent E. Parker

Advisory Board: Timothy K. Beougher John B. Polhill Chuck Lawless Peter J. Gentry Esther H. Crookshank Mark A. Seifrid Randy Stinson

Typographer: John Rogers

Editorial Office & Subscription Services: SBTS Box 832 2825 Lexington Rd. Louisville, KY 40280 (800) 626-5525, x 4413

Editorial E-Mail: journaloffice@sbts.edu

Volume 15 · Number 2 Summer 2011

Global Christianity

Editorial: Stephen J. WellumReflections on the Great Commission

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The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology is published quarterly by The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2825 Lexington Road, Louisville, KY 40280. Summer 2011. Vol. 15, No. 2. Copyright ©2011 The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. ISSN 1520-7307. Second Class postage paid at Louisville, KY. Postmaster: Send address changes to: SBTS, Box 832, 2825 Lexington Road, Louisville, KY 40280.

Christopher J. H. Wright Truth with a Mission: Reading All Scripture Missiologically

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Chuck Lawless“To All The Nations”: The Great Commission Passages in the Gospels and Acts

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M. David Sills and Kevin BaggettIslam in Latin America

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Book Reviews88

John Mark Terry The Growth of Christianity in East Asia

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Jeff K. WaltersLooking to a City: Current Themes in Urban Missions

52

The SBJT Forum78

Samuel W. KunhiyopChallenges and Prospects of Teaching Theology in Africa

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Editorial: Reflections on the Great CommissionStephen J. Wellum

Stephen J. Wellum is Professor of Christian Theology at The South-ern Baptist Theological Seminary. Dr. Wellum received his Ph.D. degree in theology from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and has also taught theology at the Associated Canadian Theological Schools and Northwest Baptist Theological College and Seminary in Canada. He has contributed to several publications and a collection of essays on theology and worldview issues.

Ev eryone a dmits th at our Lord Jesus’ command before his ascension to go into all

the world and make disciples of all the nations (Matt 28:18-20) is programmatic for the church. It has been rightly labeled the “Great Commission” for Christ’s church. If we are to be faithful and obedient disciples of our Lord we cannot neglect

what the Lord of the church has commanded us to do. With that in mind, I offer three ref lections on the Great Commission which hopefully will set the stage for this issue of SBJT, which is devoted to this very important subject and the larger theme of global Christianity.

First, at the most basic level, the Great Commission is foun-dational to the church’s purpose. Of ten the church ’s pur pose is described in a threefold way. Our

first and primary purpose is to glorify God and to worship him in every area of life. Worship, it must quickly be stated, is not merely what we do

on Sunday or how the “worship team” leads us in singing and praise. Rather, “worship” is a compre-hensive category in Scripture that describes our engagement with our covenant God through faith in Jesus Christ and what he has done for us. Such faith necessarily expresses itself in daily obedi-ence and service to God in every sphere of life, including our gathering as the people of God. Second, the church’s purpose is to nurture and edify God’s people in order to build them up into maturity in the faith (Col 1:28-29; Eph 4:11-16). Another way of stating it: the church is to make disciples by teaching them the Scriptures (cf. 1 Tim 4:6, 11, 13; 5:17; 2 Tim 2:1-2, 14-15; 4:1-5; Tit 1:9) which equips “the saints for works of service” (Eph 4:13). Third, the church is to take the gospel to the nations as we live our lives in this world and await our Lord’s return (Matt 28:18-20). When relating the Great Commission to the purposes of the church, it specifically emphasizes the last two purposes even though edification and witness can never be divorced from our worship of God. And it also reminds us that unless our churches are

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 2-3.

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living out all three purposes we are sadly not ful-filling our calling, or our raison d’être (reason for being) as God’s people. The health and vitality of our local churches must be evaluated by this Great Commission standard alone, which is a sobering thought indeed.

Second, it is important to place the Great Com-mission in the storyline of Scripture and the over-all plan and missio Dei (mission of God). Too often we isolate our Lord’s command from God’s mis-sion and what he is incredibly doing in the world through the church. In recent years, the person who has reminded us of this important point is Christopher Wright. In his important work, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narra-tive (InterVarsity Press, 2006), Wright argues that the whole Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of God’s purpose for the whole of creation. Mission, including the Great Commission, is not just one of a list of things that the Bible talks about. Mission is what the Bible is about. God is at work in this world and human history as Creator, Redeemer, and Judge. He has a plan, goal, and purpose for this world which ultimately is for the glory of his own name and the good of his people. And it is precisely because God has a mission and plan that we, as his image-bearers and redeemed people, have a mission. The Great Commission, then, is not an isolated piece from this overall plan; rather, it is part and parcel of that plan as we live our lives for God’s glory and take the gospel to the nations. When viewed in this way, we are reminded both of our incredible privilege to be Great Commission people as well as the awesome responsibility our great God has entrusted to the church.

Third, the Great Commission is only pos-sible because of the triumphant work of God’s Son, Jesus the Lord. In the New Testament, the Lordship of Christ is developed along two com-plementary paths. By virtue of who the Son is as the eternal Son and second person of the Trinity, he is Lord (see John 1:1-3; Col 1:15-17; Phil 2:6; Heb 1:1-3). Yet, probably the more predominant

emphasis in the New Testament, is that the eter-nal Son becomes Lord by virtue of what he does, namely his taking upon our human nature and his cross work for us including his life, death, and resurrection (Rom 1:3-4; Phil 2:7-11). In other words, it is due to his work as God the Son incar-nate that he acts as our representative and substi-tute and wins for us our salvation. Without his entire work for us there would be no salvation and no Great Commission. It is this latter emphasis which Matthew 28:18-20 stresses. By virtue of his resurrection, our Lord announces that “all author-ity has been given to him” so that as the victorious and triumphant Lord he sends his people out into the world. It is under the marching orders of King Jesus that we, as his ambassadors, take the gospel to the nations. Once again, this reminds us that there is no higher calling imaginable than to serve as his ambassadors announcing his triumphant work and kingdom to the nations.

In this issue of SBJT, our goal is to ref lect on the Great Commission. We want to wrestle with how it is tied to God’s overall mission as well as ask how we are doing as the church in taking the gos-pel to the nations. In addition, we want to wrestle with various challenges we face in our global con-text in order to fulfill our Lord’s command. It is my prayer that this issue will remind us anew of our great privilege and responsibility to be God’s people and to be part of his larger mission and plan for this world.

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Truth with a Mission: Reading All Scripture Missiologically1

Christopher J. H. Wright

IntroductIon

I r emember them so vividly from my child-hood—the great banner texts around the walls

of the missionary conventions in Northern Ireland where I would help my father at the stall of the Une-

vangelized Fields Mission, of which he was Irish Secretary after twenty years in Brazil. “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,” they urged me, along with other similar imperatives in glow-ing gothic calligraphy. By the age of twelve I could have quoted you all the key ones—“Go ye therefore and make disciples,” “How shall they hear?,” “You shall be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth,” “Whom shall we send? … Here am I, send me.” I knew my missionary Bible verses. I had responded to many a

rousing sermon on most of them. By the age of twenty-one I had a degree in the-

ology from Cambridge in which the same texts had been curiously lacking. At least, it is curious to me now. At the time there seemed to be little

connection at all between theology and mission in the mind of the lecturers, or of myself, or, for all I knew, in the mind of God either. “Theology” was all about God—what God was like, what God had said and done, and what mostly dead people had speculated on such questions. “Mission” was about us, the living, and what we’ve been doing since Carey (who, of course, was the first mission-ary, we so erroneously thought). Or more pre-cisely, mission is what we evangelicals do since we’re the ones who know that the Bible has told us (or some of us, at least) to go and be missionaries.

“Mission is what we do.” That was the assump-tion, supported of course by clear biblical com-mands. “Jesus sends me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Many years later, including years when I was teaching theology myself as a mission-ary in India,2 I found myself teaching a module called The Biblical Basis of Mission at All Nations Christian College—an international mission training institution. The module title itself embod-ies the same assumption. Mission is the noun, the given reality. It is something we do and we basi-cally know what it is. And the reason why we know we should be doing it, the basis, foundation, or

Chr istopher J. H. Wr ight is International Director of the Langham Partnership International.

Previously, Dr. Wright served on the faculty of Union Biblical Seminary and as academic dean and principal of All Nations Christian College. With a Ph.D. in Old Testament Ethics from Cambridge, Dr. Wright is the author of numerous books, including The Mission of God’s People: A Biblical Theology of the Church’s Mission (Zondervan, 2010), and The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (IVP, 2006).

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 4-15.

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grounds on which we justify it, must be found in the Bible. As good evangelicals we need a biblical basis for everything we do. What, then, is the bibli-cal basis for mission? Roll out the texts. Add some that nobody else has thought of. Do some joined- up theology. Add some motivational fervor. And the class is heart-warmingly appreciative. Now they have even more biblical support for what they already believed anyway, for these are All Nations students, after all. They only came because they are committed to doing mission.

This mild caricature is not in the least deroga-tory in intent. I believe passionately that mis-sion is what we should be doing, and I believe the Bible endorses and mandates it. However, the more I taught that course, the more I used to introduce it by tel l ing the students that I would like to rename it—from The Biblical Basis of Mission, to The Missional Basis of the Bible. I wanted them to see, not just that the Bible con-tains a number of texts which happen to provide a rationale for missionary endeavor, but that the whole Bible is itself a “missional” phenomenon .

the BIBle as the Product of God’s MIssIon

A missional hermeneutic of the Bible begins with the Bible’s very existence. For those who affirm some relationship (however articulated), between these texts and the self-revelation of our creator God, the whole canon of Scripture is a mis-sional phenomenon in the sense that it witnesses to the self-giving movement of this God towards his creation and towards us, human beings in God’s own image, but wayward and wanton. The writings, which now comprise our Bible, are them-selves the product of, and witness to, the ultimate mission of God.

The very existence of the Bible is incontrovert-ible evidence of the God who refused to forsake his rebellious creation, who refused to give up, who was and is determined to redeem and restore fallen creation to his original design for

it…. The very existence of such a collection of writings testifies to a God who breaks through to human beings, who disclosed himself to them, who will not leave them unilluminated in their darkness … who takes the initiative in re-establishing broken relationships with us.3

Furthermore, the processes by which these texts came to be written were often profoundly missional in nature. Many of them emerged out of events, or struggles, or crises, or conflicts, in which the people of God engaged with the constantly changing and challenging task of articulating and living out their understanding of God’s revelation and redemptive action in the world. Sometimes these were struggles internal to the people of God themselves; sometimes they were highly polemical struggles with competing religious claims and worldviews that surrounded them.

So a missional reading of such texts is very definitely not a matter of, first, finding the “real” meaning by objective exegesis, and only then, sec-ondly, cranking up some “missiological implica-tions” as a homiletic supplement to the “text itself.” Rather, it is to see how a text often has its origin in some issue, need, controversy, or threat which the people of God needed to address in the context of their mission. The text in itself is a product of mission in action.

This is easily demonstrated in the case of the New Testament.4 Most of Paul’s letters were writ-ten in the heat of his missionary efforts: wrestling with the theological basis of the inclusion of the Gentiles; affirming the need for Jew and Gentile to accept one another in Christ and in the church; tackling the baffling range of new problems that assailed young churches as the gospel took root in the world of Greek polytheism; confronting incipi-ent heresies with clear affirmations of the suprem-acy and sufficiency of Jesus Christ, and so on.

And why were the Gospels so-called? Because they were written to explain the significance of the evangel—the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, especially his death and resurrection. Confidence

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in these things was essential to the missionary task of the expanding church. And the person to whom we owe the largest quantity of the New Testament, Luke, shapes his two volume work in such a way that the missionary mandate to the disciples to be Christ’s witnesses to the nations comes as the climax to the Gospel of Luke and the introduction to the book of Acts.

But also in the case of the Old Testament we can see that many of these texts emerged out of the engagement of Israel with the surrounding world in the light of the God they knew in their history and in covenantal relationship. People produced texts in relation to what they believed God had done, was doing, or would do, in their world. The Torah records the exodus as an act of Yahweh that comprehensively confronted and defeated the power of Pharaoh and all his rival claims to deity and allegiance. It presents a theology of creation that stands in sharp contrast to the polytheistic creation myths of Mesopotamia. The historical narratives portray the long and sorry story of Israel’s struggle with the culture and religion of Canaan, a struggle reflected also in the pre-exilic prophets. Exilic and post-exilic texts emerge out of the task that the small remnant community of Israel faced to define their continuing identity as a community of faith in successive empires of varying hostility or tolerance. Wisdom texts interact with international wisdom traditions in the surrounding cultures, but do so with staunch monotheistic disinfectant. And in worship and prophecy, Israelites ref lect on the relationship between their God, Yahweh, and the rest of the nations—sometimes negatively, sometimes posi-tively—and on the nature of their own role as Yahweh’s elect priesthood in their midst.

The Bible, then, is a missional phenomenon in itself. The writings which now comprise our Bible are themselves the product of, and witness to, the ultimate mission of God. The individual texts within it often reflect the struggles of being a people with a mission in a world of competing cul-tural and religious claims. And the canon eventu-

ally consolidates the recognition that it is through these texts that the people whom God has called to be his own (in both Testaments), have been shaped as a community of memory and hope, a community of mission, failure, and striving.

In short, a missional hermeneutic proceeds from the assumption that the whole Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of God’s purpose for the whole of God’s creation. Mission is not just one of a list of things that the Bible happens to talk about, only a bit more urgently than some. Mission is, in that much-abused phrase, “what it’s all about.” readInG the scrIPtures wIth the rIsen chrIst

Now to say, “mission is what the Bible is all about,” is a bold claim. I would not expect to be able to turn any phrase that began “the biblical basis of…” around the other way. There is, for example, a biblical basis for marriage, but there is not, I presume, “a marital basis for the Bible.” There is a biblical basis for work, but work is not “what the Bible is all about.” However, I take some encouragement for my claim from an impec-cable authority. It seems to me that Jesus comes very close to saying, “This is what the Bible is all about,” when he gave his disciples their final lec-ture in Old Testament hermeneutics. “This is what is written,” he said. “The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repen-tance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem” (Luke 24:46-47).

Now Jesus is not quoting a specific text here, though we would love to have been able to ask which Scriptures he particularly had in mind. (Doubtless, the two from Emmaus could have filled in the gaps). The point is that he includes the whole of this sentence under the heading, “this is what is written.” He seems to be saying that the whole of the Scripture (which we now know as the Old Testament) finds its focus and fulfillment both

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in the life and death and resurrection of Israel’s Messiah and in the mission to all nations, which flows out from that event. Luke tells us that with these words Jesus “opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45); or, as we might put it, he was setting their herme-neutical orientation and agenda. The proper way for disciples of Jesus of Nazareth (crucified and risen) to read the Scripture is messianically and missiologically.

Paul, though he was not present for the Old Testament hermeneutics lecture on the day of resurrection, clearly had his own way of reading Scripture radically transformed in exactly the same way with the same double focus. Testifying before Festus he declares, “I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen—that the Messiah would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the nations” (Acts 26:22–23; emphasis added). It was this dual understanding of the Scriptures which had then shaped Paul’s whole résumé as the apostle of the Messiah Jesus to the Gentiles.

On the whole, evangelicals have been good at the former (messianic reading of the Old Testa-ment), but inadequate with the latter (missio-logical reading of it). We read the Old Testament messianically in the light of Jesus, in the sense of finding in it a whole messianic theology and escha-tology which we see as fulfilled in Jesus. In doing so we follow his own example, of course, and that of his first followers and the authors of the Gos-pels. But what we have so often failed to do is to go beyond the mere satisfaction of checking off so-called messianic predictions that have “been fulfilled.” And we have failed to go further because we have not grasped the missiological significance of the Messiah.

The Messiah was the promised one who would embody in his own person the identity and mis-sion of Israel, as their representative, king, leader, and savior. Through the Messiah as his anointed agent, Yahweh the God of Israel would bring about

all he intended for Israel. But what was that mis-sion of Israel? Nothing less than to be “a light to the nations,” the means of bringing the redemp-tive blessing of God to all the nations of the world, as originally promised in the title deeds of the covenant with Abraham. For the God of Israel is also the creator God of all the world. Through the Messiah, therefore, the God of Israel would also bring about all that he intended for the nations. The eschatological redemption and restoration of Israel would issue in the ingathering of the nations. The full meaning of recognizing Jesus as Messiah, then, lies in recognizing also his role in relation to the mission of Israel for the sake of the nations. Hence, a messianic reading of the Old Testament has to flow on to a missiological reading—which is pre-cisely the connection that Jesus makes in Luke 24.

However, even if we accept that Jesus offers us a messiah-focused and mission-generating herme-neutic of Scripture, we may still query the claim that somehow there is a missional hermeneutic of the whole Bible such that “mission is what it’s all about.” This uneasiness stems from the persistent, almost subconscious paradigm that mission is fun-damentally “something we do.” This is especially so if we fall into the evangelical reductionist habit of using the word “mission” or “missions” as more or less synonymous with evangelism. Quite clearly the whole Bible is not just “about evangelism,” even though evangelism is certainly a fundamental part of biblical mission as entrusted to us. Evangelism is something we do and it is validated by clear bib-lical imperatives. The appropriateness of speaking of “a missional basis of the Bible” becomes appar-ent only when we shift our paradigm of mission from our human agency to the ultimate purposes of God himself. For clearly the Bible is, in some sense, “all about God.” What, then, does it mean to talk of the mission of God?

whose MIssIon Is It any way?God with a Mission

Though the phrase missio Dei has been misused in some theology virtually to exclude evangelism,

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it does express a major biblical truth. The God revealed in Scripture is personal, purposeful, and goal orientated. The opening account of creation portrays God working towards a goal, complet-ing it with satisfaction, and resting, content with the result. And from the great promise of God to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 we know this God to be totally, covenantally, eternally committed to the mission of blessing the nations through the agency of the people of Abraham. From that point on, the mission of God could be summed up in the words of the hymn, “God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year,” and as generations come and go.

The Bible presents itself to us fundamentally as a narrative, a historical narrative at one level, but a grand, metanarrative at another. It begins with a God of purpose in creation; it moves on to the conflict and problem generated by human rebellion against that purpose; it spends most of its narrative journey in the story of God’s redemp-tive purposes being worked out on the stage of human history; and it finishes beyond the horizon of its own history with the eschatological hope of a new creation. This has often been presented as a four-point narrative—creation, fall, redemption, and future hope. This whole worldview is predi-cated on teleological monotheism—that is, there is one God at work in the universe and in human history, and that God has a goal, a purpose, a mis-sion which will ultimately be accomplished by the power of his word and for the glory of his name. This is the mission of the biblical God.

To read the whole Bible in the light of this great overarching perspective of the mission of God is to read “with the grain” of this whole collection of Scriptures that constitute our canon. This founda-tional point is a key assumption of “a missiological hermeneutic” of the Bible. It is nothing more than to accept that the biblical worldview locates us in the midst of a narrative of the universe behind which stands the mission of the living God. All creation will render “glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the

beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” That is a missional perspective.

Humanity with a MissionOn the day of their creation, human beings

were given their mission on the planet so purpose-fully prepared for their arrival—the mandate to fill the earth and subdue it and to rule over the rest of creation (Gen 1:28). This delegated authority within the created order is moderated by the paral-lel commands in the complementary account, “to serve and to keep” the garden (Gen 2:15). The care and keeping of creation is our human mission. We are on the planet with a purpose that flows from the creative purpose of God himself. Out of this understanding of our humanity (which is also teleological, like our doctrine of God) flows our ecological responsibility, our economic activity involving work, productivity, exchange and trade, and the whole cultural mandate.

To be human is to have a purposeful role in God’s creation. In relation to that creational mis-sion, Christians need to be reminded that God holds us accountable to himself for our humanity as much as for our Christianity. There is, there-fore, a legitimate place for ecological concern and action, for biblical earth-keeping, within our understanding of Christian mission respon-sibility—on the assumption that Christians too are humans made in the image of God (indeed being restored even more fully to that humanity in Christ), who have not been given some privi-leged exemption from the mission God entrusted to our whole species. This ecological dimension of our mission flows not only from creation, but also reflects an eschatological perspective. The bibli-cal vision is of a new creation, of which Christ is the heir. Our care for the earth is an expression of our understanding of its future as well as its origin (similarly to our concern for the human person).

Israel with a MissionAgainst the background of human sin and

rebellion, described in the bleak narratives of Gen-

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esis 3-11, running from the disobedience of Adam and Eve to the building of the Tower of Babel, God initiates his redemptive mission of blessing the nations of humanity, beginning with the call of Abraham in Genesis 12. This is the essential mis-sional purpose of God’s election of Israel. Israel came into existence as a people with a mission entrusted from God for the sake of the rest of the nations. All that Israel was, or was supposed to be—all that Yahweh their God did in them, for them, and through them—was ultimately linked to this wider purpose of God for the nations.

A missiological hermeneutic of the Old Testa-ment, in its redemptive dimension, centers around this point. Israel’s election was not a rejection of other nations but was explicitly for the sake of all nations. This universality of God’s purpose that embraces the particularity of God’s chosen means is a recurrent theme. Though not always explicitly present, it is never far from the surface of the way in which Scripture portrays Israel’s intended self-understanding. We shall explore this missiological reading of the Old Testament more fully below.

Jesus with a MissionJesus did not just arrive. He had a very clear

conviction that he was sent. But even before Jesus was old enough to have clear convictions about anything, his significance was recognized. Just as Luke ends his Gospel with the double significance of Jesus for Israel and for the world, so also right at the start he makes the same connection. It is there in the words of recognition spoken by Simeon as he cradled the infant Jesus, words appreciated by generations of Anglicans for their evening beauty in the Nunc dimittis, but rarely recognized for the missiological significance of their double messi-anic claim: “Lord now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word. For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, to be a light for revelation to the nations and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32; emphasis added).

It was at his baptism that Jesus receives an affir-

mation of his true identity and mission. The voice of his Father at his baptism combined the identity of the Servant figure in Isaiah (echoing the phrase-ology of Isa 42:1), and that of the Davidic messi-anic king (echoing the affirmation of Ps 2:7). Both of these dimensions of his identity and role were energized with a sense of mission. The mission of the Servant was both to restore Israel to Yahweh and also to be the agent of God’s salvation reach-ing to the ends of the earth (Isa 49:6). The mission of the Davidic messianic king was both to rule over a redeemed Israel according to the agenda of many prophetic texts, and also to receive the nations and the ends of the earth as his heritage (Ps 2:8).

Jesus’ sense of mission—the aims, motiva-tion, and self-understanding behind his recorded words and actions—has been a matter of intense scholarly discussion. W hat seems very clear is that Jesus built his own agenda on what he per-ceived to be the agenda of his Father. His will was to do his Father’s will. God’s mission determined Jesus’ mission. In the obedience of Jesus, even to death, the mission of God reached its climax.

The Church with a MissionAs our quotation of Luke 24 above indicated,

Jesus entrusted to the church a mission which is directly rooted in his own identity, passion, and vic-tory as the crucified and risen Messiah. Jesus imme-diately followed the text quoted with the words, “You are witnesses,” a mandate repeated in Acts 1:8: “You will be my witnesses.” It is almost certain that Luke intends us to hear in this an echo of the same words spoken by Yahweh to Israel in Isaiah 43:10-12:

You are my witnesses, declares the Lord, and my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed nor will there be one after me. I, even I, am the Lord, and apart from me there is no savior. I have revealed and saved and proclaimed—I, and not some foreign god among you. You are my witnesses, declares the Lord, that I am God.

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Israel knew the identity of the true and living God; therefore they were entrusted with bearing wit-ness to that in a world of nations and their gods. The disciples know the true identity of the cruci-fied and risen Jesus; therefore they are entrusted with bearing witness to that to the ends of the earth. Mission flows from the identity of God and his Christ.

Paul goes further and identifies the mission of his own small band of church planters with the international mission of the Servant, quoting Isaiah 49:6 in Acts 13:47 and saying quite bluntly, “[T]his is what the Lord has commanded us: ‘I have made you a light for the nations, that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’”5 So again, the mission of the church flows from the mission of God and the fulfillment of his purposes and his word. It is not so much, as someone has said, that God has a mission for his church in the world, as that God has a church for his mission in the world. Mission is not just something we do (though it certainly includes that). Mission, from the point of view of our human endeavor, means the commit-ted participation of God’s people in the purposes of God for the redemption of the whole creation. Mission, like salvation, belongs to our God and to the Lamb. We are those who are called to share in its accomplishment.

Putting these perspectives together, then, and summarizing what I have said above, a missiological hermeneutic means that we seek to read any part of the Bible:

(1) in light of God’s purpose for his whole cre-ation, including the redemption of humanity and the creation of the new heavens and new earth;

(2) in light of God’s purpose for human life in general on the planet, and of all the Bible teaches about human culture, relationships, ethics, and behavior;

(3) in light of God’s historical election of Israel, their identity and role in relation to the nations, and the demands he made on their

worship, social ethics, and total value system;(4) in light of the centrality of Jesus of Nazareth,

his messianic identity and mission in rela-tion to Israel and the nations, his cross and resurrection;

(5) in light of God’s calling of the church, the community of believing Jews and Gentiles who constitute the extended people of the Abrahamic covenant, to be the agent of God’s blessing to the nations in the name and for the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

a MIssIoloGIcal PersPectIve on the old testaMent

Evangelical Christians have traditionally had less of a problem reading the New Testament from a missional angle, which is hardly surprising given the dominance within the New Testament of the apostle Paul and his missionary travels and writ-ings. So in the rest of this essay I want to focus on how the above proposals can help us to develop a missiological reading of the Old Testament.

Certainly, preaching mission from the Old Tes-tament usually rouses people’s curiosity, mainly because it is unexpected. Many people, in my fre-quent experience, are surprised to hear a sermon on mission based on a text from the Old Testa-ment. “Mission” is widely viewed as a task origi-nating from some words of Jesus on the Mount of Ascension. It seems to involve sending off some-what peculiar but doubtless very worthy people to far-off parts of the earth to work for God in a bewildering variety of ways, and then to return from time to time to tell us about their adventures and ask for continued support. Since nothing of that sort seems to have happened in the Old Testa-ment (not even Jonah came home on furlough to raise funds for a return trip to Nineveh), mission is deemed “missing, presumed unborn” in that era.

A more sophisticated form of such a caricature is to be found in the way David Bosch, in his mag-isterial survey Transforming Mission, relegates the Old Testament’s contribution on mission to a sub-section of a chapter entitled “Reflections on the

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New Testament as a Missionary Document.”6 The Old Testament certainly provides essential theo-logical preparation for the emerging mission of the New Testament church, but Bosch defines mis-sion in terms of crossing barriers for the sake of the gospel (barriers of geography, culture, language, religion, and so on.). Since Israel received no man-date to go to the nations in that sense, there is, in Bosch’s view, no mission in the Old Testament.

Apart from observing that in fact there are many “barrier-crossing” episodes in the grand Old Testament story of Israel’s journey with Yah-weh which are worthy of missiological reflection, I would argue that Bosch has defined mission too narrowly. What follows is a brief survey of some of the key Old Testament themes, which con-tribute to the broadening of the idea of mission which I have argued for above. This is, to be clear once again, not a search for bits of the Old Tes-tament that might say something relevant to our narrowed concept of sending missionaries, but rather a sketch of some of the great trajectories of Israel’s understanding of their God and his mis-sion through them and for the world. We are not concerned about how the Old Testament gives incidental support to what we already do, but with the theology that undergirds the whole worldview that Christian mission assumes.

What we will merely sketch below are the mis-siological implications of four major pillars of Old Testament faith—monotheism, election, ethics, and eschatology. A great deal more could be fruit-fully explored in the same way.

The Uniqueness and Universality of Yahweh

According to the Old Testament texts, the faith of Israel made remarkable affirmations about Yah-weh, affirmations which had a polemical edge in their own context and still stand as distinctive claims. Among them are the declaration that Yah-weh alone is God, and there is no other (e.g., Deut 4:35, 39). As sole deity, it is Yahweh, therefore, who owns the world and runs the world (Deut

10:14, 27; Ps 24:1; Jer 27:1-12; 1 Chron 29:11). This ultimately means the radical displacement of all other rival gods and that Yahweh is God over the whole earth and all nations (e.g., Ps 96; Jer 10:1-16; Isa 43:9-13; 44:6-20). The impact of these claims is felt in such widely varying contexts as the struggle against idolatry, the language of worship, and the response to other nations, both in their own contemporary international history, and in eschatological vision.

There is no doubt that the strength of the Old Testament affirmations about the uniqueness and universality of Yahweh as God underlie, and indeed provide some of the vocabulary for, the New Testament affirmations about the uniqueness and universality of Jesus (cf. Phil 2:9-11, based on Isa 45:23; and 1 Cor 8:5-6, based on Deut 6:4). It is also noteworthy that these early Christian affirma-tions were equally polemical in their own histori-cal context as those of ancient Israel and in turn provided the primary rationale and motivation for Christian mission. We are dealing here with the missiological implications of biblical monotheism.

A fully biblical understanding of the universal-ity and uniqueness of Yahweh and of Jesus Christ stands in the frontline of a missiological response to the relativism at the heart of religious pluralism and some forms of postmodernist philosophy.

Yahweh’s Election of Israel for the Purpose of Blessing the Nations

The Old Testament begins on the stage of universal history. After the accounts of creation we read the story of God’s dealings with fallen humanity and the problem and challenge of the world of the nations (Gen 1-11). After the stories of the flood and of the Tower of Babel, could there be any future for the nations in relation to God? Or would judgment have to be God’s final word?

The story of Abraham, beginning in Genesis 12, gives a clear answer. God’s declared com-mitment is that he intends to bring blessing to the nations, “all the families of the earth will be blessed through you” (Gen 12:3). Repeated six

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times in Genesis alone, this key affirmation is the foundation of biblical mission, inasmuch as it pres-ents the mission of God. The creator God has a purpose, a goal, and it is nothing less than bless-ing the nations of humanity. So fundamental is this divine agenda that Paul defines the Genesis declaration as “the gospel in advance” (Gal 3:8). And the concluding vision of the whole Bible sig-nifies the fulfillment of the Abrahamic promise, as people from every nation, tribe, language, and people are gathered among the redeemed in the new creation (Rev 7:9). The gospel and mission both begin in Genesis, then, and both are located in the redemptive intention of the Creator to bless the nations. Mission is God’s address to the prob-lem of fractured humanity. And God’s mission is universal in its ultimate goal and scope.

The same Genesis texts which affirm the uni-versality of God’s mission to bless the nations also, and with equal strength, affirm the particularity of God’s election of Abraham and his descendants to be the vehicle of that mission. The election of Israel is assuredly one of the most fundamental pillars of the biblical worldview, and of Israel’s his-torical sense of identity.7 It is vital to insist that although the belief in their election could be (and was) distorted into a narrow doctrine of national superiority, that move was resisted in Israel’s own literature (e.g., Deut 7:7ff.). The affirmation is that Yahweh, the God who had chosen Israel, was also the creator, owner, and Lord of the whole world (Deut 10:14ff., cf. Exod 19:4-6). That is, he was not just “their God”—he was God of all (as Paul ham-mers home in Rom 4). Yahweh had chosen Israel in relation to his purpose for the world, not just for Israel. The election of Israel was not tantamount to a rejection of the nations, but explicitly for their ultimate benefit. If we might paraphrase John, in a way he would probably have accepted, “God so loved the world that he chose Israel.”

Thus, rather than asking if Israel itself “had a mission,” in the sense of being “sent” anywhere (anachronistically injecting our “sending mission-aries” paradigm again), we need to see the mis-

sional nature of Israel’s existence in relation to the mission of God in the world. Israel’s mission was to be something, not to go somewhere. This per-spective is clearly focused in the person of the Ser-vant of Yahweh, who both embodies the election of Israel (identical things are said about Israel and the Servant), and also is charged with the mission (like Israel’s) of bringing the blessing of Yahweh’s justice, salvation and glory to the ends of the earth.

The Ethical Dimension of Israel’s “Visibility” Among the Nations

Naturally, then, there is an enormous amount of interest in the Old Testament around the way in which Israel related to the nations. It is far from being a simple relationship. On the one hand, there is the ultimate vision of Israel being a blessing to the nations. On the other hand, there is the calling for Israel to be separate from them, to resist their idolatry, to avoid their wickedness, to reject their gods and their ways. At the same time, Israel was a nation among other nations in the broad sweep of ancient Near Eastern macro-culture, and so there is considerable missiological interest in the variety of ways in which the faith of Israel related positively and negatively to the cultures of other nations over the centuries. For example, we could give much more missiological attention to the different responses of the patriarchal narratives to their surrounding culture; of the Deuteronomic materials to Canaanite culture; of the prophets to the relationship between Israel’s experiment with royalty (king and temple) and Canaanite parallels; of the exilic and post-exilic communities to the world of Mesopotamian and Persian religion and culture; and these are just some of the possibilities.8

Later, covenantal obedience is not only based on Israel’s historical redemption out of Egypt, but also linked to their identity, and the major point of interest here is—in its shortest expression—the missiological dimension of Israel’s holiness. Israel was called to be distinctive from the surrounding world in ways that were not merely religious but

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also ethical. This is expressed as the very purpose of their election in relation to God’s promise to bless the nations in Genesis 18:19. In the context of, and in stark contrast to, the world of Sodom and Gomorrah, Yahweh says of Abraham, “I have chosen him so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him” (Gen 18:19). This verse, in a remarkably tight syntax, binds together election, ethics, and mission as three interlocking aspects of God’s purpose. His choice of Abraham is for the sake of his promise (to bless the nations); but the accomplishment of that demands the ethical obedience of his community—the fulcrum in the middle of the verse.

Later, covenantal obedience is not only based on Israel’s historical redemption out of Egypt, but also linked to their identity and role as a priestly and holy people in the midst of the nations in Exodus 19:4-6. As Yahweh’s priesthood, Israel would be the means by which God would be known to the nations and the means of bringing them to God (performing a function analogous to the role of Israel’s own priests between God and the rest of the people). As a holy people, they would be ethically (as well as ritually) distinctive from the practices of surrounding nations. The moral and practical dimensions of such holy distinctiveness are spelled out in Leviticus 18-19. Such visibility would be a matter of observation and comment among the nat ions, and that expectation in itself was a strong motivation for keeping the law (Deut 4:6-8). The question of Israel’s ethical obedience or ethical failure was not merely a matter between themselves and Yahweh, but was of major significance in relation to Yahweh’s agenda for the nations (cf. Jer 4:1-2).

T h i s m i ss iolog ic a l per s pec t ive on Old Testament ethics seems to me a fruitful approach to the age-old hermeneutical debate over whether and how the moral teaching given to Israel in the Old Testament (especially the law), has any

authority or relevance to Christians. If, as I believe, it was given in order to shape Israel to be what they were called to be—a light to the nations, a holy priesthood—then it has a paradigmatic relevance to those who, in Christ, have inherited the same role in relation to the nations. In the Old as well as the New Testament, the ethical demand on those who claim to be God’s people is determined by the mission with which they have been entrusted.

Eschatalogical Vision: The Ingathering of the Nations

Israel saw the nations (including themselves) as being subject to the sovereign rule of God in history—whether in judgment or in mercy. This is a dimension of the Old Testament faith that we need to get our minds around, since it does not sit very congenially with our tendency to a very individualistic and pietistic form of spirituality (cf. Jer 18:1-10; Jonah). But Israel also thought of the nations as “spectators” of all God’s dealings with Israel—whether positively or negatively. That is, whether on the receiving end of God’s deliverance or the blows of his judgment, Israel lived on an open stage, and the nations would draw their con-clusions (Exod 15:15; Deut 9:28; Ezek 36:16-23).

Eventually, however, and in a rather mysteri-ous way, the nations could be portrayed as the beneficiaries of all that God had done in and for Israel, and were even invited to rejoice, applaud, and praise Yahweh the God of Israel (Ps 47; 1 Kgs 8:41-43; Ps 67). And, most remarkable of all, Israel came to entertain the eschatological vision that there would be those of the nations who would not merely be joined to Israel, but would come to be identified as Israel, with the same names, privi-leges, and responsibilities before God (Ps 47:9; Isa 19:19-25; 56:2-8; 66:19-21; Zech 2:10-11; Amos 9:11-12).9

These texts are quite breathtaking in their universal scope. This is the dimension of Israel’s prophetic heritage that most profoundly inf lu-enced the theological explanation and motivation of the Gentile mission in the New Testament. It

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certainly underlies James’s interpretation of the Christ-event and the success of the Gentile mis-sion in Acts 15 (quoting Amos 9:12). And it like-wise inspired Paul’s efforts as a practitioner and theologian of mission (e.g., Rom 15:7-16). And, as we saw earlier, it provided the theological shape for the Gospels, all of which conclude with their vari-ous forms of the Great Commission—the sending of Jesus’ disciples into the world of nations.

And finally, of course, we cannot omit the even wider vision that not only the nations, but also the whole creation will be included in God’s pur-poses of redemption. For this God of Israel, of the nations, and of the world, declares himself to be creating a new heavens and a new earth, with a pic-ture of a redeemed humanity living in safety, har-mony, and environmental peace within a renewed creation. Again, this is a portrait enthusiastically endorsed in the New Testament and sustains our hope today (Ps 96:11-13; Isa 65:17-25; Rom 8:18-21; 2 Pet 3:13; Rev 21:1-5).

conclusIonMuch more could be said, taking up other major

themes of the Old Testament and reading them from the perspective of the missional purpose of God for his people and his world. From this angle also individual stories, events, persons, and insti-tutions come to have an added significance. At least I trust this sketch may have touched on some of what Jesus had in mind when he asserted that the mission of bringing the good news of repen-tance and forgiveness in his name to the nations is nothing less than what is written in the Scriptures that pointed to himself.

ENDNOTES 1This article is based on my much larger work, The

Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Dow ners Grove, I L: InterVarsit y, 2006), and contains some edited excerpts from it.

2Another curious thought: I could have done precisely the same job in a college in England, but that would not have been considered “mission.”

3C. R. Taber, “Missiology and the Bible,” Missiology 11 (1983): 232.

4Marion Soards surveys four current issues in New Testament studies (first-century Judaism, the life of Jesus, Pauline theolog y, and the character of the early church), and shows how they are relevant to mission studies also. But he concludes with a converse comment in l ine with the point being made here: “Mission studies should remind biblical scholars that many of the writings that we study (often in painstaking and even painful detail) came to be because of the reality of mission. An awareness of, and a concern with, the key issues of mission studies may well help biblical studies find foci that will bring deeper appreciation of the meaning of the Bible.” M. L. Soards, “Key Issues in Biblical Studies and Their Bearing on Mission Studies,” Missiology 24 (1996): 107. With this I fully agree. See also A. J. Köstenberger, “The Place of Mission in New Testament Theology: An Attempt to Determine the Significance of Mission within the Scope of the New Testament’s Message as a Whole,” Missiology 27 (1999): 347-62, and the works referred to there.

5A missiological hermeneutic of the Old Testament if ever there was one! As the NIV footnote shows, Paul has no problem applying the singular “you,” which was spoken to the Servant, to the plural “us.”

6David J. Bosch, Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991). The relevant words are, “There is, in the Old Testament, no indication of the believers of the old covenant being sent by God to cross geographical, religious, and social frontiers in order to win others to faith in Yahweh.… Even so, the Old Testament is fundamental to the understanding of mission in the New” (17).

7This has been shown very clearly, and in a way which underlines its importance for the whole mission of the biblical God through the people of God for the world, in the works of N. T. Wright, especially his New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 244-79, and Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996).

8Walter Brueggemann is one of very few Old Testament

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scholars who has given serious and detailed attention to the nations as a theological reality in the Old Testament. See Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997), 492-527.

9See Acts 15:16-18; Eph 2:11-3:6.

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“To All The Nations”: The Great Commission Passages in the Gospels and ActsChuck Lawless

Chuck Law less serves as Vice President for Global Theological Advance at the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Prior to this, Dr. Lawless was dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to numerous scholarly essays and articles, Dr. Lawless is the author of several books, including Membership Matters: Insights from Effective Churches on New Member Classes and Assimilation (Zondervan, 2005), and Discipled Warriors: Growing Healthy Churches That Are Equipped for Spiritual Warfare (Kregel, 2002).

The wor ds of Charles Spurgeon often cause me to halt whatever I am doing, think seri-

ously about my responsibility, and repent of my apathy. Seldom are the words as gripping, though,

as these words spoken to his Pas-tor’s College Annual Conference in 1874:

I plead this day for those who can-not plead for themselves, namely, the great outlying masses of the heathen world. Our existing pul-pits are tolerably well supplied, but we need men who will build on new foundations. W ho wil l do this? Are we, as a company of faithful men, clear in our con-sciences about the heathen? Mil-lions have never heard the Name of Jesus. Hundreds of millions have seen a missionary only once in their l ives, and k now noth-

ing of our King. Shall we let them perish? Can we go to our beds and sleep, while China, India, Japan, other nations are being damned?1

This masterful nineteenth-century English preacher was a wordsmith like few others, espe-cially when speaking about the Great Commis-sion. Spurgeon stated these words almost 150 years ago, but they remain relevant and challeng-ing today. Rarely has the church seen the opportu-nity we have today to take the gospel to the ends of the earth.

If Spurgeon’s words grip us, however, those words pale when compared to the words of the Lord Jesus. When he speaks, our response should be humble gratitude and unquestioned obedience simply because he is the Son of God. It was he, the one in whom “all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form” (Col 2:9), who uttered the mandate that is the focus of this article—the command commonly known as the “Great Commission” (Matt 28:16-20; Mark 16:15; Luke 24:45-49;

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 16-26.

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John 20:19-23; Acts1:6-8).2 Spoken at least four times from the lips of Jesus, the Great Commis-sion clearly matters to God.

The primary purpose of this article is to review Jesus’ varied expressions of the Great Commission in the Gospels and Acts, focusing on the author-ity of Christ, the command to make disciples, the primacy of proclamation, and the empowerment of the disciples. A secondary goal is to offer sug-gestions for local church leaders who seek to lead Great Commission churches.

the authorIty of chrIstBoth the repetition and the location of the

Great Commission passages imply seriousness and significance behind the commission. All four of the Gospels include some type of statement of sending, going, or proclaiming near the end, suggesting a climactic purpose behind the tex-tual positioning. Acts 1:8 differs, of course, but that text serves more as a rough outline and theme verse of Luke’s second volume than it does a cli-max.3 That difference notwithstanding, it is unde-niable that near the end of his ministry, and at the beginning of the church’s mission, Christ called believers to take the gospel to the nations.

The best known and most quoted expression of the Great Commission is Matthew 28:16-20:

But the eleven disciples proceeded to Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had designated. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some were doubtful. And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I com-manded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”4

More than one writer has noted that these final verses of Matthew’s Gospel summarize his cen-tral themes, including the authority of Christ, the

universality of the gospel, the necessity of disciple-ship, the significance of worship and faith, and the power of the abiding presence of Christ.5 More specifically, the one who is the fulfillment of the covenants and prophecies of the Old Testament now is the center of a message to be carried to the ends of the earth.

In this Matthean passage, the one who spoke the commission is the one who had been given “all authority” (28:18) to do so. The authority of Christ is not a new theme in this Gospel (see, e.g., Matt 7:29; 10:1, 7-8; 11:27; 22:43-44; 24:35). His power to defeat the devil (4:1-11), to teach like no other (7:28-29), to calm nature (8:23-27), to for-give sin (9:1-8), and to heal the sick (9:27-31) had already been established. In what is likely a refer-ence to the Son of Man imagery of Daniel 7:13-14, he is now the resurrected one before whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord (Phil 2:9-11). The Father has now granted him authority over all of heaven and earth.6 He had, and has, “the divine right, as ruler over all, to give all Christians their marching orders.”7

A similar sense of authority, albeit described differently, is depicted in John’s Great Commis-sion text. In John’s Gospel, Jesus is the one with authority to send the disciples, even as the Father had sent him (John 20:21, cf. 17:18). Jesus came to earth to fulfill the Father’s purpose—a purpose tied inextricably to the message of atonement that the disciples carry to the nations. The world needs to hear that the Son is also the Savior:

Jesus saw a close identification between him-self and his Father. He spoke regularly of the Father’s having sent him. He and the Father are one, and so the work that the Son did was also the work of the Father. Jesus came for the purpose of giving his life as a ransom, a means of liberating those people who were enslaved to sin. He offered himself as a substitute for them.8

Moreover, he who had been the one sent is now the sender. Andreas Köstenberger, in his study on

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the “sending” motif of John’s gospel, concludes that Jesus as the sent one was to bring glory and honor to the sender, do the sender’s will by work-ing his works and speaking his words, witness to the sender and represent him accurately, and know the sender intimately by living in relationship with him and following his example.9 Now, Jesus is the one sending, and the disciples’s “relationship to their sender, Jesus, is to reflect Jesus’ relationship with his sender, the Father.”10

The Word who became flesh (John 1:1-14) has the authority to require as much. In the words of Christopher Wright, “the identity and the author-ity of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen, is the cosmic indicative on which the mission impera-tive stands authorized.”11 That is, we do the Great Commission because the l iv ing Son of God demands that we do so.

Properly teaching this foundational truth would likely change the commitment of most local churches to the Great Commission. Per-haps believers are less obedient to the Great Commission because they do not fully recognize the nature of the one who gave the command. If Christ is perceived as less than the Son of God before whom all will be judged (2 Cor 5:10), his words lose their force; a low Christology leads to a diminished Great Commission focus. On the other hand, truly knowing the majesty and power of the Son should lead to a deep desire to proclaim his name—and consequently, an uncompromised obedience to his Matthew 28 command.

the coMMand to Make dIscIPles

Matthew records that the risen Jesus met with his disciples on a mountain in Galilee, thus con-tinuing the theme of mountaintop events in Mat-thew’s gospel (14:23; 15:29; 17:1; 24:3; 26:30). Jesus’ mandate to them was clear: “ go and make disciples of all nations.” The imperative—the command—in the text is “make disciples” rather than “go.” “Go” is better translated as the parti-cipial phrase, “As you are going” or “having gone,”

suggesting that the disciples were to make dis-ciples wherever they were, in any context and with any people.

That is not to say, however, that “go” loses its imperatival force or international focus in this case. D. A. Carson’s analysis is helpful here. Not only does a participle used in this fashion often function as a command, but “in a context that demands that this ministry extend to ‘all nations,’ it is difficult to believe that ‘go’ has lost all impera-tival force.”12 In Wright’s words, “they [the dis-ciples] will have to go to the nations as a necessary condition of obeying the primary command” to make disciples.13

That is, the disciples are not to wait for non-believers to come to them; rather, they are to take the initiative to evangelize. Such evangelism models the heart of God, whose Son came to his own, became f lesh, and dwelt among us (John 1:11, 14). He who died for us while we were yet sinners (Rom 5:8) demands that his followers take that good news to the ends of the earth. Through that ministry, believers from the corners of the globe will enter the kingdom (Matt 8:11).

“And Make Disciples”The task is not finished with evangelizing, how-

ever. “Make disciples” is an equally non-negotia-ble element of the Great Commission. Indeed, the process includes leading a non-believer to trust in Christ and repent from sin, followed by directing that new Christian in the lifelong task of walking with Christ in obedience. The former is marked by baptism, and the latter is accomplished through teaching (28:19). New Testament scholar Rob-ert Plummer describes this responsibility of the church as follows:

The apostles must bring persons to the point where they knowingly and publicly align them-selves with Jesus Christ by declaring their faith through baptism (Matt 28:19). This baptism is in “the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”—implying that the one being

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baptized has come to know God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That is, the convert is not one unwillingly immersed, but one who has entered into conscious relationship with the triune God. The apost les are to teach the converts e ver y t h i ng t h at Je s u s h a s c om m a nde d (Matt 28:20). If the young converts are to become mature disciples, they must continue to be schooled in the apostles’ teaching—enabled by Christ’s indwelling Spirit to love God and love neighbor (Matt 22:37-40).14

The goal is that those who follow Christ will live like Christ and lead others to do the same. Believers are to be “learners commanded to pro-duce more learners.”15 Hence, a process of making disciples that ends with only the conversion of the evangelized is incomplete at best, disobedient at worst. In fact, the results of this omission can be disastrous. Untaught believers are ill equipped to face trials, untrained to recognize false teachings, and unprepared to teach others. They quickly become easy prey for an enemy who seeks to devour them (1 Pet 5:8).

Here, the contemporary church faces at least three issues. First, most local churches are doing neither evangelism nor discipleship strategi-cally. For example, an increasingly lower number of baptisms in the Southern Baptist churches at least implies that we are neither evangelizing nor raising up believers committed to evangelism.16 Carrying out both components of the Great Com-mission is biblically required, but doing both begins with doing at least one of the two. The inherent struggle with balancing evangelism and discipleship is non-existent if neither is occurring in the first place.

Second, where evangelizing is taking place, follow-up discipleship is often neglected. Baptiz-ing in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit may be occurring, but teaching to follow all that Jesus commanded somehow gets lost in the process. The result is now multi-generational spiritual weak-ness: undiscipled believers are serving as leaders in

our churches, and they are doing little to disciple the newest believers. Great Commission obedi-ence is seldom found in believers who should be eating the meat of God’s word, but who are still feeding on the milk (cf. 1 Cor 3:1-3, Heb 5:12).

Third, young pastors seeking to correct this problem must be aware of the danger of empha-sizing discipleship to the neglect of evangelism. Clearly, the problem must be addressed, but teaching and training alone produce a classroom more than a New Testament church. Genuine discipleship turns out believers committed to doing everything Jesus commanded—including evangelism.

the call to the “natIons”Jesus’ disciples heard this command on the

mountain: they were to make disciples of “all the nations” (panta ta ethnē). Luke’s Gospel (24:47) also employs the same phrase, where Jesus chal-lenged his disciples to proclaim the word to all the nations. Though not using the term “nations,” Mark ’s call to “go into all the world” (16:15) echoes a similar mandate.

Scholars have understood the term “nations” here in at least two ways.17 Some understand the term as referring only to Gentiles, an interpre-tation likely built on a belief that God had ulti-mately rejected the Jews who had first rejected him. Others view “nations” as “peoples” or “ethnic groups.” Gentiles and Jews alike would have thus been included in this call. The gospel would be for all the world, not only the lost sheep of Israel (Matt 10:6).

The latter interpretation best captures the intent of Matthew 28, the concluding chapter in a book that shows God’s concern for the world. God’s love for Israel is evident throughout this book (9:36; 10:5-6; 15:24). In fact, the Gospel of Matthew is about God’s fulfilling his covenant with Abraham; the blessings through the patri-arch would come to all families of the earth (Gen 12:3) through Jesus. At the same time, Matthew’s Gospel illustrates God’s concern for non-Jews,

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including magi (2:1-12), a Roman centurion (8:5-13), and a Syro-Pheonician woman (15:22-28). Included in the genealogy of Jesus were at least two women—Rahab and Ruth—who were Gen-tiles (1:5). Jesus’ Great Commission words in Mat-thew 28 could thus be viewed, argues Wright, as “a christological mutation of the original Abrahamic commission—‘Go … and be a blessing … and all nations of the earth will be blessed through you.’”18

Additionally, as John Piper has so thoroughly shown, the best interpretation of panta ta ethnē is “all the people groups” rather than “Gentile indi-viduals” or “countries.”19 Piper’s argument is based on word study and biblical teachings. Regarding the former, he points out that the singular form of ethnos in the New Testament always means peo-ple group or nation, and the phrase panta ta ethnē more often refers to people groups or is ambiguous in meaning than to Gentile individuals. Regard-ing the latter, Piper concludes that the Old Tes-tament promise to Abraham to bless the nations (Gen 18:18; 22:18; 26:4)—later referred to in the New Testament (e.g., Gal 3:6-8)—forms the basis for a people group focus in the church’s mission. Piper’s arguments are not limited to these noted, but all of his arguments lead to this conclusion: “In all likelihood, Jesus did not send his apostles out with a general mission merely to win as many individuals as they could but rather to reach all the peoples of the world and thus to gather the ‘sons of God’ who are scattered.”20

One should not deduce, however, that group conversion must be the only goal of the church. Group conversions can happen, particularly in tribal settings, but the text itself does not demand that. Both Craig Blomberg and Hal Freeman have pointed out that a shift from the neuter word ethnē (“nations”) to the masculine pronoun autous (“them”) in verse 19 indicates that “them” refers to individuals rather than nations.21 The mandate, then, is to make disciples of individuals from all people groups of the world.

Luke’s Gospel (24:47) and Acts (1:8) describe this task geographically, with the church begin-

ning its work in Jerusalem and extending to the ends of the earth. There the gospel would first be proclaimed in Jewish territory, but would be fol-lowed by ever-broadening proclamation to the peoples of the world. The starting point of Jeru-salem reflects not only a Lukan emphasis on the Holy City, but also “the reversal of the mission-ary movement from centripetal [in the Old Testa-ment] to centrifugal, as indicated in Acts 1:8.”22 The church would now take the initiative to go to the nations, as evidenced in this reminder of the Great Commission texts:

(1) Matthew 28:19, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.”

(2) Mark 16:15, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.”

(3) Luke 24:45, “repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations.”

(4) Acts 1:8, “…and even to the remotest part of the earth.”

Southern Baptists who are aware of the Inter-national Mission Board’s work will recognize the people group approach in the current EMBRACE emphasis. International Mission Board presi-dent Tom Elliff has challenged all SBC churches to embrace one of 3,800 unengaged, unreached people groups. These people groups are less than 2 percent reached with the gospel, and no one is known to be currently engaging them with an intentional church planting strategy.23 The goal—to get the gospel to all individuals in all people groups who have not heard—ref lects the New Testament emphasis on reaching people groups.

Emphasizing people groups is not limited to international fields, however. Current research reveals that 584 unengaged, unreached people groups are also represented in North Amer-ica.24 Given that most will be found in urban settings—where more than 80 percent of the population of North America now reside—the opportunities for touching the globe while serv-

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ing Christ on this continent abound.25

Such an emphasis may well be a starting point for turning a church toward the Great Commis-sion. In my almost 15 years as a church consultant, I have seen two significant issues that stand in the way of a church’s growth—a lack of outward focus, and a failure to plan strategically. Though they would not be inclined to admit it, many churches focus only on meeting internal needs, with little regard for the non-believing world around them. In addition, many operate with no long-term vision or strategy, choosing instead to function on a Sunday-to-Sunday basis. An intentional com-mitment to engage a specific people group will demand improvements in both areas.

the centr alIty of ProclaMatIon

The Gospel of Luke ends with this challenging directive:

Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and He said to them, “Thus it is writ-ten, that the Christ would suffer and rise again from the dead the third day, and that repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending forth the promise of My Father upon you; but you are to stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:44-49).

Surprising two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus, Jesus taught them about himself as revealed in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms; that is, he taught them that the Old Testament is itself a book about him. As one writer has summarized, “The Old Testament—they would see now with the new light cast upon it—showed the necessity of an atoning Redeemer, from the sin which it everywhere reveals, and of a dying Redeemer, from the death which it pro-claims as the consequence.”26

He who opened their eyes to him (Luke 24:31) also opened their minds (24:45) to understand the Scriptures he explained (or “opened”) to them (24:32). Jesus led them to understand (1) that the Old Testament speaks of his suffering and resur-rection (e.g., Ps 22; Isa 53) and, (2) to see his story in those writings. He likely taught them that the message of calling the nations to him is a clarion call in that same testament (e.g., Ps 67; Isa 42:6; 49:6; 60:3; Acts 26:22–23).

Proclaiming Repentance and Forgiveness

Luke 24:47 best states the author’s understand-ing of the Great Commission: “repentance for forgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusa-lem.” The reader will likely recognize that Luke’s expression is similar to the debatable passage in Mark (“preach the gospel to all creation”) and to the thematic verse of Acts 1:8 (“you shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem … and to the ends of the earth”). Though not directly addressing the Lukan passage, William Hendrickson’s under-standing of John 17:18 and 20:21 ties the Johan-nine Great Commission text to Luke as well:

The two comparisons [between the Father’s sending the Son, and the Son’s sending the dis-ciples] blend into one idea, which is this: just as the Father has sent Jesus into the world with a message, so also Jesus has sent the disciples into the world with a message.27

Without question, proclamation—that is, ver-bally speaking the message—is essential to doing the Great Commission. That should not be sur-prising, if indeed one believes Romans 10:14—“How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher?” Apart from hearing the gospel, no person in any people group of the world can be saved; thus, proclaiming the word

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is imperative. As Piper has rightly noted, “The frontline of missions is the preaching of the Word of God, the gospel.”28

This gospel is a gospel of suffering and death—the death of the Son of God who had to die and rise again to fulfill Scripture and to bring redemp-tion to a lost world. His death was the means by which forgiveness of sins would be offered, and repentance would be a necessary step in gaining that pardon. Through preaching this gospel, Jesus’ disciples would “announce the news that will divide for eternity the forgiven from the unfor-given.”29 Some would find forgiveness through faith and repentance; others would remain unfor-given in rebellion (John 20:23). In a first-century world that was haunted by unresolved guilt over wrong, the forgiveness Jesus offered was surely a welcomed answer to some.30

At the same time, this combination of repen-tance and forgiveness—common in the Luke/Acts volumes (see Luke 24:47; Acts 5:31; 8:22)—undoubtedly shows that forgiveness does not come apart from repentance. The disciples were to echo John the Baptist (Matt 3:1-2; Mark 1:4) and Jesus himself (Matt 4:17) in demanding repen-tance even as they proclaimed forgiveness. The contemporary church that has been so reticent to demand repentance would be wise to take note of this mandate again. Preaching without a call to repent is not Great Commission preaching.

The disciples were also “witnesses” (here and in Acts 1:8 understood to be those who had seen the events described and could testify to them), and their witness added credibility to their message. In the sermonic words of the preacher Warren Wiersbe, the disciples were to be “both preach-ers (heralds of a message) and witnesses (sharers of an experience) of what the Lord had done for them and said to them.”31 This they are to do in the power and authority of his name, and this they did throughout the book of Acts (e.g., Acts 2:38; 3:6, 16; 4:10, 12, 17-18, 30; 5:28, 40; 8:12, 16; 9:27-28; 10:43, 48; 16:18; 19:5). In the name of Jesus people would be saved and disciples made.

At least two challenges for the local church come to mind. First, church leaders must honestly consider how clearly and recurrently we proclaim the good news of Jesus. In some cases, messages address needs but not our greatest need: the need for a forgiving Savior. In other cases, preaching is so dominated by what we stand against that the lost world never fully hears the good news. Nei-ther sermon is a Great Commission sermon; the former never gets to the real problem, and the lat-ter never gets to the answer.

Second, young preachers increasingly inter-ested in social justice and New Testament social ministry (and rightly so) must remember that it is the word of the cross that is the power of God unto salvation (1 Cor 1:18). We older leaders who wrongly backed away from social ministry for fear of losing our evangelistic focus have much to learn from the younger generation here—but all of us must fight to keep primary the proclamation of the gospel. Much more common than a return to gospel-centered preaching is a subtle slide away from it.

the eMPower Ment of the dIscIPles

Most str ik ing in the Great Commission texts covered in this article are the surrounding accounts of the disciples’s behavior and thinking. In Matthew’s Gospel, at least the eleven remain-ing disciples (and perhaps more of his followers) gathered at the mountain Jesus had designated (28:16). When they saw him, some worshipped him and some were doubtful (28:17). Scholars dif-fer about the number of followers present, and not all commentators agree on the nature of the doubt in the crowd. Nevertheless, it is possible that some of the eleven worshipped the risen Christ, while others “were less sure how to react.”32 Some sim-ply struggled to accept the resurrection.

Mark’s account, while disputed, still reflects a similar teaching of the remaining Gospels: the dis-ciples were slow to learn. Indeed, Mark indicates that some did not believe Mary’s report about the

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resurrection (16:11), and some refused to believe the two disciples to whom Jesus appeared while they were walking (16:12-13). Disbelief in a resur-rection might seem sensible, but Jesus reproached the eleven “for their unbelief and hardness of heart” (16:14). In the very next verse, though, he calls these same men to preach the gospel to all creation!

Luke’s Great Commission passage is also pre-ceded by stories of disciples who struggled to believe the resurrection (24:13-27, 36-39). The account in John 20 is sandwiched by descriptions of disciples who hid for fear of the Jews (20:19) and one disciple—Thomas—who was unwilling to believe the resurrection without seeing Jesus (20:24-25). These were, it would seem, not the best men to trust with the responsibility of the Great Commission.

Even the book of Acts reveals a group of men who did not fully comprehend yet. The doubts of the veracity of the resurrection are not apparent, but these same disciples were seemingly more focused on the nationalized kingdom of Israel than on God’s kingdom (Acts 1:6). One can only surmise that their contemplations about their own potential roles in the kingdom distracted them from the work at hand—world evangelization.

Nevertheless, these unworthy and doubting disciples were still the same men that Jesus had called out to be fishers of men (Mark 1:17). They remained the center of his plan to spread the gos-pel. That sovereign choice was a grace-filled and love-saturated one:

This little group of ordinary men were to go to all the nations of the earth and turn their hearers into disciples of Jesus like themselves! They were having a hard time believing in Him even though they had been with Him for three years and had lived through all the extraordinary events of His ministry and, in particular, of these past few weeks with His death and resurrection. Yet this little group who were so slow to believe were to convert the nations of the earth!33

The task, however, would not be easy. The cost of doing the commission would be high for these disciples. Persecution would always hang in the air. Rejection, imprisonment, and death would not be uncommon. In fact, this call to make dis-ciples of all nations was “truly a staggering propo-sition that would verge on the ridiculous were it not for the accompanying authority and promise of the risen Christ, who gives the commission.”34 Jesus knew all of this, though, and he recurrently promised the disciples the power needed to be faithful even unto death.

Presence and PowerHence, the promise of Jesus at the end of Mat-

thew, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt 28:20), was much more than a perfunctory closing to a call statement. It was an announcement of victory even in the midst of per-secution. In all of these dangerous situations, the disciples would need to trust the bookend truths of Matthew’s gospel: the virgin-born redeemer named “God with us” (1:27) would be with them to the end (28:20). Indeed, “Every disciple who has gone out in the strength of this promise can testify that it has always proven true. From high-est mountain to deepest valley, in joy and in sor-row, in life and in death, not one of his disciples has he ever forsaken!”35

The Lukan account is even more arresting. Jesus called his disciples to proclaim the message to all the nations, promised to empower them by sending the Spirit, and then ordered them to wait in Jerusalem until they were “clothed with power from on high” (24:49). No steps would be taken, no decisions would be made, and no ministries would launch out apart from the power of God’s Spirit. With God’s Spirit, though, these same weak disciples would play a role in taking the gospel to the center of the Roman Empire.

The Great Commission account in John’s Gos-pel begins with Jesus’ announcing “peace be with you” to a group of frightened disciples (20:19). Their having apparently not fully recognized

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him, he showed them his pierced hands and side and then announced “peace” to them a second time. This repetition was surely not coinciden-tal. Rather, this double greeting, likely based on the Hebrew tradition of “shalom,” was a reminder that the one who commissioned them knew their heart. He who had purchased peace for them through the cross recognized their fears and anxi-ety. He was nonetheless about to send them out into the world—but not alone.

Rather, he “breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (20:22). Interpretations of this act differ. Whether the action was a fore-shadowing of coming Pentecost or a marker for the conversion of the disciples, it seems clear that the action symbolized empowerment for minis-try. Not only does this understanding of John’s Great Commission passage square with the other passages studied in this article, but it also ties the action most clearly to the disciples’s stated minis-try (John 20:23). Only in the power of the Spirit could the disciples pronounce forgiveness or judg-ment on others.

A brief review of this section is in order here. The men mandated first to carry out the Great Commission were often self-centered. They doubted. They were jealous of others at times. They allowed fear to grip them. They f led. And still, Jesus gave them the responsibility to get the gospel to all people. He did so not because he believed they could get the task done; instead, he did it because he knew what the Spirit could do through them. Luke’s second volume would thus undeniably show that the promised Spirit empow-ered the church as they proclaimed the good news (Acts 1:8; 2:4).39

This truth ought to serve as both encourage-ment and warning for the contemporary church. We should rejoice that God can use anyone in the task of the Great Commission. He who chose the disciples has also chosen us, in spite of who we are. This profound reality reminds us that none of us is given permission to ignore the Great Commis-sion. We have no excuse not to do it if God has

sent his Spirit to get the job done. The danger is that we will program and strate-

gize the Great Commission until we are relying on our plans and know-how more than on God. Pro-grams are important. Strategy matters. Training is imperative. Plans help guard against an enemy who schemes against us (Eph 6:11). But plans and programs apart from power will not reach the peo-ple groups of the world. The breath of God must blow across our efforts if we want to make a Great Commission difference.

conclusIonThe numbers are staggering. According to the

Joshua Project, 2.8 billion people make up the unreached people groups of the world.36 More than 41 percent of the world’s people groups remain unreached. 37 We have a lready seen that 3,800 people groups are unengaged and unreached. In North America, a 2010 Barna study concluded that approximately 100 million Ameri-cans had not attended any church activities within the previous six months.38 Can believers make a genuine difference in this darkness?

We can indeed, for we do this work in God’s power and under God’s promise.40 Charles Spur-geon, whose sermon of missionary challenge began this article, is the best one to conclude this article with a resounding word of hope:

I think that no true hearted Christian will ever give up any enterprise which God has laid upon him, because he fears for its ultimate success. “Difficult,” said Napoleon, “is not a French word.” “Doubtful,” is not a Christian word. We are sure to succeed; the gospel must conquer. It is possible for heaven and earth to pass away, but it is not possible for God’s Word to fail; and there-fore it is utterly impossible that any nation, or kindred, or tongue should to the end withstand the attacks of love, and the invasion of the armies of King Jesus.41

God will, in fact, draw to himself a multitude from

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every nation, tribe, people, and tongue (Rev 5:9; 7:9). Armed with that truth, let us press on with the task.

ENDNOTES 1Charles Spurgeon, “Forward!” in An All-Round Min-

istry (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2000), 55-56. 2Included in these texts is Mark 16:15. This discussion

inevitably raises the question of the original ending of Mark’s Gospel. See Perspectives on the Ending of the Gospel of Mark: Four Views, (ed. David Allen Black; Nashville: B&H, 2008). The space limitations of this article prohibit tackling this complicated issue suffi-ciently. For the purposes of this article, I have chosen to include Mark 16:15 because it generally reflects the remaining unquestioned texts.

3John Polhill, Acts (New American Commentary; Nashville: Broadman, 1992), 87.

4Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture references in the article are from the New American Standard Version.

5Craig Blomberg, Matthew (New American Commen-tary; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2001), 429; Ian Campbell, Opening up Matthew (Leominster: Day One, 2008), 176-78.

6D. A. Carson, Matthew 13-28 (Expositor’s Bible Com-mentary; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984), 594. Carson argues that the authority granted here was not an increase in authority, but rather an enlarge-ment of the spheres of authority.

7A. Scott Moreau, Gary R . Corwin, and Gary B. McGee, Introducing World Missions: A Biblical, His-torical, and Practical Survey (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004), 44.

8Millard J. Erickson, Introducing Christian Doctrine (ed. L. Arnold Hustad; 2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 260.

9Andreas J. Köstenberger, The Missions of Jesus and the Disciples According to the Fourth Gospel: With Implica-tions for the Fourth Gospel’s Purpose and the Mission of the Contemporary Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 191, 108.

10Ibid., 192. 11Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlock-

ing the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), 60.

12F. E. Gaebelein, D. A Carson, et al., eds., Matthew, Mark, Luke (Expositor’s Bible Commentary; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 595.

13Wright, Mission of God, 35.14Robert L. Plummer, “The Great Commission in the

New Testament,” The Southern Baptist Journal of The-ology 9 (2005): 4. Plummer also points out that the command was to teach all that Jesus commanded—thus including the Great Commission itself. If the students of the disciples were themselves to do the commission, the argument that the Matthew 28:18-20 was intended for only the disciples has little credibility.

15S. K. Weber, Matthew (Holman New Testament Commentary; Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2000), 485.

16Lee Warner, “Southern Baptist Baptisms at Lowest in Decades” [cited 12 July 2011]. Online: http://www.christianpost.com/news/southern-baptist-baptisms-at-lowest-in-decades-51060/.

17Blomberg, Matthew, 431.18Wright, Mission of God, 213. 19John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad: The Supremacy of

God in Missions (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), 210-11.20Ibid., 211.21Blomberg, Matthew, 432; Hal Freeman, “The Great

Commission and the New Testament: An Exegesis of Matthew 28:16-20,” The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 1 (1997): 18.

22Craig Ott and Stephen J. Strauss, with Timothy Ten-nent, Encountering Theology of Mission: Biblical Foun-dations, Historical Developments, and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 38.

23Alan James, “Southern Baptists Commit to ‘Embrace’ the Unengaged, Unreached” [cited 12 July 2011]. Online: http://www.imb.org/main/news/details.asp?LanguageID=1709&StoryID=9749.

24Erich Bridges, “NAMB & IMB Partnership to Tran-scend National, Geographic Borders” [cited 12 July 2011]. Online: http://www.namb.net/nambblog1.aspx?id=8590116839&blogid=8589939695.

25See, for example, “Send Cities” [cited 12 July 2011].

26

Online: http://www.namb.net/send-cities/.26H. D. M. Spence-Jones, ed., The Pulpit Commentary:

St Luke (vol. 2; Bellingham, WA: Logos), 276.27William Hendriksen and Simon J. Kistemaker, Expo-

sition of the Gospel According to John (New Testament Commentary; Grand Rapids: Baker, 1953), 361.

28Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad, 84.29Plummer, “The Great Commission in the New Testa-

ment,” 7.30Michael Green, Evangelism in the Early Church (rev.

ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 39. 31Warren W. Wiersbe, Wiersbe’s Expository Outlines on

the New Testament (Wheaton: Victor, 1997), 206.32Blomberg, Matthew, 430. 33Jerram Barrs, The Heart of Evangelism (Wheaton:

Crossway, 2001), 16. 34Ott and Strauss, Encountering Theology of Mission, 37.35F. H. Paschall and H. H. Hobbs, The Teacher’s Bible

Commentary: A Concise, Thorough Interpretation of the Entire Bible Designed Especially for Sunday School Teachers (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 1972), 615.

36“Global Peoples Summary” [cited 12 July 2011]. Online: http://www.joshuaproject.net/.

37Ibid.38Barna Group, “Millions of Unchurched Adults Are

Christians Hurt by Churches But Can Be Healed of the Pain” [cited 12 July 2011]. Online: http://www. barna.org/barna-update/article/12-faithspirituality/ 362-millions-of-unchurched-adults-are-christians-hurt-by-churches-but-can-be-healed-of-the-pain.

39cf. Acts 2:17-18; 4:8; 4:31; 5:32; 6:10; 8:29; 8:39; 9:31; 10:19; 10:44; 11:12; 13:2; 13:4.

40Plummer notes that the Luke 24:47 Great Com-mission passage is a prediction best understood as “repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations.” Polhill concludes likewise about the Great Commission call in Acts 1:8, say-ing, “Jesus promised the disciples two things: power and witness. The future tense here has an imperati-val sense: ‘you will [must] receive power’; ‘you will be my witnesses.’” In that light Plummer concludes, “In proclaiming the gospel, we know we are busy with a winning and important task.” See Plummer, “The

Great Commission in the New Testament,” 6; Polhill, Acts, 86.

41Charles Spurgeon, “The Missionaries’ Charge and Charta” [cited 12 July 2011]. Online: http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols7-9/chs383.pdf.

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Islam in Latin AmericaM. David Sills and Kevin Baggett

M. David Sills is A. P. and Faye Stone Professor of Christian Missions and Cultural Anthropology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Dr. Sills previously served as a missionary in Ecuador, as a church planter and general evangelist among the Highland Quichua people and as Rector and professor at the Ecuadorian Baptist Theological Seminary. His recent books include Reaching and Teaching: A Call to Great Commission Obedience (Moody, 2010) and The Missionary Call: Find Your Place in God’s Plan for the World (Moody, 2008).

K evin Baggett is a D.Miss. candidate at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

IntRoduCtIon

It took the tragic events of 9/11 for Islam to register on the radar screen of many Ameri-

cans. Since then, a growing awareness of Islam’s strength and influence in our world is causing an uneasiness among Westerners. This growing aware-ness is not only fueled by the daily news of revolts and riots in the predominantly Muslim countries of the world, but also by Islam’s burgeoning global advance. The contemporary resurgence and rapid spread of Islam evokes words of caution and concern from conser-vative Western politicians, but also from theologians and missiologists. A recent installment of the Kai-ros Journal, reporting on current trends in world religions and world- views states:

This new phase of Islamic resur-gence is funded by wealthy, oil-

rich Muslim nations and is facilitated by the movement of Islamic populations into post-Christian Western societies. These new Muslim

immigrant communities jostle for power with declining European societies that have lost much of their confidence and sense of pride in their own heritage. Western government policies on multiculturalism facilitate the empowerment of well-organized Muslim minorities. In turn, these increasingly dynamic Muslim immigrant communities throughout the West are undergo-ing a process of creeping militancy, increasingly influenced by Islamic activists seeking to gain strategic advantage.1

Remarkably, while the prevalence of Islam in Europe is frequently addressed, most Westerners are unaware of the growing presence of Muslims in Latin America. This growing population and influence has come about through immigration as well as conversions of Latinos to Islam. A Google search of the terms “Islam in Latin America” returned over 10,000,000 results. These results included blogs, websites, organizations, and even Wikipedia entries dedicated to the presence of Islam in Latin America, all of which are divided between those in favor and those opposed to Islam’s growth. Less well known is the common history they share.

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 28-41.

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MusLIMs And LAtIn A MER ICAns The close proximity of Spaniards and Moors in

the Iberian Peninsula for almost 800 years (A.D. 711-1492) resulted in many cultural, linguistic, worldview commonalities, and even a shared ancestry in some cases through physical relations, forced and otherwise. The U.S. has an increasing interest in and curiosity about Islam, nervously noting Muslim arrivals at U.S. airports. Yet, many fail to realize that Muslims have found a home in the countries of our southern neighbors in Latin America. What is the origin of the interface of the Muslim world and Latin America? What evange-listic and missiological strategies and methodolo-gies are suggested by this reality? And what are the missiological implications for engaging the U.S., Latin America, and the world of Islam? To under-stand the current reality, one must be aware of the origins of Islam and how it came to Latin America.

IslaM: froM the ar aBIan PenInsula to the aMerIcan Present

In the early seventh century, Muhammad’s claims of divine revelation formed Islam. From this isolated beginning, one of evangelical mis-sion’s most daunting challenges has grown from a regional faith to a global movement. As Islam matured, several distinct branches developed. The major branches are well-known, such as the Sunni, Shi’ia, and Sufi. Others are lesser known but still find their roots in Islam, such as the Druze, Alawi, and Ismaeli. Folk Islam appeared when tribal groups fused traditional animistic beliefs with Islamic traditions. Radical Islam and groups such as the Nation of Islam further complicate the task of the evangelical world’s attempt to understand this world religion.

Historical Spread of IslamIslam has historically spread in two distinct

and deliberate ways: peacefully and forcefully. J. Dudley Woodberry emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between either the military

or political rule of Islam and spiritual conver-sion to Islam.2 Woodberry writes, “The adoption of Islam ranged from total conversion, to alle-giance for expediency because of its advantages, to forced submission.”3

A.D. 630-1258 Islam was not born in rel igious isolation.

Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism were all present in Mecca—among Muhammad’s own polytheistic tribe—when he began proclaiming his revelations from Allah. These revelations sub-sequently formed the Quran. The monotheistic teachings of Muhammad and his subsequent per-secution led him to move with his followers out-side of Mecca to Yathrib, later named Medina. In Medina, the number of followers of Muhammad grew through spiritual conversion and the political submission of fellow tribal groups. Two key events happened within the initial few years of Islam’s existence. In 630, with little resistance, Muham-mad subdued the people of Mecca and integrated the Meccan tribes into his followers. Later, after Muhammad’s death in 632, his followers were left to develop a new Islamic leadership structure.4

Abu Bakr became the first caliph, or Muslim leader, chosen in the new structure. A dissenting group claimed Ali ibn Abu Talib, a blood relative of Muhammad as well as Muhammad’s son-in-law, to be the rightful leader of Islam. This group even-tually formed the Shi’a division of Islam. Abu Bakr not only sustained Islam by compiling primary accounts of the teachings of Muhammad, but he also used military force to expand Muslim terri-tory to the north and south. Abu Bakr’s two-year reign ended with his death in 634.5

Umar ibn al K hattab succeeded Abu Bakr and reigned for ten years. Umar called himself the “Commander of the Faithful.” He further expanded the borders of Islam through the use of military force. Umar, selected by Abu Bakr on his deathbed, also changed the procedure for selecting a new caliph by entrusting the transfer of power to a “selection committee.”6 The commit-

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tee chose Uthman ibn Affan to be the next caliph. Uthman reigned from 644-656 and continued the trend of conquering territory by force. Donner describes the conquered territory: “By the mid-650s the Believers ruling from Medina had loose control over a vast area stretching from Yemen to Armenia and from Egypt to eastern Iran.”7

Uthman died in a rebellion caused by his appointment of his nephew, Mu’awiya, as gover-nor of Syria. Ali ibn Abu Talib was chosen as the fourth caliph. Ali was passed over in each of the previous three successions of power, despite his familial tie to Muhammad. Following two civil wars over the rightful caliph, the followers of Islam were essentially left with Ali and Mu’awiya. The Shi’a and Sunni orders of Islam were formed from the followers of these two men.8 After the death of Ali and Mu’awiya, followers of Islam “embraced their identity as Muslims—that is, as a monotheist confession following the teach-ings of Muhammad and the Quran.”9 The years between 700 and 950 represented “an age of political and communal expansion, great institu-tional and cultural development, and economic grow th.”10 Shari ’ah law was developed, and Muslim territory continued to expand includ- ing North Africa, Spain, Syria, Persia, and even “black Africa.”11

By the eleventh century, the caliphs’s power was eventually limited to religious authority as political and military power was siphoned away by regional camps. The Sufis, Ismaelis, and Druzes developed during this time.12 By the twelfth cen-tury, Ghana and Mali contained Muslim commu-nities as well.13 The official caliphate era ultimately ended when the Mongol dynasty entered Muslim territory by force in 1258.

A.D. 1258-1453 T he Mongol dy nast y of Gengh is K ha n

stormed into Muslim-held territory in 1258. Led by Genghis’s grandson, the Mongols gained con-trol of significant portions of Iran and Iraq before stalling in Syria. Future Muslim leaders were,

therefore, influenced by Mongol culture. Leaders began claiming descent from Genghis Khan and believed the ruler could form law, introducing the “notion of the ruler’s decree as law.”14 The strength of Islam was also proven during Mongol rule as the religious beliefs and culture of Islam perse-vered in spite of foreign control.

Beginning in 1095, Musl im nations a lso defended themselves against the Christian Cru-saders. The Crusades ended in 1453 when Turkish Muslims claimed Istanbul, where the Ottoman Empire’s headquarters were established.

A.D. 1454-1879Despite opposition, Islam continued to spread.

The Mamluks, who had turned back the advanc-ing Mongols in France, gained power and ruled Egypt until 1517. Several Muslim sultans regained power, and the Muslim world “extended from Africa to Southeast Asia, from Timbuktu to Min-danao, as Islam penetrated Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe.”15 In their sketch of the history of Islam, Peter Riddell and Peter Cotterell describe Islam’s spread during the Ottoman Empire:

The issue of conversion is key. Before the Turkish migrations into Asia Minor, the vast majority of the population was Christian. By the fifteenth century, over 90 percent of the population was Muslim. Lapidus comments that “some of this change was due to immigration of a large Muslim population, but in great part it was due to the conversion of Christians to Islam.”16

While the Ottoman Empire was the most nota-ble, it was not the only significant Muslim empire established prior to the twentieth century. The Persian Empire was primarily Shi’a, located in present-day Iran, and ruled from 1501-1722. The Mughal Empire was another significant Muslim empire, and its seat was Delhi, India. The Mughals reigned in India until Britain colonized the terri-tory. Islam was also propagated through Indian

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trade routes to Southeast Asia until the British gained control.17

A.D. 1880-1905 The time period of 1880-1905 is called the time

of New Imperialism. The Industrial Age changed the landscape of global power. Much of the Mus-lim world fell under the control of the indus-trial West. Many viewed the declining Ottoman Empire as equal to Western rulers. Muslims felt the loss of power was a result of spiritual negli-gence, so they began to rid themselves of foreign powers and desired a return to Islamic traditions.18

A.D. 1906-1948 World War I ended in 1918, with the Ottoman

Empire being divided between its conquerors, the French and the British. European leaders divided up the Arab world into different countries and appointed leaders over certain territories. World War II quickly followed. By the conclusion of the Second World War in 1946, most of the Arab world was independent; but the world would soon change. In 1947, the United Nations approved the division of Palestine into two separate states. A year later the State of Israel was formed. The exis-tence of Israel in Palestine is still viewed as foreign occupation by many in the Muslim world.19

A.D. 1949-Present Since the end of World War II, the Muslim

world has not used traditional military force to broaden its territory. However, it has been through the prolific violent revolutions and ter-rorism of jihadists that the attention of the West-ern world has turned in an effort to understand Islam. As it does, a key challenge is to understand its spread, influence, and ideology while recogniz-ing the distinctions between culture, religion, and splinter groups. As we in the West seek to under-stand Islam better, Islamic advancement contin-ues through immigration, religious conversion, and social, political, and economic influence.

Reasons for Islamic ResiliencyAn outsider may look at Islam and wonder how

it has survived so many occupations, wars, and periods of foreign rule. The reason is that Islam is more than an empire or a religion. Islam is a cul-ture that does not compartmentalize the varying areas of life, society, or religion. A Muslim’s alle-giance is to Allah and Shar’iah law. The ultimate goal of Islam is a Muslim world, and the means for achieving such a world are not limited to either spiritual influence or military conquest. Religious conversion, democratic takeover, peaceful sub-mission to Muslim influence, and a forceful jihad are all seen as means to achieve a Muslim world by various Muslims. Muslims “do not envision two civilizations living in harmony, but one, Islam gaining world domination.”20

Introduction of Islam in Latin America

Three waves of Muslim immigration have landed on the shores of Latin America. Muslim scholars believe the first wave of Muslim immi-gration arrived in the Americas in the sixteenth century with Spanish and Portuguese armies. The Muslims were required to claim Catholicism as their religion, but many secretly remained faith-ful to Islam. Those who remained faithful were referred to as Moriscos. Researchers believe this initial wave of Muslim immigration was eradi-cated during the Catholic Inquisition when the Moriscos were burned at the stake for apostasy.21

The second wave of Muslim immigration origi-nated in Africa. Africans were brought to the New World as slaves. As the New World “imported” workers, it also imported a new religion: Islam. In 1758, Muslims led an armed revolt in Haiti. Less than a century later, African Muslims in Brazil formed a short-lived Muslim state in 1830.22

Around 1830, a third wave of Muslim immigra-tion began to arrive in the Americas from Asia. Originally, these devoted adherents of Islam arrived as indentured servants. But by the end of the century, Syrian and Lebanese followers

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of Islam were arriving as legal immigrants. The immigration from Greater Syria to Latin Amer-ica lasted from 1880 to 1955.23 Most immigrants from Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine settled in urban areas such as Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago de Chile.

ContEMpoR ARy ExpAnsIon of IsLA MGlobal Spread of Islam

The increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants to Europe, Canada, and the U.S. has caught the attention of the Western world. Additionally, Mus-lim birthrates are dwarfing those of Europeans and Americans. While some scholars try to calm the fears of Westerners about the possibility of terrorism, the impact of never before seen Islamic immigration rates is changing the landscape of the Western world.24 Once immigration connec-tions are formed, the rate of immigration usually increases exponentially, and the host country can do little to slow immigration flow.25

Spread of Islam in Latin AmericaWhile Europe and the U.S. have seen signifi-

cant Muslim immigration in recent years, Latin America has not previously experienced such surges. Jack Goldstone points to the aging popula-tions in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. in contrast to the more youthful populations in Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Latin America as an explanation for the former being preferred immigration destinations. In addition, Latin America has a much younger generation of citi-zens in the job market but fewer opportunities than those in Europe, Canada, and the U.S.26

In spite of fewer job opportunities, new waves of Muslim immigrants are arriv ing in Latin America today, mainly from West Africa. African refugees illegally board ships bound for Argen-tina and Brazil, unaware of the ship’s destination. While the number of African immigrants to Latin America is less than similar movements have been to Europe, the numbers are still significant. These

immigrants flee civil war and poverty in hopes of a better life, and they ultimately find strict immi-gration regulations in European countries less inviting than those in Latin America. Currently, Brazil’s largest refugee population is African. At the turn of the twenty-first century, seeing an African on the street in Buenos Aires was rare, and less than fifty Africans existed in the country. But in 2009, the number of African immigrants in Argentina increased to over 3,000 as they traveled from Senegal, Egypt, Nigeria, and Ghana. Bra-zil has experienced additional immigration from Angola, Congo, and Gambia.27 Growth in these populations in Argentina has been so substan-tial that the most recent Argentine census made counting African immigrants a priority.28

As the missionary considers the status of Islam in Latin America, he should beware of some common misconceptions. First, all Arab immigration is not Muslim immigration. The largest population of Palestinians outside of the Middle East is in Santiago de Chile, but the vast majority of these Arabs are not Muslims.29 Second, all Muslim immigrants are not Arabs. For instance, many Muslim immigrants to the U.S. are from countries such as Bosnia, Herze-govina, and Indonesia. With the status of Mus-lim immigration to Latin America as well as these misconceptions in mind, an exploration of key sociopolitical factors and trends will help to understand the missiological implications of Islam’s place in Latin America.

socIoPolItIcal factors and trendsCultural and Worldview Connections

In The Cultural Imperative: Global Trends in the 21st Century, R ichard D. Lewis compares various global cultures and categorizes each cul-ture as linear-active, multi-active, or reactive. He describes the degree to which each of these cultures corresponds to the respective cultural category. Lewis identifies Latin American, Afri-can, and Arab as three of the most representative

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cultures in the multi-active category and demon-strates their similarities.30

Lewis describes multi-active cultures as “emo-tional, loquacious and impulsive people; they attach great importance to family, feelings, rela-tionships and people in general.”31 Lewis notes common qualities such as a dislike for schedules, the importance of relationships both socially and professionally, and a preference for a strong leader.32 When one puts aside religion, the cul-ture of Latin America and the Muslim world are very similar.

Another similarity between these cultures is a mutual dislike for the U.S. In a Pew Research Center global poll, the seven countries whose respondents articulated the least favorable view of the U.S. were Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, Jor-dan, Argentina, Lebanon, and Mexico. Of those, Mexico had the highest favorable impression, with 56% of those polled viewing the U.S. favorably. Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt had the least favor-able opinions, with only 17% of each viewing the U.S. favorably. Argentina was the Latin American culture most likely to have an unfavorable attitude toward the U.S.33

The significance of gender within Muslim cul-ture is also well documented. Are the challenges facing Latin American women similar to those of Muslim women? Inter-American Dialogue recently analyzed the Gallup Latin American Women Leadership Study. The study observed that in many circumstances, women in Latin America had fewer opportunities than men. The analysis also considered presidential victories by female candidates in places like Chile and Argen-tina.34 The simple fact that discussions concerning opportunities for women are taking place demon-strates a general contrast between Latin America and the Muslim world.

Much has been written about the oppression of Muslim women. Would women in Latin America embrace strict regulations on dress and male lead-ership as taught in the Quran? One Gallup poll asked Muslim women what they admired least

about the West.35 The women listed moral decay, promiscuity, and pornography.36 Is the general lib-erality of Latin America conducive to a religion that will demand a strict cultural change? Will Islam be willing to compromise its spiritual law to proselytize?

The question observers of Islam in Latin Amer-ica are trying to answer is whether Muslims are trying to win individual religious converts or if Islam is working toward the Islamization of Latin America as a whole. Does Islam want to propa-gate itself in the lives of Latin Americans or sim-ply control Latin America legally, politically, and economically?

EconomicsBesides cultural similarity, a mutual dislike for

the U.S., and a history of Muslim immigration, why would Latin American countries unite with the Muslim world? The answer is as simple as it is obvious—money. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has made at least nine visits to Tehran, Iran, during his presidency, and Venezuela is an observing member of the Arab League.37 Peruvian President Alan Garcia describes the growing alli-ances between the Muslim world and Latin Amer-ica: “This is an unprecedented step toward joining our two cultures, our two worlds, until now, we have always dealt with the United States, China and Europe. But now, we are seeing the rise of Arab nations that have immense resources.”38 For-mer president of Brazil Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva used similar words to describe new alliances with predominantly Muslim countries: “The wealth of the Arab world is now becoming a factor of devel-opment … and you have to protect it.”39 Current economic insecurity in the Western world has led Latin America to turn its eyes to the Arab world for security. The oil industry is another common link between these economic regions. Chavez has suggested the formation of an alliance that would use “petro-currency” rather than the dollar or euro.40 Is the Muslim world gaining power over Latin America with its wealth?

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Global TerrorismMost of Latin America has gone untouched

by Muslim terrorism. There have only been two acts of Islamic terrorist attacks in Latin America. Both cases occurred in Buenos Aires, Argentina. On March 17, 1992, the Israeli embassy in Bue-nos Aires was attacked when an assailant drove a pickup truck loaded with explosives into the front of the embassy. The terrorist and twenty-nine oth-ers were killed in the blast, with another 242 peo-ple wounded. The second attack occurred at the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina building on July 18, 1994. Eighty-five people died and more than three hundred people were wounded when a car bomb was detonated outside the building. Both attacks have been linked to Hezbollah and Iran. Unfortunately, convictions have not been won for either of the cases. Members of the police department and even former president Carlos Menem have been accused of being involved in the attacks.41

Each of the attacks operated through an area called Tres Fronteras, although it is believed they were conceived in Tehran. Tres Fronteras is located where the borders of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet. Ciudad del Este in Paraguay was developed by President Alfredo Stroesnner to be a free trade zone. But, with the financial decline of the 1990s, Ciudad del Este has become “a city without law.”42 The city is now home to a signifi-cant Muslim population with origins in Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. Worldwide security agencies also believe the city is the home to Hezbollah’s Latin American headquarters.43 Even though Latin America has not seen a large number of ter-rorist attacks, the potential for terrorist activity still exists.

IsLA M In spECIfIC LAtIn A MER ICAn ContExtsArgentina

The f irst wave of Muslim immigration to Argentina took place between 1880 and 1955. The immigrants were primarily of Syrian and Leba-

nese descent. Census data from the beginning of the twentieth century showed Syrian and Leba-nese people were the third largest ethnic group in Buenos Aires.44

The majority of Syrian and Lebanese immi-grants arriving in Buenos Aires originated from Mount Lebanon, a province in Ottoman Syria. The first immigrants to arrive from the region were Christ ians of Orthodox and Cathol ic backgrounds. Religious persecution and con-stant political turmoil were the primary reasons for their immigration, but financial factors also impacted the decision.45 The initial immigration of Lebanese Christians was followed by subse-quent migrations of Druze, Alawi, and Muslims. The original immigrants were male and worked as street salesmen. These businessmen chose exoga-mous marriages with Argentine women. The dif-fusion of Islam into Argentine society may have been hampered by these multi-faith marriages more than any other single factor.

The first Islamic association was founded on the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1917, and a year later an Islamic center was formed inside the city. Prior to owning their own buildings, Muslim families practiced their faith in their homes with other families, but in 2000 the largest mosque in South America was erected in Buenos Aires. The President of Argentina at the time, Carlos Menem, whose parents were Muslim immigrants from Syria, was central to its establishment. Memem donated the land for the mosque while Saudi Ara-bia funded the project and continues to provide the leadership for the mosque.46

No definitive statistics exist on the Muslim population in Buenos Aires. One Arab group, la Confederación de Entidades Argentino Arabes, uses the census data gathered in the early twen-tieth century—the last census to ask questions about ethnicity—to project as many as 3.5 million people of Arab descent in Argentina.47 Interviews with Muslim leaders and people who regularly attend the mosques in Buenos Aires reflect that they do not believe there are such high numbers

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of practicing Muslims. One prominent Muslim leader in the city believes the maximum number of practicing Muslims of Arab descent is a little more than seven thousand.48

The majority of these Arab descent Muslims are part of a fourth or fifth generation immigrant community. These later generation immigrants are not centrally located into a specific area of the city. They are dispersed throughout the city with some modestly higher population densities in two or three “barrios” with mosques.

The recent A frican immigration has also changed the face of Islam in Buenos Aires. In 2000, the average Muslim in Buenos Aires was a middle-aged man of Syrian descent. His primary language was Spanish, and he was a small busi-ness owner. Today, the average mosque attendee in Buenos Aires is a young Senegali male. He is learning Spanish, but he speaks French and Wolof. He sells jewelry and watches from a briefcase on a busy street corner somewhere in the city. He returns to an area of town known as “Little Dakar” each night. At the close of the meeting in the mosque, a participant will hear both Arabic and African languages.49 In spite of this recent immi-gration, religious conversion among the general Argentine population is rare. One Muslim leader, who understands the reality of Islam in Buenos Aires, believes the goal of Muslims in Buenos Aires should be to “color the Argentine culture with Muslim cultural paint” rather than expect large numbers of Argentines to convert to Islam.50

The recent African Muslim immigration and the terrorist attacks in the early 1990s have impacted the evangelical church in Buenos Aires. Prior to 1990, the Muslim community in Buenos Aires went unnoticed. Today, cross-cultural evangelism is no longer a task left for missionaries who travel to the far reaches of the globe. The local church in Argentina must also cross cultural barriers.

BrazilBrazil is experiencing recent immigration

similar to that of Argentina, as immigrants from

Africa comprise the largest refugee group in Bra-zil. According to Henao, “the largest black popula-tion outside of Africa” resides in Brazil.51 African immigration to Brazil is no recent phenomenon. As early as 1538, African slaves arrived in Brazil. The first slaves were from Guinea. Next to arrive were the Fulani people and Bantu tribesmen. By the end of the sixteenth century, more than twenty thousand people of African descent lived in Brazil. New slaves arrived from the regions of present day Senegal, Gambia, and Angola. By 1822, over two-thirds of the population of Bra-zil was categorized as “people of color.” Research indicates thirty to forty percent of Brazil is cur-rently of African descent.52

Many of the original Africans to arrive in Brazil were Muslims. Muslims from the Hausa, Mand-inga, Fula, and Nago all arrived in Brazil. History tells of Muslim rebellions that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.53 Among the Africans arriving in Brazil were Muslim intel-lectuals and religious leaders; the latter helped maintain literacy.54 Unfortunately, the assimila-tion rate was slowed by the short lifespan of slaves, but new slaves were always arriving to reinforce the religion. Muslim Africans arriving today in Brazilian ports share the same destination as their ancestors years ago.

Brazil experienced the third wave of Latin American Muslim immigration similar to Argen-tina. From the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, large numbers of Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians arrived. W hile signif icant Arab Muslim immigration eventually stopped in Argentina, the immigra-tion of Arabs to Brazil slowed without stopping. Sao Paulo, Rio de Janiero, and the area known as Tres Fronteras still receive small but significant numbers of Arab Muslim immigrants.

The f irst Musl im charit y association was founded in 1929. The next was not established until the late 1970s. During this time, the majority of Muslims arriving in Tres Fronteras were from Baloul, Lala, the Bekaa Valley, and South Lebanon.

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In 1987, after six years of work, the first mosque was opened in Foz de Iguazu. The Sunnis and Shi’as were of equal number during the early 1990s.55

In light of such historical and current Islamic presence in Brazil, one might expect Islam to be thriving in this Latin American country. But, Maria Moreira, a Brazilian Muslim living in Egypt, says Islam is not succeeding in winning Brazilians. She quotes Khalil Saifi, sheikh and coordinator of the Center of Divulgation of Islam to Latin America: “Our main concern is to attend to the Muslims who descended from Arabs to help them preserve their link to their language and cul-ture. The Brazilians who come to us come through the contact with Muslims out there.”56 She argues that neither the strong Catholic presence nor Latin culture is the primary reason for the lack of Brazilian converts to Islam. Instead, Muslims in Brazil see non-Arab Muslim descent people as “intruders.” She points to a lack of resources in Portuguese to inform people about Islam as evi-dence of the lack of evangelistic effort.57

VenezuelaBefore “the largest mosque in South America”

was erected in Buenos Aires, the mosque in Cara-cas held that distinction. The ties between Vene-zuela and Iran have already been discussed in this article. Venezuela claims to be home to 100,000 Muslims.58 When evaluated in light of similar pro-jected adherent populations elsewhere in Latin America, this number most likely represents the number of Arab descent people in Venezuela rather than the actual number of people practic-ing Islam. But as one considers Islam’s historical spread, it will be seen that Islam does not always spread by religious conversion or military con-quest. Islam also spreads by gaining political con-trol of countries. If religious matters are laid aside, the governments of Venezuela and Iran appear to have similar goals and aspirations. The fraternal relationship between these two nations should be considered when one evaluates the current impact of Islam on Latin America.

MIssIoLoGICAL IMpLICAtIons Eugene Nida wrote, “Good missionaries have

always been good anthropologists,”59 teaching the truth that those who have the greatest impact on cultures are those who take the culture into account and so reach and teach those within it in culturally appropriate ways. To reach and teach the Latin Americans to our south as well as those who have immigrated among us, we must tailor outreach efforts to each people group and not minister generically to Latinos. Accordingly, to realize fruit in this ministry, we must take into account the historic interface of Islam with Lati-nos as well as the resurgence of Islam that targets them specifically.

Cultural Observations and Implications

In A.D. 711 the Moors of northwest Africa invaded the Iberian Peninsula, beginning a back and forth struggle that lasted almost 800 years. During this time, most of the battles were not to accomplish total domination or destruction, but rather to achieve the upper hand. When the Muslims ruled, the Catholic Spaniards were typi-cally allowed certain freedoms, lands, and con-tinuation of their culture. Similarly, the Spaniards typically allowed Muslims these freedoms when they held the upper hand. These cultures shared ideas in medicine, art, architecture, philosophy, mathematics, and language. Spaniards and Arabs also share many anthropometric markers such as height, facial features, and skin color—the result of relationships through the 800 years they both lived in the Peninsula, as well as intermarriage of Arab immigrants with Latin Americans in recent centuries. In 1469, when Ferdinand and Isabel united their powers into a common effort, they shared the dream for a pure Catholicism. This, in turn, gave rise to the Spanish Inquisition—whose harsh measures sought to purify the Spanish Roman Catholic Churches from witches, Jews, and Muslims.

When the battle of Granada was over in 1492,

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the Spanish victory resulted in the expulsion of all Muslim Moors who did not submit or convert. It was only then that the Spanish king and queen could turn their attention to the insistent would-be discoverer of a westward route to the spice lands. Columbus was granted permission to sail, and he carried with him a zealous Catholicism that was pre-Reformational and inquisitional, but it was also a Spanish Catholicism that was heavily influ-enced by almost 800 years of close proximity to and interaction with another world religion: Islam.

The result of this history is that Arab Muslims and Latin Americans share much in common. The cultural implications of this commonality are many. In addition to the previously mentioned shared ideas in medicine, art, architecture, philos-ophy, mathematics, language, and, in some cases, ancestry, both Latinos and Muslims share a cul-tural affinity in other ways. They both tend to have indirect communication styles, strong multi-gen-erational family bonds, and find their identity in group/collectivistic orientations. Both share the concept of society working through the networks of family and fictive ties in social interaction, busi-ness, and government. Both cultures stress shame and honor rather than a dichotomistic guilt-inno-cence orientation, which includes a strong uncer-tainty avoidance. Latinos and Arab Muslims are notoriously patriarchal and masculine in their perspective of gender roles in society. All of these factors must be incorporated into successful mis-siological strategies and methodologies.

Strategic Development NeedsWith the increasing spread of Islam and its

concomitant inf luence, missiological strategies are needed to engage Muslims effectively. Some have suggested blurring the lines between evan-gelicals and Muslims, stressing what we have in common to relieve the gospel-hostile stance often taken by Muslim extremists. However, what is needed is a clear word, not a diluted common word that would make embracing Christianity easier. Some Christian missionaries have sought

to emphasize Christian and Muslim commonali-ties such as monotheism, Abraham as a religious forefather, submission to the will of God, prayers, prophets, alms, angels, a historical Jesus (Isa), and so forth. Yet, in their effort to do so, the distinct lines between the Christian and Muslim under-standings of these commonalities have become unrecognizable in some contexts.

Indeed, one strategy seeks to foment insider movements using a controversial contextualiza-tion model that has been promoted for several decades.60 In this effort, Muslim converts to Christianity are encouraged to remain in Islam culturally, legally, and socially (and in some forms, even in religious identification) until a crit-ical mass of believers arises to provide protection and support of Christianity. The controversy and rhetoric relating to this method are exacerbated and complicated by divergent views of the defini-tion of Christian, as well as whether proponents of this method are promoting syncretism.

Other methodologies within this strategy grant credibility to the Quran as they uncritically use it to evangelize, while others refer to Jesus as the Prince of God rather than Son of God so as to avoid offending Muslims which they maintain would risk closing the door to further evange-lism efforts. The limitations of space preclude a thorough explanation of the model, its risks, dan-gers, and logical outcomes. However, it must be noted that Christian missionaries are not alone in employing such a model. Muslims intent on winning Christians to Islam have been seen using similar models in the southern cone of South America, encouraging Catholics to remain in the Church while turning slowly to Islam.

Many missionaries working in Muslim con-texts report that a blurring of the lines and removal of Christianity’s offense and stumbling stone is not what is needed, but rather a clear presentation of the gospel. Some missionaries are making the case for speaking plainly, defining very clear lines between those who are in Christ and those who are in darkness, calling to repentance those who

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have rejected him, and offering hope to all who are willing to repent and believe in Jesus as the Son of God and Savior of the world who died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead on the third day, who ascended into heaven where he reigns and intercedes for his own.

Global Missiological ImplicationsThe global missiological implications are too

numerous to develop fully in the space of one article, but some must be mentioned. The cultural, linguistic, ancestry, and worldview affinity that Latinos and Arab Muslims share is exploited and strengthened by leftist Latino governments that pander to wealthy Arab nations who share a dis-trust and dislike for the U.S. Add to this volatile mix the fact that the oil-rich Arab nations have vast resources which they are eager to invest to win friends and influence, and there is a potential pow-der keg worth watching.

However, just as the nearly 800 years of Span-iards and Muslims sharing the Iberian Peninsula resulted in a blending and commonality of many aspects of their cultures that allows Arab Muslims to pass for Latinos very easily, the reverse is also true. Latin American evangelicals are very effec-tive missionaries to Arab Muslim lands. The very fact that they do not have U.S. passports grants Latinos a certain freedom and a pass on the scru-tiny that blocks many Westerners from living and serving in Arab countries. The Latin American church is maturing in their Christianity, and many believers are hearing God’s missionary call. Unfor-tunately they lack the advantages of financial and educational training resources that benefit North Americans.

Contemporar y Western missionaries must devise platforms for creative access to countries that forbid Christian missionary activity and refuse to grant Christian worker visas. Many missionar-ies struggle to develop and maintain platforms as business consultants, English teachers, and a host of other options in order to gain access to “closed” countries. Indeed, it is often noted that an average

of three countries per year close their doors to Christian missionaries.61 Sadly, many missionar-ies who find a believable platform are frustrated in ministry since they must keep a very low profile to avoid detection from government monitors. This low profile often results in very little ministry, and many do little more than simply live in the target country. The most effective creative access strat-egy may be very nearby, sitting in the shadow of the U.S.

The churches in Latin America have much to teach the churches in the West (and North). They have numbers, youth, commitment, enthusiasm, and zeal. However, much of their zeal is without knowledge. What the Western church could bring to the equation is training and financial resources. In most instances we have been so burdened to reach the unreached, that when we reached one group, we left as soon as possible to reach the next, and so on. We have overlooked the truth that Jesus sent us to reach and teach the nations of the world, making disciples and teaching them to observe everything he has commanded us. At the same time, the U.S. is one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world. We are spending vast amounts of money to get people into creative access countries and maintain them there, oftentimes crippled in their ministries by the need for secrecy.

A wiser strategy might be to equip those Chris-tians whom the Lord is calling to missions, who do not have passports from Western nations, and who would fit in culturally and linguistically much more quickly than most Westerners. The unfortu-nate identification of Western culture with Chris-tianity has resulted in a view of Christianity as an inferior, sinful, and shameful way of life. Much of the world believes that the U.S. is a Christian nation. With the Muslim understanding of the intertwined relationship between religion, culture, and law, they assume that this means what they see from us is synonymous with Christianity. This is problematic as our largest export is the entertain-ment industry’s films, television shows, and music; therefore, the behavior, clothing, lifestyles, habits,

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and morals of these products are understood as what characterizes Christianity. Effective mis-siological models will be those that emphasize the truth that we represent the Lord Jesus Christ, and not the West in general or a specific country. Latin American Christians are able to represent the gos-pel without the stumbling block of this perception.

Western missionaries could establish pro-grams in Latin American settings offering inter-cultural training, theological and missiological education, and pastoral preparation as their part of the effort. The financial resources that the West brings to bear on the challenge to reach and teach Arab Muslim people groups would be more wisely invested in the equipping and sending of many of these missionaries. Such a new missiological model would not have to be mutually exclusive with traditional models; Western missionaries would still go as called, led, and able, but the newer model would result in more effective missionar-ies and better stewardship. These well-equipped Latino missionaries could then establish similar training programs in near neighbor nations for the equipping of still others in a model of 2 Timothy 2:2 faithfulness.

ConCLusIonThe rapid growth of Islam and the recent revo-

lutionary activity in many Arab Muslim countries have kept them in the news, on the hearts, and in the prayers of Christians around the world. Many missions-minded Christians are burdened to reach them as quickly and effectively as possible. A natural affinity exists between Latin Americans and Arab Muslims that would result in more rapid cultural adjustment and relationship building between them. The nearly 800 years that Span-iards lived in close proximity to Muslims resulted in a blending of many aspects of the cultures, which allows Arab Muslims to pass for Latinos very easily. Shortly after 9/11, an agency of the U.S. government ran a full-page advertisement in the national paper of Ecuador posting the pictures of dozens of Al Qaeda operatives who were believed

to be living in hiding there. Those scanning the pictures realized that these operatives could be any one of the people they saw everyday on the streets. These similarities are not inconsequen-tial. Western Christians could take their consider-able resources, teachers, educational programs, and passion for missions to eager Latin American believers. In doing so, they would assist them to reach unreached Arab Muslims, those with whom they already share cultural, linguistic, and world-view commonalities. While Western mission agen-cies brainstorm to find creative access platforms to get their people in to reach the unreached in Arab lands, the most effective creative access may be right next door.

ENDNOTES 1Kairos Journal, “Cycles of Islamic Resurgence” [cited

25 May 2011]. Online: http://www.kairosjournal.org/Document.aspx?QuadrantID=4&CategoryID=10&TopicID=50&DocumentID=9640&L=1.

2J. Dudley Woodberry, “Islam,” in Evangelical Diction-ary of World Missions (ed. A. Scott Moreau; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 504-506.

3Ibid., 505. 4Fred M. Donner, “Muhammad and the Caliphate:

Political History of the Islamic Empire Up to the Mongol Conquest,” in The Oxford History of Islam (ed. John L. Esposito; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4-11.

5Peter G. Riddell and Peter Cotterell, Islam in Context: Past, Present and Future (Grand Rapids: Baker Aca-demic, 2003), 32-35.

6John L. Esposito, Islam: the Straight Path (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 38-39.

7Donner, “Muhammad and the Caliphate,” 12. 8Riddell and Cotterell, Islam in Context, 37-38. 9Donner, “Muhammad and the Caliphate,” 19. 10Ibid. 11Woodberry, “Islam,” 505. 12Esposito, Islam the Straight Path, 47-59. 13Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Islam: Religion, History, and

Civilization, (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2003), 137.

40

14Donner, “Muhammad and the Caliphate,” 58-59.15Esposito, Islam: the Straight Path, 62. 16Riddell and Cotterell, Islam in Context, 109. 17Ibid., 111-13. 18Ibid., 114-15. 19Ibid., 115-34.20Uriya Shavit and Frederic Wiesenbach, “Muslim Strat-

egies to Convert Western Christians,” Middle East Quarterly 16 (2009): 11.

21M. Ali Kettani, Muslim Minorities in the World Today (London: Mansell, 1986), 191-92.

22Ibid. 23Ibid., 198.24Martin Walker, “Europe’s Mosque Hysteria,” Wilson

Quarterly 30 (2006): 14-22.25Esther Ben-David, “Europe’s Shifting Immigration

Dynamic,” Middle East Quarterly 16 (2009): 15-24.26Jack A. Goldstone, “The New Population Bomb,” For-

eign Affairs 89, no. 1 (2010): 31-43. 27Luis Andres Henao, “More African Immigrants Find-

ing a Home in Latin America” [cited 4 April 2011]. Online: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/more-afri-can-immigrants-finding-home-latin-america.

28Instituto Nacional De Estadística y Censos, “Censo 2010: Afrodescendientes” [cited 4 April 2011]. Online: http://www.censo2010.indec.gob.ar/index_afro.asp.

29Oscar Contardo, “Historia Inmigración Palestina: De Turcos Solo el Pasaporte,” Artes y Letras de El Mercu-rio, (Santiago de Chile, 14 April 2002). The author also conducted ethnographic research to determine the number of Muslims in Santiago de Chile.

30R ichard D. Lewis, The Cultural Imperative: Global Trends in the 21st Century (Finland: WS Bookwell, 2003), 83.

31Ibid., 71. 32Ibid., 72. 33Pew Research Center, “Opinion of the United States:

Do you Have a Favorable or Unfavorable View of the U.S.?” [cited 25 May 2011]. Online: http://pewglobal.org/database/?indicator=1.

34Inter-American Dialogue, “Latin American Women Leadership Study: A Look at the Changing Attitudes of Latin Americans Toward Gender and Women’s Leadership Capabilities” [cited 4 April 2011]. Online:

http://w w w.thedialogue.org/PublicationFiles/Latin%20American%20Women%20Leadership%20Study.pdf.

35Frank Newport, “The Issue of Women in Govern-ment in Islamic Countries: Majorities in a Number of Predominantly Muslim Countries Approve” [cited 30 March 2006]. Online: http://www.gallup.com/poll/22180/issue-women-government-islamic-coun-tries.aspx.

36Helena Andrews, “Muslim Women Don’t See Them-selves as Oppressed, Survey Finds,” The New York Times (7 June 2006) [cited 4 April 2011]. Online: http://w w w.ny times.com/2006/06/08/world/middleeast/08women.html.

37Kara Rowland, “Obama Freezes Out Chavez, While Iran Comes Courting: Not Even a Mention in Trip to Region,” Washington Times (27 March 2011) [cited 4 April 2011]. Online: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/mar/27/obama-freezes-out-chavez-while-iran-comes-courting/?page=3.

38Jim Wyss, “Latin America Calls for Boosting Ties with the Middle East,” Miami Herald (19 February 2011) [cited 4 April 2011]. Online: http://w w w.miamiherald.com/2011/02/13/2074607/arab-nations-expand-ties-in-hemisphere.html.

39Al Jazeera, “Arab-Latin American Ties Hailed: Sec-ond Summit of the Two Blocs in Qatari Capital Dis-cusses Trade and Investment Flows” [cited 4 April 2011]. Online: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/03/2009331131144938569.html.

40Ibid.41Hernan Cappiello, “Acusan a Irán por el Ataque a la

AMIA” [cited 31 March 2011]. Online: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=852740.

42Jorge Bergman, The Secret War with Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World’s Most Danger-ous Terrorist Power (New York: Free Press, 2007), 173.

43Ibid., 169-84.4 4Argentina has not included any questions about

ethnicity in their census unti l the most recent census, 2010.

45Club Libanés de Buenos Aires, ed., Libro Púrpura de los Sesenta Años del Club Libanés de Buenos Aires:

41

1936-18 de Octubre –1996 (Buenos Aires, 1996), 17.46Liliana Cazorla, Interview by Author, Buenos Aires,

2009.47“Inmigración Sirio Libanesa en Argentina,” Fearab

Confederación de Entidades Argentino Arabes [cited 13 May 2010]. Online: http://www.fearab.org.ar/inmigracion_sirio_libanesa_en_argentina.php.

48Daniel Attar, Interview by Author, Buenos Aires, 2009. The maximum number of practicing Arab descent practicing Muslims (including Druzes, Ala-wis, and other sects) was seven thousand. These lead-ers also claimed very few people not of Arab descent were practicing Muslims. In 2009, significant immi-gration from Senegal and the rest of Africa was just beginning.

49Luis Andres Henao, “More African Immigrants Find-ing a Home in Latin America” [cited 25 May 2011]. Online: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/more-african-immigrants-finding-home-latin-america.

50Attar, Interview with Author.51Henao, “More African Immigrants Finding a Home

in Latin A merica” [cited 25 May 2011]. Online: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/more-african-immigrants-finding-home-latin-america.

52John Geipel, “Brazilian’s African Legacy,” History Today 47 (1997): 19.

53Ibid., 21.54Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “Africa and Its Diasporas:

Remembering South America,” Research in African Literatures 40 (Winter 2009): 156-58.

55John Tofik Karam, “(Un)covering Islam and Its Fifty-Year History in South American Frontier Region” [cited 5 April 2011]. Online: http://casgroup.fiu.edu/lacc/pages.php?id=1409.

56Maria Moreira, “Islam in Brazil: Convert Maria Moreira Examines the History and Current State of the Muslim Community in Latin America’s Larg-est Country,” Islam for Today [cited 5 April 2011]. Online: http://islamfortoday.com/brazil.htm.

57Ibid. 58James Brooke, “Caracas Getting Continent’s Big-

gest Mosque,” The New York Times (3 January 1993) [cited 5 April 2011]. Online: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/03/world/caracas-getting-continent-

s-biggest-mosque.html.59Eugene A. Nida, Customs and Cultures: Anthropology

for Christian Missions (New York: Harper, 1954), xi. 60Rebecca Lewis, “Promoting Movements to Christ

within Natural Communities,” International Journal of Frontier Missions 24, no. 2 (2007): 75. An “insider movement” is any movement to faith in Christ where (a) the gospel f lows through pre-existing commu-nities and social networks, and where (b) believing families, as valid expressions of the body of Christ, remain inside their socioreligious communities, retaining their identity as members of that commu-nity while living under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the authority of the Bible.

61Center for Great Commission Studies, “An Interview with Dr. Jerry Rankin” [cited 25 May 2011]. Online: http://cgcs.sebts.edu/?p=748.

42

The Growth of Christianity in East AsiaJohn Mark Terry

IntroductIon

Missiologists and missions adminis-trators focus much of their attention on East

Asia. This is natural because East Asia contains about 25 percent of the world’s population. China’s

population alone represents 20 per-cent of the people on earth. What is the status of Christianity in East Asia? This article will survey the progress of Christianity in these nations of East Asia: China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Taiwan. As will be shown, much has been accomplished, but much remains to be done.

chrIstIanIty In chInaA noted Chinese Chr ist ian

leader, John Ong, often speaks of—The gospel “to” China, the gospel “in” China, and the gospel “from” China. Those helpful des-ignations provide an outline for this brief survey of Christianity in China.

The Gospel “to” ChinaChristianity first came to China through the

efforts of Nestorian missionaries. The Nestori-ans entered China in the seventh century, travel-ing along the ancient Silk Road from the Middle East. They were welcomed by the emperors of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-907) and were allowed to build monasteries and establish churches. The Nestorian monks continued their work in China for two hundred years until Emperor Wu Tsung ordered the monks and their monasteries expelled in A.D. 845. The fate of the Nestorian converts in China is unknown, but a Nestorian monk, sent to ascertain the state of the church in China in A.D. 987, reported that he did not find any Christians in China.1

Christianity re-entered China after the visit of Marco Polo in 1266. His account of his adventures in China prompted the Vatican to send a Francis-can monk, Giovanni of Monte Corvino, to China in 1294. The emperor welcomed him and gave him freedom to build a church and evangelize. By 1305 he had six thousand baptized believers. The Roman Catholic mission prospered in Bei-jing and on the southeastern coast in Quanzhou.

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 42-51.

John M a r k Ter ry is Adjunct Professor of Evangelism and Missions at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

In addition, he also serves as a professor at a seminary in the Pacific Rim. Previously, Dr. Terry has served as a professor of missions at Philippines Baptist Theological Seminary, Asia Baptist Graduate Theological Seminary, and as professor of evangelism and missions at Clear Creek Baptist College, in addition to serving 15 years as a missionary in the Philippines. Dr. Terry is also the author or editor of a numbers scholarly works, including Missiology: An Introduction (B&H, 1998), Church Evangelism: Creating a Culture for Growth in Your Congregation (B&H 1997), and Evangelism: A Concise History (B&H, 1994).

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Again, a change of dynasty brought persecution for the Christians. When the Ming dynasty came to power in 1372, the Ming emperors favored Bud-dhism and suppressed Christianity.2

The Roman Catholics again sent Jesuit mis-sionaries to China in 1582. They entered China through the Portuguese colony in Macau. Mat-teo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit, learned the Chinese language and culture in Macau and then trans-ferred to Beijing, the capital city, in 1601. Ricci had been trained as a clock maker. He made a beautiful clock and presented it to the emperor. The emperor liked the clock and named Ricci the imperial clock maker. This gave Ricci both pres-tige and access to the emperor’s court. With these freedoms Ricci and his fellow Jesuits were able to baptize two thousand converts by 1610.3

W hile the Jesuits prospered in Beijing, the Franciscan and Dominican missionaries fumed in Macao. They envied the Jesuits’s access to the capital, and they disagreed with the Jesuits on accommodation to the Chinese culture, especially in regard to the veneration of ancestors. This “rites controversy” continued for a century until the Vat-ican ruled in favor of the Franciscans and Domini-cans. The pope’s ruling angered the emperor, and he ordered the expulsion of all the missionaries and the closure of all the churches in 1724.4

The next phase of missions in China saw the entry of the first Protestant missionary, Robert Morrison, in 1807. Morrison served under the Lon-don Missionary Society. He had to study Chinese secretly because it was illegal for Chinese to teach their language to foreigners. Morrison only made twelve converts during his twenty-eight years in China, but his great achievements were the Chi-nese Bible and his Chinese-English dictionary.

After the Opium War of 1840 the Chinese government was forced to open five treaty ports for western commerce and missionary activity. A number of missionaries went to China, but most confined their work to the ports and nearby dis-tricts. Hudson Taylor arrived in China in 1854, serving under the China Evangelization Society.

He became so disgusted with that agency’s poor administration that he resigned. Bad health forced Taylor to return to England in 1860. While he was recovering, he prayed and planned for a new type of mission organization. In 1865 he founded the China Inland Mission. He was determined to pen-etrate all of China with the gospel, thus the name, Inland. Hudson Taylor was one of the great mis-sionary recruiters, and the China Inland Mission grew rapidly. One reason for its rapid growth was his openness to appoint single women as mission-aries. He also accepted missionaries with little for-mal schooling. He insisted that all his missionaries live by faith, forbidding them to solicit financial support. Thus, the China Inland Mission became the first and prototypical “faith mission.” Taylor also required all his missionaries to adopt Chinese dress, master the Chinese language, and identify with the Chinese people as much as possible.5

Hudson Taylor’s determination to evangelize all of China, especially the interior, was achieved. By 1882 the China Inland Mission had deployed missionaries to all of China’s provinces, and its total number of missionaries had risen to 641. This made it the largest mission agency in China, and the largest Protestant missions organization in the world.6

China was the f irst foreign mission “field” for Southern Baptists. When the Southern Bap-tist Convention was established in 1845, its first action was to establish the Foreign Mission Board (FMB). One of the first actions of the Foreign Mis-sion Board was to make China its initial field of ministry. China was Southern Baptists’s main mis-sion field until 1949. In the beginning Southern Baptist missionaries focused much of their work in southern China, specifically in and around Canton. Rosewell Graves, a missionary physi-cian, served in Canton for an amazing period of fifty-six years. His faithful ministry contributed to the development of what the FMB called the South China Mission. Later, the FMB established work in Shanghai. Matthew Yates led this work for many years. This work became known as the Cen-

44

tral China Mission. Southern Baptist missionaries established the North China mission in Shandong Province in northeastern China. Prominent mis-sionaries in that mission included J. B. Hartwell, T. P. Crawford, and, of course, Lottie Moon. In 1910 the FMB, inspired by the example of the China Inland Mission, opened its Interior China Mission in Hunan Province, and the Manchuria Mission was opened in 1924.7

There were 49 Southern Baptist missionaries in China in 1900, but by 1918 the number increased to 172. The highest number recorded was 287 in 1924. The effects of the Great Depression and World War II caused the number to decrease steadily except for a brief increase between 1945 and 1948. When the Communists won the Civil War, they gradually forced the missionaries out, and by the end of 1951 all Southern Baptist mis-sionaries had exited. The close of the China mis-sions did not mean that Southern Baptists ceased to work with Chinese. The FMB reassigned the missionaries to work with diaspora Chinese all over Asia, and, indeed, “the old China hands” opened Baptist work in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malay-sia, Thailand, Singapore, Taiwan, and Korea.8

The missionaries of the China Inland Mission and the Roman Catholic missionaries suffered greatly during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. The Boxer Rebellion was a nationalistic movement that aimed to remove foreign inf luence from China. Because they considered Christianity a “Western religion,” the Boxers attacked missionar-ies and Chinese Christians and burned churches and Christian institutions. Tens of thousands of Chinese Christians died at the hands of the Box-ers, and 135 Protestant missionaries and 53 chil-dren of missionaries died as martyrs. Most of the missionaries escaped to the coast of China, where foreign soldiers protected them.9

The missionaries re-engaged the Chinese peo-ple after the Boxer Rebellion, and the martyred missionaries were replaced by new missionaries, especially those enlisted by the Student Volunteer Movement. The zenith of Protestant missionary

deployment to China came in 1925. In that year there were 8,158 Protestant missionaries serving. That number declined in the 1930s due to the world economic depression and in the 1940s due to World War II.10

In 1911 a Christian physician, Sun Yat-Sen, led a revolution that overthrew the Manchu dynasty and installed a democratic government. Sun’s weak government struggled and soon failed. Regional warlords controlled much of China. From this chaos emerged two strong political forces, the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai Shek and the Communist Party, led by Mao Tse Tung. They both fought the Japanese, who invaded China in 1937, but after World War II they fought each other. The Chinese Civil War brought even more devastation to China, which had suffered greatly during the world war. Finally, in 1949 the Communist armies defeated the Nationalists, and Chiang Kai Shek escaped with his army to Taiwan.

The Gospel “in” ChinaW hen the Communists gained control of

China in 1949 there were, perhaps, 750,000 Prot-estant Christians in China and 4,062 foreign missionaries. The Roman Catholics numbered about 1,500,000, and there were 5,682 foreign priests and nuns. That was not many in a country of approximately 400 million.11 The missionaries began leaving China during 1949, but they had no choice but to leave after 1951. In that year Chou En Lai, Premier of the People’s Republic of China, issued an order, expelling all foreign missionar-ies. This was not surprising, given the fact that the Chinese Communist Party was officially atheis-tic. The Communist government closed most of the churches and imprisoned many of the pastors and church leaders. The Communists reorganized Chinese Protestant Christianity into one national church—the Three-Self Patriotic Church. This church was closely controlled by the Communist government, which appointed all the pastors. The government chose that name to emphasize the church’s separation from foreign control. The

45

term “three-self ” came from the indigenous mis-sion strategy espoused by Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn. They encouraged missionaries to plant churches that would be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. Of course, the Communist government did not want the church to propagate, but they did desire to eliminate for-eign influence on the Chinese church.

Chinese Christians responded to the govern-ment’s crack-down in two ways. Some rejected the Three-Self Patriotic Church and took their faith underground. They worshipped in small groups in homes, barns, and apartments. This was especially true in rural areas. In urban areas some churches remained open, and other Christians tried to adjust to the new realities. Some even stated that the Chinese church was better off, freed from the domination of the Western missionaries.

The situation for Catholic Christians was sim-ilar. The Communist government insisted that the Catholics in China break with the Vatican. Those who refused to do this experienced severe persecution. Others acceded to the government’s demands and formed the Catholic Patriotic Association.

Both the Three-Self Patriotic Church and the Catholic Patriotic Association tried to serve as a buffer against the antipathy of the Communist government. They both suffered during Mao’s anti-rightist campaign in 1957-58 and especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Dur-ing the Cultural Revolution intellectuals and reli-gious persons suffered persecution at the hands of the Red Guards. Many pastors were jailed or sent to “re-education camps,” and more churches were closed.12

After the death of Mao Tse-Tung (1976) China opened up to the West. With this political renais-sance in China came a toleration of the church. Three-Self Patriotic churches were reopened as were some theological seminaries. By 1987 four thousand Three-Self churches were established and were full of worshipers. The reduced persecu-tion also benefited the house churches. These were

(and are) churches that refuse to register with the government because they reject government con-trol of their congregations. Many different house church networks developed, and some of them have millions of members. Though they are called house churches, they meet in many different loca-tions, including factories. Some exhibit reformed theology, but many of them could be described as charismatic or Pentecostal.13

The persecution of the church in China proved to be an Acts 8 experience for the church in China. Acts 8:1, 4 tells how the church in Jerusalem was persecuted, but the persecution actually spread the gospel throughout Judea and Samaria. In 1949 the church in China was hindered by foreign con-trol and by institutionalism. The expulsion of the missionaries and the closure of the institutions forced the Chinese church into a new pattern of operation. The Chinese church returned to its New Testament roots. As the house churches proliferated, the number of Christians multiplied rapidly. In fact, the Asia Times reported that ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day.14

How many Christians are there in China? The real answer is that no one knows for sure, but there are lots of estimates. According to the Chinese gov-ernment, there are 21 million (16 million Protes-tants and 5 million Catholics), but the government only counts those in the registered churches.15 In some provinces it seems the authorities delib-erately under-report the number of members in the Three-Self churches. Also, the government only reports the baptized members of Three-Self churches. Because it is against the law to baptize a person under the age of 18, the Three-Self statistics do not include youth and children who attend the churches, nor do the statistics include millions of worshipers who have yet to be baptized.16

The China Aid Association reported in 2007 that Yie Xiaowen, director of the Chinese State Administration for Religious Affairs, stated in a nonpublic meeting at Beijing University that the number of Christians in China was 130 million, most of whom were members of house churches.17

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Paul Hattaway is recognized as one of the most knowledgeable researchers on Chinese Chris-tianity. In August 2010 he reported 82 million Protestants of all types in China and 21 million Catholics, for a total of 103 million.18 The latest edition of the highly respected prayer guide, Oper-ation World, estimates that there are 21 million Catholics and 85 million Protestants (Three-Self and house churches combined).19 Most of these Christians are ethnic Han Chinese, and they live mainly in the eastern part of China. One encour-aging sign is that the Three-Self Patriotic churches are increasingly evangelical in their theology and practice, though there are some restrictions on their evangelistic efforts.

Why is it so hard to get an accurate count? Several reasons complicate the work of missions researchers. First, the Chinese government does not want the total number of Christians publi-cized. Researchers risk arrest and punishment. Second, there are hundreds of house church networks. Some of them do not keep records for security reasons. Other networks refuse to num-ber their members, believing that practice is con-trary to Scripture. They cite God’s punishment of King David for numbering Israel (2 Sam 24:1-17). Third, the house churches are so decentralized that many house church leaders do not know how many people actually belong to their churches. Fourth, China is a big country with a big popula-tion, and accuracy remains a great challenge. Still, Western Christians can rejoice that the number of Christians in China has risen from perhaps three million in 1949 to more than one hundred million in 2011. Patrick Johnstone writes, “China remains one of the biggest challenges for world evangeliza-tion…. We all marvel at the millions of Chinese who have come to Christ over the past twenty years, but this fact obscures a vital truth that this turning to God is not happening for every part of China nor for all its constituent peoples.”20

The Gospel “from” ChinaThe Christians in China, in at least some of

the house church networks, are coming to under-stand their responsibility to bring the gospel to the world. This is wonderful development because the Chinese church has great missions potential. There are several reasons for its potential. First, Chinese Christianity has grown amidst great persecution. Chinese Christians know how to evangelize, plant churches, and endure hardships. Second, the rapid development of China’s econ-omy can provide the funding necessary for world missions endeavors. Third, the large number of Chinese going overseas to work makes it possible for Chinese missionaries to enter restricted access countries more easily. 21

There are two aspects involved in the recent Chinese missions movement. As mentioned above, the vast majority of Christians in China are Han Chinese, who live in the eastern part of China. The Han comprise about 90 percent of China’s population. However, there are many eth-nic groups in China (about five hundred according to Operation World). Most of the people groups in western China are Muslim. The two largest of these Muslim people groups are the Uyghurs and the Hui. So, the first goal of the mission-minded believers in eastern China is to bring the gospel to the Muslims of western China.

The second aspect of the Chinese missions movement is international missions. Several large house church networks in China have joined together to sponsor the Back to Jerusalem Move-ment. The basic idea of this movement is that the gospel traveled from Jerusalem westward into Europe. Then the gospel was brought to the Americas. Later, missionaries from Europe and North America carried the gospel to China. Now, Chinese Christians have a special calling from God to complete the circle and bring the gospel through Central Asia and the Middle East and “back to Jerusalem.” The Chinese believers mean to traverse figuratively the ancient “silk road” that leads through Central Asia and the Middle East toward Jerusalem.

This vision of bringing the gospel back to Jeru-

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salem is not new. It actually harkens back to the vision of a small group of Bible college students in northwestern China. On Easter Sunday, 1943, the students at the Northwest Bible Institute in Fengxiang, Shaanxi Province, received a chal-lenge from one of their professors, Mark Ma. He challenged the students to commit themselves to evangelizing western China. Eight of the students responded by declaring their call to evangelize Xinjiang Province in far northwest China. Mark Ma committed himself to accompany the students to the Northwest. He and the students adopted a Chinese name and an English name for their group. They chose “The Back to Jerusalem Evan-gelistic Band” as their English name. The group made short-term mission trips to the Northwest beginning in 1944. They sent a group into far western China in 1949; however, the events of the China Civil War overtook them, and they were turned back. Eventually, most of the members of the band were arrested and spent time in Com-munist prison camps. The vision of the Back to Jerusalem Movement could not be implemented for almost forty years.

In 1988 Simon Zhao, a pastor who had spent thirty-one years in prison camps, encouraged the house church leaders to resuscitate the Back to Jerusalem Movement. Several house church network leaders responded, and the Back to Jeru-salem Movement was reborn. There was much ini-tial enthusiasm, and the house churches deployed the first wave of missionaries into Central Asia. Unfortunately, these missionaries received no training, and they struggled to cope with the harsh realities of service in Muslim countries. Some returned home; some were arrested; some became ill; and some were martyred. The leaders of the house church networks realized that zeal alone would not suffice. The missionaries needed training in order to serve effectively in cross-cul-tural settings.

The initial failure of the Back to Jerusalem Movement has prompted the house church net-works to develop missionary training centers.

Many young adults have received missionary training, and many more are currently in train-ing. Beyond that, a missionary infrastructure is being developed. Rest houses, safe houses, and field supervision are being provided now, and these will enhance the effectiveness of the second wave of missionaries.

chrIstIanIty In JaPanJesuit missionaries sent by the Roman Cath-

olic Church first brought Christianity to Japan. Francis Xavier arrived in Japan with two Jesuit companions in 1549. Japan was in political, cul-tural, and religious turmoil at that time, and the Catholic missionaries found Japan a fertile field. However, eventually central rule was established in Japan, and that was a bad thing for the Chris-tians. In 1587 King Hideyoshi ordered that all the missionaries be expelled, but many missionaries refused to leave. In 1614 the persecution intensi-fied until by 1630 the authorities had eradicated Christianity.

Christianity was reintroduced to Japan in 1853. In that year Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his squadron of U.S. Navy ships into Tokyo Bay. He demanded that the Japanese government estab-lish relations with the U.S. This was done, and an American consul, Townsend Harris, went to live in Japan. He was a dedicated Episcopalian, and he held Christian worship services in his home. In 1858 a Roman Catholic missionary entered Japan, and between 1859 and 1869 four Ameri-can missionary agencies (Episcopalian, Presby-terian, Reformed Church, and Northern Baptist) sent missionaries to Japan. The reign of the first Meiji emperor, Mutsuhito, began in 1867. He was interested in Western culture, and he eventually allowed missionaries to enter Japan freely. By 1882 there were 145 missionaries in Japan, and they claimed about 5,000 converts. By 1888 there were 451 missionaries and 25, 000 believers.22 Southern Baptist missionaries entered Japan in 1889.

The number of Christians in Japan grew slowly but steadily until 1940. When World War

48

II began, the military-controlled government of Japan tried to force all the Christian denomina-tions to combine into one—the Church of Christ in Japan (Nippon Kirisuto Kyodan). After the war American missionaries f looded into Japan, and they did find some response in the war-torn coun-try. However, the interest in Christianity proved short-lived. By 1963 there were perhaps 500,000 Protestants in Japan and 250,000 Roman Catho-lics. This was in a nation of 90 million.23

The Japanese people are the largest unreached people group in Asia. Although there are strong churches and strong Christian institutions in Japan, the percentage of the population profess-ing Christianity has remained quite small. The population of Japan in 2010 was 127 million, while the number of evangelical Christians was only 596,498. These numbers raise the question—Why is the number of Christians in Japan so low? A number of factors have negatively affected the growth of Christianity in Japan. First, Japanese view Christianity as a Western religion. Second, the Japanese are loyal to the Shinto religion, their national religion. Thus to be Japanese is to be Shinto. In actuality, many Japanese practice syn-cretism; that is, they worship at Shinto shrines, but they also practice Buddhism or one of the “new religions.” They see no inconsistency in this at all. The Shinto religion does not condemn syn-cretism, but Christianity does. Third, the Japanese are very group-oriented. To profess faith in Christ would be seen as breaking fellowship with their family, friends, classmates, and co-workers. The fact that approximately 50 percent of Christian converts renounce the faith within three years speaks to the great pressure to conform to group expectations. Fourth, some researchers say the true religion of Japan is materialism. They are seeking money and the comfortable lifestyle it can provide.24 The Japanese government freely grants missionary visas, and many missions agencies have missionaries in Japan. New strategies and methods have been employed, but the response remains disappointing.

chrIstIanIty In koreaRoman Catholic Christianity first entered

Korea from China around 1860, but the king of Korea reacted against it. By 1864 no vestiges of the Catholic mission remained. Protestant mis-sionaries began work in Korea after 1882 when the Korean government established diplomatic relations with the United States. Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries arrived in 1885.25

Two significant events shaped Korean Chris-tianity. The first occurred in 1890. The new mis-sionaries in Korea felt quite intimidated by the task they faced. They decided to invite John L. Nevius, a veteran missionary to China, to come and teach them how to do missionary work effec-tively. He and his wife came to Korea and spent several weeks, instructing the missionaries. Nev-ius had developed a strategy in China that had proved successful. He believed strongly in the indigenous approach to missions; that is, that mis-sionaries should work in such a way that the new churches could be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. The three “selfs” were not new, but Nevius further developed the indigenous strategy. He taught that: (1) Each believer should continue in his home and work, witnessing to those around him; (2) Christian institutions and programs should be developed on a scale that was sustainable by the local Christians; (3) the local Christians should select and support financially those they deemed worthy of church leadership; (4) the churches should be built in an Asian style and with money and work provided by the local Christians; and (5) the church leaders—elders, pastors, evangelists, and church planters—should be gathered each year for a period of intense instruction in Bible and doctrine.26 The mission-aries heeded Nevius’s advice, and the Korean church was indigenous from the beginning, in stark contrast to the church in China.

The second shaping event was the revival of 1907. As mentioned above, it was the custom of the Korean Presbyterian leaders to gather for a period of biblical and theological teaching each

49

year. The teaching was done during the day, and at night worship services were held. On the night of January 6, 1907, the leader encouraged the wor-shipers to pray aloud at the same time. Soon, many of the participants were weeping and confessing sin. Throughout the night the service continued with praying, confessing, and singing. William Blair, one of the Presbyterian missionaries pres-ent, wrote this: “We may have our theories of the desirability or undesirability of public confession of sin. I have had mine; but I know now that when the Spirit of God falls upon guilty souls, there will be confession, and no power on earth can stop it.”27 When the participants returned home, they took the revival with them, and many local churches experienced renewal.

The revival that began in Pyongyang in 1907 still affects Korean Christianity. Most churches still have dawn prayer meetings, and many have all night prayer meetings on Friday nights. Kore-ans continue to pray aloud at the same time in prayer meetings and worship services.

The Korean church grew steadily until World War II, though the church was often persecuted by the Japanese colonial government due to the Christians’s anti-colonial activities. After the war Korea was divided into North and South Korea. North Korea became Communist, while South Korea established a democratic government. In 1950 North Korea invaded the South, and a dev-astating war began, which lasted until 1953. The government of North Korea persecuted the Chris-tians and closed all but a few churches left open for show. Most of the Christians fled southward or died as martyrs. Little is known about the status of Christianity in North Korea today. The govern-ment has outlawed worship services in any loca-tion, and it is a serious crime to possess a Bible or speak of God or Jesus. Operation World estimates that there are 300,000 Christians in North Korea, including 100,000 in prison camps. Missionaries are not allowed to minister in North Korea. Some Christian relief organizations do operate there; but they are not allowed to witness, and their activities

are closely monitored by the security police.28 South Korea represents one of international

missions’s great successes. Flying into Seoul at night is a blessing for a Christian. One can see florescent crosses on top of church buildings all over the city. During the 1970s and 80s Christi-anity grew tremendously in Korea. That explosive growth has slowed now, but Christians com-prise 31 percent of the population. The Korean churches have embraced the cause of interna-tional missions, and they have sent more than 20,000 missionaries throughout the world. At first these missionaries primarily ministered to Koreans living abroad, but improved missionary training has brought a greater emphasis on cross-cultural mission.29

chrIstIanIty In MonGolIaNestorian missionaries tried to establish work

with the Mongolian people in ancient times, but nothing remains from those efforts. James Gilm-our, a British Methodist, worked in Mongolia from 1872-1888, but he baptized only sixteen converts during those years. The church he estab-lished disbanded after he died in 1893. When the Communists gained control of Mongolia in 1921, there were no known Christians left in Mongolia.

The Communist government collapsed in 1990, and Christian missionaries entered the country. There were perhaps only four Christians in the country at that time, but by the year 2000 there were approximately 10,000. Today, there are more than 45,000 Christians of all denomi-nations. Evangelizing the Mongolians presents a great challenge because one-third of the people are nomads. Beyond that, the great distances between settlements and inclement weather make missionary work difficult. Many Christian relief organizations work in Mongolia, seeking to address poverty and social problems. There is a missionary radio station operated by the Far East-ern Broadcasting Company, and the Jesus Film is available in the local languages and has proved quite popular. Korean missionaries have been

50

especially active in Mongolia. The total popula-tion of Mongolia is less than three million, but the people, especially the younger people, have shown an interest in Christianity.30

chrIstIanIty In taIwanChristianity came to Taiwan (Formosa) when

the Dutch East India Company established a trad-ing post in 1624. Company chaplains preached to the local people and won many converts, after they gave up preaching in Dutch and began preaching in Hokkien, the local language. The chaplain-mis-sionaries organized churches and consistories of the Dutch Reformed Church. A local rebellion, led by Koxinga, defeated the Dutch and forced the Dutch East India Company and its chaplains to leave the island. Without any missionaries, the once thriving Reformed Church in Taiwan with-ered and died.

The Treaty of Tianjin, signed in 1858 after the second opium war, opened several Taiwanese cit-ies as “treaty ports.” Missionaries were free to live and minister in treaty ports, and both the Catho-lics and Presbyterians soon established mission stations. The Japanese gained control of Taiwan in 1895. The Japanese were familiar with Chris-tian missionaries, but they wanted to avoid com-petition between the different mission agencies. Therefore, the Japanese government excluded all missionaries except Roman Catholic and Presby-terian. These were permitted to continue because they were already ministering in Taiwan when the Japanese assumed control. The Japanese oppressed the churches and Christians during World War II because they viewed them as pro-Western. At the end of the war control of Taiwan reverted to China.

When Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists lost the Civil War in China, General Chiang and more than a million soldiers and supporters fled to Taiwan. Many veteran missionaries transferred their work to Taiwan, and many Christian insti-tutions were re-established on Taiwan. These included Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Meth-odists, Assembly of God, Lutherans, the Christian

and Missionary Alliance, and the China Inland Mission (now Overseas Missionary Fellowship). Beyond these Western agencies, a number of indigenous Chinese groups opened work on Tai-wan, like the Assembly Hall Church, founded by Watchman Nee. All this activity led to a marked growth in the number of Protestants from 13,000 in 1945 to 180,000 in 1960.31

Unfortunately, the rapid growth, mainly due to migration, did not continue after 1960. Today, Christians only comprise 6 percent of Taiwan’s population. True, there are a number of strong churches and outstanding seminaries, like the China Evangelical Seminary and Taiwan Baptist Seminary, but the people have resisted fervent mis-sionary and evangelistic efforts. Taiwan remains a bastion of Buddhism and especially Chinese reli-gion. Chinese religion is a syncretistic amalgam of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and traditional shamanism. Taiwan freely admits missionaries, and a number of evangelical missionaries continue to work in Taiwan. Operation World describes Tai-wan as “politically open, but spiritually closed,” and that is an accurate assessment.32

conclusIonSometimes it is good to step back and get a

better perspective on things. Historians can look back over four hundred years of Roman Catholic missionary work in East Asia and two hundred years of Protestant ministry. Certainly, much has been accomplished. There are more than 100 mil-lion Christians in China, and Korean churches have sent twenty thousand missionaries around the world. One can travel to any city in East Asia and find a church to attend. Seminaries, Christian institutions, and Asian mission agencies abound. So, a Christian can heave a sigh of contentment and thank the Lord for his faithfulness through the past centuries.

That feeling of contentment might be mis-placed, though. Although many in China have come to Christ, the western provinces of China are still sadly underserved, and more than 90

51

percent of the Chinese people still do not profess Christ. Taiwan boasts large churches and out-standing seminaries, but 94 percent of the popula-tion is lost. The Japanese people remain the largest unreached people group in Asia. So, our reflective Christian should thank the Lord for his marvelous work in the past and pray to ask God for strength and spiritual power to finish the work. Much has been done, but much remains to do.

ENDNOTES 1Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Lon-

don: Penguin, 1986), 81-82. 2Samuel H. Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia:

Vol. 1—Beginning to 1500 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 445-46.

3Ibid., 141. 4Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion

of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publish-ing, 1970), 3:356-57.

5Neill, History of Missions, 282-83. 6Ibid. 7J. Winston Crawley, “East Asia,” in Advance: A History

of Southern Baptist Missions (ed. Baker J. Cauthen; Nashville: Broadman, 1970), 79-86.

8Ibid., 89-102. 9Ibid., 287.10Ibid., 429.11The number of missionaries can be stated accurately,

but the number of Protestants and Catholics in China is difficult to ascertain. The statistics given come from Ralph Covell, “China,” in The Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions (ed. A. Scott Moreau; Grand Rap-ids: Baker, 2000), 179; and Stephen Neill, History of Missions, 429. Daniel Bays estimates there were three million Roman Catholics in 1951 and perhaps one million Protestants. See his article, “Chinese Prot-estant Christianity Today,” The China Quarterly 174 (2003): 491.

12Paul R. Spickard and Kevin M. Cragg, A Global His-tory of Christians (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), 445.

13Ibid.14Spengler, “Christianity Finds a Fulcrum in Asia,” The

Asia Times (August 7, 2007), 1.

15“Sons of Heaven,” Global Chinese Ministries Prayer Letter (January 2009), 1.

16Paul Hattaway, “How Many Christians Are There in China?” [cited 24 February 2011]. Online: http://www.asiaharvest.org/pages/Christians%20in%20China/christiansInChina2.html.

17“News Briefs: China,” Lausanne World Pulse [cited 9 June 2011]. Online: http://www.lausanneworldpulse.com/newsbriefs.php/09-2007

18Paul Hattaway, “Asian People Group Profiles” [cited 9 June 2011]. Online: http://asiaharvest.org/pages/profiles/pageChina.html.

19Jason Mandryk, ed., Operation World: The Defini-tive Prayer Guide to Every Nation (Colorado Springs: Biblica, 2010), 216.

20Paul Hattaway, Operation China (Pasadena, CA: Wil-liam Carey Library, 2000), xi.

21Michael Tai, “The Chinese Are Coming!” unpub-lished manuscript, Malaysia Baptist Seminary, 2009.

22Neill, History of Missions, 276-81.23Ibid., 427.24Mandryk, Operation World, 492-93.25Neill, History of Missions, 290.26Ibid., 291.27Wesley Duewel, Revival Fire (Grand Rapids: Zonder-

van, 1995), 254-55.28Mandryk, Operation World, 507-508.29Ibid., 511.30Ibid., 594-97.31Tsu-Kung Chuang, “China (Taiwan),” in The Evangel-

ical Dictionary of World Missions (ed. A. Scott Moreau; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 179-80.

32Mandryk, Operation World, 258-60.

52

Looking to a City: Current Themes in Urban MissionsJeff K. Walters

Sometime in 2008, our world quietly crossed a historic milestone—it became urban. A 2009

report by the United Nations confirmed that, for the first time in history, more people now live in cities than in rural areas.1 The report predicts

that the global urban population will double to 6.4 billion by 2050. Africa and Asia have the fastest growing urban populations; both are expected to triple over the next forty years.2 Today, over 400 cit-ies have a population exceeding 1 million persons. Twenty-one cities worldwide have a population of over ten million.3 The majority of those cities are found in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Even though

Christianity has often been an urban movement,4 rapid urbanization has presented special challenges for modern evangelicals. A prevalent anti-urban mentality, the predominance of rural churches, and modern social issues such as poverty, globalization,

and homelessness have slowed the evangelical response to the growth of cities.5 Missionaries and urban pastors have increasingly asked how to touch urban centers with the gospel.

the rIsInG tIde of urBan MIssIons

As missiologists and urban ministry practitio-ners consider how best to engage cities, a hand-ful of trends and conversations seem to rise again and again. The most foundational trend in urban missions is the fact of rapid global urbanization itself, along with the growing tide of interest in reaching cities with the gospel. Rising from such growth are concomitant discussions related to urban church planting and the nature of global migrations. While missionaries could create a long list of trends in urban missiology, this article will focus on these two issues and their related effects and conversations.

Interest in urban missions is really nothing new. Many have noted Paul ’s focus on cities,

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 52-63.

Jeff K . Wa lter s is a Ph.D. candidate in Christian Missions at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also serves as the Associate Director for both the Professional Doctoral Studies office as well as the Dehoney Center for Urban Ministry Training.

In addition, Walters has served as a church planting strategist with the International Mission Board in Western Europe.

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whether the strategy was intentional or not.6 The early growth of the church most certainly took place in cities, and urban centers became the base for missionary ventures into the countryside. Harvie Conn and Manuel Ortiz note that “for its first three hundred years beyond the coming of Christ, the church saw cities as gifts of God, royal routes to the evangelization of the world.”7 Wil-liam Carey, commonly referred to as the “Father of Modern Missions,” settled first in Serampore, India, not far from Calcutta. Although he worked frequently in rural areas, he began his mission in a city. The Southern Baptist Convention’s Board of Domestic Missions sent its first missionaries into New Orleans in 1845.8

In spite of the biblical and early historical work in cities, later missionaries struggled with urban contexts. Conn and Ortiz further noted just two decades ago:

[N]ow the picture is not so bright. In the Western world, the church moves to the outer edges of the city, fearful of what it perceives as emerging urban patterns. In the worlds of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the cities expand as the popula-tion flows toward them, but with notable excep-tions, the church feels overwhelmed and moves only slowly to face urban challenges.9

Since that comment, however, missiologists have noted a significant shift in interest in global urban centers.

One of the key figures in the contemporary rise of urban missions has been Ray Bakke. Bakke arrived in Chicago from rural Washington in 1956.10 He served as a church planter and pastor and has written extensively on ministry in urban contexts. In 1980, Bakke accepted leadership of urban consultations for the Lausanne Commit-tee for World Evangelization, a platform from which he has advocated for urban missions for three decades. The basis of Bakke’s ministry and teaching has been a pastoral approach to cities. He argues that those involved in urban ministry

should understand their context as a parish with diverse personalities, opportunities, and needs. A second significant contribution has been Bakke’s exposure of urban themes in the Bible. His A The-ology as Big as the City, though f lawed in many respects, has been important in helping urban missionaries develop biblical strategies for reach-ing the city.11

A second influential figure in the recent history of urban missions has been Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Perhaps more than any other individual, Keller has drawn the attention of young pastors and church planters to the needs of cities. He launched Redeemer in 1989 with a clear vision not only for a church in the borough of Manhattan but also for a movement of new churches in New York City. Keller’s emphasis was on the spiritual, social, and cultural transformation of the city.12 Redeemer’s church planting manual has become an important resource for urban church planters.

Southern Baptists, though never known as an urban denomination, have also been influential in the development of urban missions over the last three decades. As early as 1966, the Home Mis-sion Board (now North American Mission Board) elected to focus its efforts on North America’s growing cities.13 From programs variously called “Metropolitan Missions,” “Key Cities,” and “Mega-Cities Focus,” Southern Baptists attempted to take the gospel to dozens of North American cities.

At the meeting of the Executive Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in September 1998, Convention President Paige Patterson and North American Mission Board President Bob Reccord encouraged pastors and leaders to consider the great needs of American cities. Patterson called on Southern Baptists to “bend our backs to the job of getting the gospel of Jesus Christ to Nineveh, to New York, to Chicago, to Philadelphia, to Cleve-land.”14 Reccord affirmed Patterson’s call to action, announcing the formation of a strategy to reach the fifty largest cities of the nation. “The effort to share the gospel in our largest cities,” he pro-

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claimed, “will be a personal priority for me and for our agency.”15 Reccord announced that Phoenix and Chicago would be the first of several “Strate-gic Focus Cities.”

The Strategic Focus Cities initiative had mixed success, but the North American Mission Board continued their attention to urban contexts. Under their current president, Kevin Ezell, the Board has launched a new strategy to reach fifty key cities through church planting.16

Urban missions is not new. The rising empha-sis led by men like Bakke and Keller has however, led to much discussion about the intersection of urbanization and missiology. Both have been inf luential in helping urban missionaries think about one of the most important trends in the last century: the wave of migration and diaspora missiology.

cItIes and GloBal MIGr atIons Within the context of this article, we must dis-

cuss two “great migrations” taking place today. The first is urbanization—the move of populations from rural to urban. Much of that migration took place in the last century, at the turn of which less than fif-teen percent of the global population lived in urban contexts.17 As discussed above, the urban popula-tion today has grown to more than half of the global total. The second wave of migration is that of indi-viduals, families, and peoples moving away from their places of origin to a new locale. Enoch Wan, a leader in the study of missions and global migra-tions, cites statistics that three percent of the global population—some 214 million people—are now living away from their places of origin.18

According to the United Nations, two-thirds of international migrants have settled in “devel-oped” countries.19 Wan identifies several “push and pull” factors affecting migration. Poverty, nat-ural disaster, and political or religious persecution are forces that often drive individuals and fami-lies from their places of origin. More positively, quality of life, opportunity, and religious freedom tend to draw migrants and refugees to developed

countries.20 These factors bring about great oppor-tunity for Christian missions as millions of people move from unchurched lands to nations where the church is much stronger. A special study group formed by the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization celebrates the fact that:

[M]any previously presumed to be “unreached” people from the 10/40 windows are now acces-sible due to the global trend of migrant popula-tions moving “from south to north, and from east to west.” Congregations in the receiving countries (i.e. industrial nations in the West) can practice “missions at our door step” i.e. reaching the newcomers in their neighborhoods without crossing borders geographically, linguistically and culturally. When God is moving the dias-poras geographically making them accessible, the Church should not miss any opportunity to reach them with the gospel, i.e. “missions to the diasporas.”21

The overlap between global migration and urbanization is the central concern for urban mis-sions. A significant portion of urban population growth is ethnic. Sociologist Roger Waldinger points out that, in the United States, “Today’s new-comers are far more likely than their native-born counterparts to live in the nation’s largest urban regions, making immigration, now as in the past, a quintessentially urban phenomenon.”22 Almost half of all immigrants to the United States between 2000 and 2009 went to the nation’s eight largest cities.23 The same is true in many Western cities.

As the nations described in Matthew 28:18-20 move to global urban centers, the opportunities for evangelism are boundless. For migrants mov-ing internally from villages to cities and for those emigrating to other nations, the overwhelming change of social life will provide opportunities for believers and churches to reach out with ministry and the gospel. “The twenty-first century,” con-tend anthropologists Caroline Brettell and Robert Kemper, “will be accompanied by vast differences

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in wealth and power within and among the world’s societies, and cities will be the critical arena in which these differences will be experienced.”24 Healthy, church-centered evangelism and mis-sions will have a significant message for those who have left their homes for urban centers. In addi-tion, new city dwellers will maintain contact with those back in their home villages, providing an additional opportunity for gospel missions.25

urBan church PlantInGA second important theme in twenty-first cen-

tury urban missions is church planting. In Church Planting for a Greater Harvest, C. Peter Wagner argued that the “single most effective evangelis-tic methodology under heaven is planting new churches.”26 The task of biblical missions rests with churches and requires that believers be involved in making disciples. The Christian mission is incomplete, however, if we stop there. The heart of missions is biblical churches making disciples by reproducing biblical churches. Once evangelism has taken place, new believers must be gathered together to form new churches. These new congre-gations must reflect a New Testament understand-ing of the church in all its facets.

Thinking About the CityA challenge in any discussion of urban ministry

and missions is that of definition. Geographers, sociologists, urban planners, and statisticians all have different understandings of what consti-tutes an urban place. John Palen outlines multiple viewpoints that impact one’s understanding of the term, including economic, cultural, demographic, and geographical factors.27 None of these defini-tions are entirely satisfactory. The United Nations reports urban populations based on each country’s own definition. For example, in the United States, urban centers are defined by population (2,500 or more persons) and population density (1,000 per-sons per square mile).28 In China, urban areas are designated by the national governing body. Other nations define any town with at least two hundred

residents within a defined border as urban.29 Don-ald McGavran defined rural and urban in eco-nomic terms, saying, “I classify as rural all those who earn their living from the soil, dwell in vil-lages, and eat largely what they raise.”30 Urban, on the other hand, were those communities of people “who live in market centers and live by trade or manufacture.”31 Still, he described urban areas as having populations of at least ten thousand.

For church planters and missionaries, sociolo-gists have constructed one of the most helpful concepts of what is urban. Such definitions have typically revolved around Louis Wirth’s three-fold description of urban places based on size, density, and heterogeneity.32 Gottdeiner and Budd build on that definition, describing a city as “a bounded space that is densely settled and has a relatively large, culturally heterogeneous population.”33 Their definition is helpful in that it emphasizes both the local (boundaries) and cultural (“rela-tively large”) nature of cities.

Wirth also described three types of relation-ships in rural and urban contexts, a subject most important to missionaries as they share Christ. Primary relationships, the type most often found in rural areas, are face-to-face and very personal. Secondary relationships are based on contacts that take place less frequently and are less per-sonal. They are also focused on a specific role, like that between a bank teller and a regular customer. Finally, tertiary relationships are formal relation-ships like business contacts. Wirth argued that urban dwellers have many more secondary and tertiary relationships than primary ones.34 More recently, sociologists have described cities more by the types of networks (family, business, social, etc.) present.35 Such studies emphasize both opportuni-ties and challenges for urban missionaries.

Defining terms like urban and city is more than a debate over semantics. How one understands the terminology impacts how one looks at the task of urban missions. Various definitions of urban contexts not only help missionaries evaluate their fields, but they also aid in strategy development. It

56

seems obvious that cities differ greatly from rural areas, but the characteristics described above emphasize the need for fresh thinking in urban church planting. Other themes such as pace of life, diversity, secularism, and security are equally important. Rural and urban differences play out in two specific areas of urban missions: social minis-tries and ethnicity.

Social Ministry and Church PlantingCities are places of significant diversity in

almost every category. Persons of great wealth live in close proximity to the urban poor. In many global urban centers, slums comprise much of the landscape.36 Cities, especially in the West, are home to families representing every race and nation on earth.

In his important (though controversial) study on a biblical theology of the urban church, Robert Linthicum explains his own experience as a con-servative American believer confronting extreme poverty, open injustice, and urban sin for the first time. Having arrived in inner city Chicago in the mid-1950s, Linthicum recalls,

incident after incident reminded me that I suf-fered from a theology gap. A theology that would be adequate for a rural world or Western culture was not adequate for the city. Manifestations of raw corporate evil, almost beyond the power even of its perpetrators to control, made nonsense of a doctrine of sin perceived as individual acts of wrongdoing. My confrontation with economic and political exploiters of the poor who were also faithful communicants in their churches made a mockery of the church as the body of Christ. My experiences increased my frustration with a theol-ogy learned in college and seminary’s halls of ivy.37

W hether one agrees with Linthicum’s reac-tion or not, he expresses well the encounter that takes place when a missionary arrives in another culture. Urban poverty and social injustice seem overwhelming. Exploitation, human trafficking,

and a host of other social problems challenge a believer’s ethical and theological sensibilities. The missionary sent to evangelize a people and start churches asks, “how can I witness and preach in the midst of suffering and deprivation?” These questions become especially acute in a densely populated city where social problems seem to be multiplied many times over.

The current discussion regarding the relation-ship between church planting and social ministry springs from a long history. The earliest modern missionaries established schools, orphanages, and other ministries to the suffering. During the Great Awakening and after, evangelical leaders pursued social concerns alongside gospel proclamation. Men like Spurgeon, Wesley, Whitefield, and their contemporaries were actively involved in social ministry.38 It was not until the late nineteenth century that division arose over the relationship between evangelism and social ministry.

In a paper presented to the Consultation on the Relationship between Evangelism and Social Responsibility meeting at Grand Rapids in 1982 (a continuation of the Lausanne Congress), Asian theologian Bong Rin Ro traced the history of the Church’s social involvement from the early church until the twentieth century.39 He found that, while levels of social involvement ebbed and flowed through the centuries, times of great renewal and revival generally led to increased social involvement. The early church, the Prot-estant Reformation, and the Great Awakenings were all characterized by social action and minis-try. The Reformers’s renewed emphasis on Scrip-ture pointed believers toward the needs of those around them. Wesley and Whitefield ministered to the masses and inspired men like William Wil-berforce to seek justice for the oppressed. D. L. Moody, Arthur Pierson, and A. B. Simpson all began their ministries in cities and were heav-ily involved in social ministries.40 Ro contends that “the contemporary theology which relates the kingdom of God to social concern and the current debate as to the priority of evangelism or

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social responsibility are recent developments.”41

David Hesselgrave identifies four different ways of looking at the relationship between evangelism and social action. On one end of Hesselgrave’s typology is “radical liberationism.” “Liberation-ists,” he explains, “tend to equate the biblical notion of salvation from sin with the struggle of poor and oppressed people for justice.”42 Few, if any, evangelicals in the Lausanne tradition would fall into this category. At the opposite end of the spectrum is “traditional prioritism.” Into this cat-egory fall those who see the primary mission of the Church as evangelism. All other ministries, including social action, are secondary. In the cen-ter is “holism theology.” Hesselgrave breaks this category down into two divisions. “Revisionist holism” considers evangelism and social action to be equal partners, while “restrained holism” retains a “certain priority for evangelism.”43

Roger Greenway has described a four-fold per-spective on missions, especially urban missions, that encompasses conversion, church planting, community ministry, and creation care. He con-siders all of these essential to the fulfillment of the missionary mandate. In terms of social responsi-bility, Greenway makes an excellent point in light of the full biblical witness:

If we wipe out poverty but neglect to tell the poor the Good News about Jesus Christ, we will have failed in our mission. If we preach the gospel but ignore the plight of the poor, we are false prophets.44

In the face of poverty and social problems, urban missiologists and church planters have concluded that one cannot separate social ministries from the church any more than one can divide people from their suffering. The answer is the gospel pro-claimed through the church.

Some urban ministry practitioners have shifted away from the controversial language of social ministry and evangelism to speak of “chang-ing the city” and “community transformation.”

When Tim Keller planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church, he did so with a “clear, compelling pur-pose: to apply the gospel to New York City so as to change it spiritually, culturally, and through it, to change our society and the world.”45 He started with the gospel, but believed that the gospel would bring about significant change in urban life. Civil-ity between neighbors, changes in family struc-tures, improvement of race and class relationships, and Christian influence on the arts are all the fruit of Christ-centered church planting ministry.46

Eric Swanson and Sam Williams also tie com-munity transformation directly to the evangelistic proclamation of the gospel and to the presence of the local church. “W herever the gospel has gone,” they note, “this spiritual transformation is reflected in a wake of societal impact.”47 Keller, Swanson, and Williams recognize that church planting and church health impact the social fabric of a city in ways that politics and government can-not. But such change cannot come about unless a church takes seriously her calling to feed the hun-gry, care for the poor, bring about reconciliation, and minister to the suffering.

Harvie Conn, a highly influential advocate and teacher of urban missions, argued that evange-lism and social ministry are “two sides of the same coin” and cannot be separated, even if they are not identical activities of the Christian church.48 He expressed his frustration with what he referred to as an “apartheid” between evangelism and social ministry, saying,

Who is more naïve? The liberal leaders of what we now call “the social gospel” with their pas-sionate concern for a broken world and their never-ending optimism of how we may rectify it? Or the evangelical who has given up on the world’s headaches in favor of a stripped-down form of evangelism reduced to four spiritual laws? Or the evangelical social activist who does not see intercessory prayer as the first and constant component of our “social evangelism?”49

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Conn viewed proclamation, presence, and prayer as part of unified whole in the lives of believers and churches. “To seek [community] develop-ment without centering on Christ as our confes-sion,” he later wrote with Manuel Ortiz, “is to be reductionist. On the other hand, to do evangelism while ignoring the concerns of the poor and the powerless is also reductionist.”50 The mission of God through the city is hampered by sin, both personal and systemic, and must be addressed through both evangelism and social ministries of justice and peace.

Ethnicity and Urban Church PlantingGlobal migration and urban church planting

intersect on the issue of ethnicity and racial rec-onciliation. Since the mid-twentieth century, mis-sionaries and church planters have focused their efforts on planting churches among particular peo-ple groups or ethnic units. That emphasis can be traced back to Donald McGavran’s Homogeneous Unit Principle (hereafter HUP). McGavran, argu-ably the most influential missiologist of the twen-tieth century, proposed that “Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers.”51 In application, this principle means that effective evangelism and church plant-ing require removing as much as possible these barriers by launching churches within particular homogeneous populations. Ralph Winter carried McGavran’s HUP one step further through his advocacy of a “people group approach” to mis-sions. He argued that in order to complete the Great Commission task of making “disciples of all nations,” missionaries and churches would have to leave behind geographic and political definitions and focus strategically on ethnoliguistic groups.52

While most contemporary missions agencies have taken up Winter’s philosophy, the approach has not been without controversy, especially among those working in urban contexts. Francis DuBose, who taught missions at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in San Francisco, recognized that the heterogeneity present in every

city must influence urban missions strategies. He clearly rejected McGavran’s Homogeneous Unit Principle as unhealthy and unbiblical, saying, “The New Testament and the homogeneous unit strategy seem in clear opposition both in attitude and practice.”53 Urban populations are diverse, he argued, and churches should reflect that diversity.

More recently, Mark DeYmaz, pastor of an intentionally multi-ethnic congregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, has been a vocal opponent of church planting focused on single ethnic groups. “Surely, it must break the heart of God to see so many churches throughout this country seg-regated ethnically and economically from one another,” he declares.54 DeYmaz bases his argu-ments on biblical passages such as Jesus’ prayer for the unity of the church ( John 17:1-26), the nationalities represented in the church at Antioch (Acts 11:19-21), and Paul’s teaching on the unity of Jews and Gentiles in the church (Eph 3:6). He concludes that “we should recognize that Paul, like Christ, intended the local church to be multi-ethnic and, as such, to uniquely display God’s wis-dom and glory.”55

A full discussion of the issue of homogeneous or monoethnic churches versus multi-ethnic churches is beyond the scope of this article, but the topic is vital to healthy biblical ministry in urban contexts. Cities are culturally, racially, and economically diverse. At the same time, minority groups exist in cities in numbers large enough to retain some cultural and language characteristics, justifying an ethnic church planting approach. McGavran’s HUP rose in rural village contexts where diversity was rare. It has proven strategi-cally valid on many fields. The question for urban missiologists is what constitutes a people group or homogeneous unit.

Missionaries recognized quickly that tradi-tional ethnoglinguistic definitions break down quickly in urban contexts. McGavran argued that “the idea of the homogeneous unit is very elastic,” saying that in various places it might be based on ethnicity. In other locales, the “common charac-

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teristic” might be geography, language, or class.56 Homogeneous units looked differently in rural or urban environments and in Western or non-Western societies.

Troy L. Bush, who teaches urban ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, argues that cities require a different vision of people groups. He contends that one must con-sider not only ethnicity and language but also social groups and urban networks. Traditional categories remain important, especially among first-generation immigrants who have not learned their host language or culture. At the same time, other factors connect urban dwellers and provide inroads to a population. Bush warns, however, that overanalysis is problematic. “The beautiful com-plexity of the city,” he says, “can lead to confusion about people groups. As we identify groups in the city, especially social groups, it is tempting to see groups everywhere.”57 Identifying people groups and people group segments in urban contexts is, at best, a complex endeavor, but it is vital to church planting in cities.

Urban missionaries have proposed numer-ous models and methodologies for planting churches that ref lect the diversity of their com-munities. Manuel Ortiz describes two types of models: multicongregational and multi-ethnic. Multicongregational churches have at least two (and usually many more) ethnic churches meet-ing in one location.58 The congregations generally gather at different times or in different areas of a church property. The benefits of this model are its stewardship of valuable urban real estate and the preservation of language and cultural distinctives. Multi-ethnic churches not only mix believers from various ethnic backgrounds in a common worship service, but they also reflect diversity in worship styles, leadership, and structure.59

One particularly interesting model of multi-ethnic church planting is aptly referred to as a “ hybrid.” John Leonard, who worked among North Africans in Paris for many years, describes this model as a meeting of the multicongrega-

tional and multi-ethnic philosophies.60 Believers and non-believers gather in small groups focused on particular people groups or segments.61 At a separate time, the small groups meet together for corporate worship and fellowship. The corporate gathering involves leadership and musical styles from diverse cultures. Leonard argues that this hybrid model is the most flexible and reproducible and that it best recognizes cultural distinctives in a biblically faithful way.62

Faithful church planters continue to seek ways to reach out to immigrants and refugees in their communities, but the challenges of language and culture make simple answers impossible. Most would agree with DeYmaz that the biblical goal of reconciliation between races and ethnicities is wor-thy. At the same time, the realities of cultural pride and conflict present real barriers that take time and solid discipleship to overcome. As with most issues in urban missions, the best answer lies in a “both/and” approach that recognizes the need for both ethnic congregations and multi-ethnic churches.

Simplicity and Urban Church PlantingOne final issue related to urban church planting

is that of “simple” models. In his most significant contribution to urban missiology, a chapter on “Discipling Urban Populations” in Understand-ing Church Growth, Donald McGavran noted that high property costs and the need for hundreds of neighborhood churches make the construction of church buildings almost prohibitive.63 He particu-larly advocated the use of the house church model, even to the point of starting a house church him-self.64 DuBose proposed that effective urban mis-sions be both flexible and simple.65 Simplicity often shows in church planting through house churches, a methodology DuBose addressed in Home Cell Groups and House Churches, written with C. Kirk Hadaway and Stuart Wright.66

Advocates of house churches argue that small gatherings are more faithful to New Testament models by providing flexibility and accountabil-ity. J. D. Payne notes that the term house churches

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can convey a limited image; house churches do not meet only in houses. They are, in his words, “the local expression of the body of Christ whether they meet in a house, a park, or a conference hall.”67 While not a perfect model, many urban practitio-ners have argued that house churches represent the healthiest way to plant churches in crowded urban contexts.68

While he maintains the value of a large corpo-rate gathering, Tim Keller also advocates for small groups spread throughout a city. Not long after launching Redeemer Presbyterian, Keller and his staff shifted to a “cell church model.”69 The church had grown considerably during its first few years, but Keller recognized that its impact was limited based on its Manhattan location and the size of New York City. They took the decision that “noth-ing would compete with small groups as the main way we minister to individuals in the church.”70 Redeemer reflects what William Beckham refers to as a “two-winged church,” having both a large collective worship service and multiple small groups for discipleship and fellowship.71 Cell churches maintain a large gathering but overcome the property barrier by holding most activities in smaller groups.

conclusIonMissions is inherently a complicated work, but

that work is made more challenging when faced with the complexity of urban contexts. The trends discussed in this article are but the beginning of issues facing urban ministry. At the same time, they ref lect the dynamic nature of engaging cit-ies and peoples with the gospel. In one sense, church planting and the growing presence of dias-pora peoples are broad missiological trends. But among these opportunities, urban centers present challenges that demand significant thought and research. Growing interest in reaching cities and urban populations will provide avenues for further discussion as the global church strives to fulfill the Great Commission among all the peoples of the world.

ENDNOTES 1United Nations Population Division, World Urban-

ization Prospects: The 2009 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2010), 1.

2Ibid., 11. 3United Nations Population Division, “Fact Sheet:

Mega Cit ies” [cited 16 March 20 09]. On l ine: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/wup2007/2007wup.htm.

4Recent scholarship on the history of Christianity in urban contexts includes Harvie M. Conn and Man-uel Ortiz, Urban Ministry: The Kingdom, the City, and the People of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2001); Harvie M. Conn, The American City and the Evangelical Church: A Historical Overview (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994); Rodney Stark, Cities of God: The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006).

5Jacques Ellul’s The Meaning of the City (Grand Rap-ids: Eerdmans, 1968) is a source of much anti-urban sentiment, but Conn and Ortiz see a long history of anti-urban feeling within Christianity (Conn and Ortiz, Urban Ministry). See also Robert C. Linthi-cum, City of God, City of Satan: A Biblical Theology of the Urban Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1991).

6See Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962); Roger S. Greenway, Apostles to the City: Biblical Strategies for Urban Missions (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1978).

7Conn and Ortiz, Urban Ministry, 79. 8Arthur B. Rutledge, Mission to America: A Century

and a Quarter of Southern Baptist Home Missions (Nashville: Broadman, 1969), 26. For more on South-ern Baptist engagement of the city, see Jeff K. Wal-ters, “Embracing the City: A Brief Survey of Southern Baptists and North American Urban Missions” [cited 8 July 2011]. Online: http://northamericanmissions.org/ ?q=node/491.

9Conn and Ortiz, Urban Ministry, 79.10Bakke details his story in The Urban Christian (Down-

ers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1987) and more recently with Jon Sharpe in Street Signs: A New Direction in

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Urban Ministry (Birmingham, AL: New Hope, 2006).11Ray Bakke, A Theology as Big as the City (Downers

Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997).12Timothy J. Keller and J. Allen Thompson, Church

Planter Manual (New York: Redeemer Church Plant-ing Center, 2002), 24-25.

13Rutledge, Mission to America, 261.14Art Toalston, “Paige Patterson Urges SBC Thrust to

Evangelize Nation’s Major Cities” Baptist Press (22 September 1998) [cited 8 July 2011]. Online: http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/bpnews.asp?id=2770.

15Ibid.16North American Mission Board, “NAMB Trustees

Approve Sweeping Changes” [cited 8 July 2011]. Online: http://www.namb.net/nambblog.aspx?id=8589997986&blogid=8589939695.

17Todd M. Johnson, David B. Barrett, and Peter F. Crossing, “Status of Global Mission, 2011, in Con-text of 20th and 21st Centuries,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 35, no. 1 (2011): 29.

18Enoch Wan, “Diaspora Missiology,” Occasional Bul-letin of the Evangelical Missiological Society 20, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 3; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Trends in International Migrant Stock: The 2008 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2009), 1.

19United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, International Migration Report 2006: A Global Assessment (New York: United Nations, 2009), 1.

20Wan, “Diaspora Missiology,” 2; See also, Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, Scattered to Gather: Embracing the Global Trend of Diaspora (Manila: LifeChange, 2010).

21Ibid., 27.22Roger Waldinger, “Strangers at the Gates,” in Strang-

ers at the Gates: New Immigrants in Urban America (ed. Roger Waldinger; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 1.

23The Brookings Institution, State of Metropolitan America (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 2010), 44.

24Caroline B. Brettell and Robert V. Kemper, “City-ward Migration in Comparative Perspective,” in Urban Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City

(ed. George Gmelch, Robert V. Kemper, and Walter P. Zenner; 5th ed.; Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2010), 356.

25For an excellent analysis of these new populations and their networks, see Doug Saunders, Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History is Reshaping Our World (New York: Pantheon, 2010).

26C. Peter Wagner, Church Planting for a Greater Har-vest (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1990), 11.

27J. John Palen, The Urban World (7th ed.; New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), 7.

28United Nations, Demographic Yearbook 2005 (New York: United Nations Population Division, 2005), table 6.

29Ibid.30Donald A. McGavran, Understanding Church Growth

(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 278.31Ibid.32Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” in Urban

Life: Readings in the Anthropology of the City (ed. George Gmelch, Robert V. Kemper, and Walter P. Zenner; 5th ed.; Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2010), 103-05.

33M. Gottdeiner and Leslie Budd, Key Concepts in Urban Studies (Los Angeles: Sage, 2005), 4.

34Ibid. 35See, for example, Mark Gottdiener and Ray Hutchi-

son, The New Urban Sociology (Boulder, CO: West-view, 2006).

36See Viv Grigg, Cry of the Urban Poor: Reaching the Slums of Today’s Mega-Cities (rev. ed.; Waynesboro, GA: Authentic Media, 2004); Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2006).

37Linthicum, City of God, City of Satan, 20.38John R. W. Stott, Issues Facing Christians Today: A

Major Appraisal of Contemporary Social and Moral Questions (Basingstoke: Marshalls, 1984), 2-4. Stott contends that the evangelical revivals of the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries, resulting in the leadership of men like Wesley, Wilberforce, and the Clapham Sect are examples of the evangelical passion for social concern throughout history.

39Bong Rin Ro, “The Perspective of Church History

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from New Testament Times to 1960,” in Bruce J. Nicholls, ed., In Word and Deed: Evangelism and Social Responsibility (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 11-40.

40See Lyle W. Dorsett, A Passion for Souls: The Life of D. L. Moody (Chicago: Moody, 1997) and Gerald H. Anderson et al., eds., Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of the Modern Missionary Movement (Mary-knoll, NY: Orbis, 1994).

41Ro, “Perspective of Church History,” 13.42David J. Hesselgrave, Paradigms in Conflict: Ten Key

Questions in Christian Missions Today (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2005), 120.

43Ibid., 120-21.44Roger S. Greenway and Timothy M. Monsma, Cities:

Missions’ New Frontier (2nd ed; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000), 72-74.

45Keller, Church Planting Manual, 24.46Ibid.47Eric Swanson and Sam Williams, To Transform a City:

Whole Church, Whole Gospel, Whole City (Grand Rap-ids: Zondervan, 2010), 44.

48Harvie Conn, Evangelism: Doing Justice and Preaching Grace (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 9.

49Ibid., 80.50Conn and Ortiz, Urban Ministry, 348.51McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, 198.52For a fuller discussion, see Ralph Winter, “Unreached

Peoples: The Development of the Concept,” Inter-national Journal of Frontier Missions 1, no. 2 (1984): 129-61.

53Francis M. DuBose, How Churches Grow in an Urban World: History, Theology, and Strategy of Growth in All Kinds of City Churches (Nashville: Broadman, 1978), 171.

54Mark DeYmaz, Building a Healthy Multi-Ethnic Church: Mandate, Commitments, and Practices of a Diverse Congregation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 4.

55Ibid., 37.56Donald A. McGavran, “The Genesis and Strategy of

the Homogeneous Unit Principle,” (paper presented to the Lausanne Theology and Education Group, May 30, 1977; Donald McGavran Collection, William

Carey International University), Cabinet 8, Drawer 4, 2.

57Troy L. Bush, “Urbanizing Panta ta Ethne,” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Southeast Region of the Evangelical Missiological Society, 25 March 2011), 17-18. See also, idem, “The Great Com-mission and the Urban Context,” in The Great Com-mission Resurgence: Fulfilling God’s Mandate in Our Time (ed. Chuck Lawless and Adam W. Greenway; Nashville: B&H, 2010), 299-324.

58Manuel Ortiz, One New People: Models for Develop-ing a Multiethnic Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1996), 63-85.

59Ibid., 86-106.60John S. Leonard, “Hybrid Church Planting Among

North African Muslim Immigrants Living in France,” in Globalization and Its Effects on Urban Ministry in the 21st Century (ed. Susan S. Baker; Pasadena: Wil-liam Carey Library, 2009), 213-24.

61People group “segments” are not necessarily ethno-linguistic groups but may reflect cultural, economic, or generational populations.

62Antioch Church in Louisville, Kentucky, is a current example of the hybrid model. For more information about this church, see their website: http://antioch-people.org.

63McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, 322.64Ibid., 322; Donald A. McGavran, “House Churches:

A Key Factor for Growth,” Global Church Growth 29, no. 1 (1992): 5-6.

65DuBose, How Churches Grow, 170.66C. Kirk Hadaway, Francis M. DuBose, and Stuart A.

Wright, Home Cell Groups and House Churches (Nash-ville: Broadman, 1987).

67J. D. Payne, Missional House Churches: Reaching Our Communities with the Gospel (Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2007), 10.

68For example, Manuel Sosa, “Church Planting in South America’s Urban Centers,” in Globalization and Its Effects on Urban Ministry in the 21st Century (ed. Susan S. Baker; Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2009), 225-42; David Garrison, Church Planting Movements: How God is Redeeming a Lost World (Midlothian, VA: WIGTake Resources, 2004).

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69Keller, Church Planting Manual, 16.70Ibid.71Wil l iam A . Beck ham, The Second Reformation:

Reshaping the Church for the 21st Century (Houston: Touch, 1995), 25-26.

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Challenges and Prospects of Teaching Theology in AfricaSamuel W. Kunhiyop

IntroductIon

Ther e is no doubt that African Christian-ity is indebted to her rich heritage including

the role Western Christianity has and continues to play. History is replete with the major contri-butions and sacrifices that the Western church made and continues making towards the birth and growth of Christianity among African peoples.

Even after the church in Africa has grown, the West still provides human and material resources that impact the church in Africa. Missionaries continue to be sent to evangelize unreached African peoples; the Bible is translated into many languages; Bible teach-ers provide theological education, and many other social services are rendered to alleviate the suffering and poverty afflicting Africans. In spite of all these positive influences, there are, however, areas that need

to be improved in order to make the church stron-ger. In this paper, I will focus on the teaching of theology in an African context, a subject that plays

a significant role in the development of ministers and teachers for the church.

Teaching theology in Africa is always an excit-ing venture, full of challenges, and criticism. In regard to criticism, many today argue that teach-ing theology in Africa must be done differently. Since systematic theology is so indebted to the West, some say, it cannot speak to the African situation. Furthermore, “Western” theology is often viewed as merely theoretical and abstract and thus not relevant to the real issues of life. Afri-cans, in general, we are told, do not like abstract and theoretical thinking but instead prefer to focus on practical issues. It is for this reason that many criticize the teaching of theology in Africa, especially theology indebted to the West. In terms of the challenge of teaching theology in Africa, then, there are many. For example, the teacher often finds his students raising questions that are not immediately relevant to the discussion at hand. Often the question begins with a story that needs a response, and this can be confusing to the teacher since he does not know exactly what the question is. However, as one begins to under-stand the African worldview and way of asking

Sa muel W. Kunhi yop serves as General Secretary of the Evangelical Church of West Africa in Jos, Nigeria.

He was previously the head of the Postgraduate School at South African Theological Seminary, and prior to that role he was Provost and Professor of Theology and Ethics at Jos ECWA Theological Seminary. Dr. Kunhiyop earned the Ph.D. from Trinity International University, and is the author of African Christian Ethics (Zondervan, 2008).

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 64-76.

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questions, one realizes that the question itself is in the story. In addition, another challenge, whether it is in Africa (or anywhere in the world!), is the disconnect between what is learned in class and what happens in life. Sadly, our culture has the tendency to mold us after it, instead of being transformed by Scripture.

In this paper, I want to address the challenges and prospects of teaching theology in Africa from an African perspective. I will first respond to the charge that theology taught in Africa is too “West-ern” in orientation and then secondly give some practical reflections on how to teach theology that is meaningful and relevant to African Christianity.

Is systeMatIc theoloGy too western?

Let us look at two criticisms that are often made in regard to teaching systematic theology in any context outside the Western world.

Systematic Theology is Merely a Western Product Not Suitable for Other Contexts

The first criticism deals with the perception that systematic theology is so indebted to West-ern thought that it is not useful for other contexts, especially an African context. No doubt, it can be demonstrated that most systematic theology written today originates from the Western world. Just the sheer number of theology texts emanating from the West is a strong enough reason to suggest that a good portion of systematic theology origi-nates in the West. Indeed, for hundreds of years, many works on theology have been exported from the West to other parts of the world. But is this enough reason to say that systematic theology is merely a Western product? The answer is no.

Thomas C. Oden argues persuasively that, historically, “Africa played a decisive role in the formation of Christian culture. Decisive intellec-tual achievements of Christianity were explored and understood first in Africa before they were recognized in Europe and [it was a] millennium

before they found their way to North America.”1 Historically, Africa played a vital role in the first five centuries of the church. In the study of church history and theology, many seem to forget the role that Africa has on the intellectual development of theology. Oden again states the obvious:

Christianity would not have its present vitality in the Two-Thirds World without the intellectual understanding that developed in Africa between [A.D.] 50 and 500. The pretence of studying church history while ignoring African church history is implausible. Yet, this assumption has been common in the last five centuries in a way that would have seemed odd during the first five centuries, when the African mind was highly honoured and emulated.2

While studying history in the West, I noted that history professors would hardly acknowledge the presence of Africa in the formation and develop-ment of Christian thought. One prominent pro-fessor even denied that Egypt is part of Africa! Another denied the fact that Augustine was an African. On this same note, Oden continues:

Well-meaning European and American histo-rians have a tilted perception of the relation of African and European intellectual history in the third and fourth centuries, and thus at the apex of African influence. This perception is prejudi-cial. The facts show that the intuition is wrong.3

The situation in Africa is not any better. Even the church history taught in many seminary and Bible college classes in Africa falls prey to this deliber-ate ignorance of the African contribution. This in no small measure contributes to the idea that Christianity and indeed systematic theology is merely a Western product. Yes, “the longstand-ing preconceived notions and biases”4 continue to shape how Christianity and theology is shaped. The intellectual history of the church and Christi-anity is ignored, resisted, and disregarded. This is

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largely responsible for the minimal or even nonex-istent role of Africa in the development of Chris-tian thought and writing. But historical theology would certainly be incomplete without the role of Africa and Africans. We cannot minimize the significant role that Africa has played in the his-tory of the church and as a result it is difficult to conclude that all systematic theology is merely a product of the West.

Historic Christianity is indebted to promi-nent African theologians such as Origen, Ter-tullian, Augustine, Cyprian, Clement, Cyril, and Lactantius. We know that theologies in the early centuries were immensely shaped by these African thinkers on major issues such as Christology, the Trinity, and other crucial theo-logical doctrines. Some have referred to Origen and Tertullian—both Africans—as pioneers in systematic theology, and rightly so, even though we would not agree with everything they said. A number of major classical philosophers were Africans, including Clement of Alexandria who was responsible for the development of logos philosophy and the Christian teaching of God. Major heresies, such as Gnosticism, Arianism, and Marcionism were fought by several African theologians. The monastic movement itself origi-nated in Egypt. The arguments that propose that all these Africans were non-Africans is simply not correct. Is it possible that the motivations for such thinking are intended to minimize the Afri-can contribution to the development of system-atic theology? It is hard to say, but Oden seems to be onto something in noting how, “even today many African-born scholars trained in the West seem all too ready to play the role of European chameleons.”5 The often-biased premise that Augustine and all North African theologians are really extensions of Europe is not correct. His-torically, at one time, African Christianity was a powerhouse, and its contribution to systematic theology, even what has been labeled “Western” theology, is significant.

Systematic Theology is not Relevant to African Christianity

A corollary to the preceding criticism is that theology, precisely because it is Western, is too abstract and irrelevant to the African. The charge is often made that abstract thinking without rel-evance is foreign to the African worldview. Behind this charge is the assumption that those from the West are more suited for abstract thinking while Africans are more practical in their orientation. Is this true? No. This is clearly a naïve way of char-acterizing both Westerners and Africans. Human beings, because they are created in God’s image regardless of race, geographical location, or any other factor, both think and do. It is not as if some cultures are “thinking” cultures, while others are “doing” cultures—one cannot so neatly distin-guish the two. Reflection and action are natural abilities to all humans—Western, African, Asian, and all others. One without the other is impos-sible, and an overemphasis to the neglect of the other is unbiblical. Systematic theology is there-fore what properly belongs to both thinking and doing and can be appreciated by all human beings because of their God-given capacity to be ratio-nal, systematic, logical, coherent, and practical. Systematic theology properly understood is not just a philosophical abstraction of ideas but a real reflection and application of God’s word to all of human life.

R EfLECtIons on tEAChInG thEoLoGy In An AfR ICAn ContExt

Let me ref lect on the teaching of systematic theology in an African context. I will begin by defining the nature of theology and then turn to some practical suggestions.

Defining the Nature of Systematic Theology

Theology’s task is to make sense of Scripture on any particular issue or to apply Scripture to every area of our lives. Theology starts with issues raised in Scripture (e.g., sin, justification), and it also

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addresses issues or questions from life, some of which may or may not directly be addressed from Scripture (e.g., abortion, homosexuality, genetic engineering, witchcraft, or ancestral belief). From whatever angle the theologian answers the ques-tions of life, he must do so from Scripture. In seeking to address the real questions of people, the theologian must also answer the issues that his people are asking. In this regard, it is important to note that not every cultural context wrestles with exactly the same issues. To be sure, given the fact that we are God’s creatures and that we have the same problem of sin, there is much more that unites us than divides. That said, sometimes theology influenced by the West does not always address the same issues or questions that Africans face or ask. The mistake many Western systematic theologies make is to presume that the questions they are raising in their own context must be the same important questions everybody is asking, and that the answers Western theologies provide to these questions must apply equally in every part of the world. This assumption is so pervasive because most who study theology in the West bring back to Africa Western-oriented questions and answers and try to plant them in contexts that have different questions and different answers.

For example, in many theolog y textbooks there are often detailed proofs for the existence of God—ontological, cosmological, moral argu-ments, to name a few. Teachers may spend entire class periods discussing different theological and philosophical arguments about the existence of God only to look out and see their African stu-dents completely disengaged with the discussion. And this is not because Africans cannot think philosophically; rather, it is because they are not asking precisely the same questions those in the West may be grappling with. For the most part, in Africa, the existence of God is not in question the way it is in the West. Belief in God is basic and, for most, unquestioned. Instead, the question that the African is concerned with is not whether God exists, but how a loving and powerful God relates

to daily problems, sickness, pain, and death. The problem of evil is another example. In the West, discussion centers around theodicy, or the justifi-cation of God: how can God exist, given the exis-tence of evil? But in Africa, this is not the question. Africans are more concerned about the role of evil forces that bring evil and suffering upon the child of God. It is not that the Western approach is more rational than the African. Both are rational, theo-logical, and philosophical, but they ask different questions and face different issues. In Africa, sys-tematic theology must address the African ques-tions, not merely the non-African ones.

The same applies to the issues that concern the African adult. For example, on issues of mar-riage and sexual ethics, the West is preoccupied with issues of divorce, homosexuality, and abor-tion. The African, on the other hand, is more entrenched in questions concerning procreation, polygamy, infertility, and the gender of children. It is not that these questions do not overlap; they do. My point is that theology taught in Africa must address particular African concerns. The chance of a Western theologian including a lengthy dis-cussion on polygamy in a systematic theology textbook is slim, but for an African theologian writing in an African context, to not address this would be negligent. The same goes for the African trying to discuss issues of utmost relevance to the Western theologian such as homosexuality, gay rights, abortion, and euthanasia. The strong con-demnation of homosexuality by African bishops in recent debates on the issue is a case in point. My point is simply this: the issues or questions sometimes discussed in Western theologies do not always have the same relevancy to the African per-son, and this should remind us that we have to be cautious about adopting Western texts on theol-ogy without acknowledging this fact and making sure the content of what we teach addresses the people we are teaching.

Probably one of the reasons why theology from the West has been problematic in Africa is that there is an uncritical transfer of theology as taught

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in the West to Africa. Many people think errone-ously that the theology taught in the West is a-cul-tural or a-temporal and must therefore equally apply to the African person. Once again, there is much that is common between all human beings, regardless of their culture or background. But theology, in seeking to apply Scripture to specific contexts must also address the questions, prob-lems, and issues in that context so the gospel will be brought to bear on their lives. We must develop and teach a theology that is not only true to the Scriptures, but also speaks cogently to the needs of the African person. Let me now lay out some con-cepts that are important to move in this direction so that we may better and more faithfully teach theology in Africa.

African IdentityIn order to develop a theology that is useful

for the African Christian, the African theologi-cal student and teacher, and even the ordinary lay African Christian must know his true identity. The great undoing of African Christianity is the attempt to mimic Western Christianity. Teaching theology from a Western perspective contributes immensely to the notion that theology is West-ern. In order to stop this, African theologians need to make sure they are asking the right ques-tions, given their context. To do that, they need to understand a number of things about African identity. A useful place to start, then, is history. For African theology, a fruitful starting point would be an earnest study and writing of African Chris-tianity, historically and theologically. African people, particularly Christians, must know their history, culture, and worldview. Foreign teachers and Christian missionaries to the continent ought to know the African person in order to inculcate biblical and Christian truths. There is a rich legacy for Africans—and those interested in teaching theology—in knowing African culture and his-tory. The call for an African Renaissance by Thabo Mbeki, the former President of South Africa, must go beyond cultural and political renewal to

include a reenactment and serious study of Afri-ca’s rightful and prideful role in the intellectual development of Christian beliefs, traditions, and practices. Oden is certainly right to conclude: “It is a category mistake to rule the interpretation of Jewish and Christian Scriptures out of early African history.”6 Among African theologians, this exclusion has spawned what Oden calls “a dilemma of self-esteem.”7 African Christianity with all its various theological, ethical, historical, and exegetical aspects must be a key element in the curriculum of seminaries and Bible colleges where men and women are trained. Carthage in North Africa formed a center of learning in ancient times. Why cannot Africa with its many modern mega cities such as Johannesburg, Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Bujumbura, Kigali, Kinshasha, and Harare not form serious centers of learning today? The way forward is for the church to recover and reaf-firm what was good in her traditional culture. The belief that all African traditional beliefs and prac-tices were pagan and evil must be re-examined. Every culture is fallen, and no culture is neutral. As Christians we have to evaluate every culture in light of Scripture, and we must do this in Africa as well. J. N. K. Mugambi has stated it well:

The modern Christian missionary enterprise has assumed, in general, that the culture and ethics of the missionary is “Christian” and “good,” whereas that of the prospective converts is “non-Christian” and “evil.” Missionary expansion has thus been rationalized in terms of going out to convert those of different cultures and religions so that they might become like the missionary.8

All that happened was that these so-called “evil” practices of African beliefs were simply replaced with alien Western beliefs (which were not necessarily Christian or biblical) that did not find a dwelling in our African souls. What is being called for is “cooking of Christianity in an Afri-can pot” as we evaluate our culture in terms of the standard of Scripture.

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Holistic Approach to Life African thought tends towards a unified vision

of reality in which there is no room for irreduc-ible dichotomies between matter and spirit, soul and body.9 Indeed, in an African worldview, the physical and the spiritual, training and ministry, academic and life situations, theory and practice, religion and economics, politics and religion, all go together. Speculative ref lection apart from action has never been a defining characteristic of the African worldview. This interconnectedness, relatedness, and cohesion are what Nkemnkia refers to as “vital force” by which he means, “the parts are really indispensable for the whole, and enable the whole to include in itself all the parts, though different from them.”10 Right belief with-out action is a paralysis. A right belief in a holy God results in righteous living. The right ethical life of Romans 12 is built upon a righteous stand-ing with God. Formal moral ethics taught in class must go along with informal moral education of the students. This must be taught in our classes and churches. It is one package.

In every culture but especially in an African culture, theologians must bridge the compart-mentalization of academic theology and moral transformation. Often theological teachers at universities and seminaries train lay and ordained leaders to pass on to their congregations and com-munities what they themselves have not learned. Perhaps it is up to theological teachers at tertiary educational institutions to bridge the gap between the compartmentalization of the intellectual affec-tive and volitional aspects of Christian practice.11

In addition, it is my conviction that the tradi-tional Western approach that sometimes empha-sizes spiritual needs over physical needs must also be discarded. Churches that are witnessing sig-nificant growth and impact in Africa are the ones who “get their hands dirty” trying to meet the real needs of people in the present. If the church in Tanzania is going to be relevant and Chris-tian, it must not simply bemoan the problem of ritual killings of the albinos; it must also seek to

eradicate the poverty and other social ills that are driving these evil practices. The killings are not isolated events but involve other important practi-cal issues—hunger and poverty to name a few. If evangelical Christianity is going to make sense and cut into the very fiber of the African, it must deal with life as one whole. Salvation must be seen to affect every aspect of life. Salvation is not just about cleansing and forgiving our sins before a holy God; it also deals with our present physical needs and challenges. Keta Sempangi states cor-rectly that “a religion that speaks only to man’s soul and not his body is not true. Africans make no distinction between the spiritual and the physi-cal.”12 Christianity is not an abstract, theoretical system. It is very concrete and practical, involving the present and the future, the now and not yet, the spiritual and the material, the head and the body, politics and religion. A religion that seeks to answer only questions of the head will fail. Chris-tianity must be seen to be relevant to every aspect of life. Any attempt to disjoint, dichotomize, com-partmentalize, or overspecialize life is foreign and alien to an authentic African Christianity.

Community LifeClosely related to the holistic thinking is the

idea of community that is paramount in many African societies. Whether one sees it in terms of the clan, tribe, or nation, the idea of community is still the sine qua non in Africa. “If the commu-nity exists,” says Nkemkia, “then the individual exists.”13 The individual is always aware of the fact that “I am because we are, and we are, therefore I am.”14 This means that existence is interpreted in terms of relationships and the society. John Mbiti correctly notes that “within African communities where kinship makes a person intensely ‘naked,’ these moral demands are uncomfortably scruti-nized by everybody so that a person who fails to live up to them cannot escape notice.”15 Because of this very communal and relational aspect of eth-ics, the family, clan, and the community serve as a public control on the moral lives of the individu-

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als. The concepts of shame and honor become crit-ical here. While we will develop the concepts of shame and honor later, it is sufficient to note that in community-based morality, how the individual conducts himself becomes critical. One’s actions either shame his family or bring them honor.

It must be noted that although individualism has contributed to many modern developments, it has also negatively impacted a number of moral issues in the Western world. Issues of abortion, euthanasia, and homosexual unions, as but a few examples, are hotly contested issues. Indi-vidualism, as a major force in modern American and European ethics, is a demon that cannot be exorcised easily. Individual rights and freedom are given as legitimate reasons for such behavior as children rebelling against parents, girls abort-ing their babies, and men and women cohabiting. Though Africa has been challenged and threat-ened by the individualism of the West, one of God’s gifts to Africa has been its community approach to life. Not only is this African, though, it is also a biblical idea. Christianity must reclaim community life and cease the overemphasis on the individual that emphasizes self and personal achievement without reference to other people. We must learn the proper biblical balance of the individual who also relates to his community.

It is a shame that an unbiblical, secularized form of individualism (often inherited from the West) is beginning to be imbibed by Africans. The breakdown of law and order, and the rise of a number of moral crises are mainly due to an overemphasis on individual rights and freedom, where the “I” is celebrated more than the “we,” where the individual is stressed over the commu-nity. Individuals commit shameful acts without a feeling of shame or accountability to the group or community.

In Scripture, one finds a balance between the individual and the community. We stand as indi-viduals before God, but we are also part of the human race, and even more, we are part of God’s redeemed community. From Genesis to Revelation

we see individuals present, but we also see a strong emphasis on communities and groups. There are families, clans, tribes, communities, and nations. The biggest and fullest, of course, is the Christian tribe that Jesus gave birth to. The blood of Jesus Christ runs through this organic body, called the church. The tribe is international and local. This international tribe has ancestors, great ancestors whose stories need to be told and retold in proverbs, songs, and riddles. These include the biblical ances-tors such as Abraham, David, Daniel, Paul, Silas, and Timothy. Other important historical figures include Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and African continental ances-tors such as Byang Kato, Bediako, and John Mbiti.

This is precisely why it should not surprise us that personalities in the Bible are always men-tioned within the context of the family, tribe, and lineage. David Wells correctly notes that in the biblical world, “people thought of themselves, not as free-floating, isolated individuals, but as belong-ers.”16 He goes on to explain that in that world, “one stood by and within one’s group, and it was from this group that one derived prestige.”17 The genealogy of Jesus provides this vivid picture: “A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the Son of Abraham … and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of who was born, Jesus, who is called Christ” (Matt 1:1ff). The Lukan account (Luke 3:23ff) similarly speaks of “Joseph the son of Heli, the Son of Matthat, the son of Levi … the son of Enosh, the son of Seth, the Son of Adam, the Son of God.” The idea of con-nectedness, belongingness, and togetherness is critical in the existence of persons. No one belongs to himself. Everybody belongs to a group. A man’s morality is seen, and judged, in terms of his con-nectedness to the larger whole. No man stands and exists for himself.

Moral judgments are made, not only for the individual person, but also for the larger commu-nity. The sin of Adam not only affected him but all of his descendants (Gen 3; Rom 5:12ff). The bless-ings of Abraham become blessings for the whole

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believing community (Gen 12:1-3; Gal 3:14). The entire clan is punished for the sins of Achan (Josh 7). The sin of the adulterer in 1 Corinthians 5 reflects greatly on the perception of morality on the church. The moral failure of one person is a reflection on the entire assembly. The whole idea of the body in describing the church also inf lu-ences Christian morality.

A very important reason for the community is that it is the best way to fight our moral decay. The community is better able to fight and win prob-lems and challenges than the individual. If the church is going to fight the moral problems in our society, it must fight it collectively.

Shame and Honor

In order to recapture our sense of morality, we must recapture the key concepts of honor and shame. In saying this I am not downplaying the importance of guilt. Sin renders us guilty before God and justification is God’s declaration that we are right before him by faith in the finished work of Christ. However, in stressing this point we have often downplayed the role of shame and honor. We must not choose between them because they go hand in hand.

Shame and honor serve as a means of public control of morality. Honor, which in a commu-nity means respect, dignity, pride, and a sense of accomplishment for exemplary conduct or acts by a member of that community, serves as a major motivation for morally praiseworthy acts. Shame on the other hand, is a feeling of being let down, disappointment, a sense of personal shortcoming or betrayal against oneself and the community.18 A shameful act not only lets a person down, but also disgraces his relations and community. There are two kinds of shame in most African communi-ties, namely—as the people of New Guinea called them—the “shame of the skin” for minor trans-gressions, and “deep shame” for major transgres-sions. Thus, to come into physical contact with an in-law may be shame of the skin or of the face, but to commit incest is deep shame or shame of the

heart that calls for confession and retribution. If the person is to become whole again, the shame needs to be removed by special rites.19

Shame and honor serve as a major restraint for moral wrong-doing—honor in terms of bringing respect and pride to the larger society to which one belongs, and shame in making a man feel that he has failed his own by doing something evil, bad, or disgraceful. It is not only he that has failed, but that the whole society has failed by his act. One’s actions are not just a failure by the individual, but really a failure of the community. The Bajju of Nigeria, would say, “A thief is not ashamed of himself, but his own clan.” In other words, if the thief would really consider his clan and the dis-grace that his act brings, he would not dare do it. Thus the Kuria says, “Often the whole commu-nity suffered retribution collectively for the ills of individuals.”20 People acted for honor for their families and clans and not for money and mate-rial personal gains. To be ashamed or to lose face means that the whole family or community suf-fers. For the Saramakans of South America, “to lose face” is rendered “your face has fallen” or, “our faces have fallen,” and the remedy is “clean your face” or “clean our faces.” Failure is not personal, but communal. David Wells argues:

To lose face is to suffer embarrassment because others see the offender as having let them dow n, or hav ing dishonored their family, or tow n, or the business. Shame and dis-honor become intertwined, the one hardly ever happening without the other, because of the sense of responsibility towards others.21

Restoring the concepts of honor and shame in our lives will put some checks in our moral behav-ior. The concepts of shame and honor are not just the values of Africans, but also reflect those of the Jewish people in the Old Testament. The theolo-gian and missionary would do well to adopt these powerful images in teaching the Christian faith in Africa.

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Models of TheologyIn order to be established, African Christian

theology must contextualize itself to its own situ-ation and thus find proper models that fit her situa-tion. Finding appropriate models and concepts has been normal practice for Christian theologians for over two thousand years. The early church had to respond to heresy and make sense of the Trinity and the person of Christ with models that made sense to their hearers. For example, the church fathers, through many lively debates and coun-cils, articulated the Christian message in mean-ingful models and concepts best understood by their contemporaries. Justin Martyr, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, and others used phil-osophical categories to apply Scripture to their respective contexts.

Likewise, the West uses categories and models best suited to make Christianity meaningful for its context. African Christianity must in the same way aim to make the Christian message “enter the hearts of Africans, so that it may bear abundant fruit in a way of life which is at the same time both truly African and truly Christ[ian].”22 As has been clearly demonstrated by Philip Jenkins, Africa is a fertile ground: Africans are very familiar with questions of evil spirits, poverty, agriculture, divine healing, rituals, and evil, and are therefore naturally more at home with biblical themes. The political, economic, social, and religious concerns of Africa create fewer roadblocks in the reading and application of the Scripture than do those in more Western contexts. Africans are privileged to have this intimate relevance to the original context of the word of God.

It must be admitted that this is not an easy task. Given what I said above about the African contri-bution to systematic theology in Christian history, it does not mean that all theological models from the past can be discarded. But it is to say that as we seek to apply Scripture to the African context we must think of ways that do so with power and pre-cision to the people we address without jettisoning the wisdom of the past. To this day the standard

textbooks in theology used in Africa are those written by Westerners or Europeans. Their mind-set is not always the mindset of Africans. We must be careful that we do not simply parrot other the-ologies from different contexts. Just as the West found a relevant theology in its own context, we must produce a theology that best fits our context.

So far, the predominant theologizing of Scrip-ture has been foreign. This does not necessarily make it wrong since our theological conclusions must always be evaluated in light of Scripture. But we must be careful that we do not baptize an overly intellectualized and secularized reading of Scripture that many in the West have given us. We must make sure that our reading of Scripture is first and foremost given to its primary and ordi-nary intended meaning. We must let Scripture first speak to us and then we must apply it to our context. One needs only to read some exegeti-cal studies on passages on homosexuality, abor-tion, and marriage, to see how liberal, secular, and postmodern biases can distort the texts and treat them as “biblical.” Scripture must be our standard as we seek to understand it and apply it. Can we even say that Africans may be able to read and hear Scripture better given the fact that we have not imbibed so much of the critical mindset of biblical scholarship? Jenkins notes that Africans typically possess,

a much greater respect for Scriptural authority, especially in matters of morality; a willingness to accept the Bible as an inspired text and a tendency to literalism; a special interest in super-natural elements of scripture, such as miracles, visions, and healings; a belief in the continuing power of prophecy; and a veneration for the Old Testament, which is considered as authoritative as the New. For the growing churches of the global south, the Bible speaks to everyday, real-world issues of poverty and debt, famine, and urban crisis, racial and gender oppression, state brutality, and persecution. The omnipresence of poverty promotes awareness of the transience of

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life, the dependence of individuals and nations on God, and the distrust of the secular order.23

This may explain why Pentecostal churches are growing faster than many other churches since they take the Scriptures at face value. Obviously this is not universal among Pentecostals. My point is that those areas where readers of Scripture do not impose the critical, liberal approach on Scrip-ture but approach it as God’s word and desire to sit under it and not over it, are those where the gospel is taking root. The Lord’s Prayer which says, “Give us our daily bread” is very relevant to many Africans who indeed lack bread on a daily basis. They do not need a Greek scholar to tell them what bread meant in the original languages. Other examples could be given, but the point is that Scripture must be heard and followed in all of its depth and breadth in the African church as well as every church around the globe.

Ministerial TrainingIf an authentic African theology is to avoid the

criticisms labelled against it, it must challenge and reformulate the old mode of ministerial training. Residential ministerial training grounds which remove student pastors from their local context and place them in foreign, strange environments with strange people and strange curricula have been unsuccessful in producing productive min-isters in the church. What residential seminaries have succeeded in doing is reproducing in their students foreign ideas that do not fit their ministry context. The Western mode of residential institu-tions has also resulted in a strict class distinction between teacher and student, master and disciple. This class distinction has also been introduced into African Christianity. There are many pas-tors who live a completely different, largely mate-rialistic, lifestyle while their members are living in abject poverty. Many of us who trained in the West, or in traditional schools in Africa, strug-gled to adjust back to Africa in a relevant way. The catalogues, books, resources, and approach

to ministry were completely Western. Again, these Western resources were and are uncritically imported wholesale to schools and churches in Africa. Although we did not have problems about the existence of God, Western theologies forced us to deal with atheism. Even when we had no problem about the Bible as the word of God, or the existence of God, we were taught to wrestle and memorize the theistic proofs and the arguments in favor of inerrancy and infallibility. Why do we need to belabor the point when we already believe in God and the Scriptures?

The Scriptures give us some hints on how to train ministers. Moses went along with Joshua and Caleb, Elijah took Elisha as well as a school of prophets who lived and ate together. Jesus and his disciples walked together, ate and drank together, struggled together, and celebrated together. They shared their aspirations, despair, anxiety, and hopes together. Joshua, Elisha, Paul, Timothy, and Titus became great religious leaders because they worked and lived alongside their mentors. The idea of a professor standing in front of a class and merely passing on learned ideas to students sitting at his feet without taking the time to make disciples by his example is not biblical. The bib-lical—and most effective—method of teach-ing has always been the intimate relationship between mentor and mentee. This is the way that Africans have traditionally trained their young. Farmers took their children to the farm, and the sons became farmers. Hunters took their children to the bush to hunt, and the sons became hunt-ers. Mothers cooked with their daughters in the kitchen while they taught them housekeeping, love, and motherhood. We need to recapture those modes of learning in our ministerial training of pastors and leaders.

Double Listening Theology has always sought to understand the

meaning of the word of God and also apply it to life situations. This is what many have labeled, “double listening.” John Stott has been credited with the

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concept of double listening, which is a powerful metaphor for the task of theology. Stott calls for,

double listening, listening both to the Word, and to the world…. We listen to the Word with humble reverence, anxious to understand it, and resolved to believe and obey what we come to understand. We listen to the world with critical alertness, anxious to understand it too, and resolved, not necessarily to believe and obey it, but to sympathize with it and to seek grace to discover how the gospel relates to it.24

Theologians and pastors have been good in interpreting the Scripture but often quite weak in understanding the times. Bible teachers, evan-gelists, and missionaries are often guilty of this as they feel that their calling is only to teach and preach the word of God without getting an under-standing of the people’s culture. This cannot con-tinue as it will affect the communication of the authentic gospel. In order to avoid this problem, our reading and interpretation of Scripture must move to the application of Scripture to our culture and time. We need also to know something of our culture’s politics, economics, and tastes in order to apply the Scripture effectively to our people’s lives. One of my seminary professors used to say, borrowing from Karl Barth, that for his devo-tions he read with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. This of course does not mean that the Bible and the newspaper have equal weight in terms of providing the Christian with truth in matters of life and conduct. The Bible is our final authority in matters of truth, faith, life, and morality (2 Tim 3:16-17). However, the point is that an appreciation of one’s context is critical in applying the word of God meaningfully. That is what I mean when I talk about double listen-ing. The word of God cannot be preached, taught, and lived in a vacuum. We must know the circum-stances and context of the people to whom we are preaching to be able to present a relevant word to them. Authentic theology must not only engage

and listen to the voice of God, but it must also put its ears on the ground and open its eyes to see the issues all around it.

Acts 17:16-33 provides some important insights on the need to understand and relate to the expe-riences and worldview of the people in order to communicate the message meaningfully. This exciting story narrates how Paul proclaimed the gospel in Athens by his awareness, understand-ing, and sensitivity to the real issues of the day. Verse 16 states that “he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” The two verbs, namely “distressed” and “saw” emphasize the fact that Paul was greatly impacted by what he saw. Paul was not nonchalant about his surroundings. He was “provoked” or “enraged” by the glaring idolatry in the city. The phrase “the city was full of idols” means that “it was smothered with idols or swamped by them.”25 As a result of his great distress and provocation at what he saw, Paul rea-soned with Jews, God-fearing Greeks, and those in the marketplace (17:17). He engaged the people with a serious intellectual discussion. He used this method to proclaim the Lordship of Christ to his hearers. When Paul later had the opportunity to address the Athenians, he did not begin by quot-ing Old Testament passages but started with the idols he had seen in the city. The point of contact was what he had seen in the city—the idols they worshipped! This approach means one can begin with a situation in order to teach a biblical truth. Paul acknowledged the Athenians’s religiosity but pointed to their acknowledgement of their own ignorance on one of the inscriptions in the city (17:23). Paul then went on to explain the real meaning of this inscription—the gospel of Jesus Christ. At the end of the presentation, though many jeered and others postponed making a deci-sion, a few believed in the gospel of Christ (17:34).

In teaching theology in Africa and other areas of the world, there are some compelling lessons to be learned from this passage. Bible teachers and missionaries must learn to see, understand, and appreciate their local context and realities. They

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must preach the gospel by bringing it to bear on the world around them. They must seek to com-municate the gospel from Scripture and drive it home to those they are addressing. John Stott states the obvious: “People are looking for an inte-grated worldview which makes sense of all their experience.”26 Seeing, listening, and understand-ing local realities provides an effective avenue for proclaiming an authentic gospel and biblical truth.

African theology must hold in tension its his-toric faith and modern relevance to faith. An essen-tial and non-negotiable aspect of the historic past is the Holy Scripture. A central feature of this faith is that the word of God is unchanging, providing the basis for life and conduct. All behaviors, life-styles, and theologies must be brought under the scrutiny of Scripture. Often people are tempted to manipulate Scripture to fit their interpretation or to justify their actions. But any deviation, in either faith or practice, must be interpreted as contrary to Scripture. Past attempts to dilute Scripture, or to water it down with new insights, have rendered Christianity unable to fulfill its mission. Mod-ern, liberal theology is losing this historic base, this foundation, this respect for biblical author-ity. Hence the distortion and confusion in cur-rent theological formulations. Sometimes, these theologies do not even have a semblance of bibli-cal Christianity. A disregard for the past renders Christianity rootless, vulnerable, and easy prey to flawed formulations, views, and errors. However, a Christianity frozen in the past, without a modern relevance, makes the faith archaic and irrelevant to modern life. Theology in Africa must be taught and practiced from a solid biblical perspective and related to the issues and questions being raised in its own context.

conclusIonThis article has identified some pertinent criti-

cisms in teaching theology in Africa. Though some have suggested that systematic theology is foreign to Africans because it involves abstract thinking and is irrelevant, we have argued that the

wedge between theory and practice, reflection and action, does not really describe the real problem. All human beings, irrespective of geographical location are thinking and doing beings. Theology is not just about abstraction but involves action.

The critical issue is that the questions of life and how those questions are answered are affected by one’s worldview and local context. Traditional sys-tematic theology has often neglected this essential ingredient in African Christianity. Non-Western questions and answers which have been written in Western oriented textbooks are dumped on African Christian theological and ministerial stu-dents. While they can easily grasp the intellectual concepts involved, these concepts do not seem to have any immediate relevance in their lives and ministries.

In light of these challenges, this paper suggests that the teaching of theology taught in Africa must begin to ask its own questions and provide its own answers in light of a proper understanding of Scripture. These questions and answers must also take into consideration the essential nature of the African worldview, which includes the concepts of its identity, community, a holistic view of life, shame and honor, and the normative role of Scrip-ture and double listening to both word and world.

ENDNOTES 1Thomas C. Oden, How Africa Shaped The Christian

Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2007), 9.

2Ibid., 9-10. 3Ibid., 31. 4Ibid., 11. 5Idid., 30. 6Ibid., 25. 7Ibid., 26. 8J. N. K. Mugambi, “The Problem of Teaching Ethics

in African Christianity,” in Moral and Ethical Issues in African Christianity: Exploratory Essays in Moral Theology (ed. J. N. K. Mugambii and Anne Nasimiyu-Wasike; 2nd ed.; Nairobi: Acton, 1999), 14.

9Martin Nkjafu Nkemkia, African Vitality: A Step

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Forward in African Thinking (Africa: Paulines, 1999), 165.

10Ibid., 166. 11Louise Kretzeschman, “The Importance of Moral

and Spiritual Formation for 21st Century Africa,” in African Christian Theologies (ed. Ernst M. Con-radie; Institute for Theological and Interdisciplin-ary Research Ecumenical Foundation of Southern Africa, 2004), 104.

12Quoted in Phillip Jenkins, The New Faces of Christi-anity: Believing the Bible in the Global South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 97.

13Nkemkia, African Vitality, 172.14John Mbiti, African Traditional Religions and Philoso-

phy (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998), 214. 15Ibid., 214. 16David Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must

Recover its Moral Vision (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 165.

17Ibid.18Laurenti Magesa, African Traditions: The Moral Tradi-

tions of Abundant Life (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), 169.

19Ibid., 173. 20H. W. Kinoti, “African Morality: Past and Present,”

in Moral and Ethical Issues in African Christianity (ed. J. N. K. Mugambi and A. Nasimiyu-Wasike; Nairobi: Acton: 1999), 79.

21Wells, Losing Our Virtue, 166. 22Benezet Bujo, African Theology in Its Social Context

(trans. John O’Donohu; Maryknoll, N Y: Orbis, 1992), 76.

23Ibid., 5.24John Stott, The Contemporary Christian, Leicester:

Inter-Varsity, 1992), 27-28.25 John Stott, The Message of Acts to the Ends of the Earth

(Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1990), 277.26Ibid., 290.

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The SBJT ForumEditor’s Note: Readers should be aware of the forum’s format. Gregg R. Allison, Hershael W. York, John Folmar, and Brian Vickers have been asked specific questions to which they have provided written responses. These writers are not responding to one another. Their answers are presented in an order that hopefully makes the forum read as much like a unified presentation as possible.

sBJt: Wh at does it mean for a church to be missional?Gregg Allison: If you have listened much to con-temporary conversations about the church, you realize that one of the most intense and wide-

spread discussions is the mission-ality of the church.1 The church is missional in that it is identified as the body of divinely-called and divinely-sent ministers to proclaim the gospel and advance the king-dom of God. Key to understand-ing and embracing this attribute is the post-resurrection appearance of Jesus to his disciples recounted in the Gospel of John:

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you .” A nd w hen he had sa id this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy

Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld ” ( John 20:21-23). After demonstrating to his fearful followers

that it was genuinely he, the once-crucified-yet-now-resurrected Lord, Jesus commissioned his disciples with the same commission with which he had been commissioned by the Father. Now, what is this commission?

The missio Dei—the mission of God—on which the Son was sent by the Father (John 3:16) and which was accomplished by the Son through obedience to the will of the Father (John 4:34; 5:30) was saving rather than condemning the world (John 3:17), giving eternal life to those who embrace the Son (John 10:28-29; 17:2), executing judgment for those who reject the Son (John 5:22, 27), and raising some to the resurrection of life and others to the resurrection of judgment (John 5:29). What Jesus had been sent to accomplish would be announced by the disciples as their mis-sion: when empowered by the Holy Spirit, they

Gr egg R . A llison is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Dr. Allison served many years as a staff member of Campus Crusade, where he worked in campus ministry and as a missionary to Italy and Switzerland. He also serves as the book review editor for theological, historical, and philosophical studies for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society. Dr. Allison is the author of numerous books, including Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Zondervan, 2011), and Jesusology: Understand What You Believe About Jesus and Why (B&H, 2005).

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 78-87.

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would offer the words of forgiveness extended and forgiveness withheld, based on the response of people to their witness of the gospel.

Other biblical passages emphasize this mis-sional characteristic of the church: Jesus’ “Great Commission” (Matt 28:18-20); Paul’s commenda-tion of preaching the good news (Rom 10:14-17) and ambassadorial charge (2 Cor 5:18-21); Luke’s portrayal of the rapid expansion of the church (see discussion below); and the like.

This missional attribute expresses itself in three ways: the church is expansive, contextually sensi-tive, and (potentially) catholic or universal. The expansion of the missional church is vividly por-trayed in narrative form in the book of Acts, which Luke punctuates with this (or a similar) expres-sion: “And the Lord added to their numbers day by day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47; 5:14; 6:7; 9:31, 42; 11:24; 12:24; 13:49; 16:5; 19:26; 28:30-31).2 The “unfinished” ending itself pro-pels all churches—including the contemporary church—toward finishing “the Acts of the Apos-tles” through expansive efforts.3 This expansion of the missional church extends to church planting endeavors around the globe today.

The sensitivity to contextualization of the mis-sional church is also rendered narratively in the book of Acts. One need only compare three Lukan narratives to gain a strong sense of this emphasis: (1) Peter’s proclamation to his (largely) Jewish audience on the day of Pentecost—a message that is replete with Old Testament quotations (Acts 2:14-41); (2) Paul’s simple words to the unsophis-ticated peasants of Lystra to dissuade them from offering sacrifices to Barnabas and himself (Acts 14:8-18); and (3) Paul’s address to the philosophi-cally sophisticated Athenians at the Areopagus—a message that only alludes to Old Testament truths (e.g., God is not and cannot be confined to humanly-constructed temples; the whole human race traces its ancestry to Adam) while quoting from Epimenides of Crete and Aratus’s poem Pheinomena (Acts 17:16-34). This comparison enables us to observe the contextualization of the

gospel by the church as it moved into different arenas of ministry, a contextualization that is still demanded today.4

Moreover, the missional church is (potentially) catholic or universal. Certainly, the divine goal for the church in terms of extension is that one day it will exist among all people groups through-out the entire world. To state the obvious, Jesus’ Great Commission is “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matt 28:18), and Jesus’ promise of empowerment by the Holy Spirit was so that his disciples will be his “witnesses … to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). This is the goal of the church in terms of its extension—complete universal-ity.5 Thus, the missional church indiscriminately preaches the gospel and, when people respond to its message, expands into every corner of the humanly-populated earth.

How does the missional identity of the church differ from what the church has practiced, more or less, from its inception in terms of evangelism, sending and supporting missionaries, and other types of missionary endeavors?6 Two key differ-ences are to be noted. First, Moltmann empha-sizes the importance of understanding “not that the church ‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the mission of Christ creates its own church. Mission does not come from the church; it is from mission and in light of mission that the church has to be understood.”7 This notion contrasts with missions being seen more as an activity of the church rather than in terms of the church’s essen-tial image of itself. Missional is a matter of identity first, then function.8 Furthermore, this emphasis underscores that the missional task of the church has been given to it; it is a divinely given mandate, not a responsibility the church takes to itself.9

Second, missional is a matter of corporate iden-tity first, then individual engagement. Hunsberger offers this criticism of many churches:

If, for evangelicalism, Christian faith and identity are first personal and individual, its sense of mis-sions tends to be the same. The responsibility to

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give witness to Christ is one each person bears. The accent rests on personal evangelism, there-fore. Any sense of a church’s mission grows from this ground. It is the aggregate of the individual callings to be witnesses. Identity and missions are first and foremost individual matters. Missions is not conceived to be first of all the “mission of the church,” to which every member is joined. First it is the mission of the Christian, which in the church becomes a collective responsibility.10

Accordingly, missions is commonly relegated to the domain and responsibility of the Chris-tians—or, in many cases, committees—in the church, which itself is “mildly irrelevant” to the whole matter; thus, “missions in the end does not belong to the church.”11 This entrenched trend must be reversed, and an emphasis on the mis-sional identity of the church helps in this regard.

Practically speaking, missional churches are characterized from their inception by an empha-sis on church planting (rather than waiting years/decades for their own development—hiring staff, building expensive facilities, producing suc-cessful programs—before turning to starting other churches), giving sacrificially for missional endeavors (from the moment of its launch, Jacob’s Well, a church plant in New Jersey, has given 30% of its receipts to missional work), inviting their church planters to “raid” their membership and take with them the best people available to launch other churches, providing training and internships

for church planters, and being on mission through their community or missional groups.

sBJt: how shou ld pastors lead in creating a heart for inter-national missions within the life of a local congregation?hershael york: In 1818 a band of hearty Kentucky Baptist pio-neers founded a new congregation between Georgetown and Frank-

fort, Kentucky, building a rough log sanctuary by a little creek from which the church drew its name, Buck Run. In 1885 the church relocated a few miles up the road to a much more convenient loca-tion at another place no one has heard of—called The Forks of Elkhorn—not far from Frankfort, the state capital. The church, which I now serve as pastor, still meets at that idyllic location, sur-rounded on three sides by gushing streams that nurture blue herons, mallard ducks, Canada geese, and many species of fish.

It’s the kind of place and history with which one can be content and satisfied while the rest of the world goes to hell. Illustrious history can masquer-ade as mission, and continuous church activities can deceive us into believing that we are fulfilling the Great Commission.

Understanding how that happens is not diffi-cult. After all, when we plan our annual calendar or budget, each of the various committees and church ministries inform the proper entities of the resources they need in the coming year. They submit budget appeals and resource requisitions. The budget committee or the church council, in turn, tries to work those needs into an annual min-istry plan. Everyone is trying his or her best to use resources wisely and meet the legitimate needs as they emerge.

But there’s a problem with that way of doing business. The 14.6 million Azeri Turks of Iran did not submit a request, reminding our commit-tee structure that if we do not provide the funds, time, and effort to reach them, they will perish in an eternal hell. The chief of the Asheninka-Kampa in the Amazon basin totally ignored our deadlines and did not fill out our paperwork. Though we will not fail to budget for the church picnic, the 536,000 Pasemah of Indonesia will simply have to understand our established priorities if nothing is left over for them.

I suspect that we are not alone in this tendency to focus on ourselves. In fact, many churches do not even evaluate their Great Commission involvement to gauge their effectiveness as a body.

H er sh a el W. Yor k is Victor and Louise Lester Professor of Christian Preaching and Associate Dean of Ministry and Proclamation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He also serves as Pastor of Buck Run Baptist Church in Frankfort, Kentucky. Dr. York is the author (with Bert Decker) of Preaching with Bold Assurance: A Solid and Enduring Approach to Engaging Exposition (B&H, 2003).

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They measure baptisms, income, and attendance, but if those things are going well, they consider their efforts successful and blessed by God, all the while forgetting that Jesus commanded us to go into all the world.

As much as the heart of God delights when we reach people in our community and make dis-ciples of them, we cannot ignore that Scripture explicitly teaches that the name of Jesus must be made great among the nations. Whether fighting our own battles or delighting in our own bless-ings, our concern often stops at the boundaries of our property. Self-centeredness is the default condition. Churches who have great strategies to minister to the sick may never think about those who are dying in Uzbekistan. Though we may have a great desire to grow the church, we seldom have the same excitement for reaching those whom we will neither baptize nor add to our membership.

How paradoxical that Jesus would initially give his global mandate to a small band of disciples who had never traveled far, but he left no doubt about his meaning: make disciples of all the nations (panta ta ethnē). As audacious as that sounds today at The Forks of Elkorn, Kentucky, it must have seemed more so in so out of a way place as Galilee. Those first disciples did not have much to help them fulfill their daunting challenge: no cars, computers, cell phones, mass marketing, direct advertising, satellite, or television—just a bloody cross, an empty tomb, and a risen Savior.

Our challenge today is to believe with every fiber of our beings that the same is all we need. Once we accept that, then we will realize that we have no excuse. No border must stop us, no cultural difference discourage us, no political regime intim-idate us into ignoring Christ’s command. Jesus did not politely ask us to take the gospel where we find it safe or convenient to do so, but commanded us to take our own cross with us wherever we go. This is inherently dangerous work.

My job as a pastor is to preach the gospel in such a way that it compels its beneficiaries to share it relentlessly with others, but also with a global

vision that does not allow them to see taking it to the nations as something that can be done merely by proxy. I must keep the world on their hearts as tenaciously as I preach the gospel for their sins. They must know that to receive the forgiveness of sins is to receive a mandate to go to the nations.

So from the Forks of the Elkhorn we are con-stantly sending teams to the world. We have a major ministry in Romania, have built church buildings in the Amazon jungle from lumber cut only with a chainsaw, have taught pastors in Nepal, have used agricultural techniques as a platform in Ethiopia, have adopted children from Asia, Africa, and eastern Europe, have had a partnership with IMB personnel in South Africa, and are currently strategizing to adopt one of the 3,800 unengaged, unreached people groups in the world. In addi-tion, we have greatly increased our giving to the cooperative program and more than doubled our giving to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions. We are keeping less of our money for ourselves and sending much more to the nations, to those who will not submit their budget and calendar needs.

To fulfill this mandate will not be without cost, and we had best prepare ourselves and our churches for it. To get the gospel to the world will cost us dollars, dysentery, and perhaps even death in some circumstances, but if we are followers of Christ, we must follow him to those for whom he died in places where he’s never been proclaimed.

sBJt: how doe s g l ob a l i z at ion affect ministry and missions in a local church setting outside the West?John folmar: As the recent unrest spread throughout North Africa and the Middle East, across the Persian Gulf in Iran, and into the Gulf states, one thing was clear: the movements behind the unrest were feeding off each other. They were interconnected by Facebook and the web, and they knew what

John Folmar is the pastor of United Christian Church of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

A graduate of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, before serving in Dubai, Pastor Folmar also served on the pastoral staff of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.

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was happening with their neighbors. True, each country had its own unique set of circumstances and pressures, but the fact remains that even here in the Middle East the world is now inextricably intertwined.

On any given Friday morning, you will find more than fifty different nationalities represented at our church gathering. (Our church founders established the weekly meetings on Friday to accord with the Muslim weekend.) The United Christian Church of Dubai (UCCD) gathers in the midst of a sea of Islam and multicultural mate-rialism in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a small oil-rich nation that borders Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. People come literally from all over the world to work in Dubai. Our members have come from Africa, throughout the Middle East, up into Central Asia, stretching eastward to Japan and Taiwan, then southward to Singapore and Indonesia, and still further south in Australia and New Zealand. Our westerners hail from South America, up through the Caribbean islands, then further north into Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, and all over Europe. The lure of lucre draws them from everywhere. You can imagine the challenges this poses to pastoring.

What have I learned pastoring a multi-ethnic church? Most importantly, I have learned that for all the cultural issues that divide us—and there are many—our shared knowledge of Christ Jesus as Lord transcends them all. We are, for all our diversity, sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, in need of the one remedy which only Jesus could secure—redemption, the forgiveness of sins. We have received Christ and together become “one new man” through the new creation begun in him (Eph 3:15). As a result, we share rich times of corporate worship and enjoy deep, cross-cultural relationships that only Christ could have secured. If the church is to be a “colony of heaven,” then we regularly experience foretastes of that “great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev 7:9).

Our multicultural congregation has the poten-tial to be a potent witness for the power and truth of Christianity. In the Muslim world, “Christi-anity” is strongly associated with the West, and particularly the U.S., and more particularly Hol-lywood. Christians are morally suspect, to say the least. Therefore, when I tell local Muslims that our congregation consists of Middle Easterners, South Asians, Central Asians, East Asians, and more, they are surprised; which is fine. But my hope is that their surprise will become intrigue and inter-est in the truth that binds us together as they expe-rience the fellowship among believers who share nothing in common except Christ. That’s why we emphasize church membership in our diverse con-gregation. To the extent that we self-consciously commit together in covenant with one another, we have the potential to be a 3-dimensional display of God’s glory. Nowhere else in the Middle East do fifty nationalities come together like this. It only happens in the churches of Jesus Christ. Evange-lism in the Middle East—and everywhere else—should not occur only through the individual, but through the congregation as a whole. Our church’s goal is to be a catalyst for revival in our region through our gospel proclamation and through our corporate witness of love, rooted in the forgiveness we’ve received in Christ (John 13:35; 1 John 4:11).

To be sure, multiculturalism in the Middle East presents unique challenges. First, there is the issue of maintaining a rigorously biblical ministry. In a multi-ethnic context, with believers coming to us from so many different denominations and cul-tural backgrounds, whose expectations should govern? Whose ministry philosophy do we adopt? It is extremely difficult for a number of reasons to maintain a biblical ministry in multicultural con-texts. Below I will list a couple concrete examples of why this is the case.

Difficult Doctrine. I fear that many “interna-tional churches” have earned the reputation of being lowest common denominator ministries. The level of diversity leads many of these churches or their leaders to dumb down doctrine. We don’t

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have a church on every corner in Dubai, the argu-ment goes, and so we must pursue a policy of theological rapprochement and avoid controver-sial truths. For example, I was preaching on elec-tion from 1 Peter 1:1, and someone commented afterward that our church should avoid doctrinal controversies and “stick to the basics.” I could not accept that advice, though. Not only does the text contain the doctrine of election, but also, if God is not sovereign in everything from election to glori-fication, then I’m packing up and going home! The obstacles to evangelism in the Muslim world are simply too great. If Paul had not been convinced of individual election, he too would have left Corinth (see Acts 18:9-11).

Membership. Another example is church mem-bership. Among our congregation, neither our Sydney Anglicans, nor our African Pentecostals, nor our Indian high-churchmen have historically practiced church membership, which admittedly has been a Baptist hallmark. So, what should we do? We should search the Scriptures and con-form our practices to biblical norms. Everywhere church discipline is mentioned in the New Testa-ment, there (by implication) is church member-ship. It was practiced in the first century (2 Cor 2:6), and we should practice it today.

Multi-ethnic ministers must seek, by God’s grace—not the latest fashion in market-evangeli-calism—but the Bible’s guidelines on how to con-duct ourselves in the household of God (1 Tim 3:15). The New Testament actually has a lot to say about how we should conduct ourselves cor-porately. To be sure, we must exercise wisdom to know when an issue of governance or church order is culture-bound, and when it is normative for the Christian life according to the Scriptures. But this argues for more rigorous adherence to the text, not less.

Second, in thinking through ministering in multicultural contexts, one must also resist the prevailing winds of evangelicalism. From my perch in Dubai, I am shocked at how widespread the superficial, nominal evangelicalism is that

takes its soundings from outward success and seeker sensitivity. David Wells in No Place For Truth targeted the “marketing ethos” prevalent in American evangelicalism. But his thesis could now easily be applied globally. A quick look at the books on display in the Bible Society in the Persian Gulf will amply prove the case. Benny Hinn, Brian McLaren, T. D. Jakes—they are all right there for the taking. People around the world are increas-ingly reading the same books. In a multicultural environment, it is easy to be blown along with the prevailing theological winds. In the West, we ben-efit from generations of denominational ref lec-tion on theological issues. But in Arabia, where we do not possess such a pedigree, we must carefully evaluate the latest fads.

Third, one must make sure to keep the main thing the main thing. The sheikhs here in the United Arab Emirates have not yet authorized further church planting in their country. There-fore, since only a relative handful of churches meet here, we at UCCD are forced to grow together amid many cultures and even denominational backgrounds. This is potentially a good thing for the gospel. Yet it’s also wise to learn how to distin-guish between primary and secondary issues. Pri-mary issues concern the gospel. Secondary issues are of lesser importance, and we must allow some leeway in a multicultural church setting, especially one in a restricted access country where church planting is not allowed legally. It is a matter of wis-dom, of course, to distinguish between what is a primary versus a secondary issue.

In my experience, a gospel-centered, exposi-tional ministry is the key to vital ministry in the Middle East, or anywhere else. Our multicul-tural setting presents many challenges to build-ing churches and spreading the gospel, but God’s people—wherever they are from—will listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd.12

sBJt: how ca n short-ter m missions be an effective way of doing theological education on the field? And what are some important things

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to keep in mind when thinking about short-term missions?

Brian Vickers: This quest ion could be answered in a variety of ways, but I’ ll address it from my personal experience as someone who regularly travels on short-term trips to teach in formal and infor-mal settings. My experience is in South and East Asia so I can only speak directly to those regions, though I suspect the situation is similar in many other places. I will address what I see as the most sig-nificant factors of which we should

be aware when thinking about taking theological education to the field in short-term formats.

When most American Christians think about theological education on the mission field, they envision something similar to our seminaries and colleges—just in a different cultural set-ting. I speak to many people who are interested in either teaching full-time in an overseas semi-nary (assuming their presence is desired), or help-ing fund a seminary or two in order to provide resources like books. These are great ways of get-ting involved in theological education overseas, but if we think of theological education on the field only in terms of formal seminaries and schools then, at least in places like South and East Asia, we are thinking about training for probably less than 10% of the total population of pastors. That number is likely a liberal estimate. The fact of the matter is that most pastors and students in many places overseas who want theological education will never be able to attend a formal seminary for any significant length of time, if at all. There are various obstacles for pursuing formal theological training, but I’ll address the three I’ve encoun-tered most often.

The first is simply a matter of finances. As Amer-ican students know, and know increasingly, semi-nary is expensive. It is even more so for the typical student in South or East Asia. Besides the money

needed for tuition and books, there is the issue of leaving one’s livelihood and moving to wherever a seminary is located—usually a central city or town. Even if some money is available, it is likely not enough to move an entire family. It is often the case that a student who has the necessary finances must leave his family behind while pursuing his studies. That is obviously not ideal on a number of levels. For one, it splits up a family for months at a time. Even in cultures where that sort of separation is more common (I’ve met a few fathers in South Asia who for a time moved to a different location for a job and sent money back home) than it is for us, it is a real obstacle for formal training.

Secondly, there are cultural issues faced by the would-be seminary student in South and East Asia with which we may have little experience or aware-ness. Let’s say a young man, 22 years old, wants to leave his town or village and go to seminary. He goes away to a city to pursue his studies, per-haps returning during breaks, and then when his education is over he returns home only to find he has no standing in his town. He’s still young, he’s been away to a city (which implies he likely has money and resources not available to others in his town—even though that is probably not the case), and now he is in his hometown trying to take on a position of leadership over people with whom he has not earned respect either in terms of his age or his experience.

Thirdly, there are too many instances of young men leaving their towns and villages to go pur-sue theological education and then not returning home after finishing their course of study. This phenomenon often takes place when students come to America for education then end up stay-ing after earning their degree, but it happens just as frequently when students pursue theological education in their home countries. It’s not difficult to see why. There are more opportunities in cities, better prospects for earning a living, and the stu-dent returning home may likely face the situation described above.

Given these realities—and I’ve only touched

Br i a n Vick er s is Associate Professor of New Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

In addition to various articles, Dr. Vickers is the author of Jesus’ Blood and Righteousness: Paul’s Theology of Imputation (Crossway, 2006). He is regularly involved in short term missions and teaching overseas. He also serves as Associate Editor for The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology.

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the surface—what is the alternative to formal theological education for those unable to attend seminary or bible college? If students are not able to come to a seminary, then theological educa-tion should come to them. Of course this sort of approach to theological education in a missions context is not new; it’s the way theological educa-tion was delivered in the early church. The Apostle Paul not only evangelized and planted churches, he returned multiple times to the young churches, sometimes staying for long periods of time, teach-ing and training leaders. This approach to theo-logical education is just as viable today as it was in the first century. I am certainly not advocat-ing that we abandon formal theological educa-tion on the field, and I believe we should support solid evangelical seminaries overseas by supply-ing teachers when needed (at least temporarily), resources, and finances. I myself regularly visit overseas seminaries and schools to teach intensive bible and theology courses to students enrolled in degree programs. But there are countless pastors and students we can help if we are willing to think about training outside a classroom. This is where short-term trips can play at least a small role in the larger program of providing biblical and theologi-cal training on the mission field.

For instance, a well prepared, small team can travel to a remote area and stay for a period of days, a week, or longer and provide basic theologi-cal training in any number of subjects depending on the strengths of the team and the needs on the field. Is this approach as thorough as formal semi-nary education? Of course not—no-one would argue that it is—but if the idea is to provide some sort of training to people whose circumstances make seminary or college impossible, then the benefit should not be underestimated. Also, if there is a long-term goal of returning to the same area on many occasions, then short terms teams can accomplish a great deal over time. Moreover, if short-term teams work in concert with established workers in the field then they are taking part in fulfilling long-term goals.

In order to be most effective, there are several things that a short-term team should keep in mind when preparing a trip. First, the team should be aware of the needs of the people with whom they will meet. This is accomplished through close contact with a person (whether a missionary or a national) working in the field. Allow that per-son to play a key role in determining what will be most effective in terms of subjects and resources. I cannot express enough how important advance contact with people in the field is to having a successful trip.

Secondly, be prepared to teach Bible study methods and to give big-picture overviews of the Bible. In many areas the pastors and students who meet with my teams are relatively new believers who have not been trained to study the Bible or taught about how the whole Bible hangs together as the revelation of God’s plan of redemption in Christ. If a team can spend several days introduc-ing students to the Bible and how to study it, then that trip can have a lasting impact.

Thirdly, if more specific topics are on the agenda then be sure that team members are prepared and able to cover whatever the topics may be. The team does not have to be made up of experts, but it is vital to assess the strengths of the team and then play to those strengths. If a team has several peo-ple who are experienced in doing discipleship and practical ministry, then let that be their focus. If there are members with experience with preparing and delivering sermons then they should plan ses-sions on developing those skills. Ideally it is best to have an idea ahead of time about what the team is going to do in terms of training and teaching then recruit members accordingly, but that is not always possible to do.

Fourth, be flexible. Many times I’ve heard mis-sionaries say, “you have to be f luid because f lex-ible is too rigid.” Short terms teams should be well prepared and ready to teach and train according to whatever is planned, but they should also be ready for plans to change at any moment, for multiple questions unrelated to the teaching topic, unfore-

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seen logistical snags, and altered schedules. Short term teams should leave American, corporate-style, precise (perhaps even laminated) agendas at home. In addition, be careful not to assume that because you have some literature or ministry focus that is successful here at home that it will be suc-cessful, or relevant, everywhere.

Fifth, be realistic. A short-term team will not bring about the total biblical and theological trans-formation of a group of pastors in a week. Plan care-fully and do whatever your particular team is gifted to do, but keep it all in a larger perspective. You are sowing seeds and passing on the knowledge and experience God has granted you to pastors and students who often have very limited opportuni-ties—particularly in comparison to what we take for granted daily. Last year in South Asia, a pas-tor from a group I met with for a week came up to me on the last day of the training and said, “I pray that God will give me the opportunity to come to a school like yours and study … that would be the answer to many, many prayers.” He may not be able to come to us, but we can go to him.

ENDNOTES 1Some of this material is adapted from Gregg R. Alli-

son, The Assembly of “The Way:” The Doctrine of the Church (W heaton: Crossway, forthcoming). For further reading on missional churches, see: Dar-rell L. Guder and Lois Barrett, Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America, (The Gospel and Our Culture Series; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998); Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007); idem, The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000); A lan Hirsch, The Forgot-ten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006); Ed Stetzer and David Put-man, Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church Can Become a Missionary in Your Community (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2006); Ed Stetzer, Planting Mis-sional Churches (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2006); Alan J Roxburgh and M. Scott Boren, Introducing the

Missional Church: What It Is, Why It Matters, How to Become One (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009).

2Narratively, such comments function in Acts to indi-cate that, despite persecution and internal problems, God’s blessing was abundant on the church.

3Graham H. Twelftree, People of the Spirit: Exploring Luke’s View of the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Aca-demic, 2009), 10.

4For example, see Martin Downes, “Entrapment: The Emerging Church Conversation and the Cultural Captivity of the Gospel,” in Reforming or Conform-ing? Post-Conservative Evangelicals and the Emerging Church (ed. Gary L. W. Johnson and Ronald N. Glea-son; Wheaton: Crossway, 2008); Jonathan R. Wil-son, “Practicing Church: Evangelical Ecclesiologies at the End of Modernity,” in The Community of the Word: Toward an Evangelical Ecclesiology (ed. Mark Husbands and Daniel J. Treier; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005).

5Though this notion of catholicity took several centu-ries to penetrate the actual consciousness of Protes-tants, it existed conceptually in Protestantism’s early statements of faith. For example, according to the Second Helvetic Confession (17): “We, therefore, call this Church catholic because it is universal, scattered through all parts of the world, and extended unto all times, and is not limited to any times or places.” Furthermore, in answer to the question, “What do you believe concerning ‘the holy, catholic church?’” the Heidelberg Catechism responds: “I believe that from the beginning to the end of the world, and from among the whole human race, the Son of God, by his Spirit and his Word, gathers, protects and preserves for himself, in the unity of the true faith, a congrega-tion chosen for eternal life....” Heidelberg Catechism, question 54 (my emphasis).

6Of course, this is not an absolute difference, as I will seek to bring out in the following few paragraphs. The current emphasis on the missional nature of the church has been seen before, even if different forms and expressions for it have been articulated. For example, well over a hundred years ago, Banner-man addressed the “chief end of the Church” in a way that resonates with the current missional focus: “The

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chief end of the Church is to be in this world what Christ Himself was, to do in it what He did, to carry on to final success the great work for which He came from heaven.” D. Bannerman, The Scripture Doctrine of the Church: Historically and Exegetically Considered (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1887), 246.

7Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit (trans. Margeret Kohl; New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 10. He adds: “It is not the church that has a mission of salvation to fulfil [sic] to the world; it is the mission of the Son and the Spirit through the Father that includes the church, creating a church as it goes on its way.” Ibid., 64.

8George Hunsberger, “Evangel ica l Conversion Toward a Missional Ecclesiology,” in Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion? (ed. John G. Stack-house, Jr.; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 110.

9Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, IV.3.2. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1962), 573ff.

10Hunsberger, “Evangelical Conversion Toward a Mis-sional Ecclesiology,” 119.

11Ibid., 120-21. 12Some of the material in my answer is adapted from

John Folmar, “Pastoring a Multi-Ethnic Church,” [cited 1 July 2011]. Online: http://www.9marks.org/ejournal/pastoring-multi-ethnic-church.

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Book ReviewsAllah: A Christian Response. By Miroslav Volf. New York: HarperOne, 2010, 326 pp., $25.99.

“Do we worship the same God?” This hotly con-tested question is asked by many Christians about Islam. Influential theologian Miroslav Volf offers an answer in his latest book, Allah: A Christian Response. Volf comes to this question with three formative inf luences, and an agenda. His first influence is a long-standing engagement with the theology of reconciliation, out of which he wrote his acclaimed Exclusion and Embrace. Volf ’s sec-ond formative influence is his intensive dialogue with Muslims in recent years, particularly through the Common Word initiative (http://www.acom-monword.com). His third influence is his admired father, to whom the book is dedicated, and who taught Volf that Christians and Muslims do indeed worship the same God. The agenda Volf pursues is one of political theology. He asks, “Can religious exclusivists, adherents of different religions [i.e., most Muslims and Christians], live comfortably with one another under the same political roof?” (220). Volf ’s answer to this question is “yes,” on the basis of a shared belief in the one God.

A “hot and spicy” dish, as Volf calls it, Allah is jam-packed with interesting ideas and perspec-tives. Volf ’s reflections on what Nicholas of Cusa and Martin Luther had to say about Islam are

rich, as is his discussion of the Trinity, in which he argues that what Muslims deny when they reject the Trinity is also denied by orthodox Christian-ity, and “Christians affirm what Muslims affirm” about God’s oneness (143).

To fully appreciate Volf ’s argument—and its limitations—one must take careful note of his “commonalities approach.” His rules of engage-ment with the other are: (1) “Concentrate on what is common,” and (2) “Keep an eye out for what is decisively different” (91). At the heart of Allah are a handful of claims about God that Volf contends are shared by “normative” Islam and “normative” Christianity (123). He argues from these shared convictions in favor of a political solution for how the two religions can live together in peace, united by faith in the same God. His six core beliefs of monotheism are: (1) there is only one God; (2) God created everything that is not God; (3) God is radically different from everything that is not God; (4) God is good; (5) God commands us to love God; and (6) God commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves. He also distinguishes between referring to and worshiping God, and pro-poses that “To the extent that Christians and Mus-lims strive to love God and neighbor, they worship the same true God” (124). The Allah of whom the Qur’an speaks, Volf argues, is the God of the Bible, and this one God “requires Muslims and

SBJT 15.2 (2011): 88-99.

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Christians to obey strikingly similar commands as an expression of their worship” (124). Volf is an advocate of religious freedom, and argues that common belief in the one God who commands us to love our neighbors requires both Muslims and Christians to support the impartiality of the state toward all religions (238), including freedom of religion (234).

Volf ’s statements about Islam betray large blind spots. This leads him to promote as uncon-troversial a series of rosy opinions about jihad in Islam, without engaging contrary evidence. In this he relies heavily upon two letters written by Muslim scholars as part of their interfaith out-reach to Christians—the Amman letter (http://www.ammanmessage.com/media/openLetter/english.pdf) and the Common Word letter—but is naïvely unaware that eminent signatories to these very same letters have published opinions in their native languages that contradict conclu-sions that Volf appears to have drawn from these letters on subjects such as aggressive jihad and suicide bombings.

Absolutely pivotal for Volf ’s argument is a say-ing of Muhammad which he claims is a command for one to love “all” neighbors as oneself (182), including non-Muslims. Again, Volf appears to derive this insight from Muslim interfaith encoun-ters. However, normative Islam interprets this tra-dition to refer to loving one’s Muslim neighbor; this is clear even in the very source which Volf himself cites (Sahih Muslim, The Book of Faith, Chapter 18). Tellingly, Volf is unable to cite a single verse of the Qur’an that commands loving one’s neighbor.

Volf is so keen to achieve his stated agenda of establishing a political theology for mutual coex-istence that he is blind to contrary evidence, even when this is readily available. An example is Volf ’s claim that the Qur’an’s commands are similar to the Ten Commandments of Moses. In making this claim, he overlooks other commands in the Qur’an that contradict the Ten Commandments in deal-ings with non-Muslims. Volf ’s method is to zero in

on apparent commonalities to secure his six prin-ciples, back each point up with a verse, and then pursue his argument in isolation from Islamic the-ology and jurisprudence. The result is that Volf ’s conclusions are at odds with normative Islamic beliefs and practices. The credibility gap between his conclusions and normative Islam is so great—on such topics as freedom of religion, treatment of apostates, and the political status of non-Muslims in an Islamic state—that he virtually mounts a proof-by-contradiction against himself, in which his premises are undermined by his conclusions.

Volf repeatedly claims that he has written this book for Christians. However, it is far from clear what is the point of persuading Christians about Islamic tolerance, if many Muslims do not and will not accept these arguments. In reality Allah is very much pitched at Western Christians. For Christians who currently live under Islamic domi-nance, Volf ’s views could be received with shocked incredulity. To them his rhetoric could sound like a form of abuse (i.e., the dhimmi syndrome), in which non-Muslims are only allowed to pursue peace by praising Islam. If the whole Christian world thought like Volf, the outcome would be that Christians do nothing to counter resurgent Islamic supremacist ideology, because they have convinced themselves that “normative Islam” supports principles of equality and freedom. This would produce anything but peaceful coexistence. Indeed it would be the recipe for a long, steady spiritual decline.

Volf ’s Allah is a good-hearted attempt to forge an interfaith theology for political coexistence and peace under “the same political roof ” (220). Although his edifice is constructed on a profound knowledge of Christianity, warts and all, it relies upon blind spots and wishful thinking about Islam. Volf takes irenic delight in focusing on the appearance of goodness and similarity in Islam, as offered up to him by Muslims in interfaith dia-logue. However, he repeatedly overstates what is common and overlooks what is different. As a result, Volf looks upon Allah through Christian

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eyes, reading the God of the Bible into the pages of the Qur’an, but is blind to contrary evidence, even when it can be found in the statements of his own dialogue partners. This is a form of prejudice, not one based on hostile fear of the other, but on the fear of excluding the other. This is a fear of being found to be less than Christian. Unfortunately, in Volf ’s method, and—it must be conceded—against his avowed intent (259), love trumps truth. Caveat lector (“Let the reader beware”).

—Mark Durie Vicar, St Mary’s Anglican Church

Caulfield, Australia

Predestination: The American Career of a Conten-tious Doctrine. By Peter. J. Thuesen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 309 pp., $29.95.

Peter Thuesen is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana Uni-versity-Purdue University Indianapolis. He is also co-editor of Religion and American Culture. His book on predestination won the 2010 Book Award for History/Biography from Christianity Today; it is a well-deserved honor.

Thuesen contends that “predestination has been one of the most important but unacknowl-edged sources of discord in churches across the denominational spectrum” in the United States (4). He supports this assertion by examining a wide range of confessional traditions that dot the landscape of American religion. Thuesen focuses on the major denominations as he examines the debates that have erupted over predestination in our nation’s short history. As one would expect, he gives most of his attention to skirmishes among Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopa-lians, Congregationalists, Lutherans, and Baptists. However, the author also touches on the histories of lesser-known groups (Adventist, African Meth-odist Episcopal, Campbellite), and even some cults (Christian Scientist, Mormon, Jehovah’s Witness)

in ways that elucidate his main argument. Although Thuesen gives a general backdrop to

the biblical idea of predestination as it has been developed in western Christianity from the time of Augustine, his main focus is not on the doctrine itself but on the divisiveness that has surrounded it as different groups have addressed it throughout American history. The result is a fascinating and informative book that sheds light not only on the development of Christianity in the United States but also on current debates that are raging over “Calvinism” within various evangelical groups.

Of particular interest is Theusen’s analysis of Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Baptists over the last 250 years in America. In the divisions that have marred each of those three groups a high view of scriptural authority has been found on the same side of a high (or higher) view of “uncondi-tional predestination.” What became the modern Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) stood firmly against their Ohio Synod brethren in the late nineteenth century because of the latter’s posi-tion that election is “intuitu fidei” (in view of faith) rather than “unto faith” (155-63). In more recent years the LCMS has stood against the avowedly liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its “ecumenical promiscuity” manifested in united efforts with Roman Catholicism as well as other liberal Protestant denominations.

The story is the same among Presbyterians. It was the “Old School” Presbyterians in the nine-teenth century who argued for strict subscription to the Westminster Confession of Faith—includ-ing chapter three on God’s eternal decree—against their “New School” counterparts who argued for a less strict adherence to the confession, especially at those points where election and pre-destination are affirmed (175-82). In the North, it was the Old School proponents who pulled out of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) and formed the Ortho-dox Presbyterian Church (OPC) in 1936 under the leadership of J. Gresham Machen, who also helped found Westminster Theological Seminary.

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In the South, a similar path was followed when Old School heirs formed the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Both of these new denomina-tions formed with a clear commitment to the full authority of Scripture. As Theusen notes, “Since 1983, when the northern and southern mainline bodies reunited to form the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), strict predestinarianism among Pres-byterians has continued to f ind its strongest advocates in the OPC, the PCA and other con-stituencies committed to biblical inerrancy” (192).

The book concludes with a look at Southern Baptists, including a special epilogue devoted to Rick Warren and his purpose-driven emphasis. While some of the details are inaccurate and oth-ers lack important nuance, no one can quibble with this summary observation: “Though home to some of the most convinced and articulate predestinarians in the United States today, the SBC also includes anti-Calvinists who are equally adamant that unconditional election is unbibli-cal” (175). After a brief overview of the Armin-ian and Calvinistic streams that trace back to the seventeenth-century origins of Baptists, Theusen examines the modern contention over the doc-trines of grace in the SBC or, as he labels it, “the other Baptist battle” (200). He rightly cites John Dagg and James Boyce as representative of the “Convention’s founders” who adhered to a Cal-vinistic understanding of the biblical doctrine of predestination. However, he betrays an unfortu-nate reliance on secondary sources when describ-ing the historic Sandy Creek Baptist Association of North Carolina as a “quasi-Arminian faction” whose heirs are the contemporary “non-Calvin-ists” in the SBC (201). It is beyond doubt that the Sandy Creek tradition influenced early Southern Baptist life. It is equally beyond doubt that those who established that tradition cannot legitimately be called Arminian, hyphenated or not. As the first covenant ever adopted by the Sandy Creek Baptist Church asserts, those early Separate Bap-tists believed in “particular election of grace by predestination of God in Christ.”

Theusen is mostly accurate in his description of the origin and work of Founders Ministries and of the changes that took place at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary under the leader-ship of R. Albert Mohler, Jr. He misunderstands, however, the manner by which Mohler led the institution to its current confessional fidelity. Theusen states that Mohler not only “announced that anyone paying mere lip service to inerrancy was unwelcome. In rebuilding the faculty, he also instituted another litmus test: subscription to the school’s unmistakably Calvinistic 1858 Abstract of Principles” (205). Far from imposing his own will on the seminary, Mohler simply called the school to return integrity in holding to its charter, which says, “All persons accepting professorships in this Seminary shall be considered, by such acceptance, as engaging to teach in accordance with, and not contrary to, the Abstract of Prin-ciples hereinafter laid down, a departure from which principles on his part shall be grounds for his resignation or removal by the Trustees.”

Peter Thuesen has provided students of Ameri-can Christianity a significant resource for exam-ining the impact of Augustinian and Calvinistic views of predestination on religious debates and denominational identities. The breadth of his examination encompasses so many traditions that minor misstatements about events or people are probably inevitable (though describing R. C. Sproul as “a radio evangelist” may not qualify as such [192]!). Fortunately, such mistakes do not detract from the overall usefulness of the book. It is well indexed and includes a helpful ten-page “Glossary of Theological Terms.”

Thuesen is an engaging writer whose skill in telling a story makes this book, on a rather nar-row slice of historical theology, both beneficial and accessible.

—Tom AscolPastor, Grace Baptist Church

Cape Coral, Florida

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No Armor for the Back: Baptist Prison Writings, 1600s-1700s. By Keith E. Durso. Macon: Mercer University Press; Atlanta: The Baptist History and Heritage Society, 2007, xii + 292 pp., $23.00 paper.

Keith E. Durso’s, No Armor for the Back deals with an idea that is once again coming to the fore in Baptist circles in the West: physical suffering for the sake of Christ. Of course, this is a bibli-cal theme, even to the point of martyrdom being recognized as a gift of the Spirit (see 1 Cor 13:1-3). Consider, for example, Acts 14:19-22. After having survived an attempt on the part of certain Jews to kill him and so silence his preaching the gospel of a crucified and risen Lord, the Apostle Paul told the disciples in various congregations he planted in present-day Turkey, “we must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God.” But a long stretch of time in which this type of experience was not part and parcel of the life of Baptist congregations—one has to go back to the days covered by this book—has dulled our memory and senses. Suffering for the sake of the gospel is all over the New Testament texts, but in days of peace, this element of Christian warfare has receded into the far recesses of our corpo-rate memory. Not anymore though, as across our world militant Islam and Hinduism seek to curb the growth of the church, and in the West there are possible intimations that our freedoms may well be in for a rough ride in the days to come. In such a context, the themes and the figures covered in this book will be a very helpful guide to what it means to suffer for Christ.

All in all, this work is a very helpful study of the experiences and writings of Baptist forebears who were imprisoned and even beaten for the sake of their biblical convictions. Most of Durso’s exam-ples come from the seventeenth century—those years from 1660 to 1688 in the British Isles when the Baptists and other Nonconformists knew what it meant to be the church under the cross—but there are also two chapters dealing with Bap-tist suffering at the hands of the Puritan leaders

in New England and Virginian Anglicans (190-251). In fact, unlike our present situation, the vast majority of the persecutors of these early Baptists were professing Christians—which itself was a strong argument in favor of the Baptist perspec-tive on religious liberty—but the lessons these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Baptists can teach us have not diminished one whit.

Abraham Cheare (1626-88), for instance, who was the pastor of the Baptist work in Plymouth, was arrested, cruelly treated, and imprisoned on Drake’s Island, a small island in Plymouth Sound in the early 1660s (see Durso’s treatment on pages 149-54 that focuses on Cheare’s poems written for children). Fearful that some of his flock might compromise their Baptist convictions to avoid persecution, he wrote a number of letters to his church during the course of this imprisonment, which was his second. In one of them he cites with approval a statement from the Irenicum (1646) of “holy Burroughs,” that is, the Puritan author Jeremiah Burroughs (c.1599-1646). “I desire to be a faithful Minister of Christ and his Church, if I cannot be a Prudent one,” Cheare quotes from Burroughs’ “Epistle to the Reader,” “standing in the gap is more dangerous and troubelsom [sic] than getting behind the hedge, there you may be more secure and under the wind; but it’s best to be there where God looks for a man” (Words in Season [London, 1668], 250). Like the other prisoners of conscience Durso examines in this book, Cheare was more afraid of displeasing God than dying.

Durso treats a number of these Baptist pris-oners through the poetry they wrote in prison (143-89), though a number of these prison poets, including Cheare, Hercules Collins (d. 1702), and the inimitable John Bunyan (1628-88) also wrote prose tracts. It is a little surprising that this latter vein of material was not more extensively used. Obviously there are limits to what one can examine in a work of this size, though I must also confess missing any mention of William Mitchel (1662-1705), a tireless evangelist in the Pennines from the Rossendale Valley in Lancashire to Raw-

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don in neighboring West Yorkshire. Mitchel was twice arrested for preaching illegally during the reign of James II (r. 1685-1688). On the first occa-sion he was treated with deliberate roughness and spent three months in jail at Goodshaw. On the second occasion he was arrested near Bradford and imprisoned for six months in York Castle. The enemies of the gospel who imprisoned Mitchel might have thought they were shutting him up in a dismal dungeon. To Mitchel, though, as he told his friends in a letter written from York in the spring of 1687, the dungeon was a veritable “para-dise, because the glorious presence of God is with me, & the Spirit of glory & of God rests on me” (see 1 Pet 4:14). He had been given such a “glo-rious sight of [God’s] countenance, [and] bright splendour of his love,” that he was quite willing to “suffer afflictions with the people of God, & for his glorious Truth.”

This omission of any mention of Mitchel is a minor quibble, though, for Durso has provided an excellent overview of the primary sources per-taining to a key facet of early Baptist life. This, together with an extensive familiarity with the rel-evant secondary sources, makes this book a highly recommended introduction to a subject that can no longer be ignored.

—Michael A. G. Haykin Professor of Church History and

Biblical Spirituality The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Athanasius. By Peter J. Leithart. Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011, xviii + 204 pp., $27.99 paper.

This new study by Peter Leithart, one of the most versatile of present-day Christian authors (wit-ness his competency in writing biblical commen-taries as well as studies of a mutual favorite, Jane Austen), is a tour-de-force in many ways. Without

minimizing elements of recent portrayals of the Alexandrian bishop as something of an ecclesiasti-cal thug, Leithart demonstrates that Athanasius’s literary defense of the deity of Christ is neverthe-less one of those key moments in the history of the church that we ignore at our peril. In this regard, Leithart provides the series of which this book is the initial volume with an excellent start: this is patristic ressourcement at its finest. Athanasian trinitarianism, which has been the object of attack since the onset of the Enlightenment project in the late seventeenth century (“Athanansianism” was a deliberate term of abuse employed by eigh-teenth-century Socinians), is shown to be a vital representation of the biblical doctrine of God, as necessary for our theological health as it was for Athanasius’s contemporaries.

For example, concluding chapter three, “The One God”—probably the most brilliant chapter of the book—Leithart rightly points out that fail-ure to appreciate the implications of Athanasius’s doctrine of the Trinity,

has sent certain forms of social trinitarianism down a blind alley. The Trinity is not, as social trinitarianism has suggested, a modern egalitar-ian democracy, made up of distinct but identical individuals. The persons are indeed equal, but not identical. At its best, though, social trini-tarianism has been a plea to take personhood of the persons seriously; it has been a plea for a scriptural exposition of the ontological life of the Trinity in which the persons converse together as they do in the Gospel story (88).

A great part of the response to modern social trinitarianism, however, also falls short of Atha-nasius’s robustly biblical model, as Leithart notes:

the response to Trinity-as-democracy should not be the implicit subordinationism that has infected some traditional trinitarianism; we do not need to resort to a unilateral hierarchical Trinity, paternal monarchianism or paternal

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causality, to avoid the problems of social trinitar-ianism. An asymmetrical account of triune life [towards which Athanasius’ corpus points] takes the pleas of social trinitarianism seriously, and can get at all the dynamism and personal inter-activity that social trinitarianism wants, without threatening to collapse into tritheism (88).

Leithart has an excellent grasp of the secondary literature and shows himself a skilled interpreter of Athanasius’s exegesis, though I, for one, wish he had not been as reliant as he is on the antiquated translations of the Athanasius volume in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. On occasion he does employ more recent translations, but, from this reviewer’s point of view, he should have done his own translation when nothing more recent existed. Critical to understanding the Fathers is being able to follow their train of argument and biblical interpretation, and the dense Victorian prose of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers is often more of a hindrance than a help for the mod-ern reader in this regard.

It needs mentioning that there was one element of Leithart’s ressourcement of Athanasius’s theol-ogy that I found particularly unhelpful, namely, his argument that “Athanasius’s trinitarian the-ology is more radically trinitarian than that of Augustine” (86; also argued at length on 75-77). Here Leithart seems to be rehearsing a variant of the old charge raised by many patristic schol-ars of the past century, namely, that whereas the eastern fathers were truly trinitarian, Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity had a fundamental unitar-ian slant. Recent patristic analysis, though, has shown this to be a basic misreading of the Latin father. (See, for example, Keith Goad’s compara-tive study of the trinitarianism of Gregory of Nazianzus and that of Augustine in his “A Com-parison of The Patristic Model of the Trinity and the Contemporary Social Analogy of the Trinity” [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010].)

More attention could have been given to Atha-nasius’s portrayal of model piety in his Life of Antony (treated somewhat sparingly on 169-71). Surely Athanasius intends us to view his hero Ant-ony as the model of Christlikeness and the fullness of the Spirit. Other patristic authors, though, were not so sure about Antony as such a model. Basil of Caesarea, for one, spent much of his career as a monastic reformer seeking to produce a form of communal monastic piety that was an implicit rejection of the eremitic model promoted by Atha-nasius in his Life of Antony.

There is also good reason to have said more about Athanasius’s ontological discussion of the Spirit in his Letters to Serapion (dealt with on 77-80, though see also 157-65 for discussion of the work of the Spirit). In these letters, Athanasius rectifies the shortcomings of his earlier writings in which the Spirit did not loom large. The pneuma-tology of these letters anticipates the work of the Cappadocian fathers and can therefore be rightly regarded as critical to the architecture of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan creed (381). (See as fundamental in this regard, Adolf Laminksi, Der Heilige Geist als Geist Christi und Geist der Gläubi-gen: Der Beitrag des Athanasios von Alexandrien zur Formulierung des trinitarischen Dogmas im vierten Jahrhundert [Leipzig: St. Benno-Verlag GMBH, 1969], which is strangely absent from Leithart’s secondary literature.)

In the final analysis, however, this is a truly convincing study of the importance of Atha-nasius’s theology for our ongoing theological reflection, in which the triune God is once again looming large, a matter surely of deep satisfaction to the angels and glorified saints, among which number we trust is to be found the human subject of this book.

—Michael A. G. HaykinProfessor of Church History and

Biblical Spirituality The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

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Secret Faith in the Public Square: An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity. By Jonathan Malesic. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2009, 248 pp., $28.00 paper.

My first thought on seeing the book’s title? “I’m not buying it!” That Christians should keep silent about their faith in the midst of a fallen world? What about Jesus’ rejection of tasteless salt? Jesus was adamant that we are not to hide our light under a basket, wasn’t he?

How important to read a book before passing final judgment on it! And in reading the book, the reader will discover that Malesic’s thesis—that a Christian’s extraordinary righteousness should not happen in order to be seen—seems quite on target, even if agreement is not found at every point along the way.

Malesic’s primary call, to the Christian, is for personal self-abasement and a refusal to promote self. The Christian ideal is that the Christian should do what is right simply because it is right. In part one of the book, the author presents sup-port for his argument that he finds in the thought and writings of several individuals from history. In Cyril of Jerusalem (fourth century), the nine-teenth century Dane, Søren Kierkegaard, and Germany’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Malesic unearths support for his position that the Christian’s pri-vate life and responsibilities are different from his public life. There are things Christians do in private (confessing our faith) and there are things Christians do in public (good deeds).

Perhaps Malesic’s reference to Kierkegaard’s “secret agape” encapsulates well his argument: “… Christians must ensure that their love is nonre-ciprocal. They must police themselves, so they do not undertake works of love in order to receive something in return” (102). Furthermore: “Con-cealing one’s agency when performing a work of Christian love provides just such a means” (102). In everyday English idiom: as Christians, we are not to toot our own horns.

Having completed his conversation with Cyril,

Kierkegaard, and Bonhoeffer, Malesic moves to part two and brings the reader into the present context and wishes to know how the Christian should live in the contemporary American con-text. The reader likely will share some of the author’s concerns, particularly the concern about American evangelicals who seem intent on build-ing personal kingdoms and his concern about the church “overidentifying with American culture and making American political, economic, and social creeds into de facto doctrines” (207).

On the other hand, the notion that spreading the gospel is “an act not of broadcasting it, but handing it on” (197) is suspicious. Malesic writes: “Handing on the gospel is itself an act of neigh-bor love … it need not be done through direct teaching. It can also be accomplished indirectly through other acts of neighbor love” (197). Almost defensively, it seems to me, he adds: “To be sure, it requires tremendous confidence in love to think that unseen works of love can bring another per-son around to adopting the Christian faith” (199).

Not merely acts of love, done anonymously or not, but the actual proclamation or declaration of the gos-pel is necessary for conversion. Paul’s well-known affirmation in Romans 10—that salvation comes through hearing and that hearing is possible only with someone preaching—underscores the neces-sity of the proclaimed or declared gospel. The act of a public proclamation/declaration of the gospel is not a notion dreamed up by contemporary evangelicals wrongly wed to American notions; rather, it was the modus operandi of Jesus and the disciples.

With its focus on Christian humility and self-lessness, Secret Faith in the Public Square is a book that can be read quite profitably, particularly by the believer in contemporary America. The reader might be forgiven, however, for questioning if the gospel can truly be advanced merely through “acts of neighbor love.”

—George H. MartinProfessor of Biblical Studies

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

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Telling God’s Story. By Preben Vang and Terry Carter. Nashville, TN: B&H, 2006, 335 pp., $29.99.

At first glance, my thought was that this book might be a useful text for a college or seminary survey course on the Bible. The questions quickly came: Would it be sufficiently detailed and technical for a Bible survey course? If not, in what context would Telling God’s Story be most useful? The following are observations made after reading the book.

The reader should not look for in-depth discus-sions and tightly argued conclusions regarding many of the more difficult and debated stories in the Bible. As one example, in addressing the mat-ter of “What was the method of creation?,” the authors note the disagreements among Christians and offer a number of questions: What should we focus on in the biblical story of creation? Duration? Method? What did God want to teach us in his story? What is the main concern? The conclusion is simple and it is correct, as far as it goes: “… God created everything that exists including people” (29). The reader is likely to be left wishing for more.

The foregoing is not to suggest that the book is f lawed or in error when dealing with difficult or disputed texts; rather, these observations simply affirm the nature of the book. It is largely a retelling of the biblical story, with occasional comment and application. It is not an attempt to deal with thorny and difficult issues that might arise in the study of the Scriptures, nor is the authors’s intent to produce an introduction to the scholarly study of the Bible.

This chronological retelling of the story is the authors’s intention, and this retelling is also the book’s strength. Especially for those who are rela-tively unaware of the broad sweep of history and the story of God’s redemptive work, Telling God’s Story should prove to be a very fruitful volume.

Told in fourteen episodes, the story moves from creation to the first fathers of Israel and covenant, to the forming of the nation of Israel, through the rest of the Old Testament history, to the birth and ministry of the Messiah and, ultimately, to the

consummation at the end of the age. Students of the Bible have sometimes summarized the over-all story thusly: “The Old Testament is promise. The New Testament is fulfillment.” This charac-ter of the Bible, as one story—the story of God’s redemption—comes through unmistakably as the reader progresses through the fourteen episodes rendered here.

Following two short introductory chapters that provide a broad overview of the Bible story and background materials, the fourteen episodes typically end with helpful study sections such as “Things to Consider,” “Study Questions,” “Out-line Help,” and other study materials that aid the reader in reflecting on the material presented.

Perhaps the most fruitful context for the use of this book would be the local church’s small group teaching ministries. An instructor might list Tell-ing God’s Story in a recommended bibliography for a college or seminary course, but probably would not use it as a primary text. In a local church set-ting, however, and with the desire to help readers better grasp the overall story of the Bible, Telling God’s Story might be the very book that a teacher would choose. The authors ask and answer the question: “Why tell this story? We tell this story because it is more than a story, even more than just a true story. It is the story! … It promises a life-changing encounter with God!” (9). In an age of sound bites, Tweets, and talking points, Telling God’s Story is a good reminder that we have a big story to tell and that it is the story that all people need to hear.

—George Martin Professor of Biblical Studies

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

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A Model for Marriage: Covenant, Grace, Empower-ment and Intimacy. By Jack O. Balswick and Judith K. Balswick. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006, 240 pp., $19.00 paper.

Jack and Judith Balswick’s book on marriage does a fine job of making scholarly research in sociol-ogy and theology accessible to those concerned with the actual practice of a harmonious marriage. They present a social theology of marriage that integrates the theological analogy of the distinct-yet-unified trinitarian God with a social scientific understanding of marriage as a unity of two dis-tinctly differentiated spouses.

The goal of their model is marital harmony through the core process of “differentiated unity in marriage.” They define differentiation as “devel-oping and defining a secure self, validated in Christ,” whose unification results in “two secure spouses, distinct and unique in themselves, discovering belonging and connection in and through marital unity.”

As the members of the Trinity maintain their unique personhood while mutually indwelling one another, so spouses maintain both distinc-tion and unity “through a mutual, reciprocat-ing process in which interdependence develops through the coexistence of distinction and unity in relationship” (33). This process is guided by four primary principles: covenant, grace, empow-erment, and intimacy. The Balswicks then show how this model functions in practical situations of communication, conflict, the different seasons of marriage, sexual intimacy, and spiritual intimacy. They even address the practical balance of a dual-earner marriage.

The Balswicks bring a host of knowledge to the consideration of a very important topic. Their expe-rience in the field is evident by their careful thought as well as their extensive practical consideration, resulting in an abundance of practical wisdom.

The central theme of the book, differentiation in marriage, is helpful in guarding against the fatal error of a spouse deriving his or her sense of self

from what the other can offer. Each spouse is to be differentiated in Christ, deriving his or her fulfill-ment and identity from him, so that each spouse is freed to serve the other while expecting ultimate fulfillment neither from one another (co-depen-dence) nor from him- or herself alone (indepen-dence). Biblical interdependence can then flourish.

This theme is also problematic, however. The issue of differentiation largely sets the agenda for the authors’s consideration of Scripture and theology. Thus, issues such as the defined self or power dynamics in relationship become the driv-ing concern in the biblical consideration of how a man and woman relate to one another in mar-riage. While the struggle for power, for instance, is helpful to consider, when it is the driving concern, biblical admonitions to serve one another become overly focused on empowerment and influence. A more biblically direct understanding of service would focus on sacrificial living for the redemp-tive good of the other. Such a focus would require a more robust discussion than this book contained on the power of sin and how the specific aspects of Christ’s atoning work counter it in marriage.

A related critique is that the authors understand the trinitarian relationship as “complementarity without hierarchy” (68), leading to an egalitar-ian perspective of marriage roles. This suspicion of hierarchy is perhaps closely connected with their concern to avoid power dynamics. Author-ity seems to be understood mainly in terms of its power to influence. Because every member of the Trinity influences the other equally, the conclu-sion is that they all share authority. But to con-clude thus is to overlook the unique ways that the members of the Trinity influence one another. The Bible does not speak of the Father having more power than the Son, but it does speak of the Father sending and directing the Son (e.g., John 8:42), and of the Son acting as the agent of the Father (e.g., Heb 1:2), for the Father’s ultimate purpose of magnifying his Son above all things (e.g., Eph 1:9-10). Failing to see the Father’s eternal authority robs the Trinity as well as marriage of the complex

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and beautiful opportunity for authority to be a tool for honoring another.

—Jeremy Pierre Assistant Professor of Biblical Counseling

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Galatians. By Thomas R. Schreiner. Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rap-ids, MI: Zondervan, 2010, 423 pp., $34.99.

Tom Schreiner is well known to the readers of this journal. He is Associate Dean of Scripture and Interpretation and James Buchanan Harri-son Professor of New Testament Interpretation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, at which he has served since 1997. Schreiner is the author or editor of numerous works. Due to his impressive commentaries such as the volume on Romans in the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, his introductory guide Interpreting the Pauline Epistles, and his theology of Paul’s letters titled Paul, Apostle of God’s Glory in Christ, Schreiner has emerged as the uncon-tested dean of Pauline studies in Southern Baptist life—and arguably in the English-speaking evan-gelical world, as well. Through both his teaching and his writings on Paul, Schreiner increasingly steps into the role that F. F. Bruce filled for a previ-ous generation. In addition to writing the volume on Galatians, he serves as an associate editor of this series.

The commentary series is packed with helpful features. The treatment of each paragraph begins with an explanation of the literary context that shows how the section fits with the material that precedes and follows it. This is followed by a very brief summary of the central thrust of the passage that condenses the major truths of the passage to just a couple of sentences. The commentator then offers his own translation of the text in a graphi-cal layout that assists the reader in visualizing the f low of thought. A section devoted to a discus-

sion of the structure of the text explains the com-mentator’s view of the relationship between the clauses of the passage. The next section contains a detailed exegetical outline that further assists teachers and preachers in understanding and explaining the flow of thought. The “Explanation of the Text” section focuses on establishing the original text of the letter, interpreting the text with careful attention to vocabulary and syntax, examining possible Old Testament allusions, and interacting with important secondary literature. Finally, the “Theology in Application” section contains reflections on the doctrinal and practi-cal implications of the passage for modern read-ers. The series strikes a balance between the needs and interests of busy pastors whose Greek skills are rusty and the scholars whose language skills remain honed.

Since it is nearly impossible to summarize and interact with the details of a hefty and detailed commentary in a review of the assigned length, the remainder of this review will focus on some of the broader characteristics of Schreiner’s work in this volume.

Although Schreiner is well aware that it is “out of fashion in some circles,” he argues that “Martin Luther and John Calvin were substantially right in their interpretation of the letter.” His exegesis convincingly demonstrates that numerous claims of scholars belonging to the so-called New Per-spective miss the mark. He correctly challenges Gordon Fee’s attempt to interpret Galatians as if the Reformation had never happened.

Schreiner does not allow current trends in scholarship to dictate his exegetical conclusions. Although he does not embrace traditional views merely for tradition’s sake, he boldly adopts tra-ditional interpretations when the preponderance of evidence supports older views. For example, Schreiner supports the South Galatian hypoth-esis that was popularized by Ramsey in the late nineteenth century and consequently affirms an early date for Galatians. He argues persuasively that Paul’s opponents in this letter were Judaiz-

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ers and that the “works of the law” on which they depended for their salvation included not only the boundary markers of Judaism like circumcision and dietary regulations, but also commandment-keeping in general. He affirms a traditional Prot-estant view of justification (although he correctly notes that references to justification are often eschatological in nature in this letter). He also argues that “faith of Christ” in Galatians is objec-tive rather than subjective—i.e., it refers to the believer’s faith in Jesus rather than Christ’s obedi-ence. He concludes that rhetorical criticism is of little benefit for a study of the Pauline letters since “we must seriously question whether Paul actually structured entire letters in accordance with the rhetorical handbooks.”

Schreiner’s exegesis is characterized by refresh-ing reserve. When the evidence is insufficient to lead one to firm conclusions and interpreters can only speculate, he candidly admits this. Further-more, his exegesis is economical in the sense that he refrains from investing enormous amounts of time on questions piqued by scholarly curiosity that ultimately have little impact on the theologi-cal and practical implications of the letter.

Schreiner clearly writes with a scholar’s mind and a pastor’s heart. His work is offered for the edification of the church and with attention to the needs of the pastor who wishes to “correctly handle the word of truth” and faithfully expound the Scriptures before his flock. Many pastors will be especially grateful for the application sections that will guide them in distilling the theology and proclaiming the practical implications of the letter for their congregations. The discussions are never dry, but are warm and inspiring. Pastors who lament having to choose between an academic or devotional commentary will be thrilled to find scholarship and worship mingled in this work.

Schreiner’s research on Galatians is far more thorough than one might expect in what might be considered a pastoral commentary. Extensive documentation in the footnotes shows that he has carefully considered the most recent research that

has been published in respected scholarly jour-nals. Interaction with these resources is normally relegated to the footnotes in order to avoid bog-ging down exegetical discussions unnecessarily. However, the interaction is so extensive that often more than half of the page is dedicated to foot-notes. Scholars will find plenty of guidance here for additional research.

One of the most impressive features of the commentary is the attention given to issues of intertextuality. Schreiner frequently shows how familiarity with the Old Testament background of Paul’s thought illuminates his arguments. In the commentary proper, the theological reflections, and the treatment of general theological themes at the conclusion of the volume, the author shows how Paul’s statements in Galatians relate to the teaching of the Old Testament, of the Lord Jesus, and of other Pauline literature. This feature makes the commentary an excellent example of an inte-grated biblical theology.

Both novices to the study of Galatians and seasoned scholars who have pored over the let-ter many times will profit from a careful reading of this commentary. The commentary certainly deserves a place alongside the works of Light-foot, Bruce, Ridderbos, and Silva on the pastor’s shelves. If a pastor or student is on a tight bud-get and can afford only one of these volumes, I strongly recommend this one.

—Charles L. QuarlesDean of the Caskey School of Divinity

Louisiana College