Contextualizing Theology in the South Pacific: The Shape of Theology in Oral Cultures

By Randall G. Prior, Roger Schroeder SVD and Ilaitia Sevati Tuwere

This book engages with a widespread contemporary dilemma--how do we do theology in a context where the cultures of the people are oral and not literate?

The nations of the South Pacific, from their missionary beginnings, inherited an approach to theology that was dominated by Western cultural categories. The global movement of contextualization began to impact upon Pacific churches in the 1960s, and challenged this inherited approach. Significant changes have resulted, but the dilemma has remained. The dominant approach is still one that is defined by and better suited to literate cultures. The consequence is that theology remains an alien enterprise, distant from the life of the local churches, and distant from the hearts and minds of the indigenous people.

In facing the dilemma, this book exposes the fundamental differences between primary oral cultures and primary literate cultures, and identifies the key factors that lie at the heart of the theological problem. By addressing each of these in turn, the author then paves the way ahead. He offers a methodology for theology that is rooted within the oral cultural context of the South Pacific . . . and potentially in any context where oral cultures are the norm.

The consequences for theology and for theological education are profound.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jul 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532658594

Randall G. Prior

Randall Prior is an Associate Teacher at Pilgrim Theological College within the University of Divinity in Melbourne. During five years of ministry in a newly independent Vanuatu in the 1980s, he became immersed in the issues of the relationship between the Gospel and cultural context. He has pursued that passion for over thirty years. He is the publisher of ten books in the Gospel and Culture in Vanuatu series.

Book preview

Introduction

In April 1979 in the South Pacific Island nation of the New Hebrides,¹ a two-week workshop on the topic of Culture and Faith was held. It was part of a series of such workshops convened around South Pacific Island nations between 1978 and 1983, sponsored jointly by the Australian Council of Churches and the Pacific Conference of Churches, and facilitated by the Rev. Cliff Wright.² For the church in the New Hebrides, it came at an historic moment. It was just one year before the declaration of national independence in July 1980, after seventy-four years of joint colonial occupation by Britain and France. The fact that the church and its leaders were the pioneers of the independence movement, and would soon play a definitive role in the post-colonial government, generated a unique atmosphere among workshop participants. There was a strong sense that it was timely for the church to examine closely the relationship between the colonial inheritance of the Christian faith and their own changing local cultural context.

The content of the workshop was mirrored in the sub-title chosen for the final report, Two Heads and Two Hearts.³ This title was evocative. It indicated that workshop participants had reached the conclusion that the Christian gospel introduced by the nineteenth century mission movement had been appropriated in such a way that it had not become integrated with the cultural context of the lives of the people. In fact, adherence to the Christian faith and embodiment of cultural tradition seemed to exist concurrently, even where there may be clear contradiction between the two. It was as if they formed two parallel lines. For example, people may be paralyzed by the fear of evil spirits, while also speaking of the victory of Jesus over such spirits; people may offer worship to ancestors while also declaring that God alone is worthy of worship; people may make use of black magic as a form of control over others, while also claiming that only God may have such control; people may carry a light when walking after dark, not to illuminate the pathway but to ward off evil spirits, and at the same time confessing that Jesus has rendered evil spirits powerless; people may hoard fetishes in their homes as assurance of personal safety, while also acknowledging that they are safe in the arms of Jesus.

This workshop in the New Hebrides illustrated a reality that was apparent across the whole of the South Pacific: Most people in the island communities of the Pacific have been torn between two worlds. It is as though in the one head there are two heads, one Christian and one traditional, and in the one heart two hearts with love for both the Christian and custom ways.⁴

This dual reality is by no means unique to South Pacific experience; it is recognized also in other regions of the world.⁵ In his landmark publication, Roman Catholic missiologist Robert Schreiter reflects on two quite different theological approaches to mission, one that assumes the pre-existent presence of Christ within a mission situation, and one that suggests that Christ is absent until being brought into that situation by the missionary. With the latter approach Schreiter notes that

One consistently runs the risk of introducing and maintaining Christianity as an alien body in a culture. The word of God never receives the opportunity to take root and bear fruit. What results in many instances are dual systems of belief, wherein the older system continues alongside Christianity, with each being selectively used by the people as needs arise. This is the case in many parts of Latin America and Africa today.⁶

In dealing more specifically with such situations of duality, he comments,

In dual systems a people follows the religious practices of two distinct systems. The two systems are kept discrete; they can operate side by side. . . . Conversion to Christianity has usually meant putting all other religious systems aside, but in these instances significant parts or even the entirety of a second system is maintained.⁷

Schreiter is describing precisely the pre-independence reality as referred to in the 1979 New Hebrides workshop report, and in the more general situation across the South Pacific Islands as summarized by Fugui and Wright. The core problem is that the introduction of the Christian faith from the colonial world into the South Pacific, through the decades of the missionary era of the nineteenth century, created a situation whereby it was never integrated into the cultural identity of local communities; in fact it remained dis-integrated. Despite the widespread acceptance of the Christian message, it failed to take root within the cultural context of the people; it was never truly incarnate or contextualized.

What is true in relation to the Christian faith, is also true in relation to the evolution of Christian theology within the South Pacific. The pursuit of Christian theology has been dominated from the beginning by Western influence and by Western cultural presuppositions. As such it has remained culturally alien to the South Pacific in both its content and its methodology. A chorus of voices affirm this viewpoint. By way of example, Feleretika Nokise, in his survey of the fifty-year history of the Pacific Theological College, remarks that the earliest forms of theological education were established by the missionaries as a crucial component of the overall evangelization policy of each mission society. This policy, he says, was to serve the imposition of Western civilization and Christianity.⁸ Again, this has been the experience in other areas of the missionized world beyond the South Pacific.

However in the period following the Second World War there has been an evolving international reaction in the Third World against such Western dominance, giving rise to a movement committed to the contextualization of Christian theology across the diversity of non-Western cultures. This international movement began to impact upon the South Pacific in the 1960s, was taken up more deliberately during the 1970s, and became firmly established in the 1980s. Through this period there was a growing recognition of, and discontentment with, the inadequacies of the inherited missionary theology, and a corresponding emphasis on the need to localize theology within the indigenous context of the people. Over the last four decades that task has been the focus of much attention by theologians and leaders of South Pacific churches.

Nevertheless, despite the serious attention given to the contextualization of theology in the South Pacific, it has been a constant struggle to achieve this goal. This struggle has been due essentially to the persistence and force of the Western cultural presuppositions that were handed down from the missionary era. They have thwarted attempts to contextualize theology and have continued to define the shape of theology. Thus the vision of the 1980s, namely to achieve a contextualization of theology appropriate to the cultures in the South Pacific, and serving the faith and witness of local church communities, remains largely unfulfilled nearly four decades later.

What lies at the root of this ongoing struggle has been a failure to recognize how extreme is the fundamental clash between the categories that define these two different cultural contexts—Western and South Pacific—and what is actually required to achieve a contextualizing of theology, one that is free from the shackles of Western culture, and at home within South Pacific cultures. The struggle has been exacerbated by a further failure to consider adequately the important distinction in theology between matters of content and matters of method—the contextual content of theological discourse on the one hand, and a contextual methodology⁹ for doing theology on the other hand. The clash of cultural categories impacts forcefully on both, but more persistently and subtly on a contextual methodology. Only the clear recognition of this reality will provide the key to finding a way through the obstacles to a form of contextualization that is genuinely grounded within the cultures of the South Pacific. Accomplishing this task lies at the heart of this book.

In forging this pathway, I will identify the principal factors internal to the cultures of the South Pacific that clash with the Western cultural and missionary heritage. I will establish that there are three such factors. The first of these is the fact that the cultures of the South Pacific are primary oral cultures and not primary literate cultures.¹⁰ The second is that the cultures of the South Pacific do not share with the Western world a heritage of the era of the Enlightenment.¹¹ The third is inter-connected with the first two, namely the cultural anomaly created by the separation of theology and local church.

All three factors create profound dilemmas for establishing a contextual methodology for theology in the South Pacific. Without such a contextualization, the Christian faith will risk remaining dis-integrated from the culture and life of the South Pacific peoples—two heads and two hearts.

Outline

In order to provide a coherent background for this work, chapter 1 will trace the evolution of the recent international movement of the contextualization of theology, including the formal adoption of the language of contextualization. The book then moves into chapter 2 for a more focused examination of how this international development, together with other coinciding influences, acted as catalysts for contextualizing of theology to become an inescapable agenda for the theologians and leaders of South Pacific churches.

These first two chapters of the book thus set the foundation for a much closer examination of the distinctive character of the contextualization of theology as it has unfolded within the South Pacific. Chapter 3 then addresses this more specific investigation. This will be done in a particular way, namely by attending to the voices of South Pacific Islanders themselves. Because the self-conscious and focused pursuit of contextualization of theology for the South Pacific is one that is to be determined by the indigenous peoples, it is important to examine how they themselves have experienced and given shape to it. The theological voices are numerous and passionate, and deserve investigation.

In approaching this investigation, I do so under three headings. First, I identify how South Pacific Islanders have defined theology. Secondly, I map the specific content that has been given to this theology. Thirdly, I examine the methodology that has been evident. Although the three elements are intertwined, it is necessary to make a distinction between them in order to provide a more precise understanding of the strengths and limitations of the way in which theology has so far been contextualized within the South Pacific. It also paves the way for identifying the critical issues that lie at the foundation of the ongoing struggle for a more genuine contextualization of theology.

It will be the particular matter of the methodology of theology that emerges as the critical stumbling block to the contextualizing of theology in the South Pacific. The issues that create this stumbling block, and how they are to be addressed in order to break through the barrier towards a more grounded and sustainable form for contextualizing theology, will then be addressed extensively in chapter 4.

Having established what is required for the development of a contextual methodology, chapter 5 turns to the examination of the case study known as the Gospel and Culture in Vanuatu project. The project deliberately sought to address the challenges illuminated so strikingly by the 1979 workshop and to develop a theology that was culturally localized, accessible to and owned by the indigenous people. It is this project that will be examined for its effectiveness in theological methodology, one that is grounded within the cultural context of the people, and one that therefore can be considered as a model for the contextualization of theology.

The final chapter of the book sets out the conclusions for the shape of the contextualization of theology within the oral cultures of the South Pacific, with implications for people of primary oral cultures beyond the South Pacific.

The Particular Context—Vanuatu

Vanuatu is located in the South Pacific and comprises eighty-three islands, sixty-six of which are inhabited (see the map of Vanuatu at the beginning of this book). It has a population of a little over 280,000 people.¹² It lies about two thousand kilometers east of northern Australia, and its islands form a Y-shape running about nine hundred kilometers from the Torres Islands in the north to Hunter Island in the south. Its nearest neighbors are New Caledonia four hundred kilometers to the southwest, the Solomon Islands eight hundred kilometers to the northwest, and Fiji eight hundred kilometers to the east.¹³

Among those outside of the Pacific region, very little may be known about Vanuatu. As recently as 2010, thirty years after independence, Vanuatu Prime Minister Edward Natapei is quoted as saying that his country is not widely known globally. People look at the passport and say ‘Vanua-Where’? He went on to relate that he had been held at airport immigration desks in both South Africa and Japan while his passport was validated.¹⁴ Perhaps the reason for this lack of familiarity is that Vanuatu comprises very small populations of people who are scattered across a vast expanse of tiny islands, whose cultures are oral, and whose level of formal (Western) education is limited, all of which means that there is little that is published or publicized for the wider world to read or hear.

This is especially so in the field of theology. Even in those publications that focus in detail upon the Third World, there may be no reference at all to the whole region of the South Pacific within which Vanuatu is located. For example, the publication, Dictionary of Third World Theologies, a survey of theologies across the Third World, makes no mention at all of the South Pacific; the nearest it gets is a one page article by Anne Patel-Grey on aboriginal Australia.¹⁵

Culturally the Pacific is divided very roughly between three defined groups of people—the Micronesians (little islands),¹⁶ the Polynesians (many islands)¹⁷ and the Melanesians (black islands).¹⁸ Broadly speaking, Vanuatu belongs to the last of these groups. Melanesian cultures are notable for the fact that they comprise small and autonomous tribal communities each with its own language, culture and structure, and without direct inter-connections with any neighboring community; in fact inter-tribal relationships were often marked by conflict.¹⁹ Vanuatu has over one hundred different and distinct languages and cultures, and some six hundred dialects. While there is discernible difference between the numerous cultures within Vanuatu, they are marked by the number and strength of their common features that, taken together, mean that they can be described as if they form a cultural classification.

The name Vanuatu in local language is best translated from the beginning and forever, with God we stand strong on our land.²⁰ But the land was not always our land. It was visited in May 1606 by the Spanish explorer Ferdinand de Quiros who, with six Franciscan priests and four monks from the order of St John of God on board, thought they had discovered the Great South Land. Claiming it for God and for Spain, they called it Terra Australis del Espiritu Santo (The Great South Land of the Holy Spirit). They attempted to establish a settlement but encountered hostilities, and after just one month, they left.

In 1768, French explorer Louis Bougainville arrived in the island group, ritually took possession of it, and named it Grandes Cyclades, correcting what had been recognized as a false claim made by de Quiros. Just six years later, in 1774, James Cook charted the islands and gave them the name New Hebrides, the name by which it continued to be known throughout its years under subsequent colonial rule.²¹

Through the nineteenth century, increased exploration led to the arrival of traders out of which grew the notorious blackbirding era, bringing decades of exploitation and cruelty to local island people. Bonnemaison reports that an estimated total of nearly 40,000 Vanuatans were involved in the labour trade between 1865 and 1906. About one in four never returned from the great journey.²²

The New Hebrides was colonized by the British and the French. In 1888, under pressure to do something to protect the local people, they formed a Joint Naval Commission to settle disputes and to control the slave trade. In 1906 they officially established joint colonial rule—a condominium. This co-colonized collection of dispersed islands and peoples was now gathered formally into a nation called The New Hebrides. Under colonial rule, it became structurally divided when the British and French could not agree on the way in which a united colonization ought to work. They created two systems of education, two health services and two structures of judiciary oversight. This complicated matters among this small population of island peoples, who were forced to link up with one or the other of the two contrasting systems of colonial rule.²³ Adding to this structural division was the further complication created by the fact that the Protestant church missionaries came from English-speaking countries and the Roman Catholic missionaries came from France, so that the Christian traditions lined up with the respective colonial authorities.²⁴

Missionaries began to appear in the New Hebrides in the first half of the nineteenth century, originally through the London Missionary Society.²⁵ In 1839 John Williams, after first visiting the New Hebridean island of Tanna where he left three Samoan teachers, landed on the nearby island of Erromango. By circumstance of his arrival, he and one of his companions, James Harris, were clubbed to death.²⁶ Through the early 1840s further attempts were made to plant the gospel among the islands, but it was not until the arrival of John Geddie from the Presbyterian Church of Nova Scotia, that the first Christian church was founded. Geddie landed on the tiny southern island of Aneityum in July 1848. Like a lot of missionaries of his era, Geddie was influenced by the revival movements of the early nineteenth century, and was a great enthusiast for the spreading of the Christian faith. He remained on Aneityum from 1848 to 1872. During the first nine years of that time he kept a diary of his missionary life and work.²⁷

In appreciating one of the main features of the historical context of Vanuatu at the time of independence, it is important to glimpse something of the presuppositions that formed the missionary theology of Geddie and of his contemporaries in mission. These are well illustrated in the following quotation taken from his diary:

This is truly one of the dark places of the earth, and all the abominations of heathenism are practised without scruple or remorse. Our hearts are sometimes tempted to say, Can these dry bones live? But we know that the gospel must be preached to every creature, that Christ shall have the heathen for his inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for his possession, and that all things are possible with God. May the time to favour this dark island soon arrive. (July

29

,

1848

)²⁸

One week later, on the departure of the boat from which they had disembarked, Geddie spoke of the stern realities of a missionary life now that they were left to ourselves on this dark isle of the sea, cut off from civilized and Christian society. (August 6, 1848)²⁹ What is pertinent here is that Geddie made these two diary entries upon the first and ninth days respectively after his arrival on the island. As such, they express not what he discovered following a period of observation, experience and enquiry, but rather the theological and cultural presuppositions that he, and the Protestant mission of that era, brought into their mission work. In terms of the particular relationship between the gospel and the indigenous cultures, the diary entries reflect a clear view held by the missionaries: their own Western culture was civilized and Christian while the cultures of the recipient local people represented an extreme form of heathenism and were dominated by powers of darkness. To this domination the people gave themselves blindly and willingly. The preaching of the gospel was then necessary to save the souls of the people from perdition,³⁰ to bring the people out of the darkness and into the light. It is notable that, even today, in ordinary street conversation, the expressions in the time of darkness and when the light came, are frequently used to mark the periods before and after the arrival of the missionaries.

For this era, conversion to Christianity was accompanied and measured by the points of disconnection between their own traditional cultures and those of the newly arrived civilized and Christian society embodied by the missionaries. While these very early diary entries are not able to do justice to the fullness of Geddie’s mission theology, they do represent one clear expression of the framework of theological thought that he brought to the understanding and practice of mission through his time in the New Hebrides.

It should be noted, however, that this does not automatically imply that Geddie and his Protestant missionary colleagues set out to destroy the traditional cultures in Vanuatu. This view is far too sweeping and simplistic. While acknowledging that his diary entries suggest that Geddie did indeed fit the popular picture of the imperialistic destroyer of traditional culture, my own research on the impact of Geddie’s work on the cultures of the people of Aneityum, led me to some significant qualifications to this conclusion.³¹ A somewhat more nuanced perspective on his theology, taken from his diary entries over more than nine years, is indicated in the following:

Geddie operated with a set of dualisms: God—Satan, Christian—heathen, belief—unbelief, light—darkness, salvation—damnation, with the missionary being represented by the former and the people of the islands and their cultures being represented by the latter. Thus, for Geddie, the culture within which people lived was ruled by Satan and exhibited all forms of darkness and abomination; the mission of the church involved a spiritual battle with Satan, calling people to the rejection of this heathen culture and the acceptance of the biblical culture of Christianity which Geddie himself embodied. Geddie disallowed the possibility that the gospel may become incarnate within the culture of the people; he assumed that his articulation of the gospel was universally valid, supra-cultural and led to uniform outcomes in personal and cultural life. . . . Geddie understood himself as a servant of the people; as such he displayed genuine humility, a sincere love and deep respect for the people, and was keen not to offend them or their customs unnecessarily. Geddie also did his best to involve his converts in aspects of the church’s mission and leadership. This approach to his mission work gained the respect and trust of the people.³²

This modified perspective is shared by Darrell Whiteman. About the impact of Protestant missionaries in Melanesia, he writes, A popular but inaccurate notion is that one of the major changes introduced by Christian missionaries has been the destruction of traditional culture. This charge is frequently made, but it is seldom based on a solid foundation of research and understanding of how change has been introduced and how Melanesians have responded.³³

In terms of the missionary theology of Geddie and his Protestant colleagues, the theological content was contained within the creedal summaries of the faith of the church, which were themselves based on and regulated by the Scriptures. Central to this confession was that God was revealed uniquely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Savior of the world. The message about him was proclaimed in the power of the Holy Spirit, with the purpose of bringing about the conversion of all people from darkness to light. As indicated in the above excerpt from Geddie’s diary, such a conversion would display itself in the convert’s rejection of their heathen past, obedience to the teachings of Jesus and the embracing of Christian civilization. This Scripture-based message was considered universal, timeless and supra-cultural.

The Scriptures, as the Word of God, constituted the focus of Geddie’s theological methodology. The sharing of the Christian message was done primarily through proclamation and teaching based on the Scriptures. In order to achieve this end, the translation of the Scriptures into the languages of the people was considered a priority.³⁴ This was accompanied by the teaching of people to read, thereby making the written Scriptures accessible to the people in literary form. Important too was that the missionary develop a relationship of trust so that the heathen were then open to respond to the message of salvation, to be saved from damnation, to be baptized, and to become part of the church community.

This content and methodology of Protestant missionary theology provided the clear and strong heritage that shaped the Protestant churches in the New Hebrides as they came through the subsequent decades of colonial control. However, in the latter period of colonialism, especially from the late 1960s, the prospect of national independence among New Hebrideans was to set the scene for profound political and cultural changes. These changes, together with the coinciding international movement of the contextualization of theology, acted as the catalyst towards a more culturally grounded and locally authorized theology. In particular, they provided the momentum for the birth of the Gospel and Culture in Vanuatu project.

A Personal Excursus

I arrived into this new cultural, political, and ecclesial climate in January 1983, just over two years following Vanuatu’s independence, and found myself—almost unconsciously—swept up into the movement raised by the question, What is the relationship between the gospel and the local cultures of the people of Vanuatu? Another way of expressing this same challenge is to put the question, What does it mean for the church to move from the heritage of a Western missionary theology to a theology that is appropriately contextual? This was, at the time, already an emerging question in international theological circles and in the wider context of Pacific Island churches.

If I was not already aware, on my arrival, of the changing ecclesial and theological climate in this newly independent nation of Vanuatu, it was not long before I was to find out. At the occasion of my induction into the parish, one of the more senior pastors of the Presbyterian Church, himself among the pioneers of independence and elected into the first independent Government of Vanuatu, gave a speech. We want you to remember, Randall, that you are here by our invitation, you are to work in the Melanesian Way, and your appointment will be reviewed annually.³⁵

In order to respond to the challenge appropriately, I had to learn the language of Bislama, and learn about the cultures of the people, so that my ministry was exercised in a way that was embedded in the context of the church and the people. Over a period of time, I became more and more familiar with the local language and cultures, with the local way of thinking, acting, doing, communicating and living.

Much of this learning, I owe to Pastor Fiama Rakau with whom I worked in partnership from the beginning of my ministry in Vanuatu. From the southern island of Futuna, Rakau had a background of secondary school teaching before going into ministry. Following his local theological studies, he completed a degree in theology at the Pacific Theological College in Suva in 1982. He returned to Vanuatu and took up his first appointment in the parish of Vila in January 1983; we were inducted into ministry at the same time. He was a most astute and thoughtful young man in his early thirties, and deeply formed by, and informed about his own traditional culture. He was like-minded in his commitment to engage actively with the issues of Gospel and Culture. We met every Tuesday morning over a period of three years. We spent the time together preparing the worship for the following Sunday. Our focus was on the Scripture readings and their message, and how that message engaged with the cultural context of the local people. It proved to be a very rich learning process in exploring the relationship between the gospel and Vanuatu cultures—for both of us. As I later recorded in the Preface to the first publication in the Gospel and Culture series: I acknowledge my dear friend and colleague in Vanuatu, Fiama Rakau, who shares a similar passion for issues of Gospel and Culture, and who has taught me so much.³⁶ Rakau himself writes, In our meetings to prepare the Scripture readings for the Sunday, each week we had to wrestle with the issue of the Gospel and Culture: how do we apply the Word of God in a changing culture to a people who look both to their culture and to their God for their survival and their livelihood?³⁷

With this growing familiarity with local issues of Gospel and Culture, I came to realize that all aspects of ministry, as I had understood and conducted them, had to be relearned. Even the gospel itself had to be newly understood in a contextually located way.³⁸ While superficially and institutionally, the life of the church and its people was recognizable to me, the mode in which these operated was not. Cultural presuppositions and cultural practices defined all things, and there was nothing about the nature of the church and the exercise of ministry that was untouched by these presuppositions and practices. This included leadership, worship, prayer, preaching, singing, teaching and learning, rituals of baptism and eucharist, dynamics of meetings, modes of communication, and pastoral ministry. In fulfilling my own role of leadership, I became more and more aware of the need to engage with the local church, its pastors, its leaders, and its people, in the issues of Gospel and Culture. I found myself not only leading studies on topics that dealt with the encounter between the gospel and the local cultures, but attempting to do this in such a way that the methods of communication were culturally informed. At a much later stage, it became clear to me that, whatever the topic of engagement, the methodology pursued in relation to the topic seemed to be the key to effective contextual communication with local people.

My own journey in Gospel and Culture in Vanuatu was given significant energy and opportunity after my departure from Vanuatu. The demands of ministry in Vanuatu, and the challenges of the context, left me with a deep yearning to do some serious reflection on what I had experienced. I spent one year at Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, UK, completing the Diploma of Mission Studies. The choice to go to Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham was influenced by the fact that this was becoming the hub of the Gospel and Our Culture (GOC) movement in the United Kingdom. The Colleges were located near the retirement home of Lesslie Newbigin, and in the year that I was in College (1987–88), the GOC movement was at its height, with its administrative base in Selly Oak.³⁹ Lesslie Newbigin had been the intellectual catalyst for the formal foundation of the movement. He had made a name for himself by throwing down the gauntlet⁴⁰ to the churches in the (post-Enlightenment) Western world. He challenged their profound cultural captivity, forecast the irretrievable disintegration of the era of Christendom, and questioned the possibility that the Christian church might any longer be able to engage in effective mission within the very society that for so long had assumed itself to be Christian.⁴¹ Beginning with an invitation to the British Churches to a more forthright missionary encounter with contemporary British culture,⁴² Newbigin raised the more general question, What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call ‘modern Western culture’? The abbreviated and more confronting version of this question became Can the West be Converted?⁴³

This missiological pursuit defined the climate of my time at Selly Oak Colleges. My own pressing questions and experience in Gospel and Culture, provided by the period of my involvement in Vanuatu, was sufficient reason for me to become immersed in the same pursuit. If I was not already convinced that "Gospel and