The State of Missiology Today: Global Innovations in Christian Witness

By Charles E. Van Engen

Mission is constantly innovating.
As contexts change, so too does the work of the church. Today, in the face of a rapidly changing world and a growing global church, the task of mission must continue to innovate in unexpected ways.
The State of Missiology Today explores the developments and transformations in the study and practice of mission. Looking both backwards—especially over the first half-century of Fuller Theological Seminary's School of Intercultural Studies—and forwards, the contributors to this volume chart the current shape of mission studies and its prospects in the twenty-first century.
This Missiological Engagements volume features contributions by

- J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu
- John Azumah
- Pascal Bazzell
- Stephen Bevans
- Jayakumar Christian
- Pablo A. Deiros
- Sarita D. Gallagher
- Anne-Marie Kool
- Moonjang Lee
- Wonsuk Ma
- Gary L. McIntosh
- Mary Motte, FMM
- Terry Muck
- Shawn B. Redford
- Scott W. SunquistMissiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Release date: Sep 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9780830893492

Book preview

9780830893492.jpg

THE STATE OF

MISSIOLOGY

TODAY

Global Innovations

in Christian Witness

Edited by

CHARLES E. VAN ENGEN

IVP Academic Imprint

This book is dedicated to the Advisory Council of the School of Intercultural Studies for their guidance, prayers and financial contributions to the 2015 Missiology Lectures, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the School of Intercultural Studies (formerly the School of World Mission).

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Innovating Mission: Retrospect and Prospect in the Field of Missiology

Charles E. Van Engen

Part 1: The Diffusion of Innovation: Looking Backward to Look Ahead

1 Donald A. McGavran: Life, Influence and Legacy in Mission

Gary L. McIntosh

2 Innovations in Missiological Hermeneutics

Shawn B. Redford

3 Seeing with Church-Growth Eyes: The Rise of Indigenous Church Movements in Mission Praxis

Sarita D. Gallagher

4 A Fuller Vision of God’s Mission and Theological Education in the New Context of Global Christianity

Wonsuk Ma

5 Who Is Our Cornelius? Learning from Fruitful Encounters at the Boundaries of Mission

Pascal D. Bazzell

6 Rethinking the Nature of Christian Mission: A South Korean Perspective

Moonjang Lee

7 What Does Rome Have to Do with Pasadena? Connecting Roman Catholic Missiology with SWM/SIS Innovations

Stephen Bevans

Part 2: The Implications of Innovation: Back to the Future (Looking Forward)

8 Innovation at the Margins

Jayakumar Christian

9 Mission Trajectories in the Twenty-First Century: Interfaith Roads Best Traveled

Terry C. Muck

10 Mission in the Islamic World: Making Theological and Missiological Sense of Muhammad

John A. Azumah

11 Emergence of New Paths: The Future of Mission in Roman Catholicism

Mary Motte

12 Revisiting Mission in, to and from Europe Through Contemporary Image Formation

Anne-Marie Kool

13 Declaring the Wonders of God in Our Own Tongues: Africa, Mission and the Making of World Christianity

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu

14 Eschatology and Mission: A Latin American Perspective

Pablo A. Deiros

Conclusion

A Historian’s Hunches: Eight Future Trends in Mission

Scott W. Sunquist

Contributors

Index

Missiological Engagements

Praise for The State of Missiology Today

About the Author

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Copyright

Preface

Charles E. Van Engen

Most of the chapters in this book were presented initially at the fiftieth-anniversary conference of Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Intercultural Studies (formerly School of World Mission)—Telling Our Unfinished Story: 50 Years of Innovation in Christian Mission . . . and Looking to the Next 50 Years—held on the Pasadena, California, campus on October 21–24, 2015. Innumerable hands made the conference and this volume possible:

President Mark Labberton and Provost C. Douglas McConnell supported this venture at every turn.

Dean Scott Sunquist and his wife, Nancy Sunquist, and the School of Intercultural Studies staff, including Wendy Walker and Silvia Gutierrez, each spent many hours planning for and making the conference happen.

Irene Neller, vice president for Communications, Marketing and Admissions, and her events staff, especially Sarah Bucek and Tamisha Tyler, among many others, oversaw the details of the event.

Our Fuller Seminary colleagues Bob Freeman, Jude Tiersma Watson, Enoch Kim, Dan Shaw, Roberta King, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Wilmer Villacorta, Ryan Bolger, Peter Im, Evelyne Reisacher, Juan Martinez and Diane Obenchain were respondents to the presentations.

Bob Freeman, Matthew Lee, Charles Van Engen, Lee Jongill, Delonte Gholston, Clare Wiggins, Diane Obenchain, David Muthukumar, Dwight Radcliffe, Roberta King, Leah Fortson, Eric Sarwar, Wilmer Villacorta, Matthew Kraybill and Toni Kraybill assisted with worship at each of the sessions.

Kirsteen Kim, Darrell Whiteman and Jehu Hanciles were listeners to the conference and pulled together many of the threads and themes from the conference.

Amos Yong, the director of the School of Intercultural Studies Center for Missiological Research, and his graduate assistant, Hoon Jung, helped with the editing and indexing of the book.

Scott W. Sunquist, Amos Yong and John Franke, as coeditors of the Missiological Engagements series, and David Congdon and the InterVarsity Press staff have been professional at every step.

It was a joy to have the opportunity to work with these colleagues to bring the conference papers together in the present volume.

Introduction

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Innovating Mission

Retrospect and Prospect in the Field of Missiology

Charles E. Van Engen

We gathered from the four corners of the globe to remember, celebrate and rethink together the significance of the past, present and future of mission theory and practice of the first fifty years of the Institute of Church Growth (ICG) / School of World Mission (SWM), now the School of Intercultural Studies (SIS), founded by Donald A. McGavran. ¹ With several hundred mission leaders and practitioners gathered for the event, recognized leaders in the field from around the globe offered short lectures reflecting on the innovations in missiology associated with Donald McGavran and his associates. The chapters of this book bring together their thoughts.

Having known Donald McGavran personally, I found the celebration to be inspiring, fun, stimulating and thought provoking. For me, it turned out to be a kind of back-to-the-future event. The reader will remember the film trilogy called Back to the Future. In the first episode (1985) of that sci-fi classic, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) must go back to 1955 in a plutonium-powered DeLorean car invented by eccentric scientist Emmett Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). Traveling back in time, Marty must make sure his then teenage parents-to-be (Crispin Glover, Lea Thompson) meet and fall in love so he can get back to the future—or he will not exist. In addition, Marty must return to his own time and save the life of Doc Brown, who is a very important scientist for the future. ² As the reader will see in the chapters of this book, our gathering in Pasadena this past October was a similar kind of back-to-the-future experience during which we reconsidered some of the innovations stimulated by McGavran and his colleagues and we reflected on the significance of the past for missiological thought and practice in the future.

Back to 1965

Come with me back fifty years to the early 1960s in missiology. Huge changes had occurred in the world with significant impact on the prevailing concepts and action of Christian mission. Here are a few examples of the phenomenal global changes that had taken place prior to the 1960s.

Two world wars had devastated the globe.

The Korean War had divided that subcontinent.

China had closed its doors to outside influence.

The United Nations was born.

The World Council of Churches was born.

Over fifty new nations, for example, Indonesia, Japan, India and South Korea, were born or reconstituted in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

Dictatorships were being re-evaluated and replaced in Latin America.

Airplane travel was expanding around the globe.

Radio, telephone and television were transforming communication all over the world.

Parallel to these changes, the way the Christian churches and their mission agencies thought about mission was undergoing significant scrutiny. Here are a few examples.

National churches began to mature and assert themselves as active agents of their own destiny and directors of their own mission endeavors.

Many folks expressed a strong anticolonial critique of the mission perspectives and actions of older European and North American churches.

The anticolonial critique rose to the point of some mission leaders in Asia and Africa calling for a moratorium on sending missions from Europe and North America.

At the same time, major faith mission sodalities were born, especially in North America.

Simultaneously, the aggiornamento of the Second Vatican Council meeting from 1962 to 1965 transformed the Roman Catholic Church’s view of Christian mission, among a host of other changes.

Meanwhile, a strong ecumenical movement took shape in the birth and expansion of the World Council of Churches (WCC).

Somewhat in response to what was happening in the WCC, evangelical Protestants expressed their view of mission, which eventually split evangelism and social action, a divide that Latin American Protestant missiologists decried.

Pentecostal cross-cultural and international mission continued to grow, planting thousands of churches and forming hundreds of new denominations around the world.

African-initiated churches with no historic ties to any Western missions continued to grow exponentially throughout Africa.

Such radical changes in contexts and concepts forced many mission thinkers to choose between the glass half empty and the glass half full. For many, the missiological glass was half empty. By the early 1960s much of the discussion surrounded the already declining churches in the West, the rise of so many competing creeds, the reality of so much disunity in the church, and the existence of so many churches and mission endeavors vying for position and status. All this produced a deep uncertainty and increasing concern over the authenticity of the church and the viability of Christian mission.

In the 1960s, there was deep pessimism and perplexity concerning the church’s mission. Some called it more a venture than ever. Others felt that its foundations had been shaken. Some called the discussion surrounding it a great debate while others felt that it belonged to an era long past and should suffer euthanasia, or at least be placed under a moratorium. Some felt the church should administer mission, but others believed the church itself was the problem. Some were convinced that mission should lead to a personal spiritual conversion, but others stressed that its motivations and goals should involve a life-and-death struggle against hunger, disease, poverty, racism and unjust sociopolitical and economic structures. Still others wanted to replace the whole idea of mission with such notions as interchurch aid or dialogue. Such feelings of uncertainty, coupled with strong appeals for support in mission, were nowhere more apparent and critical in the 1960s than in the discussion, critique and caricaturing of Donald McGavran and what became known as the church-growth movement, the central creating and forming initiative of the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary. ³

McGavran and his associates were among those who saw the glass of missiological reflection as half full and affirmed that classic mission had been at the center of the church’s life throughout the centuries and especially in 1965, when they established the SWM. They recognized that mission endeavors had absorbed tremendous energy, people power and money. They admitted that in some cases mission was that part of the church’s life that had made it (wittingly or not) a partner in the worldwide expansion of Western influence. They admitted that mission was an enigmatic aspect of the church’s nature that exhibited sometimes the church’s vitality but sometimes its decadence. But they also reminded folks that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mission was seen clearly as the church’s primary task, one of its major contributions to world civilization. Yet these same more optimist folks felt the need in the early 1960s for tangible, concrete and clear criteria by which to judge the authenticity and effectiveness of mission. Amid the uncertainties of the day, they wanted to be able to recognize authentic Christian missionary expression. Into this controversy stepped Donald McGavran.

McGavran and his associates affirmed that it was God’s will that the church grow in all aspects, including in the numbers of believers, their spirituality and their impact on their surrounding cultures and contexts. McGavran emphasized that money, manpower and planning should be aimed at converting to Christ what at that time were estimated to be the three billion. Somewhat in reaction to his own experience and background in mission in India, McGavran stated that, where that was not happening, some good things were possibly being done but the true aim of mission was not being fulfilled. In speaking, teaching, writing and publishing, he told the world that the command of Jesus Christ to his disciples was to make more disciples and, as a result, to see the church grow. Thus McGavran and his associates believed, in opposition to those who believed the church to be at the sunset of mission, that the worldwide Christian church was at the sunrise of mission in the second half of the twentieth century.

What transformed these discussions into red-hot debate was the simultaneous rise of three major paradigms of mission that took shape in parallel, with few bridges and little overlap between them. In the late 1950s and early 1960s three major perspectives of missiology arose. Each spawned its own movement in mission. At the risk of oversimplification, let me offer a summary description of these views of mission.

(1) Due to the disastrous silence of the churches in Western Europe during the Third Reich and its genocide, especially regarding Jewish people, a missiology of relevance arose that some would call a missiology of the guilty conscience. With Dietrich Bonhoeffer as its main inspiration, this view of mission stressed the importance of socioeconomic and political action on the part of the church. Most strongly involving the older Protestant churches and mission agencies of Western Europe and North America associated with the World Council of Churches (WCC), this perspective called for the church to recognize what God was doing in the world and to join God’s efforts by carrying out actions of compassion and justice.

(2) With Gustavo Gutiérrez among its main proponents, a second view of mission offered a strongly economic Marxist-Leninist rereading of history and reality and called for a renewed awareness of structural evil. Born in Latin America and drawing from a predominantly Roman Catholic para­digm that had emerged as one of the fruits of the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology encouraged a number of additional very important theological and missiological perspectives. Theology of struggle in the Philippines, Dalit theology in India, Minjung theology in Korea, and black and feminist theology in North America would be pertinent examples. Some of the WCC mission thinking, including God’s preferential option for the poor, borrowed much from liberation theology.

(3) The third major missiological movement of the 1960s was church growth. Begun by McGavran, this movement involved mostly conservative evangelical churches and missions in North America. This perspective called for a reaffirmation of classic mission theology and a renewed commitment to world evangelization. ⁴ Drawing from his life experience in India, McGavran focused his attention on the local congregations around the world. Being at heart an evangelist interested in persons becoming followers of Jesus everywhere in the world, McGavran asked the question, why do some local churches thrive and grow, and others decline? Such growth and decline related to all aspects of congregational life but could be primarily recognized by examining the congregation’s numerical growth like a kind of thermometer used to test the health of a patient. McGavran wanted to research the factors of growth and decline of local congregations in order to change the prevailing mission practice. Of the three paradigms, McGavran and the church-growth movement focused primarily on the life and health of local congregations.

It is interesting to note here that all three of these missiological movements were multidenominational, global and activist. All three wanted to bring about change—but they disagreed about what change should be sought. None of the three paradigms of mission was monolithic and unified within itself. They all exhibited a rather wide spectrum of perspectives. There were some mission thinkers who did manage to bridge all three viewpoints. ⁵ But differences within each paradigm were small compared to the difference of each from the other two paradigms. The reader will hear echoes of some of these discussions in the chapters of this book.

The uncertainty and questioning of the 1960s appear once again today. Echoes of the misgivings of fifty years ago may be heard today as we look forward into the future of mission theory and practice in this new century: we are back to the future. In fact, the reader may recognize that a number of the authors of this book seem to suspect that a full-orbed biblical missiology for the twenty-first century will need to draw water from the wells of all three paradigms and combine elements of all three with discernment, creativity and wisdom.

The Growth of a Discipline

In response to uncertainty about Christian mission in the late 1950s and early 1960s, McGavran and his associates set out to create a movement that would stimulate new efforts in classic global mission and world evangelization on the part of missionary practitioners, churches, denominations, mission agencies and missiologists. They became quite intentional about what they called the diffusion of innovation. As a result, although missiology as a discipline had been known in Europe, the faculty members of the School of World Mission were the principal agents who fostered the recognition of missiology as an academic discipline in North America. Offering master’s degrees in church-growth-oriented missiology in the 1960s and early 1970s, by the mid-1970s they were offering accredited doctoral degrees at Fuller Seminary in the discipline: first a doctor of missiology (DMiss) and later a PhD.

In library science there has long been an effort to track the development of an academic discipline or field of inquiry. Of course, library science wanted and needed that ability in order to best archive, arrange, catalog and organize all the materials related to a particular discipline. Some years ago Edgar Elliston shared with me a table derived and adapted from library science (see table I.1). I have found it to be very helpful in understanding the growth and development of church-growth missiology as an academic discipline in its own right. The reader will notice that the creators of the original table, Cerise Oberman and Katina Strauch, mark four stages in the growth of a discipline: pioneering, elaboration, proliferation and establishment. The reader will also note that the authors mark four aspects of that development, stages and activities that utilize appropriate methods of communication and produce source material, which can then be tracked by means of certain control tools of library science. The church-growth movement mirrored most of the aspects described in this table. Amid severe criticism, particularly from those associated with the World Council of Churches, the faculty of the Institute of Church Growth/School of World Mission devoted much of their energy to research, teaching, writing, speaking and spreading concepts associated with their view of mission. As an example, McGavran began The Church Growth Bulletin, which was sent all over the world. ⁶

In 1955, Donald McGavran published his groundbreaking book, The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Mission, which became the cornerstone of church-growth theory and the foundation of ICG/SWM/SIS at Fuller. ⁷ Missiological thinking and missionary practice were transformed by the energy, vitality, insight and stubborn tenacity of Donald McGavran. McGavran’s style of writing was quite polemical and made a lot of people angry—but they did not seem to be able to ignore him. ⁸ Whether they agreed with McGavran or not, after the publication of The Bridges of God , mission professors, executives and practitioners could no longer do business as usual, nor their usual business.

In my opinion, after John R. Mott, Donald Anderson McGavran was the second most influential missiologist of the twentieth century. He forced the world of mission to reexamine what had been accepted missionary practice for the previous hundred years. He challenged mission agencies and churches to return to a biblical and classical view of mission that gave center stage to the primary purpose of mission: to fulfill God’s will that women and men become disciples of Jesus Christ and responsible members of Christ’s church. Affirmation of this purpose became the foundation of the church-growth movement.

Table 1.1. The growth of a discipline

McGavran revitalized global missiological thinking by introducing entirely new disciplines into missiology—and it all began with the publication of The Bridges of God. McGavran founded what would become the largest school of missiology in the world. Those in the church-growth movement who studied with him quickly spawned branch movements in North America, England, India, Australia, Canada, Korea and numerous other countries in Asia and Africa. He founded a journal, Global Church Growth. One of his associates, Ralph Winter, founded a publishing house, William Carey Library; the US Center for World Missions; William Carey University; and the Perspectives Study Program, a college-level course in which thousands have studied missions. McGavran’s teaching and writing stimulated research and writing that resulted in hundreds of published works in numerous denominations. C. Peter Wagner, McGavran’s disciple and colleague, popularized McGavran’s writings and, with McGavran, founded the North American church-growth movement. A professional society called the North American Society for Church Growth was born to continue the development of McGavran’s ideas. From the late 1970s through the beginning of the 1990s, hundreds of pastors in the United States studied church growth in Fuller’s doctor of ministry (DMin) program. In Korea, one of McGavran’s disciples, David Yonggi Cho, founded what would become the largest church in the world. Nearly all the theories about church planting taught today flow from the fountainhead of Donald McGavran’s missiology.

McGavran called for the careful examination of social and cultural cohesion that could provide relational bridges along which the gospel could spread naturally. He suggested that there might be significant cultural and worldview factors affecting a group’s receptivity or resistance to the gospel. He challenged everyone in mission to think about people groups rather than isolated individuals as the appropriate audience for gospel presentation. He called for new converts to immerse themselves—and remain immersed—in their cultures and among their kin rather than being extracted from their culture into mission stations, as had been the practice during the previous century. He challenged everyone who would listen to find culturally appropriate ways to present the gospel (a missionary approach later known as indigenization and contextualization).

McGavran forced churches and mission agencies the world over to reconsider the importance of calling persons and people groups to faith in Jesus Christ rather than establishing large institutions and building huge buildings, as had previously been the practice of most mission agencies. Donald McGavran and his associates also exerted a definitive, shaping influence on the Lausanne Movement, born in 1974. A host of other movements such as Discipling a Whole Nation (DAWN), Adopt-a-People and NCD (Natural Church Development) cut their missiological teeth on McGavran’s theories. In fact, many of McGavran’s ideas are now standard practice for many evangelical Protestant church planters, pastors, cross-cultural missionaries and mission agencies, so much so that McGavran’s concepts are often taken for granted as the assumed way that evangelical mission is to be done, with little or no awareness of the one who first proposed them, or of how revolutionary—and controversial—they were in the 1950s and 1960s. ⁹

Readers will find sprinkled throughout the chapters of this work many brief references to the issues discussed above. There were glaring omissions in the missiology of the ICG/SWM, and many highly respected missiologists did not hesitate to point them out. Yet, when one goes back to the future and compares the missiology of the mid-1960s with missiology as we know it today, the number of innovations is remarkable—and the ICG/SWM/SIS faculty have been at the forefront of, or have encouraged others in, the rise of a significant number of these innovations in missiology. In preparation for this fiftieth anniversary celebration, several of us created a list of innovations in mission theory and practice that involved the SWM/SIS faculty. The list includes a rather large number of items. An analysis of all these in a history of the school and the movement it spawned remains to be done sometime in the future. However, one can categorize these innovations according to ten major missiological issues, as seen below. There is not enough space in this introduction to explain the items in the following list, nor to list the specific SWM/SIS faculty members who researched, taught and wrote about them. When the organizers of the fiftieth anniversary celebration invited the world-class scholars whose presentations appear in this book, they asked the contributors to consider one or two innovations of ICG/SWM/SIS that they might deem noteworthy (both positively and negatively) and to craft their presentations and write their chapters in relation to these. I will leave it to the reader to connect the emphases found in the chapters of this book with one or more of the following ten innovations.

Indigeneity, people groups, multi-individual conversion, contextualization

Strategies of mission, diffusion of innovations, mobilization of mission efforts to evangelize those who are not yet followers of Jesus, formation of societies of church growth, publications

Social sciences employed in missiological analysis: for example, cultural anthropology, linguistics, communication theory, language learning, sociology

Mission history reexamined and reread from the point of view of the expansion of the church

Biblical theology of mission, Bible and mission, theological perspectives in missiology

Revivals and awakenings that have impacted the health and growth of the church

Studies of the growth or decline of local congregations, cell-based churches, megachurches

Leadership, theological education, theological education by extension

Spiritual issues in mission, issues of spiritual power

Ecclesiological issues of the nature of the church and its mission, Church Next, the mission of the local congregation

Overview of the Book

The chapters in the rest of this book elaborate on this list of innovations (focus of part one) even as they chart trajectories of innovation looking forward (emphasis of part two). We begin with Gary L. McIntosh, who originally presented on Donald A. McGavran during the preconference proceedings. McIntosh has spent a lifetime studying the SWM founder and argues that McGavran’s missiological church-growth principles continue to reverberate throughout the missionary world of the early twenty-first century. Shawn B. Redford, an SWM PhD graduate who studied under Charles Van Engen, was invited to write a chapter on the Bible and mission since this has been such an important theme in SWM/SIS history and ought not to be neglected in the publication celebrating, honoring and remembering the event. His chapter makes the case that missiological, thematic, ethno-, spiritual and scientific hermeneutics all offer unique interpretational capabilities for a holistic understanding of God’s mission as found in Scripture for the purpose of questioning, shaping, defining, directing, guiding and evaluating today’s ongoing missional activity.

The rest of the chapters were plenary presentations originally invited for the book. Sarita D. Gallagher focuses on how the church-growth movement established by Donald A. McGavran and Alan R. Tippett marked a monumental paradigm shift, specifically in twentieth-century indigenous mission theory, that has continued to influence indigenous people movements toward active participation in the global mission of God. Wonsuk Ma writes as the quintessential missionary, expressing his conviction that this genera­tion lives with an unprecedented possibility of world evangelization but that this requires every believer and every congregation to become active mission players, which in turn compels all of us to seriously re­examine our understanding of and approach to mission and theological education. Pascal D. Bazzell then turns more specifically to intercultural and interreligious encounter and outlines how the Cornelius encounter (Acts 10) contributes to a missiological paradigm shift from missio ecclesiae to missio Dei, which is explicated in terms of what Bazzell refers to as Christian mission with the people. This is a radical embrace of the divine in the other, together seeking and proclaiming who God is. Consequently, mission is not only about giving but also about receiving, not only about evangelizing but also about being evangelized; mission is about sharing with and hearing from the mysterious work of the triune God in the other in order to participate with God’s mission.

Moonjang Lee writes from a South Korean missiological perspective to point out that, as global Christianity is in the midst of great and rapid changes, we need to rethink the nature of the current crisis in Christian mission and find ways to reinvent Christianity, beginning with a renovation of the churches and then also of theological education. Stephen Bevans asks, in the final chapter of part one, what does Rome have to do with Pasadena? And he answers, a lot! SWM/SIS has inspired Catholic scholars and has explored issues that Catholic missiology has also explored. Roman Catho­lics, of course, have also broken ground that Fuller’s evangelical missiologists have not. In the end, however, it is clear that Fuller’s evangelical understanding of missions and Roman Catholic missiology have worked together for the establishment of God’s reign.

The chapters in part two of the book highlight past innovations of SWM/SIS, but the accent is on future challenges and possibilities. Jayakumar Christian urges that, since the poor and the oppressed are no longer merely objects of mission but have become its agents and bearers, there is a need for the community of missiologists to develop an alternate missiology that provides credible forms of engagement with this reality. Terry C. Muck then applies his extensive experience in the interfaith encounter and maps strategies of contestation, confession and consilience, suggesting the strength and weaknesses of each. Referring to these principles, he recommends how evangelicals can move forward on the world religious ground in the next century. John A. Azumah then dives deeper into the interreligious arena but focuses on Islam, unpacking how recent events reveal how the question of Muhammad’s prophetic status is not merely a theological or philosophical one but a political and existential one that calls for a carefully considered response from Christians.

Sister Mary Motte’s chapter returns to engagement with Roman Catholic missiology but focuses on its future trajectories. She shows how in the context of recent history, when our planet is situated between chaos and transformation, emerging paths from Vatican II are gradually leading to a new way of seeing, doing and missionizing among Roman Catholics. Anne-Marie Kool then identifies images of Europe and European Christianity in the Atlas of Global Christianity 1910–2010 and delineates the conceptual and methodological problems of their formation. Kool also examines the assumptions of missiometrics and the underlying mission theory of the atlas, including clarifying some of the criticisms that have emerged over time vis-à-vis McGavran’s church-growth theory and principles.

In the thirteenth chapter, J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu writes about how in the twenty-first century Africa has developed as a major heartland of Christianity and how the single most important factor in this development is the power and presence of the Holy Spirit working through ordinary people. He unpacks thereby the claim that Pentecostalism has never been alien to the African experience. In the final chapter derived from the plenary presentations, Pablo A. Deiros, reflecting from a Latin American missiological perspective, urges that as we move deeper into the new millennium, we need to consider the future as our hermeneutical key and develop an eschatological missiology that follows a tri-dimensional model of the Christian mission. The conclusion by current SIS dean Scott W. Sunquist was written specifically for this volume, and he attempts to anticipate the implications for the future of mission thinking and practice suggested by the chapters in this volume.

As Marty McFly learned, sometimes we need to go back to the future in order to receive new lenses and gain new understanding of our present and future. Has the movement founded by Donald A. McGavran run its course, or is it poised to embark on a new journey into the future of global innovation in world evangelization? Time will tell. We invite the reader of these chapters to accompany us back to the future.

PART 1

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The Diffusion of Innovation

Looking Backward to Look Ahead

1

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Donald A. McGavran

Life, Influence and Legacy in Mission

Gary L. McIntosh

Introduction

It was Sunday, September 16, 1923. Donald and Mary McGavran rose early to make final preparations for their trip to India. Beyond the sounds of packing, a crying baby and emotional goodbyes lay a future that was unimaginable at the time—the tragedy of a child’s death, the pain of rejected leadership resulting in a demotion, the struggle to evangelize a low-caste tribe and the loss of a dream to train leaders in how to achieve greater growth in the church. Yet, as God would script it, the ministry of Donald McGavran was destined to be one of the twentieth century’s glittering triumphs. The pains and losses of his life were mixed with the joys of discovering new insights for reaching lost people with the ageless gospel, of winning over one thousand precious souls to Christ, of planting fifteen churches, of writing groundbreaking books, of starting a worldwide movement, of establishing a profoundly influential school of missiology and of changing the entire face of mission. No one could have foretold that Donald McGavran would eventually become the premier missiologist of the twentieth century, but that is just what happened. ¹

Early Life

Donald Anderson McGavran was born in Damoh, India, on December 15, 1897. His parents, John and Helen McGavran, were living in Damoh because of a famine that had hit central India. Their primary job was to care for approximately four hundred orphaned boys, as well as to alleviate the suffering of those in need as far as resources allowed. The famine slowly ended