Lesslie Newbigin
NEW METHODS AND STRATEGY:
REACHING TOMORROW’S WORLD
From the time of the apostle Paul, mission strategy has been a key element in the advance of the gospel. Yet there have always been misgivings and a degree of apprehension between the one who, propelled by a sense of duty and calling and passion, simply obeys God’s command and resolutely preaches the gospel, and the one who contemplates and plans and questions methods and strategies before launching into an evangelistic endeavor that may be ill-advised.
In the generations that followed the New Testament era, ordinary Christians were the missionaries who spread the faith in private homes and the marketplace, while at the same time apologists contemplated how best to make the faith comprehensible in the wider Greco-Roman world. This continued through the centuries as the gap between the lay Christian with a passion for evangelism and the missions administrator or missions professor in the ivory tower continued to grow. But the most influential and capable of the long line of mission strategists were those who were thinkers and practitioners at the same time. In recent generations, being a strategist-practitioner has become an aspiration of virtually all missionaries—though few actually attain that status.
“The New Missionary” was the title of a Time magazine cover story in 1982 about men and women devoting their lives to bringing Christianity to some of the most remote and impoverished areas of the world. Who is this “new missionary”? From the perspective of Time, the “new missionary” is not really very different from the missionary of generations past. Both are characterized by a sacrificial devotion to carrying the gospel to the ends of the earth. However, there are some significant differences between the new and the old missionary style. The “new missionary” is, in many ways, much better trained and more professional in outlook than was the “old missionary.”These men and women tend to be more concerned with methodology and principles of mission strategy, more aware of population growth and other relevant statistics, more eager to make use of the latest technology, and, as Time pointed out, more careful than ever to avoid any tactics that would associate them with Western imperialism. They are also more likely than ever to seek to preserve colorful cultural traditions that were once viewed as unchristian.
Paralleling the development of the “new missionary” has been a significant advance in the field of missiology in recent decades, as evidenced by scholarly journals, recognized schools of mission, and an impressive task force of forward-thinking missiologists. Once a description given only to a handful of scholarly mission board directors, today the term missiologist is associated with hundreds of professional specialists involved in developing more effective mission strategies. In 1970 the American Society of Missiology did not exist, but a decade later, eight years after its founding, it had several hundred members. By the 1990s more seminaries and schools of religion were offering studies in missiology—a specialty coming of age in the broad field of theology and world religions.
The greatest area of interest and controversy in missiology in the 1990s was religious pluralism. Christianity’s place among other religions was an issue as old as the faith itself. Pluralism “was known as a theological problem to the earliest Church,” writes Geoffrey Wainwright, “but Western Christendom was not obliged to confront it—except in the shape of Islam at its circumference” and Jews “in its midst.” However, that changed in modern times with “a widespread awareness of the rest of the world,” and the development of Enlightenment rationalism supplied “a normative intellectual framework for a relativistic account of the various religions that systematically undermined the certainty of the Christian faith concerning the absoluteness of Christ.”1
In the late twentieth century John Hick became a leading figure in espousing religious pluralism. It was his own Copernican Revolution, with Christianity no longer at the center of the universe, so to speak. Christianity was simply one of many religions—one of many paths to God. While such positions had long been held, Hick, more than anyone else, brought the matter to the forefront of missiological discussions. Karl Rahner, a Jesuit theologian, added his own unique concept to the mix by introducing a version of inclusivism by his term “anonymous Christian.” Such are people in other religions who are saved through Christ even as Christians are—though they do not know it. Amid the new publications and ensuing controversies, evangelicals and conservative Christians of all stripes upheld the traditional position, referred to as exclusivism—insisting that salvation comes exclusively through Christ.
As important as the issue of religious pluralism has become, however, it is only one cultural aspect of the contemporary scene in world evangelism. The most striking characteristic of cross missions is the diversity of methodology and philosophy. Some mission strategists have conducted their work almost as though the debates were not taking place. Their concerns were church growth and how to effectively reach the most people with limited time and resources. Among the leading proponents who focused on “people groups” or “hidden peoples” were Donald McGavran, Ralph Winter, and Don Richardson, whose concepts were being supported by many mission agencies.
By the time of the annual meetings of the IFMA (Independent Foreign Missions Association) and EFMA (Evangelical Foreign Missions Association) in the fall of 1982, there were few among the nearly two hundred mission agencies of these two largest associations that were not by then already using these terms and making plans for expansion into new frontiers in order to reach these “hidden peoples.” The concept was widely adopted by the younger generation of evangelical mission leaders and became a dominant theme in the last decades of the twentieth century.
Many issues that came to the fore during the last decades of the twentieth century had been topics of mission concern much earlier in the century. Although the modern missions era is generally dated with William Carey’s early work in India around the turn of the nineteenth century, it was not until a century later that missiology—the science of mission studies—was born. That is not to say that there were not major mission thinkers before that time, but the beginning of systematic scientific study of missions is usually associated with Gustav Warneck, who was a professor of missions at Halle in Germany from 1897 to 1908. Another early-twentieth-century missiologist who has had a significant influence on mission theory and strategy was Roland Allen (1868–1947).
Allen was an Anglican minister who served as a missionary in China for several years before returning to England due to health problems. After serving for a time in a local parish, he resigned from the priesthood and directed his energy to lecturing and writing. “The crises of his early experience,” writes Charles Henry Long, “led him to a radical reassessment of his own vocation and the theology and missionary methods of Western churches.”2
He was a harsh critic of the mission station formula set in motion by Carey (and others before him), arguing that the missionary task was to plant self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating churches. His widely disseminated mission concepts were enunciated in one book—the book for which he is primarily known—Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? Published in 1912, this classic has influenced generations of missionaries. He wrote with passion about a Pauline style of evangelism that can all too easily become a mundane aspect of another mission program or strategy:
St. Paul expected his hearers to be moved. He so believed in his preaching that he knew that it was “the power of God unto salvation.” This expectation is a very real part of the presentation of the gospel. It is a form of faith. A mere preaching which is not accompanied by the expectation of faith, is not a true preaching of the Gospel, because faith is part of the gospel. Simply to scatter the seed, with a sort of vague hope that some of it may come up somewhere, is not preaching the gospel…. St. Paul expected to make converts, but … others expected it also. This accounts for the opposition which his preaching created. People were afraid of his preaching, and fear is a form of expectation: it is a form of faith…. St. Paul did not scatter seeds, he planted. He so dealt with his hearers that he brought them speedily and directly to a point of decision, and then he demanded … they make a choice and act on their choice.3
Dutch scholars also made significant contributions to the field of missiology in the early twentieth century, among them Hendrick Kraemer (1888–1965) and J. H. Bavinck (1895–1964), who both served as missionaries in Indonesia. Kraemer is remembered for taking a stand against liberalizing tendencies in missiology—particularly his defense of the uniqueness of Christ and the biblical message in relation to world religions. Bavinck also focused attention on world religions. “The central problem in Bavinck’s thinking,” writes J. van den Berg, “was that of the relationship between religious experience and God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.”4 He was particularly interested in eastern mysticism, confessing that he himself “was born with an Eastern soul.” The two works for which he is most remembered are An Introduction to the Science of Missions and The Church Between Temple and Mosque.
As a missionary and as a professor, Bavinck was deeply committed to evangelism and ecumenical endeavors. “He was ecumenical,” writes Johannes Verkuyl, “not because he felt forced to be showy or stylish, but simply because with child-like simplicity he thankfully and joyously recognized the Spirit of Jesus Christ in whichever human beings and church communions He was revealing Himself.”5 Yet, despite his “radical devotion to Jesus,” he struggled with “powers of darkness” in his own life. In his book Faith and Its Difficulties, he confessed his own struggles in believing:
In all the voices that reach my ear, in all the books I open, I recognize and see Him, the mighty Unknown, the Regent of life, the Ruler of all nations. And with every step I take, I have difficulty understanding that the Unknown God is the same as the God who spoke to me in Jesus Christ. And sometimes I am oppressed with fear and anguish that I can see no confluence of these two, that I cannot see them proceeding in one direction, and that everything will be demolished and destroyed. That is our tension and our strain. And we shudder!6
This tension that Bavinck experienced reflected the tension of many Christians in modern and postmodern times and set the stage for missiologists like Lesslie Newbigin, who would, like Bavinck, bring East and West together in one heart and mind. With the same spirit, though in a very different way, Ken Strachan sought to bring North and South together in his ministry in Latin America.
A widely hailed—and sometimes controversial—mission strategy of the mid-twentieth century known as “saturation evangelism” was advanced by Ken Strachan. His development of Evangelism-in-Depth was extolled as a “Revolution in Evangelism,” as the title of a book on the subject suggests. His concepts still stimulate debate and claim loyal disciples, though he died in 1965. Yet his basic premise, “that the growth of any movement is in direct proportion to its ability to mobilize its entire membership for continuous evangelism,” was not new.7 Others had operated under the same theory, but none had developed it into a well-defined missionary thrust. It was left to Strachan to do that, in part as a reaction to the weaknesses he saw in his own father’s evangelistic ministry.
Ken Strachan (1910–65) was born and raised in Latin America, the son of Susan and Harry Strachan, cofounders of the Latin America Mission (originally called the Latin American Evangelization Campaign). Most of his early years were spent in Costa Rica, his mother being responsible for the oversight of LAM head-quarters while his father conducted evangelistic tours. Roberts writes that Harry Strachan, “as ubiquitous as the fabled Don Quixote, had moved up and down the continent in unceasing evangelistic activity, setting up, coordinating, and carrying on evangelistic campaigns in all the principal cities of Latin America. He was advance man, follow-up man, coordinator, master of ceremonies, song leader, and sometimes the evangelist himself.”8 But impressive as his individual pursuits were, he was unable to inspire others to join the ministry with equal enthusiasm. And as his health declined, so did the evangelistic efforts of the mission.
That the son could ever fill his father’s shoes seemed out of the question. “Squirt” was his nickname at Wheaton College, and there was little else about him that would have pointed to a future missionary statesman. He “lacked his father’s commanding pulpit presence, his singing voice, his natural authority, and his ability as a preacher and evangelist. Little wonder that he should be plagued all his life by an inferiority complex in this area of his ministry.”9
Moreover, throughout his young adult life, Ken Strachan was plagued by spiritual battles. During his college years he frankly admitted such in a letter to his mother:
Things have not been going very well, Mother, and I hate to tell you about it, but I know you’d rather hear it from me than elsewhere…. I tried hard to get right with God…. I had a fight for several days …, and in the end I lost out…. It would not have been so bad if it were only that I had backslidden religiously, but I have lost any traces of manhood. I have no willpower or self-control, I have not made myself do the things I know I should have done, and as a result, I am failing not only in Christian life but even more so than the most worldly man…. I feel so heartily ashamed of myself when I think of what I should have done and didn’t, and yet I haven’t the strength or haven’t gone far enough to turn back.10
In 1945 his father died, and he was suddenly thrust into a position of leadership that he did not relish. Immediately, there were decisions to make, and the differences between father and son became readily apparent. While Ken saw the need for publicity and promotional work, he had an instinctive aversion for it. He tried to continue his father’s evangelistic emphasis, but big-time evangelism was simply not his niche. He saw “inconsistencies, contradictions, and even phoniness” in things “others seemed to accept with ease.” Another area that troubled him was the tightrope he was forced to walk “between the Fundamentalists and the Inclusivists, whose controversies were highly distasteful to a man of such vision for cooperation.”11
Strachan’s position in the mission became that of codirector with his mother, and he served in that capacity until she died in 1950. Then, as the director of the Latin America Mission, his leadership qualities blossomed. The mission expanded its radio, literature, educational, and medical services; and by 1960 the missionary force had increased to 144, an 82 percent increase since the death of his mother a decade earlier.
More important than the increased membership from North America, however, was the Latin-Americanization of the ministry. For years Strachan had been concerned about the “race question” (not black versus white per se, though he may have been alone as a white evangelical mission leader to maintain membership in the NAACP). He had taken issue with his mother when she had been insensitive to employing Latins in the mission; and later, when he stepped into the directorship, he took steps to bring Latins in on an equal par with North Americans.
“Latinizing” the mission did not simply mean bringing in more Latin members and allowing them opportunities for leadership. It also meant bringing the mission policy itself in line with Latin culture and thinking. The issue of mixed marriages, for example, was a sore point. Most of the North American missionaries had opposed such marriages—a position perceived by the Latins as one of implied superiority. Strachan faced the issue squarely and insisted that such “obstacles to full fellowship be eradicated.”12 To further incorporate Latins into the mission, Spanish became the language in which all business was conducted.
Cooperating effectively with the Latin Americans came much more easily than did cooperation with fellow North American missionaries outside the LAM. He wanted to work with others in cooperative ventures even if they were not within the fundamentalist camp. He quickly realized, however, that such an approach threatened to dry up contributions from zealous supporters back home. After walking the tightrope for several years, he became convinced that the Scriptures did not teach separation as fundamentalists perceived it, and LAM began to take a more cooperative approach to evangelism. By broadening the appeal in an effort to expand the evangelistic outreach, the mission lost support and was accused of “flirting with apostasy both in the Ecumenical Movement and the Roman Catholic Church.”13
Earlier in his ministry, Strachan had renounced any association with groups tied to the World Council of Churches, but by the 1960s his position toward both the WCC and the Roman Catholic Church had softened. The greatest threat to Latin America, he had come to believe, was communism; and to combat the evils of that system, Christians had to work together. This radical departure from traditional evangelical thinking surfaced publicly at the 1961 convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, where he made the statement that “Rome is changing,” and “we may have to stand beside Rome against Communism.”14Though he later qualified his optimism about the changes occurring in Catholicism, he nevertheless created a stir that would widen the gap between him and other conservative evangelical missions and supporting churches.
Many evangelicals did not acknowledge the positive changes that were occurring in Latin America through the influence of Pope John XXIII and Vatican II. Although Strachan did not live to steer his mission through this new era of relaxed religious tension, the LAM, under the leadership of others, continued to maintain an openness toward Catholics, thereby isolating itself more and more from many of the evangelical missions. As controversial as his softening toward Catholicism was, however, in the minds of some it was no worse than his friendship and cooperation with Pentecostals. To him a “ministry of reconciliation” was far more conducive to missions and to an evangelistic program than was a strict separatist position, and that attitude pervaded the Evangelism-in-Depth campaigns and the total ministry of LAM.
The evangelistic crusade ministry of LAM that he had continued after the death of his father came to a climax in 1958 following the Billy Graham Caribbean crusade. It was an exhilarating time, but despite the outward signs of immediate success, he had become convinced that such an approach was not effective evangelism. He believed that “the church, rather than the visiting evangelistic team, was … central in God’s program of evangelistic outreach.”15 Total mobilization of the church became his theme—a theme that he developed after observing and reading abut the success of three rapidly expanding groups: Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Pentecostals.
His first experiment with Evangelism-in-Depth was a seven-month endeavor in Nicaragua, which he launched with a retreat for interested Christian workers. Following this four-day conference of seminars and Bible studies, those present fanned out across the country and began developing visitation programs and witnessing teams in local churches. This was followed by area-wide evangelistic campaigns and climaxed by a nationwide crusade in Managua. Follow-up was a key element; new believers were established in local churches and discipled by more mature Christians. Judged on the basis of the traditional crusade, this program was “fabulously successful.”16 It was truly a national effort, and as a result some twenty-five hundred reportedly were converted.
What happened in Nicaragua was seen by many as an encouraging new trend in missionary outreach that was ideal for anywhere in the world. “Here is a well-organized effort to meet the demands of this hour,” wrote Arthur Glasser. “We are being shown what can be accomplished when the total Christian strength of a country is mobilized for a united effort.” Despite the praise, Strachan was not satisfied with the Nicaraguan effort. Although nationals had undertaken the major responsibility for the extended campaign, the initiative had come from the outside, and “it could not truthfully be said that a revolution had been effected in the work and attitudes of the churches.”17
The next Evangelism-in-Depth experiment was in Costa Rica. Here, as in Nicaragua, there were many decisions for Christ, but again the lasting tangible effect on the local churches was less than had been anticipated, and the local committee was left strapped with a large debt after the five-month effort was completed.
The mental and physical strain of the Costa Rican campaign and the lackluster results left Strachan spiritually and psychologically depressed. Serious doubts arose as to whether LAM should move ahead with a planned Evangelism-in-Depth program for Guatemala. The mission was in deep financial straits, and the future looked dismal. Then, during a meeting in September of 1961 at Keswick Grove, New Jersey, the picture suddenly changed. As he later recalled, “in that moment … a promissory note was written on a piece of scratch paper and laid before the Lord. Suddenly we were brought out of the distress of mind to the perfect haven of assurance that God would provide.”18
The Guatemalan effort went forward, and the end result was “not only the biggest and the toughest but also the ‘deepest’ of the Evangelism-in-Depth movements to date.” When the year of concentrated outreach ended, the “harvest had only begun.” “The conclusion was inescapable,” according to Dayton Roberts. “Guatemala had been shaken spiritually during 1962 as never before.”19
The Guatemalan campaign marked the end of Ken’s very active involvement with Evangelism-in-Depth. His health was declining, and in 1963 his doctors diagnosed his condition to be Hodgkin’s disease—a deteriorating condition that took his life in 1965. The principles that he had developed through Evangelism-in-Depth, however, would not die. His colleagues in Latin America continued the efforts he had begun, and in nine years eight countries were reached, resulting in more than one hundred thousand conversions. As word of such successes spread, missionaries and church leaders from all over the world took notice. Invitations to conduct Evangelism-in-Depth campaigns came from as far away as Hong Kong and Japan, and LAM officials had the unique opportunity of teaching their principles to others who would carry out the actual ministry.
Evangelism-in-Depth changed over the years, but the basic principle of mobilizing laypeople and Christian workers remains. And in the years since Strachan’s death, the work of LAM, known for its progressive views in regard to the relationship between the mission and the national church, continued to move forward. Instead of opting for “the most common solution … of two parallel but independent organizations on the same field—the association of local churches and a continuing mission structure with a coordinating committee as go-between,” the mission “took a bold step in organizing each entity in Latin America under Latin leadership.”20 Some North Americans found the policy difficult to adjust to, but it represented the far-sighted mission philosophy that Ken Strachan so ably promoted.
Mission leadership and independence in Latin America was coming of age, with or without the encouragement of Ken Strachan, and among the voices raised from that part of the world was Orlando Costas (1942–87). He had participated in Evangelism-in-Depth, and that experience opened his eyes to the divisiveness of Christians in Latin America—among old-line Protestants, evangelicals, charismatics, and Catholics. A major aspect of his ministry was to build bridges and nurture dialogue among these groups. He also sought to build a bridge between Latin America and North America.
Costas was born in Puerto Rico and at age twelve immigrated to the United States with his family—exchanging the “island of enchantment” for “Hispanic ghettoes of large U.S. cities.” He might have taken a turn toward gangs and crime, but with his Methodist heritage, he turned toward Madison Square Garden and a Billy Graham Crusade, which he speaks of as his first conversion—to saving faith in Christ. His second conversion was his rediscovery of his Hispanic roots, and his third was his conversion to social activism. As a student at Bob Jones University through the influence of a Puerto Rican friend, his concern for communicating the gospel took root. But another concern also took root that year: “I came face to face with Anglo-Saxon culture in its worst form … the puritanical value system … the shameless defense and justification of racism … and the triumphalistic belief in the divine (manifest) destiny of the United States.”21
Costas left the university and returned to the North. In the years that followed, he served in pastoral positions, studied at Nyack Missionary College, and then returned to Puerto Rico with his wife Rose to continue in pastoral ministry and university studies. “These studies led me to rediscover my Puerto Rican identity, to affirm my Latin American cultural heritage, to begin to question the political hegemony of the United States in Latin America and to consciously break with its culture,” he said. Referring to an incident in 1965 when Marines landed in the Dominican Republic to support a military coup, he lamented, “I had a chance to see for myself how a powerful nation quenched the hopes and aspirations of a people.”22
After returning to the States for seminary studies, Costas and his wife served in Costa Rico as missionaries with the Latin America Mission, where he taught at the Biblical Seminary in San José and worked with Evangelism-in-Depth. During the decade of the 1970s he was deeply involved in the turmoil and excitement that was occurring within the context of Latin American missiology—particularly as it related to liberation theology. Biblical seminary itself “became the focus of a bitter controversy at the center of which was liberation theology.” The issue became so polarized that he left the school and the vision behind. “The dream we had,” he writes, “of making the Seminary an Evangelical institution committed to the Latin American context and independent from American missionary power centers had been frustrated (at least for me).”23
During those turbulent 1970s Costas took his doctoral studies at Free University in Amsterdam with the noted missiologist Johannes Verkuyl and then relocated in Birmingham, England, where he taught at the missionary training center at Selly Oak Colleges, where Lesslie Newbigin also taught. By the time he returned to Latin America for his second term of missionary work, his name was becoming well known in the field of missiology—far beyond that region of the world. In 1980 he relocated again—this time to Pennsylvania, where he would teach at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and later at Andover Newton Theological Seminary in Massachusetts.
In his widely heralded book Christ outside the Gate, Costas addressed several key issues related to the church and mission, including what he viewed to be a continuing alliance between mission endeavors and Western imperialism. “It was not by accident that mission work took an entrepreneurial shape,” he argued. “It occurred because the modern missionary movement is the child of the world of free enterprise.” His seeing the United States as “a New Macedonia” was a reversal of how the Central American Mission and other mission societies viewed Latin America as “Samaria”—the next door neighbor that should be evangelized. Instead, he saw the United States as “a mission field for Third-World Christians.” He sensed a visionary call to Latin American Christians and other minorities in North America to bring the simple gospel of Jesus Christ to Americans for whom the gospel has been distorted.
Costas was at the height of his missions vocation when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “On November 5, 1987, at the age of forty-five, the man who had crossed so many borders as a missionary crossed the final border to meet his Lord.”24
One of the most recognized missiologists of the late twentieth century was Donald McGavran, whose specialty was church growth. Not content with the age-old mission station approach, for more than a half century he was a missionary activist vitally involved in cross-cultural evangelism. “His thesis,” writes Arthur Glasser, “is that the social sciences can be harnessed to the missionary task. Research and analysis can result in the removal of hindrances to the growth of the church. Indeed, he is the Apostle of Church Growth.”25 McGavran brought a new twist to the subject of church growth that thrust him into the very center of the fiery debate. In fact, much of the debate on mission strategy in the 1970s and 1980s were focused on his ideas. “He has been lauded, and he has been blasted,” writes David Allen Hubbard, “but he has not been ignored.”26
McGavran was born in India in 1897, the son and grandson of missionaries. He initially rebelled against the thought of a lifetime of “missionary barrel” life style: “My father has done enough for the Lord,” he reasoned. “It is time for me to strike out for myself and earn some money.”27 His student days at Butler University foreshadowed his later missions career. As president of his senior class and a debater, he looked forward to a career in law. But through the influence of the Student Volunteer Movement his aspirations changed. After graduating from Yale Divinity School, he and his wife went to India to begin their life as missionaries—a life filled with adventure that harks back to the missionary pioneers of an earlier generation—adventure that included fending off a wounded tiger on one occasion and a wild boar on another, checking “almost single-handed a cholera epidemic,” climbing in the Himalayas, and trekking through the jungles of remote islands in the Philippines.
But his adventures also included conducting seminars across Africa, producing a motion picture, and writing more than a dozen books. Retirement, however, was not among his accomplishments. In 1973, during his seventy-sixth year, he wrote three books, taught classes, and conducted research projects. In 1983 he conducted seminars in India and Japan, and his active ministry continued in the years that followed.
McGavran’s missionary career began in Harda, India, as the superintendent of a mission school, serving under the United Christian Missionary Society. He later served in other capacities relating to education and medical services and was active in translation and evangelistic work. In the mid-1930s his missionary work was briefly interrupted by further graduate studies that culminated in a Ph.D. at Columbia University.
For two more decades he ministered in India, during which time he was deeply involved in studying the phenomenon of mass movements, but by the mid-1950s his mission board began to use him in broader activities. He was interested in missiological issues—particularly the mission strategy of church growth. He had long realized that much of the work that was being conducted by missionaries was accomplishing very little toward the goal of world evangelization, and he wanted to study new concepts of evangelism. At that time he began teaching in the field of missions at various Christian institutions, and in 1961 he founded the Institute of Church Growth, with which his name has been associated for more than two decades.
Like Ken Strachan, McGavran studied evangelistic activities of others to discover principles and methodology that resulted in church growth. No method was sacred or beyond the scrutiny of scientific investigation. Even Strachan’s Evangelism-in-Depth was eventually put to the test. “Careful research on several Latin American republics,” according to C. Peter Wagner, “could not come up with any cause and effect relationships between year-long Evangelism-in-Depth efforts and increased rates of growth in the churches.”28 For McGavran and his disciples, the actual incorporation of converts into the church—not necessarily the numbers of “decisions”—was the key factor in evaluating missionary methodology. If crusade evangelism resulted in church growth, McGavran sought to discover why, and then he applied the principles he had discovered elsewhere.
Through his Institute of Church Growth this field of missiological research developed more fully than it had anywhere previously. Beginning in 1961 at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon, with one student, it moved to Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena in 1965. McGavran “was goal-oriented to the core,” writes Wagner. “He dealt with principles, not methods. Methods were accepted or rejected … on the basis of what he called ‘fierce pragmatism.’ Research became his chief tool.”29
From his research, McGavran concluded that not only had traditional methods of mass evangelism contributed little to real church growth, but that the main missionary thrust of the whole nineteenth and much of the twentieth century had been misdirected. The mission station approach that dominated missions for nearly two centuries had not fostered the kind of spontaneous expansion that characterized the early church. Although missionaries had worked diligently to establish indigenous churches, Christianity continued to be focused around the mission station.
“These mission station churches,” writes McGavran, “are lacking in the qualities needed for growth and multiplication.” The basic reason is that converts are often segregated from their former social relationships and find their only fellowship with other mission station Christians. They generally feel “immeasurably superior to their own unconverted relatives,” and thus they have limited influence on them for evangelism. What results is the unintentional and misguided creation of a new tribe, a new caste, a separate society that is dependent on the mission station for employment and social services. Such Christians may “draw the easy conclusion that if more people become Christians, the resources of the mission will be spread thinner,” resulting in instances where “they have actually discouraged possible converts from becoming Christian.”30
The solution, according to McGavran, is people movements—movements of whole tribes or “homogeneous units” toward Christianity. Such “multi-individual” conversions, rather than individual conversions, were, in his mind, far more lasting and stable for real church growth. Such movements had occurred in the past but had “seldom been sought or desired.” In India most such movements were in fact “resisted by leaders of the church and mission where they started,” in part because of the “Western preference for individual decision” over “corporate decision.”31
The most controversial aspect of McGavran’s people-movement concept, called the Homogeneous Unit Principle, became widely disseminated after he addressed a plenary session at the Lausanne Congress in 1974. He argued that a consciousness of race should be seen, not as a negative factor, but rather as a positive one in the process of world evangelization. “It does no good,” he insisted, “to say that tribal peoples ought not to have race prejudice. They do have it and are proud of it. It can be understood and should be made an aid to Christianization.” He was not defending race prejudice. Rather, he insisted that becoming free from race prejudice could not be made a prerequisite to becoming a Christian. He defined two stages of Christianization: “discipling” and “perfecting.” It was only in the second stage, he believed, that real progress toward eradicating race prejudice might be accomplished.32
One of his most pointed critics was John H. Yoder, an Anabaptist theologian, who questioned the honesty of McGavran’s approach. “I would think the missionary was cheating,” he charged, “if he told me after I was baptized that I had to love blacks when he had not wanted to tell me before.” “If we have not said the Christian church is an integrated community initially,” he asked, “what authority will we have to call for a movement toward integration later?”33
Another critic of McGavran’s Homogeneous Unit Principle was Rene Padilla, a missiologist from Latin America. In his view, the homogeneous unit is “sub-Christian” and sinful:
The idea is that people like to be with those of their own race and class and we must therefore plant segregated churches, which will undoubtedly grow faster. We are told that race prejudice “can be understood and should be made an aid to Christianization.” No amount of exegetical maneuvering can ever bring this approach in line with the explicit teaching of the New Testament regarding the unity of men in the body of Christ.34
McGavran’s critics have accused him of “stressing quantity at the expense of quality; of being so concerned with the saving of souls that he neglects the serving of human needs; of pushing for church extension and being blind to the needs of social justice; and of relying on human effort instead of the Holy Spirit.”35 But his writings brought new energy into the field of missiology. According to Arthur Glasser (writing in 1973), he is “more widely quoted” and “more hotly debated than anyone else in the field of missions today.” He “has completely upset the old, traditional and largely nonproductive missionary methodology that dominated all missions … prior to 1955.”36
When McGavran died in 1990 at the age of ninety-two, he left behind a long legacy of mission research and continuing debate surrounding his church growth concepts. In many respects, his significance lies not so much in the correctness of his answers as in the questions he raised. He helped to elevate the study of missions from introductory courses in a few Christian schools into a widespread professional discipline. He had himself been influenced by other scholars, but the one who had the most profound influence on him as a missiologist was an Indian woman whose words changed his life.
One day while walking through the mission compound after church, he encountered an Indian woman who, with her family, had lived and worked on the headquarters compound for many years. He struck up a friendly conversation, in the course of which he asked, “How is it that you have been with Christians for all these years, yet none of you has ever become a Christian?” She told him they probably would have long ago if anyone had cared. No one had ever urged her, or anyone in her caste, to make such a decision.
“That went through me like a knife,” McGavran remembers. He was shaken that a family living on the mission compound had never been asked to take Jesus as Lord. He was working twelve hours a day as an administrator, but he began to spend one night out of every week evangelizing her family and her caste.37
Ralph Winter has arguably been the twentieth century’s premier missionary statesman—a practitioner, strategist, scholar, organizer, innovator, motivator, and enthusiast. Indeed, it would be difficult to single out anyone else who has been more involved in as many facets of missions as he.
Winter was born in Los Angeles in 1924 and, except for his years spent in school or overseas, had lived in the same house since the age of two. Following high school, he entered California Institute of Technology to pursue an engineering career as his father had done. After graduating from Cal Tech and serving in the navy, he went on for further education, eventually culminating in a Ph.D. from Cornell University and a degree in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary in preparation for missionary service.
After ten years of mission work in Guatemala with his wife Roberta, Donald McGavran invited him to join the faculty of the Fuller School of World Mission, where he taught for a decade. Then, in 1976, he and Roberta gave up the security and salary of teaching and set out with no financial backing to found the U.S. Center for World Mission (USCWM) and purchase a college campus in Pasadena. “They believed this would be the ideal base of operation to bring together men and women with the purpose of reaching the unreached. The cost: $15 million. They had $100 between them.”38
In the years since its founding, the USCWM has “faced imminent foreclosure” and “seemed destined to die at the loan desk,” until “last-minute funds rolled in.”39 But the focus of the battle has never been centered on mortgage payments. The focus, rather, has been on the estimated seventeen thousand distinct people groups—over two billion people—where the Christian church was not in existence.
The USCWM is a “beehive of energy”—a cooperative “think-tank” to which mission agencies assign people to work together in the research and mobilization necessary to reach these “hidden peoples.” “There’s more to it than just the creative genius of its director,” writes David Bryant. “From what I sense in many quarters, the Center’s great appeal lies in the models of pioneering faith it has rallied to itself (Winter being one of them), whose zeal of the glory of God renews the faith of many (including myself) in what God can and will do through His people for Christ’s global cause.” Bryant has compared the center with the town Rivendale, in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: “the place where visions can be born, where fragile dreams can become reality, where battle plans can be laid for great battles ahead, and faith renewed in ultimate, inevitable success.”40
The USCWM, however, is not the only brainchild of Winter’s “fertile mind.” He was active in the founding of the William Carey Library (a publishing house specializing in books on Christian missions), the American Society of Missiology, Theological Education by Extension, Frontier Fellowship, and the William Carey International University, an international undergraduate and graduate extension program.
For Winter, mission work is not just a vocation. It encompasses his whole life. He and his family have maintained what he calls a “wartime lifestyle,” not to be confused with a “simple” lifestyle. “A wartime lifestyle,” according to him, “may be more expensive or less expensive than simple. If a man is out in a trench and he’s eating K rations, he’s not using up much money, but a guy who’s flying a fighter plane may be using up $40,000 a month of technology. In other words, during wartime one doesn’t judge according to the same model of lifestyle. What’s important is getting the job done.”41
The model is evident in their everyday life. While using the latest computerized equipment in their offices and taking advantage of express mail services to facilitate projects, he was often seen driving his 1965 Dodge station wagon that was into its third hundred-thousand-mile cycle and wearing a blue sport coat that he picked out of the “missionary barrel.”
Through his various organizations and personal contacts, Winter has been primarily involved in the North American scene in mobilizing others for the cause of cross-cultural missions. “Roberta and I would be back on the field,” he wrote to supporters, “if we were not convinced that the biggest task is that of extending mission vision to the American Church. Right now only two percent of the people in our congregations have that vision.” The very reason for the U.S. Center for World Mission and the cause for which he has given most of his life is summed up on the center’s website:
Could “staying home” do more to accomplish that than going to the field?
Missionaries do all kinds of good things, but the truly unique task of missions is not “winning more souls.” (We will always have the job of evangelism.) Neither is it social involvement. (Life and culture will always be under attack.) The unique task of missions is to establish a viable growing church movement among every tribe, tongue, people and nation on the earth.
Until we are sure there is a strong church movement within every one of the people groups, our task is not finished.
Yes, until a people group has a rugged, believing fellowship within its culture, it is unfair to expect very many individuals to make a truly meaningful decision about Christ and His claims. Until individuals in every group can see how their “new life” relates to their culture, as it has in thousands of others throughout history, they will not feel comfortable or have the fellowship necessary to be reproductive followers of Christ.42
The premier missiologist of the late twentieth century was Lesslie Newbigin, whose scholarly writings and lectures were profoundly informed by his lifelong service in the church and its evangelistic and missionary outreach. His life intersected with the religious cross-currents of East and West in a way that allowed him to speak perceptively in either setting with recognition and credibility accorded to few individuals in the history of Christianity.
Newbigin was born in England in 1909, the son of devout Christian parents. After completing his secondary schooling, he “abandoned the Christian assumptions of home and childhood.” But during his college years, through the Student Christian Movement and its connections with missions leaders “whose sheer intellectual and spiritual power was unmistakable,” he “began to explore the faith again.”That exploration had also been triggered by a visionary experience while working for a social service center at a mining camp in Wales—“a vision of the Cross, but it was the Cross spanning the space between heaven and earth”—a vision that changed his life:
I saw it as something which reached down to the most hopeless and sordid of human misery and yet promised life and victory. I was sure that night, in a way I had never been before, that this was the clue I must follow if I were to know how to take bearings when I was lost. I would know where to begin again when I had come to the end of all my own resources of understanding or courage.43
Evangelism became a foundation for Newbigin’s energized faith—evangelism that included old-fashioned, open-air, soapbox preaching that demanded the fortitude “to stand up to heckling” and answer “the serious questions of working men and women.” He used this same method of evangelism when he was serving as a missionary in India: “I fitted a wooden box to the back of my bike and stocked it with cheap paperback copies of the Gospels which could be sold for one anna. Every now and then I would stop, prop up the bike, open the box and take out a Gospel to read. At once a small crowd would collect.”44
In India, Newbigin’s concept of mission outreach developed slowly as he was influenced by “a lonely prophet”—Roland Allen—whose writings from a generation earlier were still fresh. “I fought against his ideas, but it was a losing battle,” he confessed, and he gradually came to realize that the advance of the gospel would come through the “spontaneous expansion of the church” as one native convert reached out to another.45 He sought to put these ideas into practice and transmit them to others as he continued his ministry as the first bishop of the newly formed United Church of South India.
Newbigin challenged many of the assumptions of McGavran, his noted American counterpart, whose ties were also with India. He agreed with both Roland Allen and McGavran that the missionary should not settle into a mission station. “But against McGavran and with Allen,” writes Wainwright, “Newbigin distinguishes between rapid spread and rapid growth,” citing Paul as one who was focused more on the faithfulness of the new communities and converts than on the numbers. Regarding the Homogeneous Unit Principle, McGavran argued that new converts be organized in separate groups according to their caste origins, whereas “Newbigin joins with the majority of [Indian] Christians in judging that such a policy would run counter to the essential witness of an evangelical ethic concerning the unity of all in Christ.”46
Newbigin was a practicing missiologist during his thirty-five years in India, but his greatest contributions to the field came after he officially retired. Back at home in Birmingham at age sixty-five, he had imagined that he would spend his remaining years teaching and writing. Instead, he discovered that England had become a “foreign mission field” in his absence. He found England much more closed to the gospel than India had been: It was “much harder than anything I met in India. There is a cold contempt for the Gospel which is harder to face than opposition.” He quickly became convinced that “the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church.”47
Five years after he retired, Newbigin was involved in a church council charged with closing a dying church in Birmingham across from the Winson Green prison. He insisted that the church must continue—that “if the Church abandoned such areas in order to settle in the relatively easy circumstances of the suburbs it would forfeit the claim to be a missionary Church.”48 His side prevailed in the debate, but only after he agreed to become the pastor of the church—without salary. Concerned for the large population of Asians in the neighborhood, Newbigin requested the help of a young man who was a native of India. “As I visited the Asian homes in the district, most of them Sikhs or Hindus,” he later recalled, “I found a welcome which was often denied on the doorsteps of the natives”—referring to his own countrymen.49
In seeking to identify with contemporary Western culture, Newbigin discounted many of the concepts of contextualization and cross-cultural communication that have been touted in recent decades. The gospel, in his mind, should be countercultural—should challenge the self-absorbed mind-set that is so prevalent. “This missionary mindset is quite distinct from evangelistic enthusiasm,” writes Tim Stafford. “Evangelism can be (and usually is) carried on within the constraints of a culture. For example, Jesus can be preached as satisfying modern desires for self-fulfillment. The missionary, however, sees the gospel as an invasive force, challenging culture, compelling a higher allegiance.”50
As a missionary, Newbigin also saw the gospel challenging his own faith and theological presuppositions—particularly his Reformed perspective on election, the teaching that God chooses or predestines certain people. George Hunsberger captures the essence of Newbigin’s understanding of what has often been perceived to be a harsh doctrine:
Newbigin stands among those who search for the purpose of election. It is to him a betrayal of trust for believers when their minds “are concerned more to probe backwards from their election into the reasons for it in the secret counsel of God than to press forward from their election to the purpose for it, which is that they should be Christ’s ambassadors and witnesses to the ends of the earth.”…
Fundamental to Newbigin’s perspective, then, is his conviction that election is about the purpose God intends by the choice, not the reason God has for making the choice…. It is so that we are reminded that election is “not special privilege but special responsibility.”51
During the last years of his life, Newbigin became the most respected and revered missiologist in the world, and the missionaries and mission scholars worldwide influenced by this work probably number in the thousands. In his last addresses before a conference sponsored by the World Council of Churches, he challenged the notion that “the sins of the old missionaries” are only redressed by giving of ourselves and making no exclusive claims for Jesus. “I am an old missionary, and I have committed most of those sins,” he confessed, “but it would be wrong to respond,‘I will refrain from talking about Jesus and will instead offer my own life as a witness that will enable people to believe.’”52
He died in 1998 at the age of eighty-eight—an old missionary with a message as old as the cross.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Roland. Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours? 1912.
Bavinck, J. H. Faith and Its Difficulties.
Elliot, Elisabeth. Who Shall Ascend: The Life of R. Kenneth Strachan of Costa Rica. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Hunsberger, George R. Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Cultural Plurality. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
Roberts, W. Dayton. Revolution in Evangelism: The Story of Evangelism-in-Depth in Latin America. Chicago: Moody Press, 1976.
______. Strachan of Costa Rica: Missionary Insights and Strategies. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971.
Wainwright, Geoffrey. Lesslie Newbigin: A Theological Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Winter, Roberta H. Once More Around Jericho: The Story of the U.S. Center for World Mission. Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 1978.