EMQ » January–March 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 1
By Lalsangkima Pachuau
Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2018
247 pages
USD $34.99
Reviewed by Matthew Friedman, Ph.D., Professor and Program Director for Intercultural Studies, Kingswood University, Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada, and Adjunct Professor at Asbury Theological Seminary.
New student orientation in the fall is an exciting time on campus. Students move into where they will live for the next several years, getting their bearings around campus and meeting some of the more prominent professors, as well as their fellow students.
Lalsangkima Pachuau’s World Christianity is a little bit like a new student orientation for the topic of “world Christianity.” Reading this book is like having a knowledgeable, articulate, and friendly guide to an unexpectedly rich subject. The author’s background as a Christian from Mizoram, in northeast India, as well as an academic who has worked fruitfully both in South Asia and in the West, informs his personal narrative integrated into this overview of both the history and reality of World Christianity. Andrew Walls’ well-known indigenizing and pilgrim principles are used as a framework for understanding world Christianity. The author’s restating of these principles as the “tendency to identify with the world as it is and … the insistence on transforming the world” (xiv) is helpful and lucid. This volume will make an excellent introductory text for both undergraduate and graduate courses.
Pachuau introduces us not only to Walls’ principles, but to numerous authors who have been foundational in the conceptualization and study of world Christianity for the past three decades, such as David Bosch, Lamin Sanneh, and Lesslie Newbigin. The author examines these sources critically; he can be unsparing of what he sees as flaws, such as Philip Jenkins’ attribution of shifts toward Christian faith in the global south as being mainly sociological rather than spiritual in origin (14–15). For Pachuau, however, and many Christians from the majority world, world Christianity is ultimately a missiological phenomenon in which sociological, cultural, and theological strands are all ultimately intertwined.
The author then describes the history of the expansion of Christian faith and community, highlighting both Western missionaries and thinkers (especially in chapters 5 and 6) and those from the Majority World, as well as the movements which emerged (and are still emerging) from their work. By emphasizing contextual methodologies and theologies, there is a necessary overlap with some of A. Scott Moreau’s recent work, especially his Contextualization in World Missions (2012). Pachuau both simplifies the views covered, and, with his own perspective from the majority world, adds (especially in 134–141) the often-missed impact of the rapidly growing Charismatic and Pentecostal movements worldwide.
Pachuau closes with a focus on Christian mission from the majority world Church, with examples of how this has been organized and has adapted the concept of “witness from everywhere to everywhere” (182). He fittingly wraps it up with a note about how “Christian migrants from the majority world are actively engaging in missions in the West, with the former colonizers becoming the recipients of the new missionary message” (183).
For Further Reading:
Kim, Sebastian and Kirsteen Kim. Christianity as a World Religion: An Introduction. 2nd ed. London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
Moreau, A. Scott. Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models. Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2012.
Sanneh, Lamin. Whose Religion Is Christianity?: The Gospel Beyond the West. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
