EMQ » July–September 2020 » Volume 56 Issue 3
By Darren T. Duerksen and William A. Dyrness
IVP Academic, 2019
224 pages
USD $21.18
Reviewed by Bradley Cocanower (pseudonym), PhD, currently living in Southern Europe helping train and equip Spanish speakers who are preparing for pioneer ministry in the majority world.
“Is the church as it exists today a cause for celebration or a reason to lament?” (1). In Seeking Church, Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness ask some hard questions in order to evaluate the relationship between culture and the church. However, their tone throughout is not one of despair, but one of hope that there may be churches around the world that are rethinking how they might engage with, reflect, and transform their native culture. In essence, Seeking Church provides a “theological reflection on the sociocultural formation and growth of communities who follow Christ” (25).
The bookstarts by analyzing the history of the church as an emergent phenomenon, or what the authors describe as a “reverse hermeneutic.” Next, the authors describe the process by which social groups begin and how an understanding of this process should contribute to a “missiological understanding of how churches emerge out of and reflect their contexts.” (62) To help illustrate these important theories, they provide thought-provoking case studies from the majority world. Next, Duerksen and Dyrness describe how various theological practices have been contextualized in the emergent churches depicted in the case studies. The authors then consider markers that should characterize a transformative church and comes to the important conclusion that “our churches rarely, if ever, fully live up to the ideal to which these markers point” (173). The book concludes by discussing in hopeful terms what the authors envision the future of the church could be by describing the church’s role in the establishment of the Kingdom God.
Though well written, individuals unaccustomed to high levels of academic rigor may find this book a challenging read. Because of its theological depth, theologians and pastors will find this book compelling, but undoubtedly, Seeking Church will be most beneficial to missiologists and practitioners. Practically, missionaries will find the case studies fascinating, inspiring and, at times, controversial. Individuals who feel comfortable with extreme levels of contextualization in Christian worship, such as insider movements, will find themselves more aligned with the authors then readers concerned with insider movements deviating from the gospel or with the dangers of syncretism in mission contexts. One shortcoming of the book is that the logic continually builds on arguments or assumptions that many readers might not agree with completely. Moreover, many of the readers for whom this book is written will struggle with various aspects of the case studies or theory. One example is the description of how “the weapon used by Sri Krisna … [was] taken over and reinterpreted as a symbol of the gospel ‘to pierce even the most obstinate of human hearts’” (99).
Perhaps the greatest strength of Seeking Church is its thoughtful interaction with crucial questions that the church and its leaders need to consider at this point in history. For example, they dedicate an entire chapter to considering markers of the transformative church by answering the question: “If the practices and forms of church are varied and contingent, what might we say are normative markers of the church, common across time and location, and how might these elucidate the quality of its transformative presence?” (150). Regardless of whether in agreement with the author’s conclusions or not, this book poses some crucial questions for the Church and presents thought-provoking new alternatives to traditional approaches. Seeking Church is an important contribution to Christian literature in that it highlights several case studies from around the world within an important theoretical conversation concerning the interaction between culture and church practice.
