Cuckoos in Our Nest: Truth and Lies About Being Human

EMQ » July – Aug 2025 » Volume 61 Issue 3

Reviewed by Gary Cymbaluk, Africa ministry director for Avant Ministries.

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Until a few weeks ago, I had never encountered a European Cuckoo, but after reading Iain Provan’s Cuckoos in Our Nest, I see them everywhere – not the birds themselves, but what they represent.

Provan captures the unsettling reality of strange and alien ideas subverting Christian thought and community with a powerful metaphor. European cuckoos are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, tricking the hosts into raising cuckoo chicks instead of their own. Once that happens, everything changes. It’s a compelling lens that urges us to reconsider the ideas we live by and the truths we hold dear.

Provan contends that the Church and mission organizations are grappling with a major theological crisis, particularly regarding the nature of humanness and the basis of Christian truth. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 addresses a Christian approach to the question of what a human being is. Part 2 describes Christian anthropology while part 3 explores its implications. Part 4 explores several cuckoos of unbiblical anthropological ideas.

While he identifies many cuckoos that have nested in the Church, he singles out the “Romantic Cuckoo,” with emphasis on “gut feeling” and subjective internal testimony to nature, as the most troublesome. It took a “long flight” (157) to get here, but now it shoves out the living Truth and replaces it with artificially-created, individual experience and radical self-identity. As a consequence, this cuckoo has created havoc in the nest. It has nurtured a distrust of God’s Word, undermined the Church’s ability to address issues biblically and worked hard to promote “disincarnation” (214).

The strength of the book lies in Provan’s robust response. He calls for a return to foundational Christian teachings and a confrontation of the worldliness that has usurped Christ-centred theology. For Provan, the Church’s mission is to both spread the gospel (Matthew 28:18–20) and nurture a community that embodies its identity in and through Christ. By encouraging the Church to follow both the Great Commission and what he calls the “creation mandate” of Genesis, he reminds readers that evangelism and cultural stewardship are interconnected.

His critique extends to the Church’s use of technology as a means of discipleship (184). He laments that Christians have amused themselves to death – using electronic platforms for easy convenience, while losing embodied community and relational wisdom. Provan exhorts us to exercise discernment in our technological choices, preferencing face-to-face fellowship and discipleship as essential for true spiritual formation. This emphasis on physical presence hyperlinks to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Eugene Peterson, whom Provan references to highlight the incarnational nature of Christian community.

Because he spends time teaching in the Global South, his insights are transcultural and will resonate with cross-cultural workers. These leaders, keen to guard the Christian nest from gospel-distorting ideas, face a unique challenge – young, urbanized generations, tantalized by the West, now share a common cultural language (Genesis 11:6), making the ideas he critiques a global threat. Since anthropology is taught and used extensively in missions today, this analysis of how unbiblical anthropology can subvert our ministries will be of interest to missionaries and those who equip for missions.

This book is urgent reading for pastors, missionaries, and Christian educators. They are burdened with the indomitable task of leading communities, an almost futile fight against the tides of individualism and technological distraction. Yet, fight we must, as Provan warned in a personal interview I conducted with him, “If we let the cuckoos roost in our minds and communities, we risk losing the gospel itself.”

For Further Reading

Modern Technology and the Human Future: A Christian Appraisal by Craig M. Gay (IVP Academic, 2018)
 

Missiological Triage: A Framework for Integrating Theology and Social Science in Missiological Methods by Sarah Lunsford (Wipf & Stock, 2023)

Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age by Samuel D. James (Crossway, 2023)

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EMQ, Volume 61, Issue 3. Copyright © 2025 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.