Missional Life in Practice & Theory: Essays in Honor of Gailyn Van Rheenan

EMQ » July – Aug 2025 » Volume 61 Issue 3

Review by Allen Yeh, DPhil, professor of intercultural studies and missiology at Biola University (La Mirada, CA), and author of Polycentric Missiology.

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Missiology is self-consciously a hybrid discipline. Surprisingly, not many people balance the hands and the head appropriately in the missional endeavor. This is one of the many reasons that Gailyn Van Rheenan deserves a festschrift honoring his life and legacy, and the title of this book expresses that he lived this balance well: Missional Life in Practice & Theory. As such, it is useful and accessible to both missionaries as well as more “armchair” theologians.

But ultimately, the fruit of his discipleship is evident in the generations of people from East Africa to Abilene Christian University and beyond who have benefitted from his many years of teaching and mission work, some of whom returned to contribute to this volume.

The book offers something for everyone. It covers a wide range of topics, honoring Van Rheenan’s broad spectrum of interests, from history to contextualization, diaspora, and spiritual formation. Geographically, the chapters also discuss ministry in the United States, Africa, and Latin America. This might be likened to the Acts 1:8 formulation, except expressed in Van Rheenan’s context, “From Texas, to Kenya and Uganda, and to the ends of the Americas!”

The content is grounded in solid missiological ideas such as Redemptive Analogies (69–70), the missio Dei as opposed to “missions” (89), and Incarnational church planting over and against the trendier Disciple Making Movements (50). But, in keeping with the theme and title of the book, these theories are rooted in practice and applied, never detached from reality.

In addition, one of his most innovative theories is highlighted several times: the idea of the “missional helix” (110–111). In his understanding, spiritual formation is a spiral which rotates between cultural analysis, historical perspective, strategy formation, and theological reflection. In many ways, this is reminiscent of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Bible, Tradition, Reason, and Experience. The interplay between these four (Van Rheenan distinguishes himself from Wesley in adding an order of operations) further contributes to its uniqueness.

This is a missiology for the present and for the future. Would that more ivory tower academics be more practical, and that missionary practitioners engage in more critical thinking. Here is an example par excellence of how it might look. The one lacuna is that I would have loved to see something about Asia in this book, but even Van Rheenan cannot have been everywhere. But this is the beauty of a written record, that it can inspire a whole new generation of students and missionaries anywhere, and make available his teachings to those who have not had the privilege of sitting under his tutelage. 

For Further Reading

Africa Bible Commentary edited byTokunboh Adeyemo(WordAlive Publishers, 2010)

Scattered and Gathered: A Global Compendium of Diaspora Missiology by Sadiri Joy Tira and Tetsunao Yamamori(Langham, 2016, revised 2020)

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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.