EMQ » April–June 2018 » Volume 54 Issue 2
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder”]Book Review
Churches on Mission: God’s Grace Abounding to the Nations
Edited by Geoff Hartt, Christopher R. Little, and John Wang
William Carey Library, 2017
ISBN: 978-0878085293
363 pages
USD $22.97
Reviewed by Joyce del Rosario, a PhD candidate at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Intercultural Studies.
Samuel Escobar’s analysis in his work The New Global Mission: The Gospel from Everywhere to Everyone that the new global mission is characterized by “missions from everywhere to everywhere” offers a helpful backdrop to what the editors were aiming to accomplish in Churches on Mission: God’s Grace Abounding to the Nations. Transmigration and globalization offer new challenges for not only what we have traditionally considered as sending missions, but also local church ministries in multicultural contexts. The goal of the book is “to bring missiology in closer connection with congregations” (xx). The editors recognize that the local church may be adept at sending missionaries to serve, but the local church does not always welcome foreigners well.
The book is split into four major sections: The Church on Mission in Biblical and Historical
Perspectives, Global Perspectives, North American Perspectives, and Practical Perspectives. Churches on Mission considers globalization issues from various cultural groups, represented by its various contributing authors. The consideration of glocal missions is most fully realized in the sections on Global and North American perspectives as each author through narratives, analysis, and research describes the local church participation in mission from within and across cultures in their contexts.
The case studies provide rich insight for other missional churches such as Chapter 7 by Guillermo MacKenzie. He describes St Andrew’s Scot Presbyterian Church and Sin Heng Taiwanese Presbyterian church in Buenos Aires, offering wonderful accounts of the questions raised when churches move from mono to multicultural church congregations.
The Practical Perspectives section offers concrete ways in which laity and church leaders alike can consider their missional efforts. That said, this section needs some development in culturally contextual applications. For instance, Nathan Garth’s Pre-Field Missionary Assessment (Chapter 13) covers characteristics of what a missionary should be evaluated on, but Garth could have also suggested a way to evaluate a missionary’s cross-cultural adeptness. Since the aim of the book is to encourage missions from the local and global perspective, cross-cultural competency should be a vital part of a missionary’s evaluation.
Articles such as Daniel Rodriguez’s (Chapter 10) does well in reorienting the reader’s lens to a more global view of Hispanic Evangelicals in North America. But caution must be taken because while Rodriguez widens our scope culturally, he encloses the church in what Paul Hiebert might call a bounded set model (See Hiebert’s book, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues). In missiological considerations, this reductive view of Christian solidarity over a local non-Christian neighbor is counterproductive to the missionary’s call.
If the editors were to continue with the aim of the book, I might suggest expanding the section from the Globalized Perspective. It is in this section of case studies that the book most effectively uses various approaches and multicultural questions, thus allowing the reader to compare their own local church context.
For Further Reading
Bolger, Ryan K. The Gospel after Christendom: New Voices, New Cultures, New Expressions. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012.
Bolger, Ryan K., and Eddie Gibbs. Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005.
Escobar, Samuel. The New Global Mission: The Gospel from Everywhere to Everyone. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003.
