EMQ » April–June 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 2
Edited by Sadiri Joy Tira and Juliet Lee Uytanlet
William Carey Library, 2020
238 pages
US$33.00
Reviewed by Richard Hibbert, director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Mission at Sydney Missionary and Bible College, Australia, who served for twelve years in church planting and leadership development among Muslims in West Asia and Europe, and for another eight years providing on-the-job-training to church planting teams.
In one sense cross-cultural mission has changed little across the centuries. The making of disciples by embodying, doing, and telling the gospel, together with planting churches that express and point to the kingdom of God still constitute the core of the mission task. As the gospel is taken around the world, however, it encounters new frontiers, and mission practitioners need to do their best to understand and adapt to these changing contexts.
This multi-authored volume, a product of a 2018 consultation convened by Global Diaspora Network, explores both the challenges and opportunities created by hybridity in peoples and individuals who are on the move. Its key strength lies in its fine analysis of an impressive range of case studies of cultural borrowing, mixing, and cross-pollination that characterize hybridized individuals and groups.
Biblical underpinnings for the analytical case studies fill the first four chapters. They effectively portray hybridity as both old in the sense of having always characterized the mission of God’s people (and even the nature of our Lord Jesus), and new – in the sense that accelerating globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has forged new frontiers of hybridization. The case studies that constitute more than two-thirds of the book are drawn from an impressive range of geographical and cultural contexts. These include Japanese diaspora in Latin America, Chinese Filipinos, South Asians in North America and Australia, and hybrid marriages and children (e.g., Jewish-gentile and bi-national marriages, and children raised transnationally).
Several features make this volume engaging for both the practitioner and the researcher. The editors have succeeded in striking a good balance between chapters that theorize hybridity and so provide important analyses of key concepts, and those that focus on the authors’ own research into particular groups of diaspora who exemplify hybridity. Second, most authors enrich their analysis by including a reflection on their own experience of being hybrids in some way. These personal narratives add a dimension of credibility to the book as a whole. Third, both ministry to hybrid, diaspora peoples but also ministry by them, underpinned by the vital recognition of their agency in fulfilling the Great Commission, is considered. Lastly, both theorizing and case study analysis are paired with key challenges for the reader to wrestle with. Among these, two stand out:
- “How can we keep our priorities right, so that the hybrids in our diasporas can use their multicultural gifts for the advance of God’s kingdom on earth most effectively and strategically?” (19)
- “How can we help our churches respond and adapt to, and be active at the missional frontiers presented by hybridized groups?” (72)
Above all, this book serves as a challenge to both churches and mission agencies to find new ways to engage hybrid peoples with the gospel and Christ’s command to make disciples. Hybridity brings a host of new opportunities as well as an added layer of complexity to mission, but it is a complexity that missiologists and mission practitioners must learn to appreciate and formulate practical responses to. This book will help them do that.
