EMQ » October–December 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 4
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder, EMQLibraryInstitution”]By Gordon T. Smith
IVP Academic, 2020
200 pages
US$25.00
Reviewed by Matthew Friedman, PhD, Professor and Program Director for Intercultural Studies, Kingswood University, Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada, and Adjunct Professor at Asbury Theological Seminary.
Andrew Walls famously developed the missional tension between what he called the indigenizing principle that the gospel can be “at home” in any cultural setting, and the pilgrim principle that the gospel is never completely at home in any setting but will always speak with a prophetic voice. What does it mean to apply this wisdom effectively to the setting of modern secularity in North America? As the author of this volume notes in his opening lines, “the Church requires the capacity to read the times … [to]cultivate competencies and dispositions” in order to effectively address these (9).
Building on the work of Charles Taylor (as mediated by James K. A. Smith), the author notes that not only is this the context “out there,” but that “Christian faith is being lived out in an essentially secular way” (25). Taylor identifies two key elements of this: disenchantment (or the loss of a sense of transcendence) (26), and what he refers to as “the buffered self” (27) (with a loss of a sense of connection or community). Citing the work of several authors, notably Thomas E. Reynolds, he repeats what is a key differentiation in this volume between a secularism, which is negative and insists on the marginalization of all faith expressions, and secularity, which entails a context in which no faith tradition is understood as necessarily normative, but each has a potential voice in the public square (118), thus viewing secularity missionally as a cross-cultural setting (119).
The author divides his text into two broad sections, with the first, a diagnostic section focused on “Reading and Understanding the Times,” taking up slightly more than half before getting to the second applied section on “Forming the Alternative Community.” He outlines four responses to secularity, evaluates these by applying wisdom from the prophets, the early Church, historic minority churches, and churches in secular Europe. In the second section, he outlines the importance of developing leadership in three areas, all of which involve community: liturgical (the worshiping community), catechetical (teaching and discipleship in a community), and, finally, missional (seeking to proactively and intentionally bear witness).
This is a timely volume that intelligently and practically ties together several strands of thought and historical experience in helping the reader to envision what a healthy and fruitful way forward may look like for those seeking to provide leadership and guidance to the church in North America and beyond. Smith’s suggestion of a more engaged “Francis” or “Dominic” model (110) rather than the more inward “Benedict” model is helpful. To this, we could perhaps add the “Celtic” model described and advocated by George Hunter in his Celtic Way of Evangelism, which extends witness out into the broader society, and ties in as well with some of the author’s concluding focus on hospitality – a central Christian virtue which should be at the heart of any missional approach. It seems to me that this would be a valuable resource for both undergraduate and graduate curricula touching on issues of worldview, witness, and mission in the postmodern West.
