Customer Reviews

The Church Between Gospel and Culture (Gospel & Our Culture)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There was a time when a mouse was just a rodent, only spiders had Web sites, surfing took place at the beach and the church was the key force for shaping culture. Those days are gone. A new era is upon us and Christendom must 1) face reality; 2) develop a plan of action and 3)reengage our culture.

The reality we must face, for Hunsberger and Van Gelder, is this: the church has capitulated to the forces of Enlightenment (forces of the scientific world view) and has given up its key role as a cultural change agent. Wilbert Shenk summed it up by saying "Christendom is spent as a cultural force"; but, and this is a big BUT, Hunsberger and Van Gelder are hopeful that the church can redefine its mission and launch an new era of relevancy in the century ahead.

The Church between Gospel and Culture rings out a wake up call, heralding the arrival of a new era. 14 authors; all thinkers, theologians, anthropologist and culturist, are the harbingers for the new world to come. George Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder (both professors of missiology) have collected and edited these significant and erudite voices. The Church between Gospel and Culture is arduous reading (due the novelty of concepts, the multiplicity of scholarly writers) and days, not just hours, need to be set aside to ponder and reflect on the significance of what these authors have to say about our culture, our era and the massive change that is upon the Christian Church. I was persuaded to rethink my role and mission as a healing missionary. The call of Christ not to be "in the world, but not of the world" was made anew to me. The Church between Gospel and Culture is worth the effort.

When Christianity was a cult (before Constantine 325AD) the people of "the Way" (Acts 24:14) were willing to be counter-cultural. They were mission to their culture, thus they challenged the "principalities and powers" of their society. "The Way" cult could do this because it was not "of the world, just in it". Atlas, in our world today the hope for those in Christendom that want to be real and relevant by their faith may find the only way is by apostasy; leaving a dying religious system and creating a new cult group that refuses to drink the cup of modernity and domestication.

When it comes to the future of the Western church I am not an optimist. In the words of Don Marquis the late U.S. humorist/journalist "an optimist is a guy who has never had much experience". To be optimistic about the future of Christianity is to be one who has not endured much of Christendom. I am closer to the thinking of both Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon who brand the contemporary Western Church as a church that accommodates the world, seeking to market "church" programs, clawing for a position in and among the other many agents of society.

This is a consequential book.

This is a book for the technician. If you are looking for how to build a postmodern church in four easy steps, this book will disapoint you. If you are looking for a book that will challenge your worldview and help equip you with some of the questions and answers that we need to hear, then you will be interested in reading this "heady" theological look at the church and culture.

This book represents a compilation of sixteen authors. Its focus is Emerging Church missiology in North America, and it is written against the backdrop of declining membership in mainline Churches. Having read it from cover to cover, I consider that it has several startling shortcomings:

1. It assumes a problem in the Church, yet fails to reveal it. For example, editors George R. Hunsberger and Craig van Gelder kick off by referring to "deep uncertainty, malaise, and despair in the Churches . . . a certain dis-ease in our congregations". What is missing, they suggest, is a certain "something more". Being a non-American myself, I wondered how I, or even an American, should understand what this and many similar comments might mean.

2. It would seem to shift the blame from the Church to society. While the book does suggest that the Church might be at fault for its malaise, the emphasis is undoubtedly on its outward circumstances. For instance, Craig van Gelder puts the trouble down to a "crisis of paradigms", out there in "the world that we encounter". The book leaves one with the uneasy sense that it might be turning a blind eye to the specifics of its internal malaise.

3. It fails to define crucial terms. The following is a short selection of terms deposited without definition: kingdom categories, forces that bring death, God's coming shalom, eschatological imperative, universal salvific purpose. I would defy any theologian (let alone reader) to proffer concise definitions for these terms. With theological terms being as "loaded" as they are, definitions should be regarded as crucial.

4. The authors in large part support their missiological framework with Lesslie Newbigin -- a missionary who took over, virtually in toto, the epistemology (theory of knowledge) of Michael Polanyi. Polanyi himself, however, suggested that if a missiologist should ever try this, there would be "absurdly remote chances" for the enterprise to succeed (Personal Knowledge, 1962, pg. 318). No matter, Newbigin attempted the absurd, and editor George R. Hunsberger introduces the book by "applying Newbigin's thesis to North America".

5. The authors completely avoid the H-words. Missiologists of the past would frequently use the H-words with reference to missiology -- that is, the "eternal dwelling places" of humankind -- and Jesus was not too shy of them Himself. Considering that this is a substantial book on missiology, the authors accomplished quite a feat in excluding them completely.

6. The authors are strikingly vague about the solutions throughout. For example, Charles C. West, in his concluding paragraphs, considers that "now we must create new models that are both novel and practical. What form should they take? . . . The church has no pat answer." And finally, editor George R. Hunsberger considers that "the mental crisis we are facing is . . . a theological crisis, one of great magnitude and consequence."

I understand that this is hardly an impartial or dispassionate review, and the reader would rightly suspect that this book does have its strengths. For those who wonder what it is really all about, its main thrust is that the Church finds itself today in "a new social location", and therefore needs to view its own culture as a mission field.

George Hunsberger and Craig Van Gelder (eds.) The Church Between Gospel and Culture: The Emerging Mission in North America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996)

Reviewed by Darren Cronshaw

The Gospel and our Culture Network (GOCN) is a collaborative effort, building on Newbigin's and Bosch's work on mission to the West, and focused on three tasks:

(1) an analysis of the North American setting;

(2) theological reflection on what the gospel is that addresses this setting;

(3) the renewal of the church and its missional identity in this setting.

This volume of essays explores these culture-gospel-church themes and their interaction which is central to grasping how churches in the West can fulfill their missionary nature.

The first two essays focus on the mission question: developing a domestic missiology for North America (rather than being domesticated by North American culture), and re-visioning the church for twenty-first century issues (including globalization, postmodenism, and changing approaches to theology and denominations).

The second section assesses Western culture in its modern and postmodern expressions. Topics include the changing place of church in society, how the church has been held captive by modern frameworks (e.g., that mission is something done overseas), the influence of secularization, how to understand and address potsmodernism, and anthropological tools for critiquing culture. These are important issues for churches in Australia, who often either ignore culture (and fail to contextualise) or adopt it uncritically (and so overcontextualise.)

Thirdly, the volume explores how to let the gospel speak to us on its own terms - doing theology in community and giving expression to it in local contexts. The writers call for radical course corrections in evangelism, missional hermeneutics that balance biblical authority and contextual diversity, vernacular theology that celebrates the truth of the gospel within individual worldviews, and authentic translation of the gospel that relativises and revitalises culture.

The final six essays seek to define the church missionally. They advocate for missionary congregations (rather than congregations that have missions); missionary pastors who imaginatively model themselves as apostles, poets and prophets; and processes for reinventing congregations from below as communities of prayer, discernment and action. Some of the papers on culture need translating from North America to Australia, but these papers on the church's identity as a missionary people are critical for churches throughout the West to move on from seeing themselves as places where things happen or vendors of religious goods and services to being a body of people sent on mission.

Emerging churches seek to place themselves at this intersection of culture, gospel and church and these papers (many of them seminal papers by North American thinkers and a couple of practcitioners) provide helpful insights from GOCN's formative years.

For emerging churches in Australia a strength of GOCN books are that they focus on mission to the West (of which Australia is a part). A weakness is that they focus on North America, where the relationship between church and culture has been different than in Australia. While the United States is grappling with the decline of civil religion, and Canada is experiencing rapid secularisation, Australian churches have never had as close a relationship with government and general culture. This is part of the reason the Australian church scene is decades ahead of North America in their openness to new paradigms.

Originally appeared in Darren Cronshaw, `The Emerging Church: Introductory Reading Guide', Zadok Papers, S143 (Summer 2005).