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Encountering New Religious Movements: A Holistic Evangelical Approach

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This book is both exhaustive and exhausting to read as a lay person. If you are an ardent fan of more poetic Christian Living writing as offered by many of our current prolific evangelical writers, this book is not for you. If however you are looking for innovative, effective, and even orthodox ways to engage members of these spiritual movements that are moving from the fringe to the mainstream of western culture, then buy this book! This book casts some new light on techniques and approaches to evangelism to new religious movements. The ministry examples are insightful and present fresh ideas on contextualizing the gospel to many of the subcultures that have traditionally been bumbled by the Western Church.

Our efforts must go beyond the handing out of tracts, confrontational discussions of apologetics, and holding demonstrations. Encountering New Religious Movements provides an in-depth history of apologetics and missions to new religious movements as well as chronicling the successes and failures their-in. Though the book is written by several authors, there is a continuous attention brought to solid doctrine and sound missional philosophy in outreach. The authors are each leaders in their respective areas and provide strong biblical foundations and historical data outlining the inception of the movement they represent and the methodology they recommend.

Too many of our seminary graduates are not equipped with the knowledge of how to engage our various subcultures with the Gospel. Many of our seminaries continue to turn out pastors equipped only to perpetuate an ineffective Christendom approach to church and outreach. If our goal is to get out of the church and to impact our culture, then we must have leadership that is prepared. This book should be high on the list of required reading in our seminaries and our various church boards, sessions, and leadership teams.

If you live somewhere that you do not believe these subcultures are present, then either you do not live in the Western World or you are simply mistaken.

ENCOUNTERING NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS: A HOLISTIC EVANGELICAL APPROACH

Irving Hexham, Stephen Rost, & John W Morehead II, General Editors
Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004

Another evangelical but more explicitly missiological approach to new spirituality can be found in some of the articles of Encountering New Religious Movements. The authors are North Americans and Australians who are engaging apologetically and missiologically with new religious movements. The North American writers provide introductory and methodological chapters and a chapter on cross-cultural mission to Latter-day Saints. The Australian chapters include Harold Taylor's discussion of contextualised mission in history (especially in Celtic and Muslim missions) and then most of the practical applications.

Philip Johnson and John Smulo discuss reaching Wiccan and Mother Goddess devotees - seeing them as a subculture with their own customs and traditions to understand, and John Smulo similarly works toward a contextualized apologetic to LaVeyan Satanism. Ruth Pollard explores sacred oils and the gospel (a good chapter for anyone interested in arguments over complementary medicine). Philip Johnson evaluates the festival booth ministry of Community of Hope with new age and do-it-yourself seekers, explaining their change from an adversarial and dismissive approach to one of dialogue and cultural understanding. In another chapter Philip explores the challenges of reaching a Bible-based group like the Christadelphians. Ross Clifford reframes a traditional apologetic to reach "new spirituality" seekers, arguing for the centrality of the resurrection, debunking myths that new spirituality seekers are not interested in factual discussion and metanarrative, and engaging rather than dismissing culture.

The paradigm shift the whole book espouses is to move away from being confrontational and aggressive with what has traditionally been called `the cults', and seek to incarnationally and sympathetically understand the culture of people in what is better termed `new religious movements'. Rather than basing ministry on mainly refuting heresy and asserting correct doctrine (as in Walter Martin's The Kingdom of the Cults), the authors espouse an approach that includes cross-cultural missiological methods including worldview analysis and cross-cultural communication.

The world is shrinking and innovations in travel and communication (let alone religious consumerism) bring a smorgasbord of religious options. The challenge is not just to hold up the cross to protect the church and our children, but to take the cross to this variety of cultural groups in evangelism. There is plenty of room for further development of these ideas and their missiological application to other new religious movements.

Darren Cronshaw is a student and teacher of practical theology and originally reviewed this for Australian Journal of Mission Studies, Vol.1, No.2 (December), p.58.

It would be inappropriate for me as a co-editor and co-author of this book to provide a review, given my obvious favorable "bias" toward the book's content, but perhaps some background as to whey the book was created will be helpful for those who are considering its purchase.

As an evangelical working in the area of alternative spirituality, new religious movements, or "cults" as they are popularly called in evangelicalism, for many years I used an apologetic methodology popularized by the late Walter Martin. This method begins with Protestant biblical orthodoxy and then compares and refutes the beliefs of alternative spiritualities as heresy. Having used this methodology for many years I reflected on it in light of my further research into missions literature, as well as insights provided by sociology and communication theory. The more I looked at the confrontational methodology of "countering the cults" the more it appeared to be better suited to "preaching to the choir" of evangelical churches rather than to evangelism. Curiously, while the religiously plural situation of America would seem to present evangelicals with unique opportunities for evangelism, the prevalent use of confrontational apologetic methodologies has in fact stifled effective disciple making.

Consider the cultural state of affairs in the U.S. in the early 21st century. Religious pluralism abounds and the post-Christendom culture in which evangelicals find themselves has pushed evangelicalism to the fringes of American culture. In the "between times" of the modernism/postmodernism paradigm shift, dogmatic and confrontational methodologies need to be reconsidered.

For these and other reasons the editors and contributors toward Encountering New Religious Movements have produced an interdisciplinary approach to understanding and responding to new religious movements. This book moves beyond mere denunciation and refutation in an attempt to sympathetically understand these movements; to consider why thousands, perhaps millions of people find them fulfilling; and to consider strategies for effective communication of the way of Christ in culturally appropriate ways to the varying religious cultures of alternative spiritualties. This volume represents a significant step toward creating a new paradigm for evangelicals in the 21st century. Read the book, engage the editors and authors in discussion about the book's contents, and participate in the growing movement creating this paradigm!

This is a collection of essays by fifteen authors detailing recent dissatisfaction with the fundamentalist/evangelical countercult movement by those on its margins.

The collection was motivated in part by concern over the propensity of the countercult to engage primarily in internal theological boundary maintenance among American conservative Protestants (see p. 290).

In addition, lament the authors, the countercult is ineffective in witnessing, given its notoriously aggressive confrontational mode of behavior (p. 13). In cautious language, since the authors whose essays appear in this volume risk being savaged as dangerous heretics, if not as cult apologists, by those within the countercult, several essays suggest that the already marginalized countercult ought to adopt a different approach (see p. 290).

They suggest one that would tone down the confrontational, largely polemical, and also highly ineffective mode of operations set in place in 1965 with the publication of The Kingdom of the Cults. John Morehead describes its author, Walter Martin, as the "granddaddy of this counter-cult movement that over time has become a virtual cottage industry" (p. 280; cf. p. 286).

A number of essays in this volume question the effectiveness of the way countercultists deal with so-called "cults," now sometimes called "new religious movements" (p. 17). Since belligerent confrontation has not been successful in bringing fundamentalist/evangelical religiosity to "new religious movements," Morehead and others now want to blend a much softened mode of apologetics with something called "missiology" into a new "methodology" (p. 299). The editors claim that there are now some new "field-tested models" (p. 21) where the target audience is approached missiologically. They recommend a substantive change in "theology, theory, and practice of ministry"--a "change from ridicule to empathy" (pp. 13--14), away from confrontation and toward sharing a message with gentleness and respect. Perhaps this explains the endorsement of the book by Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and Craig J. Hazen, who teaches apologetics at Biola University.

The "field-tested models" have been directed at the followers of Anton Szandor LaVey's Church of Satan, Christadelphians, Wicca, various "New Spirituality" (or New Age) seekers, "Do-It Yourself" (DIY) enthusiasts, various aromatherapists, and, of course, Latter-day Saints (pp. 159--73).

Kenneth Mulholland, of the Salt Lake Theological Seminary, describes an effort he calls "Bridges," which he claims is "relational evangelism rather than confrontation" since it makes use of what he calls "points of contact" (p. 159). While the rhetoric in which Mulholland sets out his "new model" (p. 162) is less abrasive than that commonly found in countercult circles, what he says about the faith of the Saints is neither accurate nor respectful. It is only a marginal improvement over what Morehead and others seem to complain about.

In the best essay in this book, Philip Johnson, who lectures "on cults, world religions, and philosophy" at the Presbyterian Theological Center in Sydney, Australia (p. 10), describes the "wooliness" of religion in Australia, where most everyone believes in a Supreme Being, yet the churches are mostly empty (pp. 228â'29) and self-help books detailing how to pleasure oneself and find well-being thrive. Feel-good "spirituality" dominates the hearts and minds of Australians, when they are not focused on sport. Johnson describes his own evangelistic efforts at booths at "spiritual festivals." These "festivals" are set up to market "holistic healing and spiritual empowerment, borrowing from many different sources, including alternative healing remedies, astrology, first-nation indigenous cultures, meditation, nature-based pagan religion, reincarnation, tarot, theosophy, and much more" (p. 232).

He does not see his efforts as merely another in the parade of voices trying to get attention in a land dominated by hedonism.