Book Review: The Mission of the Church: Five Views in Conversation

Abstract

The Mission of the Church: Five Views in Conversation. Edited by Craig Ott. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2016. 224 pp. $22.99 (paper).The missionary nature of the church has become increasingly recognized and affirmed within recent years by scholars and church leaders from across the ecumenical spectrum. Yet when it comes to construing precisely what this entails, significant differences remain. This volume convenes a conversation among five leading missiologists who reflect a range of ecclesial traditions to provide a rich and concise window onto that broader debate.Editor Craig Ott, a missiologist at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, frames the book with an introductory essay that traces the evolution of missiological thinking about the church over the past hundred years, highlighting the mid-twentieth century consensus that emerged around refocusing mission theology within the triune Gods life (missio Dei). That consensus diverged into competing trajectories in the 1960s within Western churches between those who looked to God's activity primarily within movements for justice and liberation in the broader world, and those who stressed personal conversion and discipleship. These bifurcations, shaped by modernity's fact/ value split, continue to haunt Western Christians to this day. They show up within the pages of this book, alongside attempts to chart out a holistic missiology that embraces the full range of dimensions of Christian mission.Roman Catholic scholar Stephen Bevans recapitulates the approach that he and Roger Schroeder first proposed in their monumental Constants in Context (2004). Mission must affirm Gods activity in creation and human culture generally. In dialogue with the worlds cultures and faiths, Christians offer a prophetic witness that confronts injustice in the name of Jesus.Presbyterian missiologist Darrell Guder, editor of the seminal volume Missional Church (1998), offers a multicultural and translational approach that builds on Lamin Sannehs work on the translatability of the gospel. Guder notes how Christendom overly identified Christianity with Western culture. Reclaiming the church's apostolic character invites vital new engagements in contextualization. Somewhat ironically, however, Guder then turns to the solas of the European magisterial Reformation as the key criteria for contextualization without noting how contextual those confessions are. …