The Newbigin Triad

October 7, 2008 | Filed Under lesslie newbigin, missional, theology | No Comments

I have found Darrell Guder to be one of the most important voices in the missional conversation. In an excellent essay titled “The Challenges of Evangelization in America: Theological Ambiguities”  Guder emphasizes the fact that mission is the  definitive task of the church.

Furthermore, Guder believes that any attempt to reclaim the missional calling of the church will require serious reflection on a spectrum of theological ambiguities that Christendom has left behind.

For a list of some of these ambiguities check out Kruse Kroncile’s post on the same article. Michael also has a link to download the article.

In one portion of Guder’s article he introduces what has come to be known as “the Newbigin Triad.” Lesslie Newbigin proposed a series of questions that spoke to the need of reclaiming the missionary nature of the western church. These questions were organized around the key emphases of Gospel, Church, and Culture.

Newbigin stated that it was essential that we constantly ask these fundamental questions:

Gospel:

What is the Gospel and how does the Gospel form and confront the church? What has happened to the Gospel in the course of western Christendom? How do we reclaim the fundamentally event character of the Gospel over against more abstract, propositional renderings of it? How do we engage the fundamental translatability of the Gospel?

Church:

What is the church and what is its purpose? How do we reclaim the church’s essential vocation as witness to the gospel, as light, leaven and salt, as Christ’s letter to the world. How does the church after Christendom learn what it means to “lead its life worthy of the calling with which it has been called?”

Culture:

What is the interaction between the church and the cultures in which it is planted? How does the gospel through the church both confront and affirm cultures as ways in which witness becomes concrete. Here again, we are asking about the fundamental translatability of the gospel, recognizing that the Gospel “destigmatizes” every culture by affirming it as a potential bearer of gospel. How does the witness to the gospel become appropriately embodied in diverse cultures, while continuing to confess the one message of the one Triune God?

If you are interested in a few of the books and journal articles by both Newbigin and Guder that I have found helpful check out my missional reading list.

Hunsberger & Missional Faithfulness

July 24, 2008 | Filed Under church, culture, lesslie newbigin, missional | No Comments

All the clearest voices tell us that the corpus Christianum, the Constantinian arrangement, and the world of Christendom that guided our thinking about ourselves for 1500 years, is not coming back.

Our habit of telling our Christian story always as a success story, the habit so ingrained in us by even these later years in which formal Christendom was largely disestablished but functional Christendom continued, is running out of capital. The danger lies in continuing to believe the fiction that this is the way our story goes. The crisis means discovering what new story awaits us, and how the Holy Spirit draws us into the story in a new way.

That brings us to the opportunity side of the crisis. The opportunity is to recover what it means for the church to be missional. This is not just to have missions, or to send missions or missionaries, but to possess a distinctly missional sense of our identity, and to know ourselves to be formed by God as a sent community that bears the marks of the full biblical story of a cross, as well as a resurrection.

Here we are face to face with the challange for which Lesslie Newbigin has become so famous (or, infamous). He imagines what it would be like for the churches of the West to become genuinely engaged in “the missionary encounter of the gospel with our Western culture.”

That this sounds so new tells how far we have lost our missional character because it is in such a continual engagement that our calling and vocation finds it certre.

– George R. Hunsberger from “Birthing Missional Faithfulness: Accents in a North American Movement” in International Review of Mission

Toward a Relevant Missiology

June 9, 2008 | Filed Under lesslie newbigin, missiology | 1 Comment

transforming-mission.jpgIn chapter twelve of David Bosch’s “Transforming Mission” he discusses the historical shifts in Protestant thinking regarding the relationship between church and mission.

To fully understand these shifts Bosch argues one must consider the contributions made by the world missionary conferences from Edinburgh (1910) to Mexico City (1963).

When discussing the Willingen conference (1952) Bosch writes:

Willingen began to flesh out a new model. It recognized that the church could be neither the starting point nor the goal of mission. God’s salvific work precedes both church and mission. We should not subordinate mission to the church nor the church to mission; both should, rather, be taken up into the missio Dei, which now became the overarching concept. The missio Dei institutes the missiones ecclesiae. The church changes from being the sender to being the one sent.

In a pamphlet published [after the conference], Newbigin summarized the consensus that had by now been reached:

(1) “the church is the mission,” which means that it is illegitimate to talk about the one without the same time talking about the other; (2) “the home base is everywhere,” which means that every Christian community is in a missionary situation; and (3) “mission in partnership,” which means the end of every form of guardianship of one church over another.

Newbigin’s Call to the Church

October 14, 2007 | Filed Under books, lesslie newbigin | 1 Comment

foolishess-to-the-greeks.jpgThe church is the bearer to all the nations of a gospel that announces the kingdom, the reign, and the sovereignty of God. It calls men and women to repent of their false loyalty to other powers, to become believers in the one true sovereignty, and so to become corporately a sign, instrument, and foretaste of that sovereignty of the one true and living God over all nature, all nations, and all human lives. It is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship.

- Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks