As part of my doctorate of ministry project I recently chronicled the history of the “missional church conversation.” In doing so I reviewed and summarized the influences of the International Missionary Council (IMC) conferences, Johannes Blauw, Lesslie Newbigin, the Gospel and Our Culture (GOC) program in the UK, and the eventual emergence of the Gospel and Our Culture Network (GOCN) in the United States.

Furthermore, I created a list of each of the publications to date in The Gospel and Our Culture Series as well as other significant books that have contributed to the conversation in the past decade.

Well this week I was delighted to receive Craig Van Gelder’s latest edition, “The Missional Church & Denominations” which includes (in the introduction) a brief historical summary of the missional conversation that nicely parallels my work. (Although it would have saved me a significant amount of time if Van Gelder’s current work would have been available about four months go!)

Here is an abreviated sampling of Van Gelder’s very helpful historical overview with added links to each of the publications mentioned:

The Influence of Lesslie Newbigin

In returning home to England from the foreign mission field in the 1970s, Newbigin took up the challenge of trying to envision what a fresh encounter of the gospel with late-modern Western culture might look like. He focused on this issue perhaps most sharply in his book Foolishness to the Greeks, where he posed this question: “What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call ‘modern Western Culture?”

A movement that tried to address this issue emerged in England in the 1980s and comes to be known as the Gospel and Our Culture (GOC) conversation. While the GOC discussion first surfaced in England, it soon spread to the United States, where it was taken up by a new generation of missiologists who were focusing their attention on addressing the North American context as its own unique mission location.

Newbigin’s missiology was largely shaped by the mission theology that was born within the International Missionary Council (IMC) conferences of the 1950s through the 1970s. This was a Trinitarian understanding of mission, or what is commonly referred to as the missio Dei, the mission of God.

Influenced by the biblical theology movement of the 1930s-1940s, this Trinitarian foundation for mission theology began to take shape at the Willingen Conference of the IMC in 1952 and was later formulated as the missio Dei by Karl Hartenstein. Johannes Blauw then gave it fuller expression in his 1962 book The Missionary Nature of the Church.

Lesslie Newbigin articulated his own expression of this mission theology in The Open Secret  (1978). Central to his understanding of mission is the work of the triune God in calling and sending the church through the Spirit into the world to participate fully in God’s mission within all of creation. This theological formulation understands the church to be the creation of the Spirit: it exists in the world as a “sign” that the redemptive reign of God’s kingdom is present; it serves as a “foretaste” of the eschatological future of the redemptive reign that has already begun; and it serves as an “instrument” under the leadership of the Spirit to bring that redemptive reign to bear on every dimension of life.

The British GOC Programme

The British version of the GOC movement that developed during the 1980s came to be known as a “programme,” and it was shaped largely by the writings of Newbigin during that period: The Other Side of 1984 (1983), Foolishness to the Greeks (1986), and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989).

The GOC Network in the U.S.

As the British programme began to gain public recognition, a U.S. version of the Gospel and Our Culture conversation also began to emerge. Several consultations sponsored in the mid-1980s by the Overseas Study Mission Center stimulated interest in the question Newbigin had posed in the Warfield Lectures at Princeton in 1984 (later published as Foolishness to the Greeks).

A network began to take shape from these early events in the mid-1980s; by the early 1990s, under the leadership of George Hunsberger, the Gospel and Our Culture Network was publishing a quarterly newsletter and also convening a yearly consultation. By the mid-1990s, the movement in the United States had begun to find its own voice beyond the influence of Newbigin, and the Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company began to publish a series of books under the moniker The Gospel and Our Culture Series. To date the following volumes have been published in this series:

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

Darrel L. Guder, ed., Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America (1998).

George Hunsberger, Bearing the Witness of the Spirit: Lesslie Newbigin’s Theology of Cultural Plurality (1998).

Craig Van Gelder, ed., Confident Witness — Changing World: Rediscovering the Gospel in North America (1999).

Darrel L. Guder, The Continuing Conversion of the Church (2000).

James V. Brownson, ed. StormFront: The Good News of God (2003).

Lois Y. Barrett, ed., Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness (2004).

This literature has focused on understanding North America as its own unique mission location and the church as being missional by nature, and it continues to stimulate a very important conversation.

There are a number of other books from several different publishers that have also contributed to this conversation, which include the following:

Craig Van Gelder, The Essence of the Church: A Community Created by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000).

Richard H. Bliese and Craig Van Gelder, eds., The Evangelizing Church: A Luthern Contribution (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2005).

Alan J. Roxburgh and Fred Romanuk, The Missional Leader: Equipping Your Church to Reach a Changing World (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).

Patrick Keifert, We Are Here Now: A New Missional Era (Eagle, ID: Allelon Publishing, 2006).

Craig Van Gelder, The Ministry of the Missional Church: A Community Led by the Spirit (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007).

Craig Van Gelder, ed., The Missional Church in Context: Helping Congregations Develop Contextual Ministry (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

Richard W. Rouse and Craig Van Gelder, A Field Guide to the Missional Congregation: A Journey of Transformation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2008).

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For additional publications that I believe have added to the missional conversation check out the Reading List link at the top of the page.