This valuable book represents the main discussions at the 1983 Wheaton consultation on ‘The nature and mission of the church in new frontier mission’. There are 16 chapters contributed by specialist writers on mission from many parts of the world. (I found the absence of any biographical information about these writers and especially the lack of any indication of their actual involvement in mission irritating. It’s one thing to write about mission, quite another to get your hands dirty and then reflect on hard experience. And there is no index to help the reader find his way to key subjects.)
Many of the issues in modern mission are dealt with in these pages: unreached peoples, church growth, church-mission relations, church unity, church renewal. There is a chapter on new structures for contemporary mission, illustrated by more-or-less helpful diagrams.
The book will be extremely useful for those who are already familiar with the jargon, and who have some understanding of the agenda established by American missiology. Bible College students will be grateful for the concise up-dates provided for items on that agenda. However the book is lacking any serious engagement with the Bible. It is liberally sprinkled with Bible quotes, but like most writing that focuses on the limited agenda accepted here the emphasis is pragmatic: ‘Will this work?’, not ‘is this biblical?’ Of the emphasis on reaching groups rather than individuals Ralph Winter comments, ‘That strategy is both a better and a faster way to reach people’, which might be true, but which begs many questions. The focal question of the role of the Holy Spirit in all this is effectively marginalized. The chapter by Petrus Octavianus on ‘Divine resources for frontier missions’ is a refreshing oasis as he studies eight missiologically-important incidents in Acts, not omitting Acts 1:8 (p. 137).
The omissions are clearly significant. It is truly surprising to find no more than passing reference to Liberation Theology (p. 106) or to the pressing need for an evangelical theology of the poor (pp. 23 and 65). There is no reference to the enormous importance of Marxism and Islam in thinking Christian mission. There is no consideration of the vast problem posed by the existence of state and national churches which blur the image of the sending church, no grappling with the issue of the position of the unevangelized, no consideration of the Jew, no engaging with the important question of Christianity in post-Christian Europe confronting pluralism and materialism and multi-culturalism. Perhaps these omissions could be excused as inevitable in a book on new frontiers in mission, but I don’t see how.
In fact evangelical missiology today appears to have taken a direction which makes it almost irrelevant to large parts of the world. It may speak to some parts of Asia and Africa (Kenya?) but totally misses the mark in Latin America, in other parts of Africa (Uganda, South Africa, Ethiopia, Sudan), and in Europe. As in so many aspects of the life of the church in the United Kingdom today we desperately need, we urgently need, biblical scholarship which can be added to evangelical commitment to mission to produce a counter agenda, an agenda which will move us forward and out of the contemporary obsession with structures and methods and statistics. I think that what I miss is the heart of God beating with compassion for the pains of the people.
