BLOG 5/6/15. POST-NEWBIGIN ‘ECCLESIASTICAL SCHIZOPHRENICS’?

BLOG 5/6/15. POST-NEWBIGIN ‘ECCLESIASTICAL SCHIZOPHRENICS’?

It is probably tantamount to sheer heresy on my part to suggest that the influence of the venerable Lesslie Newbigin is not only dated, but outdated. After all, Lesslie Newbigin’s influence on the church’s understanding of itself and its mission was awesome. Many of the readers of this blog may have never encountered this guy, but Newbigin went from the UK to South India as a young missionary after World War II, and soon thereafter in a huge ecumenical development he found himself so respected locally as to become a bishop at a very young age. His genius was obvious in that when I was still ‘wet behind the ears’ Newbigin had written the much touted: The Household of God (1953). He was a prolific writer and much appreciated across the ecumenical spectrum.

Part of his enormous effectiveness was that he became a very sympathetic student and observer of the Hindu culture in the community in which he lived, and he found time to engage its leaders in fruitful conversation, so that in many ways he understood their culture and their sources as well, if not better, as they, and was appreciated by them. He was, then, a guy who was very culture conscious, and so aware of the context into which our gospel is addressed.

In1973 he retired from his post in South India, and he and his wife moved back to the UK, where he became a lecturer in Selly Oaks College, and as a pastor of local churches. But it was in the UK that his lights went on, and so the stimuli which launched him into such an influential career late in life. He became aware that it had been much easier for him to communicate the gospel in Hindu South India than it was in what was ostensibly ‘Christian’ England. What he realized was that for the Indian-Hindu folk, the gospel was a whole fresh and challenging thing, … but in England, the folk had heard the gospel for centuries, had pretty much become deaf and immune to it and so built up ‘anti-bodies’ against it.

It was this realization, that the West had moved into a post-Christendom, or post-Christian culture, and that the institutions and thought patterns that had dominated it for so many generations were no longer viable dawned on him. To that end he wrote a couple of milestone books in the 1980s: Foolishness to the Greeks, and The Gospel In a Pluralist Society. He became a frequent lecturer in universities and seminaries in both the UK and the USA. Whole think-tanks developed around his thesis, and seminary chairs of missiology were vastly influenced by him. I am one of those who has profited enormously by his thinking and have done some minor introductions to his contribution in classes and conferences. I am indebted to him in so many ways. But, do you know what? … history and culture don’t stand still. Newbigin’s huge influence was inescapable thirty years ago, but a couple of generations have emerged since then, and we have moved into a culture where even the word: Christian has little resonance among the Millennial generation and the iY (born after 1995) or ‘digital’ generation.

The Newbigin aficionados are rapidly passing into the AARP and what becomes apparent is that they have all too much become ecclesiastical schizophrenics, in that they have accepted the indisputable thesis of Newbigin that we have moved past the era of Christendom, and are, in fact in the post-Christian era, … but their roots are so deep in the forms and ecclesiastical and missiological patterns of Christendom, that the best they can do is to keep trying to find some way to refound Christendom congregations and institutions, while clinging to them rather than suspending the horizons, and re-inventing the church for a whole new culture. Everything must be on the line. … Meanwhile church headquarters and theological training schools keep cranking out church patterns and leadership for a cultural setting that is no longer with us, alas!

The fruitful church that Christ is building is elastic, ever re-inventing itself, defying institutional ossification, fruitless patterns, and ancestor worship as it pursues it pilgrim journey. There’s our challenge. Stay tuned …

About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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