Returning to 1980s Britain after forty years in India,  Lesslie Newbigin viewed the Western church with a different set of lenses, and he spoke a message that the Western church needed to hear.  Newbigin created a space for Western churches to analyze their relationship to Western culture.  Newbigin returned to a church held captive by the culture and its own traditions. He questioned how the church had become so marginal to public life by tracing the church's current focus on reason, the individual and the removal of values from the public sphere.  As Newbigin followed the threads back through history, he found that the Enlightenment had come to have a huge influence on the church.  In addition, he identified another source of the lifeless nature of the Western church – Christendom.  Because of the their historic relationship with the state, Western churches had come to serve passively as chaplains to the culture, baptizing the culture’s agenda.  The church had come to be dominated by popular culture's worldview and absorbed in its historical relationship with Christendom.  The church found itself beaten-down with little ability or energy to respond.

 

All was not lost. Newbigin argued for a response, a way out of the church’s predicament. Because of the historical nature of the church’s position, other trajectories were possible. He advocated that the gospel must be the starting point for Christians -- specifically the gospel as expressed in the Incarnation and the Trinity. The gospel must frame all other church structures and practices, not science or any other tradition or philosophy. Newbigin believed that the gospel could handle pluralism as it emerged in a post-modern era, provided the gospel was central to all the church did and was. The church, not the culture, needed to set the agenda, speaking from within the biblical narratives to the wider world.

For Newbigin, the church must embody the public truth of the Gospel in all realms of society, foregoing the sacred/secular split of the Enlightenment, e.g. in neighborhoods, in arts, science, politics and economics. Rather than accept life on the margins, the church must serve as pointer to the coming reign of God. In retrospect, Newbigin gave the church a gift by exposing the influence that secular worldviews and encouraging a gospel-like response in all spheres of culture. 

A Look Ahead:  The Church of the Future

What have we done with the seeds that Newbigin planted?  Are they now growing in the church, or do we still have work to do?

To what extent can we identify the secular influences that have found their way into the structures and traditions of the church?  Most of the Western church has been formed within the context of the sacred/secular dichotomy – if not being actively influenced by  the culture, then from the church itself. Not yielding to the sacred/secular split, how might the church learn to speak prophetically to these worldviews, all the while seeking their redemption? How might the church look to where Jesus is at work in the culture, and follow him there? How might the church learn to foster the rearrangement of cultural items to Christ, not adding or subtracting to the culture, but glorifying God within the culture itself? How might the church follow Christ in all realms, including politics, economics, arts, education, recreation?

Regarding Christendom, to what extent is the church still patterned after Christendom models? Has the clergy/laity split been rooted out or simply replaced by professionalization of church leaders and various other modes of control? Do we train individuals or entire communities in giftedness? On the church question, do Christians see the church itself as the people of God dispersed throughout society rather than as a place and time to meet? Do communities of faith meet in all sorts of configurations, consistent with the culture, presenting no unnecessary barriers to those outside?

Newbigin advocated for the church’s engagement with all spheres of culture, thereby proclaiming public truth.  Sphere by sphere, our members need skills to embody this truth; they need to learn how to embrace culture, to critique society and to see where God has gone before them in the world. The church today has yet to acquire the skills for which Newbigin advocated. I think we would do well to press on until these skills become synonymous with ‘church’.

 

 

Ryan Bolger, assistant professor of Church in contemporary culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, teaches classes on emerging churches and postmodern/global culture. As part of his research, he traveled throughout the U.S. and U.K., interviewing leaders and looking at congregations in which postmodern culture thrived in the lives of their respective communities. Ryan has co-written a book on the subject called Emerging Churches. To learn more from Ryan, click here.