Called to Witness (Darrell Guder) -- A Review
CALLED TO WITNESS: Doing Missional Theology (The Gospel and Our Culture Series). By Darrell L. Guder. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015. Xvi +203.
It would seem that every church has gotten on the
missional band wagon. Whether we know what this means or not, we like the idea
that we’re a missional people. My congregation deemed itself missional, though
it continues to learn what that means. Even my denomination wants to see itself
as missional. At our most recent General Assembly a new concept of life
together was offered. Thus we are putting "Mission First." Just
google the word missional and you will find dozens of conferences, books, and
even degree programs. As with most terms
that become popular the meaning of the word "missional" is in the eye
of the beholder.
Of course the word has an origin. In fact, it is of
fairly recent vintage. So what did the originators of the term have in mind
when they coined it? One of the key figures we might want to consult is Darrell
Guder, an emeritus professor of missional and ecumenical theology at Princeton
Seminary. In fact, Guder may have been the very first person to hold an academic
position in missional theology. He is counted among the founders of the
movement, so he’s a good person to consult. In Called to Witness, Guder gathers together recent essays
and speeches that share his own vision of a missional theology. In the book,
Guder attempts to re-engage with the roots of the movement. Therefore, the book
allows us to revisit the concerns that led to the emerging of the movement, as
well as seek to reconnect mission and theology. Because the book is a collection of previously produced
materials focusing on a specific theme, there is considerable
overlap/redundancy from one essay to the next. Nonetheless, as one reads
through the essays (and readers might want to pick and choose which ones to
read), one gets a good sense of what was intended by the creators of this movement.
By training and profession Guder is a theologian, but he
is a theologian with a strong concern for mission and evangelism. This focus
has led to his being classified as a practical theologian, a division within
theological education focuses more on “how-to” than on why. As a missional
theologian he wants to reconnect the how and the why. Indeed, Guder rues the
fact that much of the theology done since Constantine's embrace of Christianity
has been done with little attention given to mission. It doesn’t appear in the
creeds or most systematic theologies. Because of the Constantinian embrace, it
was assumed that the world was “Christian.” But in recent years we’ve
discovered that the world isn’t nearly as Christianized as we once thought. He
would like to see that change. Missional theology is, according to John Franke,
editor of the Gospel and Our Culture Network series in which this book appears,
an attempt to "repair this divide and restore the inherent relationship
between mission and theology" (p. ix).
What we seem to discern from reading this book is that
mission and theology belong together, and that much of our theological work has
been impoverished by the fact that they have been set apart with mission being
set off on the margins. We also are reminded that the catalyst for this
reengagement of theology and mission was Lesslie Newbigin, who wrote a series of
books that addressed the increasingly secularized nature of his homeland, after
return to England from India where he had served as a bishop of the Church of
South India. Newbigin had noticed that the church seemed unable to make sense
of this new reality or speak to it. The challenge given by Newbigin was taken
up by a cohort of persons who formed the Gospel and Our Culture Network in the
late 1980s. The first published work that came from this effort emerged in the
mid-1990s, and Guder was among the leaders.
The Book is composed of eleven essays. The first essay
was delivered at Princeton Seminary and seeks to bring mission and theology
together in a missional theology. He discusses the idea of Missio Dei, the Christological formation of missional practice, the
church as missional community.
There is a chapter on the "Nicene marks of the
Post-Christian Church," in which he reads the Nicene marks backwards. By
beginning with apostolicity, we are reminded that the church at its heart is
missional. He comes back to this point in the final chapter on the connection
of mission to the ecumenical movement. He writes that “apostolicity is the
foundational and definitive characteristic of the missional church. The church
is defined by its "sentness” (p. 198). From there we affirm its catholicity and
holiness. Our vocation as church then is
to be witnesses to the gospel (Acts 1:8).
There are two
chapters dealing with Scripture, and two on the "Worthy Walk" of
missional community. The chapters on the “worthy walk” were delivered as the Payton
Lectures at Fuller Theological Seminary. He returns to Missio Dei as he explores theological formation for an apostolic
vocation.
The final chapter looks at the missional dimension of
ecumenism or the ecumenical nature of mission. He offers a reminder that the
ecumenical movement has its origins in the church’s mission efforts in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. The ecumenical vision, which was
demonstrated in efforts like the Church of South India, emerged as those
engaged in mission recognized that disunity and sectarianism undermined their
work. Guder insists that this unity needs to be visible, but it needn’t be
visible in the form of a large organization.
There is both diversity of focus and overlap in this
book. In my reading of the book I found it helpful to be reminded that it is
easy to overlook mission. It is good to be reminded that as Christendom dies
away, and a post-Christian world emerges we will need to reevangelize our own
communities—including the church. That is, as Lesslie Newbigin sought to make
clear—the church in the west needs to regain its missionary calling.
While denominations from across the theological spectrum
have embraced the missional idea, Guder roots it in the Reformed tradition. The
overwhelming emphasis on the Reformed roots of the movement that is present in
the book may have something to do with Guder’s primary audience, but one is
hard pressed to find a person engaged in the essays who is not Reformed. While John Wesley gets a passing nod, the key
figures here are Newbigin and Karl Barth. Indeed, Barth plays a major role in this book, for Guder sees him as the first
missional theologian. Barth is the first to understand the connection between mission and theology in a way that can engender a missional movement.
It is a good and important book that has a scholarly
focus. If you’re trying to get your feet wet in the missional idea the works of
people like Alan Roxburgh and Craig
Van Gelder might be a better starting point. Nonetheless for those who have some idea of
what the movement is about might find this a helpful opportunity to engage the
movement theologically. I would have liked to see Guder engage persons outside
the Reformed tradition, and persons outside the European and North American
context. With a few exceptions the conversation is held with white men from the
first world. Maybe greater engagement with those outside this context -- at
least persons of color as well as more women—would be helpful. Having said
this, his thesis offered up in the book is an important one. That thesis, which
he makes clear in his chapter on “Integrating Theological Formation for
Apostolic Vocation,” is stated in this way: “we only understand the calling and
purpose of the church correctly when we do so in terms of the calling, forming,
equipping, and sending of the witnessing church” (p. 170). The church is truly
the church when it is engaged in mission. Who this church is in its being can’t
be separated from what it does. Theology must be done in conversation with
mission. Unless we grasp this, then we will fail to engage the increasingly
secular context of our age.
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