Abstract
Of late there has been a powerful resurgence of interest in missions and evangelism in the USA’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, of which this textbook is a noteworthy result. A collaborative effort by forty scholars, most of whom teach at SBC seminaries, Missiology: An Introduction to the Foundations, History, and Strategies of World Mission, is a revision of a popular textbook published in 1997 and subsequently translated into seventeen languages. Clear, concise chapters introduce the biblical, theological, and philosophical foundations of missiology, then survey the history of missions; the latter half of the textbook is dedicated to ‘applied missiology’, e.g., cultural analysis for effective evangelism, church planting, and cross-cultural leadership. This is a textbook that will appeal to teachers for its clarity and comprehensiveness, but is clearly intended to transcend the classroom for practical use.
Confident of God’s sovereign redemptive purpose and enthusiastic about the ‘triumphs of missions’ (p. 217), the contributors to Missiology are resolutely committed to ‘Great Commission Christianity’. Such genuine concern for non-Christians grants priority to evangelism and church planting over education or development, and breeds suspicion of divergences from this priority, like liberation theology or even the ‘missional church’ movement in North America. Perhaps the conservative evangelical and American parentage of Missiology might also be the reason why some important global issues that intersect missions today, like globalization, environmental degradation, and poverty, are not as prominent as they could be. And while the ‘perspectival shift’ (p. 567) caused by the explosion of Christianity in the Majority World is treated by one chapter, missions is largely depicted as one-way traffic from ‘us’ to ‘them’—even when immigration is discussed. ‘God has brought the world to the doorstep of the American church, and other evangelical communities across the world, in order that we might proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ to them’ (p. 86). What of the fact that many immigrants to North America (and Europe) are Christians?
That said, while Missiology is rooted in a particular church tradition it is not parochial: contributors constructively engage stalwarts like Bosch, Bevans, Scheiter, and Yong with whom they do not always agree. As a result, this textbook, which surely will be widely used by SBC students and missionaries, can be consulted with profit by missiologists of other traditions, who will find it an informed, accessible, and spirited description of a conservative evangelical Baptist theory and practice of mission.