Abstract
Participating in God’s Mission offers a missiology for the contemporary church in the United States, anchored in a sweeping historical analysis of past congregational mission. Craig Van Gelder and Dwight Zscheile are well positioned to give such an account, as both have long associations with Luther Seminary (St. Paul, MN), and Van Gelder in particular has been a leader within the influential Gospel and Our Culture Network, serving on the team that produced the ground-breaking work Missional Church (Eerdmans, 1998).
Their argument proceeds in three sections. The first establishes the need for and framework of considering the congregation as the locus of encounter between the Gospel and culture; the second traces the historical ways that the United States has had its own unique missiological engagement, and the third synthesizes the theology of part 1 and the history of part 2 into ways of navigating present and future challenges. The general argument made is relatively simple but not simplistic: as the context changes, so too does the understanding of the missio Dei. As a context, the United States has changed and will continue to do so, just as the church’s understanding of mission is constantly changing. Van Gelder and Zscheile argue that missiology should focus on the encounter of the Gospel with culture, whereas it has previously had a focus on the church in culture. The past ecclesial focus has missed the larger truth that it is God’s mission that we participate in and has thus distorted responses to the changing context. Over half of the book is dedicated to tracing the changing context and giving an account of today’s religious landscape in the United States.
Herein lies both the strength and the weakness of the book. The strength is that it gives a comprehensive, theologically grounded argument for mainline US students and practitioners to understand how they might be faithful to God’s ongoing work in their context. The weakness is that the United States is so diverse and its history so filled with a plurality of voices that it is impossible to adequately describe each and every context. For instance, while Van Gelder and Zscheile give attention to colonial atrocities and indigenous populations and trace the context of US race relations starting in slavery, they clearly identify as part of “the Euro-tribal faith traditions” (7). Those outside the author’s white mainline tradition will recognize their own story and how God has accomplished God’s mission in the United States—but only from a Eurocentric perspective. More voices are needed to give a full account of God’s work in the United States. Nevertheless, Van Gelder and Zscheile have given a good framework for future missiologists to engage in and an adequate description of one important context as an example.