Abstract
Scott Moreau is professor of intercultural studies at Wheaton College Graduate School. As the general editor of the Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, intercultural missionary in Africa, author of numerous books and articles in missiology, and long-time editor of Evangelical Missions Quarterly, Dr. Moreau has been a guiding light for all of us in evangelical mission thought.
This book is a sequel intended to broaden and deepen Scott’s earlier work, Contextualization in World Missions (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2012). Here, Moreau invites us to consider “seven dimensions of contextualization that frame a holistic and healthy approach to planting . . . and nurturing a local gathering of believers in a healthy church that is both in their culture . . . and also out of their culture” (ix). The seven dimensions (social, mythic, ethical, artistic and technological, ritual, supernatural, and doctrinal) form the principal chapters of the book.
The strength of this work lies in its holistic approach to living out the gospel of Jesus Christ in context. Moreau offers us many real-life practical examples of Christian faith that seeks to transform all of life. The book demonstrates a deep concern for the church and offers intercultural missionaries much cultural wisdom concerning the relationship of the gospel and culture. The book’s outstanding organization and clarity make it a useful manual and teaching tool.
A weakness of the work is its restriction within a “communication” paradigm of contextualization. The work seems to assume that intercultural communicators know the gospel and have little or nothing to learn about God from the new cultural contexts they encounter. Elsewhere in Transforming Mission Theology (William Carey Library, 2017, chap. 7), I have described five distinct paradigms of contextualization: communication, indigenization, translatability, local theologizing, and epistemology. Moreau’s book draws from the communication paradigm, moving toward indigenization. The other three paradigms of contextualization encourage the original “communicator” to discover new aspects of the gospel that flow from the wellspring of the receptor culture. Each new incarnation of the gospel in a new culture offers the church an opportunity to learn something about God’s revelation in the Bible that has not been known before. As Shoki Coe, Juan Luis Segundo, and others initially suggested in their contexts, the culture itself may offer some new insights—a new hermeneutic—for understanding the gospel. That new insight may arise through new “translations” (à la Lamin Sanneh), new thought drawn from a new “local theologizing” (à la Robert Schreiter), or a new epistemological encounter with new horizons of the gospel (see, e.g., my Communicating God’s Word in a Complex World, written with R. Daniel Shaw [Rowman & Littlefield, 2003]).
It would be helpful for this work to converse with Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Conciliar, and/or Pentecostal perspectives on contextualization. In the twenty-first century, it is also imperative that we consider the many aspects of “recontextualizing” our understanding of the gospel among the second, third, and fourth generations of believers. Each new generation, especially among immigrant peoples, understands the gospel in a new way.
We are all indebted to Moreau for a helpful, clear, and inspiring work. He has given us an excellent handbook for examining ourselves as we do mission in new contexts. This work should be required reading for anyone interested in intercultural mission endeavors.