Abstract
In his book Creative Tension (Edinburgh House Press, 1959, 81), Bishop Stephen Neill provokingly articulated his famous statement, “If everything is mission, nothing is mission.” Among some evangelical circles, Neill’s statement has become a dictum on mission theology and praxis. Thus, for them, mission should be strictly defined and includes only specific practices. Interestingly, the articles contained in Advancing Models of Mission suggest otherwise. They all point out that mission in the evangelical tradition has been and always must be widely understood and contextually practiced in a variety of ways.
Advancing Models of Mission is one of the Evangelical Missiological Society’s contributions to encouraging such reflection from the evangelical perspective (ix). The book contains thirteen selected papers presented at the 2020 EMS conference. According to the editors, the papers were chosen for compilation because each specifically “demonstrated a way in which missionaries are updating their paradigms and models of mission” (ix). They are divided into three parts, although somewhat unevenly. The five articles in part 1 each highlight specific figures in the history of Protestant missions and five others in part 2 each propose a reexamination of certain mission theories influential among evangelical missiologists and missionaries. The book’s final section contains only two articles, each of which draws on demographic data to provide global analysis and projections on mission practices in the future.
The editors do a good job with the first section because each article highlights the history of missions in different regions, including East Asia (China and Korea), South Asia (India), transnational East Africa, and the Caribbean. The most exciting thing about the articles is that they pay close attention to women and local initiatives in mission. Four of the five articles emphasize the role of women in missions and the impact of Christian missions on women. Indeed, one of them, written by Linda Saunders, provokingly argues that mission scholarship should consider Rebekka Protten, a former enslaved black woman from the Caribbean, as “the mother of the Protestant missionary movement” (35).
Using various approaches, three articles in part 2 challenge the narrow concept of the unreached people group in mission, while the other two respectively propose the use of hybridity and social apologetics to enrich mission discourse and practice. Placed together, they show that the mission theories of the past generation need to be re-conceptualized and expanded in order to address effectively the missional challenges of the present and into the future. All of them assess commonly held evangelical theories and concepts of mission as too narrow and they fail to consider the true breadth of mission in both the Bible and the mission field.
Although the articles in Advancing Models of Mission are limited in scope, I agree with the editors that the book could serve “as an excellent resource for courses on missions” (x). For both scholars and students, the book shows the richness of evangelical mission history, the need for constructive criticism toward recent mission concepts, and the urge to answer future challenges with new ideas and practices.