For reasons I can't clearly remember, I have kept a note of what I read year on year. I can't remember either, why I map my reading from July 1st to June 30th, rather than work with a calendar year. It may go back to University and College days when at the end of one academic year you started planning for the next. In any case my reading over the years has worked within a clear timeframe and framework. I'll write about the specifics of that in a later post.
In 1976 I devised a way of reading across the areas that seemed to me to matter most in what came later to be called lifelong learning, or continuing ministry development. But in reality it was a way of harnessing my own curiosity and diverse interests so that I could read in a number of disciplines and areas of interest. The only time this approach didn't work so well was when I was in an academic context and where reading, study, and research were largely dictated by courses and other programmed work. So by and large since 1976 I have a record of what I read, and it acts as an intellectual diary, a literary biography of books read. Some of the books I read then, are now gone, out of date, no longer relevant, or have been superceded by more recent scholarship and thinking.
But, and here is the point of this post; some books no longer speak to where I am, though once they both reflected and shaped how I thought. Over the years my understanding of life, of society, of myself and of my faith in relation to each of these has changed, and with those changes an inevitable distance between how I now see things and how I saw and thought then. It isn't that fundamental elements of my faith have eroded, or that my early experiences as a Christian are invalidated by later experience. It is more that, as time passes, and knowledge deepens, and intellectual interests change, and the world requires newer considerations of what is important and even defining for Christian mission and ministry, then the engagement of the mind in the service of Christ makes different choices, follows different paths, is required through simple obedience to journey forward to the new things God is doing, and the new horizons which open up in every future.
Here is one example of what I mean. When I was ordained in 1976 there were significant shifts taking place in a society increasingly impatient with the constraints of a culture less and less Christian. The Church, and the churches, were enaged in a reconfiguration of what mission might look like; indeed it was around that time that missiology became a key focus of Christian theology. In the late 1970s I remember reading John Stott's Mission in the Modern World, and then Lesslie Newbigin's early The Open Secret, and Verkuyl's hefty Introduction to Missiology. All three books are now dated, but not out of date; all three were also part of significant shift in evangelical theology towards a much more considered view of the Gospel, culture, the church and the challenges around evangelism and mission to the wider world.
Around this time the Lausanne Congress on Evangelism launched a global exploration of what world mission might loo like on a global scale that was careful of culture, context, communication and the beginnings of reaction against colonial, imperial and Western based, and biased, views of Christianity beyond Europe and North America. So one area in which there has been a pardigm shift in emphasis is in the developing and diversifying theology, practice and contextual emphases of Christian mission in a globalised world. One of the lasting fruits of such expanded thinking was the classic and enduring magnum opus of David Bosch, Transforming Mission. This is a book that gathered so much previous thinking into one coherent and inclusive theology, and in doing so also sent out trajectories for continuing wrestling with the great challenges of mission in the endless diversity and powerful agendas of a world in process of becoming globalised and digitised.
Interestingly, amongst the books I read in the first years of my Christian discipleship, several were the all but iconic biographies of missionary endeavour and strategy on the old models. Through Gates of Splendour by Elisabeth Elliot, When Iron Gates Yield by Geoffrey Bull, Hudson Taylor by Grattan Guinness, By Searching by Isobel Kuhn; these and other missionary biographies represented a popular genre of Christian vocational, devotional and motivational writing. They were ubiquitous on bookstalls, the stock in trade of Christian bookshops and were passed on from one grateful reader to another as examples of genuine sacrifice, courage and advdnture, creating in their readers that potent mixture of guilt, admiration and longing to be more effective, fruitful and obedient to Christ's call to evangelise.
I'm not sure when the last such missionary biography gained bestseller status. But sometime in the 1970's and into the 1980's missionary literature became more strategic in its concern to explore how best to communicate the Gospel. MIssiology grew more theologically self-conscious in formulating a mission theology established on biblical, systematic and contextual principles, aimed at developing new strategies for mission.
These more substantial and strategic studies left behind the model of the missionary hero and the life story of the remarkable exception. The evolution from missionary story and appeal, towards missiology as a recognised theological and academic discipline, and mission as an essential locus in any biblically based Christian theology, has created a status for all things "missional" in contemporary evangelical theology, and that missional mindset as an all encompassing and defining element of evangelical activism and strategic focus.
Indeed words such as "missional" and "mission" are validating qualifiers for church activities and strategies. Missional as a criterion is also understood as an essential mindset of the kind of church and kind of leadership required for the church to be an effective bridge communty into each church's context. With globalisation, sensitivity to post colonial concerns, the decline of Christianity in the West, and the realigning of Christian weight and influence throughout the 20th and into the 21st Centuries, mission is no longer about overseas, and the missionary church is learning the scale of the tasks in its own contextual doorstep. A case can be made for suggesting that the last 40 years the church has had to unlearn much that was taken for granted, and quite literally repent in the sense of change direction from older models to new ways of the church becoming the Gospel in the changing fluidity of 21st C culture.
A recent book which now sits near the top of my must read list is Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, himself a significant thinker in the areas of mission and culture. The increasing interest in "the missional hermeneutic" as an interpretive key to the whole of Scripture is gathering pace and support. Where this will lead remains to be seen; but the age of the missionary biography is now one phase in the history of missions. It is previous, past, a form of apologetic no longer capable of those past feats of inspiration and challenge to personal commitment. But they remain classics of Christian experience, narratives of sacrifice and vision, examples of a nascent missional theology as biography even if the theology has required reformation and reformulation in a very different world.
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