Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – New Religions, Subjective Life Spiritualities, and the Challenge to Missions in the Post-Christian West

By John Morehead
July 2008

Options for Engagement
The Church has responded in a variety of ways to this situation, from ignoring cultural developments in Western spirituality, to the expression of various forms of church that attempt to woo spiritual seekers to the church community and building in order to interact with the gospel, to apologetic refutation of doctrinal and worldview elements of those new religions and spiritualities considered heretical or “cultic.” The latter option has been most prevalent among evangelicals,5 primarily in the United States, where many ministries produce resources that seek to counter the teachings of various new religions in relation to Christianity.

While recognizing the biblical call for discernment and warnings about false teaching within the Church (Matthew 7:15ff; Acts 20:26-32; Ephesians 4:11-16), and the continuing need for the Church to engage in apologetics and the defense of the faith (1 Peter 3:15), some evangelicals have recognized the limitations of such approaches when used as evangelistic methods and have called for a broader and more holistic response that incorporates the insights of cross-cultural missions.

Cross-cultural Missions and Contextualization
 Many evangelicals, particularly those associated with Lausanne Movement Issue Group 16,6 are reflecting on the biblical examples of communication of the gospel across cultures, particularly in the examples of Jesus (John 4: 4-26; 12:20-24) and the Apostle Paul (Acts 13:13-52; 14:8-20; 17:16-34), who modeled differing missional approaches when engaging Jews and Gentiles.

In addition, they are reflecting on the history of Christian missions with examples of those like Patrick among the Celts in Ireland, Matteo Ricci among the Confucian literati in China, and Karl Ludvig Reichelt among Buddhist monks in China. The discipline of missiology also provides an important resource, and all of these areas come together so that the lessons learned might be applied to the development of mission models to new religions and Western subjective life spiritualities.

Two aspects of a missiological approach stand out as most significant.

  1. This approach moves beyond viewing new religions as “cults” to considering them as dynamic religious or spiritual cultures or subcultures.7 While still recognizing doctrines and worldviews of these groups that are at odds with biblical teaching, a missiological approach seeks a broader framework for understanding and engagement that includes not only doctrine and worldview, but also other important considerations such as vocabulary, customs, rituals, sense of community, and social identity.
  2. A missiological approach involves a process of contextualization. As New Testament scholar and missionary Dean Flemming has defined it, “Contextualization has to do with how the gospel revealed in scripture authentically comes to life in each new cultural, social, religious, and historical setting.”8 As Flemming discusses, the biblical writers framed the gospel message and developed theologies that were appropriate for effective communication and living in different segments of the ancient Mediterranean world. This provides an example and pattern for the Church to emulate for successive generations, which then requires careful reflection by Christians as students of both theology and culture.

Practical Examples
 Participants in Issue Group 16 at the Lausanne 2004 Forum for World Evangelization in Thailand, as well as the subsequent meeting in 2006 in Hong Kong, have been interacting carefully with these ideas and examples. As a result, participants have developed contextualized mission approaches to new religions. Some of these examples are highlighted in the Issue Group’s 2004 Occasional Paper. These and other examples have received more extensive treatment as case studies and practical, field-tested models in Encountering New Religious Movements,9 a book devoted to the exploration of a cross-cultural mission approach to new religions.

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John Morehead is director of the Western Institute for Intercultural Studies, one of the senior editors for Sacred Tribes Journal, co-editor and contributor to Encountering New Religious Movements, and an adjunct instructor at Salt Lake Theological Seminary in Utah, USA. He is also part of the ongoing Lausanne Issue Group 16 that addresses alternative spirituality and new religious movements in the Western world.