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

Moving Forward
It is our hope that the efforts of those of Issue Group 16, and others who are developing new models of cross-cultural missions and contextualized theologies to new religions and alternative spiritualities, can provide fresh starting places for Christians grappling with new ways to live and communicate the Christian faith in the West.

But the work has just begun. Representatives of the issue group will be meeting in October 2008 for a “Consultation on Post-Christendom Spiritualities: The New Unreached People Groups.” Many leading scholars and practitioners working in the field of new religions and spiritualities will present papers and interact with missiological methods of engagement. During the consultation, the issue group will meet to reflect on its past accomplishments, its present activities, and where it needs to go as we plan for the Lausanne gathering in South Africa in 2010. We invite the participation of others who are interested in this ministry context and its relevance to other areas of ministry and missions.

The Challenge of the Western World
Over two decades ago Lesslie Newbigin asked a question that has yet to be sufficiently grappled with. Having returned from India (where he had served as a missionary) to his home in the United Kingdom, he discovered that the Western world was just as much a valid mission field as the India he had departed from, and that Christians needed to be thinking missionally in the Western context just as much as outside of it. This prompted him to ask the question, “Can the West be converted?”¹⁰ a query that has consumed the thinking of increasing numbers of church workers in the Western world. Sadly, as Newbigin surveyed missiological literature for application to the West, he concluded:

The weakness, however, of this whole mass of missiological writing is that while it has sought to explore the problems of contextualization in all the cultures of humankind from China to Peru, it has largely ignored the culture that is the most widespread, powerful, and persuasive among all contemporary cultures—namely, what I have called modern Western culture.¹¹

With the global shift of Christianity’s growth from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere, and the increasingly pluralistic and post-Christian nature of the West, the presence of new religions and subjective life spiritualities may provide us with a context by which we can work through answers to Newbigin’s question and experiment with the development of new approaches at contextualization and new theologies for the rapidly changing Western world.

Endnotes

1. 1998. After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Berkeley, California, USA: University of California Press.

2. 1999. Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion. Princeton, New Jersey, USA: Princeton University Press.

3. With Benjamin Seel, Bron Szernsynski, and Karin Trusting. 2005. The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality. Oxford: Blackwell.

4. See Partridge’s complete discussion of these developments in Western culture and the place of alternative spiritualities in this milieu in his 2002 article, “The Disenchantment and Re-enchantment of the West: The Religio-Cultural Context of Western Christianity.” Evangelical Missions Quarterly 74(3): 235-56.

5. Johnson, Philip. 1997. “The Aquarian Age and Apologetics.” Lutheran Theological Journal 34(2): 51-60.

6. The issue group’s website may be found at www.lop45.org.

7. Hexham, Irving and Karla Poewe. 1997. New Religions as Global Cultures. Boulder, Colorado, USA: Westview.

8. 2005. Contextualization in the New Testament: Patterns for Theology and Mission. Downers Grove, Illinois, USA: InterVarsity Press. Cf. Richard N. Longenecker. 1999. New Wine into Fresh Wineskins: Contextualizing the Early Christian Confessions. Peabody, Massachusetts, USA: Hendrickson Publishers.

9. Hexham, Irving, Stephen Rost, and John W. Morehead II, gen. eds. 2004. Encountering New Religious Movements: A Holistic Evangelical Approach. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA: Kregel Academic & Professional. Related issues are also explored at Sacred Tribes Journal, where many of this issue group serve as editors and contributors.

10. 1985. “Can the West Be Converted?” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 6(1): 25-37.

11. 1986. Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture. Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2-3.

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.