Who Will Be the Missionaries to Western Culture?

By Thomas West

I live in London as someone inspired by two missionaries to Western culture. One is Lesslie Newbigin, a cross-cultural missionary sent to India who later returned to England. The other is Tim Keller, a church planter who established a thriving evangelical congregation in the middle of Manhattan.

Today, Keller’s life and ministry are being celebrated following his recent death. Keller showed us how to connect with, confront, and call to Christ a culture with the gospel, doing this, of all places, in New York. His love for the city and his theological vision inspired my family to move to London to plant a church.

I first encountered the works of Newbigin and his missionary perspective while a seminary student. I also learned of the Stone Lectures delivered by Newbigin at Princeton in 1989, where he famously called the church to “a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and modern Western culture.” In 2017, Keller gave the Kuyper Lecture at Princeton titled “Answering Lesslie Newbigin,” in which he stated, “I’m here to tell you that on the basis of my almost 30 years of experience in New York, Lesslie Newbigin is basically right.”

Both Keller and Newbigin saw Western culture as a great challenge to the global church, and that challenge calls for a missionary response.

Pervasive Culture

Newbigin identified what he called the crisis of Western culture. On returning home, he found England in the 1980s to be as much a mission field as India in the 1930s. His country had developed a non-Christian culture resistant to the gospel. This led him to ask, “Can there be a more challenging frontier for the Church than this?” Elsewhere, Newbigin wrote that Western culture is “the most powerful and pervasive of human cultures” and “next to Islam, it is of all human cultures the most resistant to the gospel.”

Western paganism is born from a rejection of Christianity.

Newbigin saw secular Western societies as progressive and pagan. What makes their paganism different from pre-Christian expressions is that it’s born from a rejection of Christianity. As he explains in Foolishness to the Greeks, “No room remains empty for long. If God is driven out, the gods come trooping in.” Secular culture may have eliminated the transcendent, or at least relegated God to the personal sphere of inner values, but that religious vacuum is now filled by other values—and increasingly by other religions.

Newbigin believed this made the Western worldview a missionary concern for the church. But not only for Western Christians. Because, as he observed, Western culture and values were spreading rapidly throughout the non-Western world. Today, as globalization increases (through physical migration and digital media) and as urbanization continues, non-Western societies are embracing and rewriting the secular script in their own languages and cultures.

This can be seen in a recent campaign called “Love Myself” by BTS, a popular South Korean boy band. Their promotion of self-love and self-affirmation embodies Western values. The challenges for England in the 1980s and the U.S. in the 2000s are now the missionary challenges in global cities around the world.

Missionary Encounter

How should we minister in an increasingly urbanized world that embraces much of Western culture? As we prepare for a missionary encounter, here are some lessons I’ve learned from Newbigin and Keller.

1. Identify as missionaries.

In Foolishness to the Greeks, Newbigin shares his profound insights as one who has successfully communicated the gospel across vast cultural landscapes. He unpacks his strategy for a missionary encounter with Western culture. Thankfully, much of his vision has been synthesized and updated in Keller’s How to Reach the West Again. He argues that we must reimagine our role as missionaries to Western culture.

2. Learn the culture.

Many people mindlessly inhabit the place they live without critically connecting with the web of worldviews of their neighbors. We need a shift from passively consuming the culture on the one hand or from aggressively attacking people and situations on the other. Instead, we should seek to build relationships with people and ask them questions about their core beliefs. We need to take the posture of a learner, like any missionary studying a local culture.

3. Speak the gospel to the culture.

Newbigin and Keller believed cultures are organized around a web of faith-based commitments. Both men modeled how to identify the core idols of a culture and answer the questions people are asking—while avoiding the dangers of syncretism and irrelevance. Both ministered to increasingly global and secular people, and both possessed a keen ability to explain why Christianity makes the most cultural, historical, and emotional sense. We can learn to do the same by reading their books, listening to their sermons, and emulating their lives.

4. Train missionaries for the city.

Missionaries are often sent to global cities without possessing urban ministry experience or a clear idea of how to serve effectively in such a context. The seminary training of recent decades rightfully gave attention to contextualization, but perhaps not to the ways non-Westerners are adopting Western views and values. Today, missionaries going to Delhi, Lagos, Istanbul, Jakarta, or Rio need to understand secularism as much as those working in Paris or Los Angeles. Missionaries don’t just need to learn about world religions; they need to understand how materialism, consumerism, and expressive individualism have become pervasive global challenges.

Missionaries need to understand how materialism, consumerism, and expressive individualism have become pervasive global challenges.

Closer to home, our congregations need to be equipped for the same missionary encounter. Members of our churches commonly leave the Sunday gathering with little application for how the sermon connects to their worldview, work, and witness. We must train them how to live as Christians in their everyday lives. This involves not simply teaching what we believe but countering the secular story with the biblical gospel.

Who Will Go?

The secular story is permeating the globe through the instrument of the global city. Thankfully, God intends for his gospel to permeate our world through the instrument of his local churches.

Toward the end of his life, Newbigin asked, “Who will be the missionaries to this culture? Who will confront this culture of ours with the claim of absolute truth, the claim that Jesus Christ is the truth?” Newbigin and Keller are now in glory with their courses completed, but the question remains. Who will be the missionaries to this culture?