Resistant to the Gospel

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 contemporary cultures - namely, what I have called modern Western culture. Moreover this neglect is even more serious because it is this culture that, more than almost any other, is proving resistant to the gospel. In great areas of Asia, Africa, and Oceania, the church grows steadily and even spectacularly. But in the areas dominated by modern Western culture (whether in its capitalist or socialist expression) the church is shrinking and the gospel appears to fall on deaf ears. It would seem, therefore that there is no higher priority for the research work of missiologists than to ask the question of what would be involved in a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and the modern Western culture. (Weston, Paul. ed. "Lesslie Newbigin: Missionary Theologian." Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 2006 p108)

Newbigin issues a clarion call to the hardest of all missions work: that in Western culture. As he notes, the only way that it will happen is through a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and Western culture.

I think there are few better things for the health of the western church than to begin to recover a missionary encounter with our own culture.