“If Arab Muslims are the least-reached people in the world, then American Evangelicals are the least-transformed people in the world,” retorted my Arab colleague as I was making my case for the priority of ministry among unreached people groups.
As an American Evangelical with a passion for disciple-making among the unreached, this stunned me. But then again, given all the ugliness that has been unveiled about American evangelicalism in (at least) the past five years, I have to admit, it might be painfully true.
In Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity, David Swartz, professor of history at Asbury University, takes the reader on tour de force understanding of what can also sometimes be understood as “Christian Americanism” abroad. In so doing, Swartz shows how global evangelicalism does not sit comfortably in American clothes, and that American “missions” often has the dual effect of affecting the church in the United States as well. As he deals with people like McGavran, Wagner, Winter, and even Hiebert, I was most impressed with his grasp of the missiological side of the conversation. The description of the book says it best:
In 1974 nearly 3,000 evangelicals from 150 nations met at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. Amidst this cosmopolitan setting and in front of the most important white evangelical leaders of the United States, members of the Latin American Theological Fraternity spoke out against the American Church. Fiery speeches by Ecuadorian René Padilla and Peruvian Samuel Escobar revealed a global weariness with what they described as an American style of coldly efficient mission wedded to a myopic, right-leaning politics. Their bold critiques electrified Christians from around the world.
The dramatic growth of Christianity around the world in the last century has shifted the balance of power within the faith away from traditional strongholds in Europe and the United States. To be sure, evangelical populists who voted for Donald Trump have resisted certain global pressures, and Western missionaries have carried Christian Americanism abroad. But the line of influence has also run the other way. David R. Swartz demonstrates that evangelicals in the Global South spoke back to American evangelicals on matters of race, imperialism, theology, sexuality, and social justice. From the left, they pushed for racial egalitarianism, ecumenism, and more substantial development efforts. From the right, they advocated for a conservative sexual ethic grounded in postcolonial logic. As Christian immigration to the United States burgeoned in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1965, global evangelicals forced many American Christians to think more critically about their own assumptions.
The United States is just one node of a sprawling global network that includes Korea, India, Switzerland, the Philippines, Guatemala, Uganda, and Thailand. Telling stories of resistance, accommodation, and cooperation, Swartz shows that evangelical networks not only go out to, but also come from, the ends of the earth.
This book will help missionaries from America see how they are viewed by evangelicals in the Majority World, but it also adds an important piece of postcolonial logic in the globalizing understanding of frontier missiology. Highly recommended.
1 comment:
Thanks for making us aware of this book. The question of how Americans unconsciously (or consciously) center America in missional outreach is a well-worn theme in missiological circles. Unfortunately, I don't think the message is getting through to churches and sending agencies operating in the US. Perhaps this book (and a few others) will help us get a better grip on just how dominant Americans have been, the negative repercussions of that among the global church, and how we need to move to a new paradigm of collaborative and polycentric global witness.
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