Canter Bridge

Near the end of twelve impeccably written lectures delivered to Fuller Theological Seminary in 1964 and published in 1968 as The Inescapable Calling, R. Kenneth Strachan summarizes his work by asking this question: What good is the Christian in the world today?

Strachan’s life ended prematurely in 1965, so this book is in some way the valedictory of a respected mission statesman who had found credibility among both his Latin American and North American constituencies at a time when such an outcome was by no means guaranteed. Indeed, it was doubtful, so tense were the times. The Latin America Mission was taking its first innovative steps towards ‘turning everything over to the nationals’, a step that raised eyebrows among conventional thinkers, put at risk deep institutional legacy, and—in retrospect—defined the genius of the ‘LAM’.

The question Strachan poses is not a rhetorical question, writing as he did amid the responsibility he carried as the LAM’s president. (The LAM has since been incorporated into the United World Mission). Latin America was alive with growing consciousness of its long-lived agony. The minority evangelical movement that was finding both scale and voice was struggling to discern what useful thing it had to say from the crucible of social change in the Americas.

The book’s somewhat ponderous subtitle—The missionary task of the church of Christ in the light of contemporary challenge and opportunity—underscores Strachan’s view that his moment of challenge and crisis were at once an open door of opportunity. He writes eloquently of the centrality of Christ in the Church’s witness and the aspired-to shape and rhythm of that life and witness as lived out by Latin America’s evangelical ‘Bible People’.

A preface written by Horace ‘Dit’ Fenton introduces the book’s 129 pages and communicates these nearly five decades later some of the shock and bewilderment Strachan’s friends and colleagues suffered via the loss. Fenton describes the author as a beloved friend and cherished colleague, in line with the oral tradition this reviewer absorbed many years later as a young missionary with the Latin America Mission in the 1980s and 1990s. Fenton also underscores one of Strachan’s core commitments: that the task of the church in Latin America and elsewhere would only be concluded via a kind of unity that was too seldom seen in 1964. And still.

We learn here also of a programmatic catalyst for unity (Evangelism in Depth) for which Strachan permitted himself a measure both of enthusiasm and of authorial pride.

Although the Table of Contents does not help the reader to anticipate this, the book is divided with justifiable logic into three sections entitled ‘Contemporary Challenges to Mission’, ‘Biblical Bases of Mission’, and ‘Fulfilling Mission Today’. In effect, Strachan argues that getting mission right in the second half of the twentieth century will be exceedingly difficult; then, that a return to the Scriptural basis of mission is likely to prove uniquely generative; and finally that there is reason for hope within the liquid and sometimes chaotic context(s) to which he is writing.

Section 1: Contemporary Challenges to Mission

The book’s first chapter (‘The Inescapable Calling’) lends its title to the volume itself. Immediately one senses the author’s restless spirit. He is dissatisfied with the way in which the churches of Jesus Christ are engaging—or failing to engage—the obligation to assume incarnate witness within their contexts. ‘One of the curious inner tensions of the Christian life is this conflict between the obligation to share the gospel and the general disinclination to do so.’ From the start, Strachan’s boldness risks alienating and losing his reader. Yet a note of hope is not long in the sounding, for Strachan observes that he is not alone in his dissatisfaction. When it comes to purposeful evangelism ‘(a) fresh wind is blowing’. The dialectic that pervades the author’s twelve chapters is present at their genesis.

Viewed through the lens of 48 years of deliberation about the precise nature of the church’s mission, one could suspect at the conclusion of the book’s first, short chapter that the word ’evangelism’ will be deployed in the narrowest sense. Strachan’s prose will soon address and—for this reader—satisfy any such concern.

In chapter two (‘Assaults upon the Christian Faith’), Strachan argues that the church has no quiet space in which to sort these matters out. She is under three-sourced assault from without: by modern scientific secularism, by the resurgence of major ethnic religions, and by ‘the frontal attack of world communism’. While the first two still face down Christian witness with enduring challenges, the third signals one of the deep crises that was felt inescapably—not least in Latin America—in the 1960s. One senses that Strachan saw the proponents of these three challenges not as belligerents to be belittled or vilified, but as genuine challenges that required of Christian witness the highest and most respectful kind of polemic. Then there were challenges from within a manifestly divided Christian community in which suspicion seemed a high-profile sentiment.’ One wonders, this half-century hence, whether on this front ours has been a pilgrims’ progress. Or regress.

Writing from a time when it was a simple thing to discern the resurgence of ‘conservative’ Christianity (Chapter three, ‘Christian Responses to the Challenge’), Strachan sustains the tone of a critical insider with an instinctive distaste for triumphalism. If the evangelical surge has exhibited some admirable action, it has been short on reflection, specifically with regard to ‘the precise nature of the modern situation and its demands’. Additionally, ‘evangelicals have taken a defensive attitude in their theological outlook.’ Finally, evangelical praxis  has ‘been characterized by a tenacious adherence to traditional methods and patterns of church life and work.’ Additional faults laid at evangelicals’ feet by critics outside the movement are enumerated and somewhat affirmed by the author or—at the very least—evaluated as worthy of serious consideration. As he comes to the end of his first section, on ‘contemporary challenges to mission’, Strachan has sketched an assertive evangelical movement possessed of an unreflective mind and an immature practice. Yet he has made it clear that things need not remain as described.

Section 2: Biblical Bases of Mission

The three chapters comprising the book’s second section (IV. Christian Mission Defined; V. Christ as a Pattern of Mission; and VI. The Apostolic Community as Pattern) carry forward Strachan’s bent for dialectical expression. On the one extreme lies a universalistic approach to mission that is deeply flawed. On the other, a reactive particularity by conservative believers leads to the kinds of exclusive focus on individuals (and on individual souls) that is often associated with ‘Fundamentalism’. He finds in Christ’s pattern of mission the radical center that makes it possible to discard false either/or scenarios. If this sounds in 2016 about as controversial as white bread, this is likely symptomatic of a hard-won battle for biblical definitions of church and mission that have so much occupied thoughtful evangelicals since the 1970s under umbrellas like the Lausanne Movement and the World Evangelical Alliance. Strachan would likely be pleased by that, yet troubled by how often such hard work fails to shape Christian life and mission where the rubber hits the road. He was, after all, an unsatisfied man.

After arguing at some length the necessity of individual faith response to Jesus and his claims, Strachan seamlessly writes a paragraph that I will quite in its entirety:

The gospel account further impresses one with the marked social and ethical concern manifested by Jesus. Her religious-ness was not enough. ‘My father and my brethren are these which hear the word of God and do it’ (Luke 8:21). Justice and mercy in the daily secular lives of the people—these were the concern of the Lord throughout his ministry. The point of this is that Christ’s ministry to the multitude is a ministry to them and that it takes the form not only of preaching and teaching the kingdom of heaven but of demonstrating and applying its virtues—not as a means of capturing followers but as genuine fulfillment of mission.’

‘The Apostolic Community as Pattern’ (chapter VI) is arguably the strongest chapter of the twelve. Here the pen is in the hand of a churchman with the mission strategist standing by in support. The richness of shared life in the Spirit-drenched community with—for example—a promptness to obey and a familiarity with miracle is celebrated not only for its own sake but also as the locus of Christian mission to those who surround.

Again, I quote at length:

Discernible in this simple strategy were the following elements: (1) the indispensable operation of the Holy Spirit; (2) the fundamental mediation of prayer; (3) the constant itinerant witness from man to man and from house to house; (4) the opportune proclamation of the gospel to the masses; (5) the intense teaching ministry in the formation of disciples; (6) the outreach of service through healing; and (7) the warmth of fellowship.

This seems to have been the apostolic strategy. The question for us today is whether, in the complexity of modern society and weighed down by the sins that beset us, we can recapture this sense of mission and engage in this joyous fellowship of spontaneous witness. We believe that it is possible and that this is what the future holds out for us. In the following chapters we shall seek to suggest some of the ways and means by which this may be accomplished.

It becomes clear that, for Strachan, Christian mission is the mission of the Church that lives in intimate communion with its Lord. There is in these lines a discernible impulse against all that is docetic or gnostic or even—for that matter—excessively para-ecclesiastical. This is worthy of note in the written legacy of a figure who was at the head of what we would today call a parachurch mission (Latin America Mission) and at the core of a parachurch ministry initiative (Evangelism in Depth).

Section 3. Fulfilling Mission Today

Section 3 spans a full six chapters—half of the book— entitled ‘VII. The Christian Martyr-Witness’, ‘VIII. The Martyr-Witness in Daily Life’, ‘IX. The Witnessing Community’, ‘X. The Worldwide Witness’, ‘XI. Evangelism-in-Depth’, and ‘XII. “For this Cause, I …”‘.

It’s not without significance that the word witness occurs at the head of four of this section’s six chapters. Certain themes flow persistently through these chapters, surfacing or refreshing the narrative at intervals in a way that shows they are part of the deep structure of Strachan’s thought.

For this reader, two stand out: the fact that witness is difficult and the reality that witness is nearly always carried out by ordinary people in unremarkable circumstances. Yet a congregation or church community that is not predisposed or taught to prioritize witness (in the widest sense of ‘mission to those who do not yet believe’) is a church poised for irrelevance.

Strachan’s dissatisfaction persists, for he believes that too many churches have fallen prey to—in fact have almost chosen—this very irrelevance. A prophetic edge is heard in Strachan’s voice. He pleads. He warns. Yet, always—or nearly so—he hopes, for he is persuaded that the church can be awakened and empowered to mission if only people will fall into the thrall of this large and inescapable calling.

Ever the dialectician, he will have nothing of false alternatives that insist ‘we have enough work to do right here’ or that prioritize mission far away while ignoring the context in which the ordinary church’s ordinary people draw their breath and make their rounds.

Pastors and leaders come in for a particular burden, for a church must be taught and trained to love and to perform mission. One gets the idea that, for Strachan, mission does not occur in nature. It must be formed in the church’s mind and empowered by the Holy Spirit’s vigor as the church goes on its way.

Concluding reflection

This reviewer was drawn to read Strachan’s now venerable work as part of my own circling back to the Latin America Mission after nearly a decade and a half away. Ken Strachan was a name I heard spoken with respect and more than occasional reverence when I served the organization he had led three decades earlier. Inexplicably, I never ‘took up and read’. He seemed like a figure from long ago, and there was so much to do today.

Now, belatedly, I’ve done so. I’m struck by the careful thought and lucid expression that marked this mission leader, as with the absence of technique or jargon. With a few changes of vocabulary and historical reference, The Inescapable Calling might well have been written by a dissatisfied soul in 2016 who fears that our churches no longer delight their Redeemer or surprise the world. And that we don’t care enough that they do not.

Perhaps, though, Strachan would find hope even for us.

No doubt he would encourage, nurture, teach, and occasionally berate us towards leaning into mission with strong confidence in the potency of witness and the empowering presence of God’s Spirit. He would doubtless often be disappointed by our shallow and formulaic approaches to mission. He would find our self-serving, inward-facing church life both suffocating and anti-missional. Conversely, he may well be encouraged by new movements towards culture-affirming ecclesiology, especially in our cities. He would find a very different Latin American evangelical and Christian community in interaction with a very different counterpart in el norte.

He would ask us what happened for someone else in our ordinary space this ordinary day.