Lesslie Newbigin

Life

Newbigin was born in Britain in 1909. While at university he took part in the Student Christian Movement, through which he developed a sense of calling to missions. He was later ordained a minister of the Church of Scotland, a Presbyterian church, and went to India, where he worked for many years in the south of the country. He first served as an evangelist, traveling from village to village to preach the gospel. After several denominations united to form the Church of South India, he became one of its bishops. Following his retirement he returned to Britain and ministered in the United Reformed Church. He died on January 30, 1998. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by the British government.

Ministry and Contributions

Newbigin's career can be divided into three strands: field missionary, ecumenical leader, and theologian.

• Ecumenical movement: As a bishop of the Church of South India, he directly experienced and helped lead the union of churches from different denominations. He later served as general secretary of the International Missionary Council. After the International Missionary Council merged with the World Council of Churches (WCC), he became an associate general secretary of the WCC, responsible for mission within the ecumenical movement.
• Mission to the West: When he returned to Britain after retirement, he found that the country, which had been a Christian nation when he left, had become a secularized society marked by a mixture of religions and values. He concluded that Western society had itself become a mission field and asked how the gospel could engage modern Western culture. His books Foolishness to the Greeks and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society are representative works addressing this question.
• Ecclesiology: He held that the church is not a body that carries out mission as one activity among many, but a community that, by its very existence, has been sent into the world. He also taught that a local congregation that believes and lives out the gospel becomes the means through which the world comes to recognize the gospel. This thinking later became an important root of the missional church discussion that developed in North America.

Influence on the Korean Church

In the Korean church, Newbigin is chiefly presented as the pioneer of missional ecclesiology. His major works, including The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, have been translated into Korean. Since the 2000s, his books have reportedly been widely read among pastors and theologians seeking to reassess church-growth-centered ministry. Because he served as a senior leader of the WCC, he is highly regarded in ecumenical circles. At the same time, because he criticized religious pluralism and emphasized the public truth of the gospel (the claim that the gospel is true for all people, not merely a matter of private belief), he is also frequently cited in evangelical circles. In a Korean church divided into camps by the WCC controversy, he is regarded as a rare theologian read by both sides.

Assessment

Newbigin is regarded as a figure of major influence on late twentieth-century theology of mission. He has, however, drawn criticism. Conservative evangelicals fault him for not reaching a clear conclusion on the question of salvation for those who do not believe in Christ. Conversely, some on the liberal side contend that he overemphasized the uniqueness of Christianity at the expense of dialogue with other religions. Others have charged that he criticized Western culture as though it were a single, undifferentiated whole.