Yesterday, I read a book by Lesslie Newbigin entitled Foolishness to the Greeks. Newbigin spent most of life as a missionary in India, but perhaps his greatest contribution was his work challenging churches to think as missionaries in their own culture. Newbigin challenges us to consider how we might approach our culture as a missionary.

What would be involved in a missionary encounter between the gospel and this whole way of perceiving, thinking, and living that we call “modern Western culture”? p. 1

He describes Western culture as needing missionaries as much, if not more than other cultures. A missionary seeks to learn about culture so that he can effectively bring the gospel to that culture. Newbigin suggests that this is the task of the modern church.

He describes the greatest challenge of Western culture as a division between public and private life. We have compartmentalized church into the private sphere, giving it permission to take place apart from the rest of culture. In many of our minds, we think of church as what we do on Sunday mornings. The rest of life, in our thinking, has very little to do with church. Church is an important addition to our life, but often has very little to do with what goes on in the office, or at home, or in the gym. Newbigin challenges us to break free from this mindset.

[The Church] must accept in every nation the responsibility of placing all public life– political, economic, and cultural– in the light of its gospel. p. 123

Our task is to become a missionary people to in our culture.

We begin to bring together what our culture had divided– the private and the public. Only thus will the church fulfill its proper missionary role… it is important that all its lay members be prepared and equipped to think out the relationship of their faith to their secular work. Here is where the real missionary encounter takes place. p. 143

Let’s continue our conversation about how we can learn to function in this manner. Newbigin wrote this book in 1986.