Who Will Be the Missionaries to Western Culture?
By Thomas West, TGC.
I live in London as someone inspired by two missionaries to Western culture. One is Lesslie Newbigin, a cross-cultural missionary sent to India who later returned to England. The other is Tim Keller, a church planter who established a thriving evangelical congregation in the middle of Manhattan.
Today, Keller’s life and ministry are being celebrated following his recent death. Keller showed us how to connect with, confront, and call to Christ a culture with the gospel, doing this, of all places, in New York. His love for the city and his theological vision inspired my family to move to London to plant a church.
I first encountered the works of Newbigin and his missionary perspective while a seminary student. I also learned of the Stone Lectures delivered by Newbigin at Princeton in 1989, where he famously called the church to “a genuinely missionary encounter between the gospel and modern Western culture.” In 2017, Keller gave the Kuyper Lecture at Princeton titled “Answering Lesslie Newbigin,” in which he stated, “I’m here to tell you that on the basis of my almost 30 years of experience in New York, Lesslie Newbigin is basically right.”
Both Keller and Newbigin saw Western culture as a great challenge to the global church, and that challenge calls for a missionary response.
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