Anti-intellectualism, the crisis of theological higher education, and the majority-world paradigm shift in theological education go a long way toward explaining the church-academy rift in general terms, but they have particular explanatory power regarding the specific ideological commitments that make church and academy increasingly distant from one another in what I will call, for convenience, “evangelical” missiology. Evangelicalism is massive and inconsistent, and rather than referring to David Bebbington’s quadrilateral or similar attempts to characterize evangelicals, I use the label here with reference to the trajectory of the Lausanne Movement and the Evangelical Missiological Society as this trajectory diverged from that of the World Council of Churches beginning in the late 1960s.1 In other words, missiology has played a major though often underappreciated role in defining (especially American) evangelicalism.
In “Mission between Theory and Practice,” I identify the commitment at the heart of evangelical missiology as “movement ideology,” whose core value is “rapid growth.” You’ll have to read the published chapter for a fuller explanation, but here’s the gist: “Training that values effectiveness tends to focus on the strategies, techniques, and practical processes that produce desired results—typically, converts and congregations. Training that values reproducibility tends to prioritize methods and content that are (supposedly) accessible in any cultural, economic, and educational context. Accordingly, the kind of training that missionaries can use to make disciples in numerically effective ways and to train those disciples to continue reproducing rapidly delimits acceptable missiological education.”2 The upshot is that movement ideology promotes a dismissive attitude toward the majority of the theological tradition and, by extension, the theological academy. Accordingly, “disciple-making movements” result in “church-planting movements”3 that reify the church-academy rift.
In this post, I want to state my concern with this commitment forthrightly and then introduce a critique of its primary theological assumption. This critique will lead to the last two posts of the series, which focus on the relevance of eschatology for assessing the church-academy rift.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Theology on the Way to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.