★★★★★ 5
An excellent collection of essays
Format: Paperback
An excellent collection of essays. A few of which deserve a brief note.
As someone from within the Reformed tradition, I particularly appreciated the chapters on Calvin and the missional impulse of the Reformed branch of the Reformation (Chapters 4, 5, and 6). Karen Spiecker Stetina’s chapter on Calvin’s Geneva as a virtual mission training center to launch missionaries around Europe and elsewhere was not only enlightening but instructive. The chapter detailing the Reformed mission to Brazil (chapter 6)–while the mission itself was underwhelming in its achievements–was especially intriguing. These chapters thoroughly undue the misconception of Calvin and his followers as missionally indifferent.
Turning to the Catholic portion of the essays (the book is split into two portions, one detailing Protestant mission in the 16th century, and the other, Catholic mission during that period), one will find essays dealing with spirituality surrounding missions (chapters 10 and 13), the intersection of missions and colonialism (chapters 12, 14, and 15), and the issue of accommodation in mission (chapter 11). All of which are exceptional.
As someone who has spent time practicing and studying mission on the continent of Africa, I found John Thornton’s chapter on the Jesuit mission to Kongo in this section to be particularly insightful. This is partly due to the nature of the mission itself. As Thornton points out, the mission was not to evangelize but to “reform a new but vibrant Catholic Church” in Kongo (265). This chapter has much to teach contemporary mission practitioners in Subsaharan Africa as the situation is largely the same for missionaries there today: one of building up rather than evangelizing. What’s more the mission failed after only a 7 year stent. There is much here for missionaries to evangelized lands/peoples today to sit with and learn from.
But perhaps the greatest benefit of the book is an expansion of an understanding of mission. Rather than viewing mission narrowly as moving to a foreign land, the essays (particularly in the Protestant section of the book), as Smither notes in the introduction, “allow Luther, Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and others to define mission on their terms and through their practice” (1). One must read the book to come a full scope of how they did so; but it ranges from being light in dark places through the preaching of the true Gospel, to church planting, to the creation of training centers just to name a few (and those are just from a single chapter!).
Gallagher and Smither’s Sixteenth Century Mission is an excellent contribution to the study of Christian world missions especially as it deals with an era typically thought to be devoid of what we today understand that phrase to entail.
Disclaimer: I received this book for free from Lexham Press in exchange for an honest and thorough review. I was not required to write a positive review
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Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2021
