The Next Evangelicalism: Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity by Soong-Chan Rah

Another great resource for those interested in the Missional Church.  Below is the introduction to a review I wrote this past week.  If interested in the full-length review, click on this link: The Next Evangelicalism by Soong-Chan Rah: A Brief Review.

The twenty-first century has posed a wide variety of cultural challenges and changes for the Christian Church and related witness in the world. The ability of the church to adapt and respond to these changes without either lagging behind or surrendering to the culture will influence both the effectiveness and faithfulness of the Body of Christ. In Soong-Chan Rah’s, The Next Evangelicalism, he indicts the Christian church for a failure to keep pace with the rising cultural and ethnic diversity and the co-option of the gospel by dominant Western, white traditions. Rah terms this contemporary reality as the Western, white cultural captivity of the church. This captivity continues to infringe on the church’s ability to bear witness to the gospel within the increased demographic and cultural plurality of American Christianity. In The Next Evangelicalism, Soong-Chan Rah exposes the nature of the church’s exilic condition, underscores the pervasiveness of Western, white captivity in evangelical and emergent churches, and provides attestations to the next evangelicalism that derives from multicultural Christian communities. The collective work of The Next Evangelicalism provides a significant resource for the Christian church in its quest for liberation from imperialistic theology and colonialist paradigms that have co-opted the Christian prophetic and missional imaginations.