Lesslie Newbigin
James Edward Lesslie Newbigin (8 December 1909 – 30 January 1998) in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England to Annie Affleck and Edward R. Newbigin, a shipping merchant. His earliest memories were happy ones, with a caring mother and a devout and politically radical father. He attended a Quaker boarding school called Leighton Park in Reding, Berkshire. By the time he headed to Queen’s College, Cambridge in 1928 he had left his religious upbringing but not dismissed it as irrational. In the summer of 1929, at age 19, while serving the unemployed of South Wales, Lesslie’s sleep was blessed with a vision of the Cross that touched the depths of human misery and offered hope. He was quickly drawn into evangelistic and ecumenical relationships and in 1930, at a Student Christian Movement (SCM) gathering in Stanwick, experienced a call to ordained ministry. On completion of his degree, he moved to Glasgow to work as staff secretary for the SCM. He returned to Cambridge in 1933 to train for ministry at Westminster College and in July 1936 he was ordained by the Presbytery of Edinburgh to work as a Church of Scotland missionary stationed in Madras, India. One month later, he married SCM colleague Helen Henderson, and together they set off for India where they lived for decades and together had one son and three daughters.
Newbigin took quickly to the native Tamil language, and began his work as a village evangelist. He became troubled by the competing denominational missions that often resulted in a separation of converts by caste. He saw this as a public contradiction to the gospel of reconciliation, and a primary obstacle to missionary work. In response, Newbigin became one of the key architects seeking the local organic reunion of the church. On August 15, 1947, India gained its independence from Britain. A month later, on September 27, 1947 the Church of South India was founded, which brought Congregational, Anglican, Methodist and Presbyterian denominations into organic union. That same year, at age 37, Newbigin was elected and consecrated one of the new Church’s first bishops, over Madurai and Ramnad. He served there for 12 years, during which he read what he called the “seminal” works of Roland Allen, and thus became “anxious to win the local village congregations away from a wrong kind of dependence on the mission bungalow.” The “South India miracle” quickly made Newbigin a prominent figure in the growing international ecumenical scene. He was a consultant for the inaugural assembly of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948. Between 1951 and 1953, Newbigin served on the “Committee of Twenty-Five” theologians in preparation for 1954. In fact, he was elected chair of the high-powered committee, which included Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr. It was during this decade that Barth wrote the three ecclesiological paragraphs in his Church Dogmatics and that Newbigin published The Household of God—his most systematic book on ecclesiology. An insider (peritus) at Vatican II claimed Newbigin’s Household of God influenced the writing of Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic statement of the church which stressed its missiological and eschatological nature as a pilgrim people. Many scholars also believe his work laid the foundations for the contemporary missional church movement, and it is said his stature and range is comparable to the "Fathers of the Church |
Quotes
“The community which lives by the faith of the Bible will never fit comfortably into any culture.
-Lesslie Newbigin We have to think globally, act locally, and keep our eyes on him who died that all might live. -Lesslie Newbigin Theology is rightly done in the context of worship and discipleship. -Lesslie Newbigin “Every church, however small and weak, ought to have some share in the task of taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth.” -Lesslie Newbigin “Nostalgia for the past and fear for the future are equally out of place for the Christian.” -Lesslie Newbigin “No room remains empty for long. If God is driven out, the gods come trooping in.” -Lesslie Newbigin “The Church does not exist for the sake of its members; it exists to continue the mission of Jesus." -Lesslie Newbigin “Instead of confronting our culture with the gospel, we are perpetually trying to fit the gospel into our culture.” -Lesslie Newbigin “…the Church is not to be defined by what it is, but by that End to which it moves.” -Lesslie Newbigin “The church lives in the midst of history as a sign, instrument and foretaste of the reign of God.” -Lesslie Newbigin “the action of the eschatologically aware church must be both in the direction of mission and in that of unity, for these are but two aspects of the one work of the Spirit.” -Lesslie Newbigin “Faith working through love is the foundation for justice, and without justice there is no commonwealth." -Lesslie Newbigin “For the church to live out an intimate engagement with the narrative of God’s action in Jesus Christ that shapes its life and thought, it must use personal and communal ways of knowing that reach beyond the merely rational.” -Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1989), 222-23. “We have to make the words of Jesus our constant theme.” -Lesslie Newbigin When the church ceases to be one, or ceases to be missionary, it contradicts its own nature, yet the church is not to be defined by what it is, but by that End to which it moves. And the power of that end now works in the church, the power of the Holy Spirit who is the earnest of the inheritance still to be revealed. To say that the deadlock in the ecumenical debate will be resolved in a perspective which is missionary and eschatological is not true unless it is understood that that perspective means a new obedience to, and a new possession by, the Holy Spirit. It is a perspective inseparable from action, and that action must be both in the direction of mission and in that of unity, for these are the two aspects of the one work of the Spirit. -Leslie Newbigin: ‘The Household of God’, written in 1953 “We are forced to do something that the Western churches have never had to do since the days of their own birth-to discover the form and substance of a missionary church in terms that are valid in a world that has rejected the power and influence of the Western nations. Missions will no longer work along the stream of expanding Western power. They have to learn to go against the stream.” -Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, p. 5. “The Church, wherever it is, is not only Christ’s witness to its own people and nation, but also the home base for a mission to the ends of the earth.” -Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season, p. 2. “The Christian gospel continues to find new victories among the non-Western, premodern cultures of the world, but in the face of this modern Western culture the Church is everywhere in retreat.” -Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season, p. 67. “The real triumphs of the gospel have not been won when the church is strong in a worldly sense; they have been won when the church is faithful in the midst of weakness, contempt, and rejection.” -Lesslie Newbigin, The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission, p. 62. “We have to be endlessly entertained and we have to have idols to fill the empty space from which the living God has been removed. In the end, the society we have is not a secular society but a pagan society in which men and women are giving their allegiance to no-gods.” -Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season, p. 150. “I think that the deepest motive for mission is simply the desire to be with Jesus where he is, on the frontier between the reign of God and the usurped dominion of the devil.” -Lesslie Newbigin, A Word in Season, 129. “We are on pilgrimage, not in permanent quarters. We serve a Lord who for the joy set before him went forward to the Cross, despising the shame. If we would follow him,, we must press on, not slacking, not accepting any concordat with the world, not looking for ease or security, but seeking only to offer him new obedience day by day until he comes.” -Lesslie Newbigin, sermon preached at Riverside Church, May 25 1960, cited in A Word in Season Notably, Christians affirm that the heart of the gospel message transcends culture and language, just as surely as it was originally proclaimed within a particular culture and language. After all, the good news of the gospel is about “the Word made flesh.” Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains the dialogical nature of the gospel as a product of culture and yet as a trans-cultural communication when he suggests: “Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.” -Lesslie Newbigin, Source: Foolishness to the Greeks "When the Church tries to embody the rule of God in the forms of earthly power it may achieve that power, but it is no longer a sign of the kingdom." -Lesslie Newbigin “We do not find Paul concerning himself with the size of churches or with questions about their growth. His primary concern is with their faithfulness, with the integrity of their witness.” -Lesslie Newbigin “In spite of the crimes, blunders, compromises, and errors by which its story has been stained and is stained to this day, the Church is the great reality in comparison with which nations and empires and civilizations are passing phenomena.” -Lesslie Newbigin “For the church to live out an intimate engagement with the narrative of God’s action in Jesus Christ that shapes its life and thought, it must use personal and communal ways of knowing that reach beyond the merely rational.” -Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralistic Society (Grand Rapids:Eerdmans, 1989), 222-23. “Every statement of the gospel in words is conditioned by the culture of which those words are part, and every style of life that claims to embody the truth of the gospel is a culturally conditioned style of life. There can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied.” -Lesslie Newbigin “Jesus did indeed preach the kingdom, but the only thing that made his preaching news was the kingdom was present in himself. Faithfulness to the mission and message of Jesus absolutely required that the early Church should have Jesus as the centre of their gospel. If they had simply preached about the kingdom of God there would have been no gospel. The news is that ‘the kingdom of God’ is no longer merely a theological phrase. There is now a name and a human face. This is why there is a gospel: the reign of God has drawn near, and we can speak of what we have seen and heard and handled.” -Lesslie Newbigin “If we take the Bible in its canonical wholeness, as we must, then it is best understood as history. It is universal, cosmic history. It interprets the entire story of all things from creation to consummation, and the story of the human race within creation, and within the human race the story of the people called by God to be the bearers of the meaning of the whole, and—at the very center—the story of the One in whom God’s purpose was decisively revealed by being decisively effected. It is obviously a different story from the stories that the world tells about itself.” -Lesslie Newbigin “It is there, on Calvary, that the kingdom, the kingly rule of God, won its decisive victory over all the powers that contradict it. The cross is not a defeat reversed by the resurrection; it is a victory proclaimed (to chosen witnesses) by the resurrection. . . . The center of the revealed mystery of the reign of God is the Cross. There the power of God is revealed—but it is revealed as weakness. The glory of God is revealed—but it is revealed as humiliation. The victory of God is revealed—but it is revealed as defeat.” -Lesslie Newbigin “All true vitality in the work of missions depends in the last analysis upon the secret springs of supernatural life which they know who give time to communion with God. All true witness to Christ is the overflowing of a reality too great to be contained. It has its source in a life of adoration and intercession. . . . Any real power that God may give them will come through those secret channels which are in this age, as in every age, the true means of blessing for the world.” -Lesslie Newbigin “If the Church is going to meet and master the forces which are shaping the secular world of our time, she needs to put a far greater proportion of her strength behind the work of the theologians; she needs a theology which is not the mere product of changing moods and fashions but deeply based on Scripture, stated in terms in which the world lives, relevant to the forces which are actually shaping the lives of men. It is not sufficient for the Church to attend to tactics: she must attend first to truth.” -Lesslie Newbigin ‘A bishop is a person who helps the Church to be what Congregationalists say the Church ought to be, but which without a bishop it usually isn’t, …and is a pastor, evangelist, teacher and leader of worship and not as an administrator.’ -Lesslie Newbigin Michael Goheen summarizes the six characteristics in Newbigin’s thought regarding what should be true of this faithful community living in light of the gospel.
Lesslie’s secret, or in fact the open secret under-girding his life, was the reply which he gave when people asked him for his advice on prayer. His answer was: ‘Buy an alarm clock.’ But Lesslie was so focussed and so competent and so sure, not of his own righteousness, but of the righteousness of God and of the Bible, that he seemed to be on another level from the rest of us, which of course, in many ways he was. His prayers and Bible reading took place early in the morning and that was when I think, in his mind at least, he wrote several of his books. |