Mission in the Way of Paul: Biblical Mission in the Church of the Twenty-first Century

Mission in the Way of Paul: Biblical Mission in the Church of the Twenty-first Century. By Christopher R. Little. Studies in Biblical Literature 80. New York, et al.: Peter Lang, 2005. xiii and 345 pages. Cloth. $76.95.

Little has written two books in one--an inner book that summarizes Paul's biblical and theological contribution to mission, and an outer book that assesses Paul's probable view of a raging twenty-first-century missiological issue: the "international partnership movement" sponsored by Western evangelical mission agencies. Adapted from a prize-winning Fuller Seminary dissertation, this complex book helps to clarify some important missiological issues.

The inner book offers a useful and comprehensive but nonoriginal review of existing Pauline studies. Touching on Paul's socioeconomic status and attitudes toward wealth and vocation, we learn of the upper-middle-class status of Paul's parents in Tarsus, able to send their son to a rabbinic boarding school in Jerusalem. Paul's doxological (as opposed to humanistic) motivation for mission is strongly emphasized. The apostle's missionary orthopraxy--his own methodology in cross-cultural mission--is set forth as a norm for biblical mission, though not an exclusive one. Paul frequently reminds readers of his letters to be imitators of himself, even as he strives to deepen his own oneness with the Lord.

The outer book presents the author's argument for a Pauline approach to the practice of world mission in a post-colonial, globalized world characterized by enormous disparities of wealth and resources. Little offers a highly critical assessment of partnership relations between Western mission agencies and their emerging third world partners in a time when both senders and receivers are desperately searching for a new missionary identity. Beginning with the presupposition that biblical mission must be missio Dei, not simply a project of churches as mission agencies, and considering that churches everywhere, both rich and poor, are called to do mission in unity, what is God's will--as far as can be discerned from Pauline orthopraxy--for the multilateral sharing of resources and the redefinition of church-church relationships in the pursuit of missio Dei?

The answer, in short, is that the transfer of money in the form of financial subsidies from wealthy and well-wishing donors to impoverished aid recipients is a formula for spiritual stagnation, a departure from Pauline orthopraxy, and a hindrance to missio Dei.

Little marshals expert testimony and documentary evidence to show that continuous Western funding of third world mission projects (evangelism, church planting, diakonia), even when well intended, is at the very least questionable, probably counterproductive, and certainly in conflict with Pauline orthopraxy. Money leads to hidden control, promotes relationships of dominance and dependence, undermines trust, and encourages mercenary motives on the part of recipients. If the author is right, the dominant strategic pattern for international partnership relationships as currently employed by evangelicals in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union is tragically flawed and violates the integrity of missio Dei. The question then becomes how to reverse a habit of ingrained dependency created by Western affluence.

Evangelicals may have learned from the ecumenical missionary movement, which dealt with similar problems a generation earlier, of the explosive potential that money, power, and decision making introduce into partnership relationships. The "Moratorium" issue of the 1970s might have been highlighted as a predictive sign.

Mission agencies and armchair missiologists will find much to challenge their assumptions in this comprehensive study.

James A. Scherer

Emeritus Professor of Missions

Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

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