27. Lived Mission in the 21st Century - Book Review
by Graham Kings
Date added: 03/09/2025
Edited by Benjamin Aldous, Harvey Kwiyani, Peniel Rajkumar and Victoria Turner
Lived Mission in 21st Century Britain: Ecumenical and Postcolonial Perspectives
(London: SCM Press, 2024), 281pp, ISBN: 978-0-334-06553-1, £35, pbk
Review for Theology by Graham Kings
This creatively radical book is ecumenical, prophetic, refreshing, representative and engaging.
It is in three sections. ‘Confessions’ has four chapters from Catholic, Congregational, Anglican, and Orthodox perspectives. ‘Contexts’ has six chapters dealing with Africans evangelising Britain, second-generation Nigerian-British mission, decolonising theology, brokenness in rural Scottish parish churches, asylum seekers, and older people. ‘Consequences’ has five chapters on racial justice, Dalit perspectives on decolonizing love, the 2021 census data, church action on poverty, and migrants rights.
I missed, however, any engagement with the significance, and limitations, of the Alpha Course, which would have been stimulating to discuss.
Let’s begin at the end, the Conclusion, ‘Where Do We Go From Here?’. It reads like a podcast, with one of the editors, Benjamin Aldous (Churches Together in Britain), interviewing two of other three editors, Harvey Kwiyani (CMS) and Peniel Rajkumar (USPG), about the book – almost a sort of inhouse book review - and setting out subjects for future discussion.
It is fascinating that the ‘Godfather’ of this book of postcolonial perspectives emerges here as Kosuke Koyama, the Japanese mission theologian, whose key books were based on his experience of teaching theology in Thailand. Aldous has previously published a fine study on Koyama, The God Who Walks Slowly (SCM Press, 2022).
Rajkumar was particularly struck by James Woodward’s chapter, ‘Befriending the Elderly Stranger: Lived Mission and Older People’, and asks, ‘What do we learn from the small, the slow and the steadfast?’ (p.252) He later states, ‘Education for a just future is something that starts with our children and in our families.’ (p.259)
Kwiyani enjoyed especially the chapter by Anupama Ranawana, ‘Communities of Resistance, Migrant Rights and the Climate Crisis’ and later suggests a focus on ‘Nazareth’ rather then on ‘Rome’. He says, ‘While resource churches have their place, it is possible, or even likely, that a great deal of mission in the UK will be carried out by Christian communities at the margins of society.’ (p.257) His own chapter is ’This is Our Land: Africans Evangelizing in Britain’
The fourth editor is Victoria Turner, (URC mission theologian teaching at Ripon College, Cuddesdon). She conducts a perceptive podcast-style interview with Tom Hackett in the chapter, ‘Witnessing as Mission: Powerlessness as Prophetic Discipleship in the Hostile Environment’. Hackett, the Children’s and Youth Development Officer for the URC Southern Synod, is also a trustee for Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group and describes in bleak detail a typical day in the detention centre.
In their substantial Introduction, Aldous and Turner, lay out the ethos and shape of the book and include an absorbing section which draws on Walter Mignolo’s concept of the ‘epistemology of disobedience’. They apply it to their reflection that the academic study of mission is often removed from its lived practice. In this book, they ‘bring out a rich, messy and polyvalent range of voices’ (p.9) and they want to ‘listen to, amplify, and be rooted and rerouted, by the voices of the Global South who have “moved into the neighbourhood” and planted themselves in the soil of the United Kingdom’. (p.9)
Their section on ‘Epistemology and Indigenous Knowledge’ is intriguing and somewhat contrasts, it seems to me, with Lesslie Newbigin’s ‘retirement’ project of ‘Gospel and Culture’, which is not referenced here. Newbigin also stressed the significance of epistemology but, in its ‘modernity’, seems to be very different from this ‘postmodern’ book. Also, not mentioned here is the work of the Mission Theological Advisory Group (of the Church of England and the Churches Together in Britain and Ireland), which has produced a series of significant books, edited by Anne Richards.
Back to the Conclusion. ‘Where do we go from here?’ was also the title of Martin Luther King’s 1967 address at the Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is quoted by Niall Cooper in Chapter 14, ‘Reimagining Mission from the Margins’. I end with that moving quotation about mission:
Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. (p.228)
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Published orginally in Theology 2025 (July/Aug), Vol 128, Issue 4
