James R. Krabill, Walter Sawatsky, and Charles E. Van Engen, eds. Evangelical, Ecumenical, and Anabaptist Missiologies in Conversation: Essays in Honor of Wilbert R. Shenk (Mary Knoll: Orbis, 2006), xiv + 336 Pps., $25.00; Chad Mullet Bauman and James R. Krabil, eds. Anabaptist and Mission: A Bibliography 1859–2000 (Elkhart, IN: Mennonite Mission Network, 2002), 249 Pps., $????
James R. Krabill directs the Mennonite Mission Network in Elkhart, Indiana, Walter Sawatsky is director and associate professor of church history and mission at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary, and Charles E. Van Engen is Glasser Professor of Biblical Theology of Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary. Together, they have edited this volume which brings the writings of twenty-six missiologists from nearly every family of mission studies to reflect on how Wilbert R.Shenk has influenced their understanding of missions. Corporately, the various authors in this text are concerned with understanding the role of all Christians in world mission and to overcoming the hostility that has at times characterized relations between Evangelical and Ecumenical Protestantism. Fortunately, they find a model for this in the life and work of Mennonite missiologist Wilbert Shenk.
Following Sawatsky’s biographical introduction to Shenk, the editors organize the volume around five characteristics of Shenk’s ministry: 1) Shenk as mission historian, 2) Shenk as mission theologian, 3) Shenk as churchman, 4) Shenk as concerned regarding Western missions, and 5) Shenk as facilitator of missiological ecumenism. The essays in part one expand Shenk’s emphases on missions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, particularly from a Lukan perspective. The essays in the second part focus on the contextualization of Anabaptist missions, the advocation peace in those missions, and knowing God in multiple contexts, all emphases derived directly or indirectly from the writings of Shenk. The contributions within part three reflect Shenk’s theology of the church, especially as it expands and contacts other faiths, especially churches within Indonesia and other Muslim areas. Part four contains essays that dialog with postmodernism in the West, and how this influences a reconceptualization of the gospel as patrons attempt to re-evangelize the West. Essays within part five take on the task of contextualizing missions in the twenty-first century, particularly in Africa in dialogue with African Independent Churches (AIC’s), which all build upon Shenk’s lifestyle of conversing with and maintaining ties with people of other traditions.
The second volume under review here is a focused bibliography of both primary and secondary sources regarding Anabaptist-Mennonite missions and missionaries in the late nineteenth through the end of the twentieth century. This title includes the nearly four thousand sources originally found in various Anabaptist publications that form a rather comprehensive bibliography. A point of further expansion could be, perhaps, to include resources from outside the North American context, however, which the editors claim that they are in the process of doing.
Taken together, these two volumes show the extent and vibrancy of Anabaptist-Mennonite missions in the world of yesterday and today. I would recommend them to graduate students working in evangelism studies as well as historical theology studies.
Bradford McCall, Regent University, Virginia Beach, VA