Pensees: “Stay Fundamental”

“Stay Fundamental”

“Stay fundamental.” (Elderly missions statesman)

“We certainly will.” (Young fundamentalist pastor)

Thus went the final words of a short exchange between Dr. David Hesselgrave and me at the close of a panel interview in which our guest missionaries, Tim Bixby and Daniel Arnold, participated.

The eighty-three year old David Hesselgrave knows a lot of people and has seen a lot of things in the past sixty years of American Evangelicalism. During the height of his career he was one of Evangelicalism’s leading missiologists. He is still highly regarded by missiologists and though he has been retired for some time, he is still writing.

A few months ago, Dr. Hesselgrave visited our church for a missions conference. We had him on our platform with several other missionaries so that we could pepper him with questions about missions.

Toward the end of the conversation, I said, “Dr. Hesselgrave, we are a fundamentalist church. We fundamentalists get beat up all the time about what we have done wrong and I myself beat up fundamentalism from time to time, but I would like to hear you tell us what we have done that’s right.”

After a short excursus on translating for Bob Jones, Sr. back in the 1950s, Dr. Hesselgrave said that it was fundamentalists who saw the error of the World Missionary Conference in 1910 and formed an official response to it which led up to the publication of the famous Fundamentals. They were right, he said. Then looking directly at our congregation he said simply, “Stay fundamental.”

Several private conversations with this godly man have been very encouraging. He’s a realist. Much of fundamentalism is bizarre. We know that. He is very well acquainted with the anti-intellectualism, legalistic pettifogging, and sectarian chest-beating that is prominent in baptist fundamentalism. He hates it, and I can’t blame him. Yet he has told me on several occasions that he has more in common with many fundamentalists than he does most evangelicals. In other words, he thinks the fundamentals of the faith are exclusive. Fundamentalists have always thought so. “It’s ironic,’ he writes, “that while the term ‘fundamentalist’ is often used pejoratively, Scripture makes it abundantly clear that the future of church and mission belongs to those who hold to the ‘fundamentals of the faith’ whatever their organizational and ecclesiastical ties might be!”

That’s pretty clear: the future of church and missions belongs to those who hold the fundamentals of the faith.

Fundamentalists have been saying that for about a hundred years now.

2010 is coming up and for a historian of missions this is a big deal. Actually, 2010 is going to be a big deal for a lot of people interested in missions. It will mark the 100 year anniversary of the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910. Everybody is talking about it. Even people within the emerging church are planning on “celebrating” one hundred years of evangelical missions and discussing better ways to do missions in a post-christian, post-modern world. Gives me the heebiejeebies just thinking about it.

Anyway, Dr. Hesselgrave has written a paper that is going to be read and discussed in some of these meetings. It’s a simple paper. Nothing fancy. The significance is really that one of the century’s leading missiologist has written it. And, more significantly, he’s not celebrating.

Actually, Hesselgrave thinks Edinburgh 1910 was a terrible mistake. Sometimes the understatement is hilarious. Says the venerable missiologist of the 1910 Conference, “Nevertheless, speaking generally, I believe that only on very rare occasions and with more precautions than were evident in 1910 do representatives of mission agencies have the prerogative of ruling divine revelation out of order in order to pursue their own objectives, however noble. And in my estimation Edinburgh 1910 was not one of those occasions.”

Yes, sir. We get the point. (And we agree.)

One consequence of Edinburgh 1910 that Hesselgrave is unhappy with is the indecisiveness of what missions actually is. “If the ‘ecumenical perspective’ on missions were to be boiled down to a single sentence it might well be, ‘Missions is everything the church does in the world,’ or the more nuanced, ‘Missions is everything the church is sent to do in the world.’ But both definitions run afoul of Stephen Neill’s oft-quoted dictum, ‘When missions is everything, missions is nothing.’”

Read the paper. And pass it on.

Download this PAPER.