A message for us

A message from David Hesselgrave's Scripture and Strategy: The Use of the Bible in Postmodern Church and Mission for all of us who work to share the gospel and plant churches, especially in our region and our organization:

Let it be crystal clear that this is not written as an indictment of any of these methodologies. Of course, some are superior to others. but all have made important contributions. Some still do and will continue to do so in the future. The weakness revealed by this history is not so much that this or that evangelistic method is mistaken or misguided. The weakness is that this or that method is so readily transmuted into an overall strategy for world evangelization. The weakness is not so much in the method as it is in our penchant for oversimplification and faddishness in embracing one method or partial strategy after another as an 'end-all' strategy. It is that faddishness that has caused church and mission leaders in the Third World to come to the place where they view American proposals and programs with a good deal of suspicion. There is indeed one way of coming to salvation, but there are many ways of contributing to world evangelization. That is the lesson to be learned from the experience of the recent past. (89)

It's not just a problem in the Third World.