Christianity Rediscovered was written by Vincent Donovan, a Catholic priest who worked among the Masai people in eastern Africa for 17 years. This book is part memoir, part theology, part missionary education, and all insightful.
There were many things about this book that I really enjoyed. I really enjoyed Donovan’s stories of his days in Masailand. I appreciated his heart for discovering where God was already at work in the Masai people and empowering them to lead. I loved his conclusions as to what the point of Christianity is after is experience in Masailand. But there were two main themes in the book that impacted me.
The first is Donovan’s persistence in allowing the response of the preaching of the Gospel to be firstly a biblical and secondly a Masai response. Not one in which he influenced with his western presuppositions. His teaching of the Gospel is summed up as this on page 63:
Repent, believe, be baptized, witness to Christ is the Spirit until He comes again. This is the response to the Christian message. This is the Church.
Donovan’s encounter with the Masai revealed to him how many culturally generated things we consider to be necessary in being a valid expression of the Church. His belief is that any given culture must be allowed to define for themselves a way of being the Church and following Jesus. He says on page 64:
Institutionalized and structured in a way entirely different from ours, or non-institutionalized, non-structured and non-organized, this response of theirs, as strange as it might seem to us, must be recognized as the church, or we are doing violence to Christianity.
His trust in the Spirits work in people is remarkable and an encouragement. It struck me that God wants His Church to be built even more so than I do and, in many cases, our best move is to let God have more control in His Church than we may feel comfortable with.
The second was Donovan’s conviction that the only true expression of the Church is one where mission is not separate, but a defining feature of what Jesus meant for the Church to be. He says it best himself on page 77:
Mission is the meaning of the Church. The church can exist only insofar as it is in mission, insofar as it participated in the act of Christ, which is mission. the church becomes the mission, the living outreach of God to the world. The church exists only insofar as it carries Christ to the world. the church is only part of the mission, the mission God sending his son to the world. Without this mission, there would be no church. The idea of a church without mission is an absurdity.
Well said.
All in all, I think this book is a great read. He flows from story, to theology, to practicalities very nicely and it makes for a good book. I’ve laid in bed thinking about different things that he said and have been greatly encouraged by it. This book was given to me over 4 years ago and I never read it…It came off my shelf and into my head at a good time.
Other notes:
Christianity Rediscovered was originally published in 1978 and then 25 years later published again.
I got this book in the mail from Amazon.fr two weeks ago and I’ve not been able to stop reading it. Two pages into it I decided to not write in the margins or do the underlining thing because I know that I’ll be reading it again…I wanted to save the graffiti for round two. I am already somewhat anal about books, so I was taking especially good care of this one…Then last week a group of us guys went down to Invalides and played some American football in the rain and mud…this resulted in ruining my quest to keep this book in pristine condition. The rain penetrated my bag and found it’s way to my book. Now the crisp pages of The Forgotten Ways are extra crisp and have a nice wave to them….this book now looks very loved and it’s just the beginning. There are many marks, underlines, drawings of my own (i’ve not seen a book with this many graphs and illustrations in it since my high-school trigonometry book!), and notes to come. 