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Coming to Know and Follow Jesus

Christianity Rediscovered

Christianity Rediscovered Book Cover Christianity Rediscovered, Vincent J. Donovan, Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY, 1978. ISBN 0-88344-096-2.

From the Introduction: Evangelism is not the most popular subject in the church today, the church of the post-Vatican II era. Conversion, to most people, no longer means "metanoia" [a change of mind]. It means rather proselytism and is a pejorative word. Missionary work, which involves taking the message of Christ to people who do not believe in him, who indeed have never heard of him, thus becomes a distasteful task. Many misgivings, fears, and suspicions revolve around the whole missionary movement and missionary history—the violence done to cultures, customs, and consciousness of peoples, the callousness and narrow-mindedness found in that history. The author of this book was involved in all of that.

I wonder if it would remove some of the misgivings if the reader would understand that that is precisely what this book is about. Suppose you were a missionary and you realized how questionable the whole system was. And yet suppose you believed in Christianity, believed that Christianity had something to say to the world that is pagan—for that is what it is, more than three-quarters pagan. What then? What would you do?

Maybe you would do as we did, begin all over again from the beginning. That means precisely what it says, starting from the beginning, with, perhaps, only one conviction to guide you, a belief that Christianity is of value to the world around it. What it means is a willingness to search honestly for that Christianity and to be open to those pagan cultures; to bring Christianity and paganism together and see what happens, if anything happens; to see what emerges if anything can emerge, without knowing what the end result will be.