Three Innovators in the Practice of Mission

Abstract

Three people are especially notable as twentieth century innovators in the practice of mission. Lamin Sanneh, a scholar of religions and of mission history, innovated the notion of Christianity’s essential translatability into all the world’s cultures, neither absolutizing any nor stigmatizing any. Lesslie Newbigin, upon retiring from decades of missionary experience in India, challenged the churches of the West to engage in a missionary encounter of the gospel with their own modern Western culture. Dorothy Day pioneered the Catholic Worker movement in the U.S.A., and for almost fifty years produced the monthly Catholic Worker newspaper which grounded the movement in a Catholic spirituality and commitment to peace and justice.