The Next Evangelicalism

THE NEXT EVANGELICALISM: FREEING THE CHURCH FROM WESTERN CULTURAL CAPITIVITY . By Soong-Chan Rah . Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press , 2009 . Pp. ix + 229 . $15.00 . Drawing from extensive parish and higher educational experiences, Rah's timely critique of Western evangelicalism highlights the Church's increasing irrelevance in global and domestic contexts. Rah skillfully tackles topics even those regularly engaged in racial reconciliation evade in public settings, and addresses how captivity to White privilege and Western cultural pressures (individualism, consumerism, materialism) have influenced the Church's theology, biblical priorities and interpretation, and ministry strategies. With his interdisciplinary approach (culling data from education, sociology, theology, among others), Rah points to problems manifest in American Christianity—1) the gap between demographic reality and fossilized ecclesiology; 2) majority-culture Christians' unawareness of Western culture's permeation into American Christianity—and looks to marginalized communities for building solutions. Rah's unique argument intersects with his call to mutuality and reciprocity, underscoring the importance of what Western Christianity must learn from immigrant and ethnic minority groups, and from the global South, in order to maintain a vibrancy in the next evangelicalism. His contention goes beyond an ethnic theology for ethnic churches to a more complete Gospel expression for all communities. Missing components include his self-professed “oversight” to address gender captivity, and, excepting brief allusions, the book needs lengthier treatments of the impact of privatization (e.g., Joel Spring, Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality, 2001) on marginalized groups in the American Church and the impact of internalized racism on ethnic-specific churches' resistance to racial reconciliation efforts. Required seminary reading, the book also will attract lay readers and diversity leaders at Christian universities with its explanations of theological terminology throughout

Christianity · Racism · Sociology · Theology · Christian Theology and Mission · Gender Studies · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development · Religious studies