You can think of Lesslie Newbigin as the granddaddy of missional church thinking. People like Darrell L. Guder and the members of The Gospel and Our Culture Network have built on his foundation. After spending decades working as a missionary to contextualize the gospel in India, he returned to the UK to find that the gospel needed just as much contextualization at home where pluralism and secularization had supplanted the cozy idea of a Christian nation.

The Gospel in a Pluralist Society is an edited series of lectures Newbigin gave at Glasgow University in 1988. Despite being over three decades old, his analysis of pluralism in Western society is still incisive. He builds on Alasdair MacIntyre’s ethics, emphasizing how the gospel creates a new “plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel” (9).

It is this new plausibility structure that enables Christianity to flourish within a pluralistic society (with pluralism carefully defined). Newbigin exposes the secular society with its supposed neutrality for what it is: a new form of paganism where people “worship gods which are not God” (220).

With their origin as lectures, the twenty chapters in The Gospel in a Pluralist Society provide perspectives into Western pluralism and the challenge of the gospel. For people in the missional discourse, this work is a foundational resource.

Newbigin, Lesslie. The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. Eerdmans, 1989.