The Transcultural Gospel

E.D. Burns has taken a massive missiological issue and made it equally accessible to missionary practitioners abroad, church leaders at home, and discerning laypersons. The Transcultural Gospel cuts through the haze of subjectivity in modern missions and presses the non-negotiables of the gospel. In an age where lived experience sits enthroned, this book will restore your delight in gospel truth. And best of all, Burns provides interviews and sample questions for pre-evangelism that will help you to put what you’re learning into practice as you make disciples. Read this book and give it to every missionary you know.

Having recently read E.D. Burns’ excellent book The Missionary-Theologian, I was delighted to hear about his newest work, The Transcultural Gospel, and could not wait to immerse myself into it too. The Great Commission is a spoken mission on a global scale. This commission’s target is the ethnicities of the world, and its message is the contents of all that Jesus taught and incorporates in the sixty-six books of the Bible. Through hard charging yet graceful reasoning, Burns engages readers, regardless of their culture, to conclude that the only way to change the world is by making disciples—men and women who will delight in living for God’s glory alone with, by, and through the timeless-boundless inerrant Word of God. This, too, is the heartbeat of The Master’s Academy International, which is to train indigenous church leaders to be approved pastor-teachers, able to equip their churches to make biblically sound disciples. It is for these reasons that I commend to you The Transcultural Gospel.

In this short and practical book, Burns rightly places contextualization in missions and evangelism within Scriptural bounds by defending the transcultural truth of God’s Word while showing the ways that Scripture itself applies the gospel to the world’s value systems.

E.D. Burns has written a helpful and timely defense of why the Protestant gospel does not need to be changed in order to be received by every tribe, tongue, and nation. Contemporary notions of cultural contextualization have made the gospel into a wax nose that is reshaped to suit the felt needs of a particular people group. Burns understands that even if a missionary or an angel preaches a gospel contrary to what we received in God's transcultural Word, then he is anathema. What you have in your hands is a faithful guide through the shifting sands of sociology and cultural anthropology, which dominate contemporary missiology, and back to the sure bedrock of Scripture alone.

Missions today is loaded with “silver bullet” methodologies that promise much but deliver little. This practical little book reminds us that the clear teaching of the gospel is relevant and powerful throughout the ages and throughout human culture. Aspiring missionaries and pastors will be greatly helped by this book in thinking through the complex issue of contextualization and its implications in cross-cultural ministry.

In an increasingly connected and globally minded world, it is imperative that Christians have a growing fluency in a transcultural gospel. Not only are we sending missionaries to the world but on a daily basis the world is coming to us. As Christians, we are called to engage those who come into our lives as missionaries, whatever field we find ourselves in. Dr. Burns’ book is a field manual for every Christian to understand, formulate, and engage a plan for missions/evangelism that is thoroughly biblical and imminently useful among all people groups the world over. It slices through the confusion of many unique cultural challenges and gets to the heart of the saving Good News and sufficiency of Jesus Christ. As a pastor I find this work to be an invaluable tool to equip the church that I serve, encourage the missionaries we support, and deploy for screening future candidates for ministry and missions. Christians who desire a faithful and thoroughly biblical understanding of presenting the gospel the world over will be blessed by this work.

I am taken by the writing of Dr. Burns. He has the mind of a theologically astute missiologist and the heart of a biblically informed missionary, and he expresses himself winsomely and with precision and clarity. In The Transcultural Gospel, Burns helps us differentiate between primary and secondary gospel paradigms as they relate to all the world’s cultures and values. This feat is not as easy as it may seem. The church is awash with soft evangelicalism that seems to be replacing robust biblical Christianity. And many of the church’s global missions endeavors have suffered mission drift by way of hyper-contextualization, often to the point of diminishing essential doctrines and robbing the gospel of its God-given, Christ-honoring offensiveness. Burns points us to the classic doctrines of Scripture as the unchanging, not-to-be-diminished, core of the transcultural gospel, relevant for all cultures and central for all value systems. He does this in a way that is accessible and that exudes a deep passion and keen concern for God’s global glory. I plan to make this book required reading in my circles of positional influence, and I will strongly recommend it in my circles of personal influence. It’s that good.

If you are thinking and praying about going to the mission field, wait! Do not go until you have read this book! Having been born overseas as a third-generation missionary still living on the field and now working to equip pastors and leaders from all around the world, I can tell you that we do not want a “contextualized” gospel approach to missions. We want a Word-centered, gospel-driven reformation that shamelessly upholds the ancient gospel. This small treasure will help you think through this topic very carefully and better prepare you for what God has entrusted to you.