Crossover Preaching: Intercultural-Improvisational Homiletics in Conversation with Gardner C. Taylor (Strategic Initiatives in Evangelical Theology)

by Jared E. Alcántara

“The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith.”6 In the world that Belloc inhabited, the church’s destiny was bound together with the destiny of Europe.

Eight years earlier, in 1885, the American reformer and clergyman Josiah Strong declared, “It is fully in the hands of the Christians of the United States, during the next fifteen or twenty years, to hasten or retard the coming of Christ’s kingdom in the world by hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years.”

Then, in 1910, during the closing address of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference, an event dedicated to the evangelization of the non-Western world within the century, John R. Mott, the chairman of the convention, proclaimed: “The end of the Conference is the beginning of the conquest. . . . The end of the planning is the beginning of the doing.”9 A prevailing sense of excitement was in the air.

In some corners of Europe, for example, church attendance is at record lows. In the United Kingdom, where weekly church attendance stood at around 50 percent in the mid-nineteenth century, church attendance in 2005 hovered at around 6.5 percent.