Wilbert R. Shenk Boeken

What is mission and what are the distinctives of the church in mission? As we look at the twenty-first century church continuing the mission for which it was commissioned by its Lord, a conference designed to pick up and learn from the vision for mission of the 16th century Anabaptist movement was held at the International Baptist Theological Seminary, Prague, Czech Republic. Participants from the current free church tradition studied many models for contextualized mission and the strategies and implementations which were tested in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the goal of discovering what has been done so they could ponder what could be learned from the past. The recent history and presence of Anabaptists, to which tradition many evangelicals claim to belong, was carefully studied. Cases were presented in order to find answers for how the church of this post modern world can and should continue to participate in the mission of God.

Shenk contends that the engagement of the church with modern Western culture resulted in the marginalization of Christian faith and the undermining of the church's integrity. He maintains that when the church of the West is renewed, it will be a church of integrity and a clear sense of mission to its own culture.