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Article: Can there be Christianity without church?
- Article from:
- International Bulletin of Missionary Research
- Article date:
- October 1, 2005
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Overseas Ministries Study Center. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Twenty-seven years ago an essay by Paul Hiebert entitled Conversion, Culture, and Cognitive Categories" appeared in the October (1978) issue of the short-lived Gospel in Context: A Dialogue on Contextualization. To conservative missiologists, who had long struggled to articulate an evangelical soteriology that would more adequately reflect both the mercy and the severity of God, Hiebert's article was groundbreaking. It began with the hypothetical case of Papayya, an Indian peasant returning to his village after a grueling day of farming. Joining a small crowd of curiosity seekers, he hears a stranger tell of a new god who appeared on earth in the form of Jesus. Before ...