Andrew Walls (1928–2021) stood at the forefront of evangelical and general Christian missiological studies in the period 1970–2020. English by birth and Oxford-educated, his academic associations variously linked him with Tyndale House, Cambridge (where he was briefly a librarian), two African universities (where he functioned in theology and religious studies), and eventually the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh (where he began as a historian of the early Church and then focused on the history of the missionary spread of the Gospel). Initially trained in patristics, Walls was versatile enough to contribute to the volume on 1 Peter in the original Tyndale series of NT commentaries (1959). (Editor’s note: Andrew Walls was also the first editor of Themelios in 1962). Identifying early with the student work of the InterVarsity Fellowship, over time, Walls, the broad evangelical, became a mentor to a much wider range of Christians in the global church.

Walls was remarkably productive over more than half a century, lecturing (as well as writing) well into his retirement years, in which he was associated with Liverpool Hope University. The volume under review, kindly edited by Brian Stanley (eventual successor to Walls at Edinburgh), consists of lectures given at intervals in Ghana, New York, and New Haven, Connecticut, from 2005 to 2008. The redacting of these, from manuscripts and recordings, has clearly been a work of tribute.

The reader takes up this book already aware of certain broad realities. There has been a notable decline since 1970 in the sending of foreign missionaries from Western lands; in the same period, there has been a corresponding increase in the sending of foreign missionaries from countries not long ago looked on as mission fields. We have come to accept the slogan that “mission is from everywhere to everywhere.” But what is the broader picture frame within which developments like these fit?

Those who have encountered Walls’s writings beforehand, notably The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996), will find clear continuities between Walls as they have already understood him, and this 2023 volume. Briefly stated, Walls’s perspective is that missionary initiative from the Western world crested some decades ago in the cascading effect of the end of the European domination of the globe post-1945. Missionary effort from the West was not simply the child of this European domination, which began in the age of Da Gama and Columbus; in fact, in the initial stages, some European powers, such as Britain, obstructed missionary effort. We know not only from Walls but also from others that the missionary enterprise, originally largely dependent on recruits from the artisan classes, had an increasingly troubled relationship with this European (and eventually American) imperial expansion. Were missionaries in developing countries there as representatives of Christ or of their homelands, from which many other representatives lived in ways that contradicted the gospel? Slavery and land seizures epitomized this conflict of interest.

This new volume, The Missionary Movement from the West, improves on this platform by the use of a clever literary device, namely, the narrating of the story of Western missions as if it were the biography of a single life lived over a 500-year period. This is to say that mission as we have known it experienced birth, youth, middle age, and also the decline that comes with old age. This literary device has a clear advantage. It allows Walls, the storyteller, to show that there were previous missionary “lives” or phases of the missionary story that came well before the era of European expansion, which has dominated the last half-millennium.

These earlier missionary “lives” have all expired, only to be succeeded by others. The fall of Jerusalem brought one expiry; later expiries came with the barbarian conquest of Rome from the north, then the eventual military spread of Islam and the intermittent Chinese hostility toward foreigners. After each civilizational upheaval, a new missionary initiative followed. Missionary effort from the Western world—which began in the era of European transoceanic discovery—is now giving way to missionary effort emerging from indigenized Christian movements planted by Western initiative.

It is a significant part of Walls’s narrative that the Christianity of Western Europe, which arose after previous disarray, accepted the trade-offs that followed from the embrace of the idea of Christendom—a civilization or territory outwardly and structurally Christian which all the while did not require that Christianity be lived out wholeheartedly. In Walls’s estimation, Christian missionary efforts during the last 500 years have mistakenly sought to reproduce this kind of Christendom abroad. Not until the late nineteenth-century rise of a more culturally pessimist missionary force (associated with a surging premillennialism) was this outlook seriously questioned.

The non-European reader may be taken aback by Walls’s rather stark post-mortem approach. He makes abundantly plain that in Western Europe, the missionary cause is already very far gone because the church itself is wasting away. He provides painful examples from the UK of this malaise (pp. 22–24). The need is no longer for the revival of the church but for the fresh planting of it. And the missionary force most likely to accomplish this is one—arising in the developing world—which represents the next missionary “life.” And by the mass migrations of population in our time into both Western Europe and North America, there are already the seeds of this next missionary cycle, as many migrants are bringing their Christian faith with them.

Does Walls’s stark portrayal of things in Western Europe perfectly correspond to what we see elsewhere? In the USA (for example), there is ample evidence that large evangelical denominations are far from scaling down large foreign missionary commitments. But his general point remains: the missionary movement from the West is no longer as central as it once was; it has been too inextricably linked to the Western domination of the world, and the Western domination of the world crested in the WW2 era. Already by 1938, the Indian Tamburan meeting of the International Missionary Council (ch. 12) made plain that the churches in the developing world of Asia and Africa had a momentum of their own which had hitherto not been properly recognized.

The Missionary Movement from the West is not a pessimistic work. Looking into the future, Walls foresaw a vigorous Christianity in the developing world already undertaking world evangelization and the production of newer theology free from some of the cultural trappings that had encumbered the Christian faith as taught to them. Here is a stimulating book, a disturbing book, a forward-looking book that is worthy of a wide readership by Christian leaders, missiologists, and all concerned for world evangelization.