As Lesslie Newbigin stepped off the train in Birmingham in the mid-1970s – briefcase in hand, spine slightly bent from years of pastoral travel in South India – he was expecting an easier time of it than he’d met with in his missionary work. This was, after all, England; this was a Christian country.

The skyline of Birmingham, a city that had once thrived on industry, now looked tired, gasping for breath in a culture that had traded cathedrals for consumerism. The smokestacks were coming down. Congregations were thinning. Churches stood like neglected historical sites, frequented by the loyal, ignored by the masses.

Newbigin was stunned. He had crossed oceans to proclaim Christ among polytheists, Muslims, and Marxists – none of whom shared his worldview, but all of whom cared deeply about questions of truth and salvation. There had been fiery debates. He had thrived. The gospel had thrived. Now he stood in his native land and found that no one was asking those questions. “I suddenly discovered,” he would later write, “that the real mission field is here.”

This was a spiritual crisis – one in which the very category of “truth” had collapsed, and Christianity had been reclassified from a public claim to a private opinion. The gospel had not been rejected because it was found false, but because it was no longer seen as interesting.

Born in 1909 in the Northeast of England, the son of a prosperous Presbyterian family, Newbigin came of age in the long twilight of British Christendom. The seeds of a vibrant faith were planted during his studies at Cambridge, mainly through the Student Christian Movement. There, the gospel took hold of him – not merely as a belief system, but as a summons: “The church,” he would write in Foolishness to the Greeks, “is not meant to call men and women out of the world into a safe religious enclave, but to call them out in order to send them back as agents of God’s kingship.”

After training at Westminster College and freshly married to Helen Henderson – a woman of remarkable strength and intellect – Newbigin set sail for India in 1936 under the auspices of the Church of Scotland. The India that awaited him was a volatile and pluralistic nation. Gandhi’s civil disobedience movement was shaking the colonial order. Hinduism and Islam defined the religious landscape. Though Saint Thomas had, reportedly, established congregations there in the first century, and the Mar Thoma Christians had been an active part of the Oriental Orthodox branch of the church since then, they were comparatively few in number and largely confined to the southern state of Kerala. Christianity, especially its Anglican form, was often regarded with suspicion: Was it truly good news, or merely another instrument of empire?

Newbigin soon discovered that he had not arrived as a politically neutral emissary of truth. He had come as a foreigner, a white man, and – however unintentionally – an agent of a crumbling imperial order. His accent, his training, even his ecclesiology were weighted with cultural freight. And the local villagers made sure he knew it.

A Hindu teacher once asked him with disarming directness, “Why do you think we need your God when we’ve lived for centuries with our own?” In another village, a new Christian convert was violently cast out by his extended family.

This changed his whole approach. We have to preach the gospel, he said, “not as a proposition, not as an argument, but as the story of the world.” Christianity is not something to be given by an enlightened culture to one yet to be enlightened. It is a drama into which every culture is invited, but which also challenges every culture, including the one that carries it.

Newbigin came to change India. But India changed him: from a bearer of Christendom to a witness of Christ, from one who taught the gospel as Western wisdom to one who learned to let the gospel speak for itself in another tongue.

This radical recalibration came to full expression in 1947 – the year India won its independence, and the year Newbigin was consecrated as a bishop in the newly formed Church of South India. As colonial structures were being dismantled, the church was undergoing a parallel reformation. The Church of South India was a declaration that denominational divides imported from the West were no longer tolerable.

Anglicans, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists formed a single body. And Newbigin, now bishop of the Diocese of Madurai Ramnad, set about shepherding a patchwork of congregations that stretched across hundreds of villages. He traveled by train, by bullock cart, and on foot. He sat on mud floors and ate from banana leaves. His theology was not forged in faculty lounges but in prayer meetings, open-air baptisms, and pastoral visits. According to Newbigin, the gospel doesn’t function as an external force thrust upon a society, but rather works organically from the inside, embedding itself within a culture to bring about transformation.

It was in this crucible that one of his most enduring insights emerged: the church itself is the hermeneutic of the gospel. This means that the church is the sign, the instrument, and the foretaste of the kingdom.

When Lesslie Newbigin returned to Britain after four decades in South India, he felt like a missionary entering a new culture – one strangely more resistant to the gospel than the polytheistic and politically volatile India he had left behind. He took up a post at the Winson Green United Reformed Church in Birmingham, a working-class, multiethnic neighborhood reeling from economic decline. Newbigin preached to dwindling congregations, visited the sick, prayed with the marginalized, and engaged in gritty pastoral care.

The apathy he encountered was not benign. It was, in his words, “far more corrosive to faith than opposition.” The prevailing atmosphere was a closed horizon in which religious claims were not debated so much as dismissed.

The gospel doesn’t function as an external force thrust upon a society, but rather works organically from the inside, embedding itself within a culture to bring about transformation.

He started to write and lecture with renewed urgency. In The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), he called the church in the West to reclaim its identity as a missionary community within its own culture. According to Newbigin, the church’s calling is not to present itself as one attractive alternative among numerous possibilities. Instead, its purpose is to give witness to the truth embodied in Jesus Christ.

The West, he claimed, had not become less religious; it had adopted a new set of doctrines, authorities, and moral codes. The Enlightenment, for all its advances, had imposed a new kind of orthodoxy – one in which truth must be scientific, value must be subjective, and faith must be kept private. This wasn’t religious neutrality. It was a worldview with its own absolute claims – only these claims were masquerading as reason.

Newbigin referred to this as the “culture of disbelief.” It was not that Christianity had been rationally discredited. Rather, the plausibility structures of society had shifted so that belief in the gospel now seemed implausible.

Newbigin responded by insisting on what he called “the gospel as public truth.” The Christian claim is not just a private consolation or tribal story. It is a claim about the real world – that in Jesus Christ, God has acted decisively in history to redeem creation. If that is true, it must be spoken and lived publicly – not imposed, but offered with courage, humility, and joy.

Newbigin had no interest in establishing a theocracy. He had seen firsthand in India what happens when religion becomes entwined with political power. What he wanted instead was resurrection-shaped confidence. The church must live in such a way that people begin to wonder, “What kind of story are these people living in?”

At the heart of Newbigin’s epistemology was the resurrection. It was not just a supernatural event; it was the apocalypse – the unveiling of reality, the proclamation of a victory.

Jesus was alive. History had been fundamentally changed. Caesar no longer held the final word. Death was no longer in control. The tomb was empty, and the world would never be the same.

Near the end of his life, Newbigin posed a question that still lingers: Can the West be converted? The answer wasn’t guaranteed. Western culture had become comfortable, self-sufficient, and morally confused. Yet, he also believed in a God who raises the dead.

Conversion, he argued, would not happen through coercion, clever marketing, or nostalgia. It would happen through cruciform love – love that suffers, loves that forgives, love that invites. It would happen when the church stopped trying to be impressive and instead began being faithful.

The church does not need to win. It needs to witness – to demonstrate by its life, its joy, its suffering, its hope – that Jesus Christ is Lord.

This witness won’t always be understood by the surrounding culture. It might provoke hostility or indifference. But if it is genuine – if it is resurrection-shaped – it cannot be ignored forever.

Newbigin died in 1998, just as the Western church was beginning to realize the severity of the crisis he had identified decades earlier. His influence is only growing. Theologians from various traditions – Reformed, Anglican, Anabaptist, Catholic, and Orthodox – have been influenced by his work. Thinkers like N. T. Wright, Timothy Keller, and Stanley Hauerwas have all been shaped by Newbigin’s insights. However, his most significant impact might be felt not in academic settings but in small congregations that have chosen to re-embrace being the church: not glamorous, or powerful, but faithful.

To follow Newbigin’s example is to trust what he trusted: that the gospel is true, that the church is God’s chosen vessel, and that the Spirit is still at work. It is to believe that the tomb really is empty, and that no culture – no matter how disenchanted – is beyond the reach of grace.

Michael Goheen has summarized Newbigin’s description of the church as a community of praise in a world of doubt, a community of truth in a world of ideology, a community of hope in a world of despair. That, surely, is the church the world still needs today.

Not a perfect church. Not a powerful church. But a church worth believing in.

Because Christ is risen, and the world, even now, is being made new.