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.

Lesslie Newbigin daringly reimagined what Christian mission could be.