An Interview with Dr. Chris Wright

Dr. Chris Wright (Global Ambassador for Langham Partnership) was with us in IBI in March. As well as speaking at a public event, we took the opportunity to ask Chris some questions.

Can you tell us something about your background?

I grew up in Belfast and was very much a Belfast boy. My parents had been missionaries in Brazil before I was born. I'm the youngest of four siblings. I went to Methodist College and grew up in Berry St. Presbyterian in Belfast City Centre. So I grew up with good Bible teaching and was in the Crusader class and the Boys Brigade and all those things.

When did you leave Belfast and why?

I went to Cambridge to do my undergraduate degree and then came back. And by then I'd been going with my wife, my girlfriend as she was then, for a number of years. We got married in 1970 and I was teaching in Grosvenor High School, but wanted to go and do a PhD. So I went back to Cambridge for that. By then we were married, so we basically moved over to England. By then we were having children, so we kind of stayed on there after that. While I was doing my PhD in Old Testament studies, I was nudged by the church we were worshipping at (it was Church of England) to consider ordained ministry. That was why I ended up being ordained in the Anglican Communion through Ridley Hall; I finished my doctorate and was ordained in the same year, 1977. So that's kind of when we moved residentially away from Northern Ireland, but we still have family here in Ireland. 

It was soon after that you served India. Would you tell us about that? 

My wife and I went to India in 1983. That was at the invitation of the Union Biblical Seminary, which is in Pune, in the west of India. That was a fairly large evangelical seminary with about 300 students, most of them in training for either ordained pastoral ministry or for some kind of cross-cultural missionary work within India. I was teaching Old Testament at both BA and MA level. We were there for five years. We had a young family by then. We spent just over five years there. 

Can you tell us what the Langham Partnership is and why it matters? 

The name Langham comes from the street in London, where there's a church called All Souls Church in Langham Place. John Stott was the rector there. And I’d known John Stott personally since about 1978, when I was involved with the National Evangelical Conference on Social Ethics, because my PhD was in Old Testament ethics. John Stott got me involved with some of the biblical side of the studies for that. After we come back from India, John invited me to be one of the trustees of the Evangelical Literature Trust, which he had founded, which was getting books in the hands of pastors in the church of the majority world, in African, Asian, Latin America. So I was familiar with his ministries, and then in the year 2000 he asked if I would take on the leadership of the combination of the literature work that he was doing, and the scholarship work, Langham scholars, because they had combined to become the Langham Partnership, which has now been in existence as an organization since 2001

The Langham Partnership is concerned for the growth of the church outside the West, that is in the Global South Africa, Latin America, Asia, where the church is often growing, as John Stott often described it, in numbers with great evangelistic zeal but sometimes without depth of maturity and pastoral teaching, and biblical scholarship. The Langham Partnership has three “arms.” One is the Langham Scholars, which is offering funding for men and women to do PhDs who then returned to their country and teach in theological education. So it's trying to raise the standards of theological education. Then there's Langham Literature, which is not just providing books, but now facilitating the creation of good evangelical books written contextually by authors and writers in their own country, often in their own language. So Langham was really trying to increase the literature resources of the churches around the world. And then the third ministry program is Langham Preaching, which is trying to initiate movements, national movements, for inculcating the skills and motivation for preaching the Bible. And that's now operating in about 90 different countries around the world and has been going since 2002. So, those three ministries of scholars, literature and preaching combined together within the Langham Partnership and is now working multi nationally, and not just with the Anglican Church but with many different churches around the world. 

Would you say that the need now is as great now as it was 20 years ago? Or is it changed slightly? 

Both, in the sense that the need is still great. That is, there are still many parts of the world where the churches are what you might call spiritually very alive, but lacking in the kind of resources that we take for granted in the West, such as books and seminars and seminaries and teaching and training. And so, yes, there is a great material difference often between churches in the West and churches in the majority world. But having said that, I think the need in some ways, spiritually speaking, is almost reversed in that the church in the West, in some parts, certainly in Europe, and even in North America, are often either in decline, or they are spiritually struggling with issues of syncretism and idolatry and all the challenges of the Western church. And in many ways, the life and the vigour and now, increasingly, the theological depth of the global church is coming from the majority world, from the global south where are some very fine, mature, experienced African and Asian Latin American scholars, writers, theologians. One of the things that Lanham seeks to do is to give them voice, not just voice in their own context, but to enable their voice to be heard in the Western Church. So, for the last 10 years or so Langham has been publishing majority word authors and enabling their books to be known and received and read in the West, in western theological colleges and seminaries, so that we recognize there is a global church. So yes, there's a material need there, but there is a spiritual need here. I think there's something quite biblical about being able to be reciprocal in that way and to recognize that we need one another. Langham sees itself very much as a conduit or a vehicle by which the voice and the life and the theology of the majority world church can help to refresh and revive, in many cases, the Western Church. 

Your role in Langham has given you some unique insight into the church worldwide. Are there particular things that we in the Western church can learn from the Church in the majority world? 

Yes, I think we have a lot to learn from one another. I think one of the things that you see when you go to the churches in the global south is that they have learned how to suffer with joy, which is a New Testament concept. It's exactly what you read in 1st Peter and Paul's letters. And in many cases, these are churches that exist where Christians are not the majority. And so they're living either with overt persecution, or as a minority community with misunderstanding and a degree of ostracism and inferiority. In many ways, they have learned through the generations to live with the expectation that suffering is a normal part of Christian experience. And in the West, we've got so used to Christianity being a comfortable add-on to an otherwise pretty unchanged lifestyle. People may think, oh, you're a Christian, well, that's interesting, but not particularly threatening in any way to society, although that's beginning to change. I think as Western culture becomes more and more not just un-Christian, but sometimes quite anti-Christian in the public sphere, where to be a Christian is almost now a disqualification for some forms of public service, or where Christians lose their job because they offered to pray for someone, I think we may have to learn, well, others have lived with that for a long time.

I think also that the church in the majority world often exist within cultures which have not yet been poisoned by the kind of functional atheism of Western post-enlightenment, humanistic culture where God is pretty well irrelevant in the public arena. And so they are in cultures where there is still, as it were, a ‘god box’ in the public mind, even if it's not what we might call the God who is worshipped by Christians, the God of the Bible, but there is an awareness of the transcendent and an awareness of the supernatural. And so Christians in the majority world believe that God is God, and God works miracles, and God is powerful, and God can overcome all sorts of things. There is a much more direct experience of the power of God, which we've often lost in the West. And sometimes they come to our western cultures and they bring that with them and we get a bit shocked and surprised at the things they do. And some of them may be a bit off beam, and you may get a bit concerned. But nevertheless, it comes from people who have actually learned to believe in the power of the living God. And there's something very refreshing about that, which we may need to learn from as well, and to recapture that sense of the truth of the gospel, and the power of the gospel, to change people's lives and to impact culture in a way which we've somewhat lost. 

Chris, why does theological education matter? 

I think the importance of a place like IBI, as of any institute of theological education, lies within the Great Commission, where Jesus says, Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and Son of the Holy Spirit. So that presupposes evangelism, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. So the teaching function of the church is a mission or function, it's part of the missionary role of the church is to teach the truth and to teach people to understand the gospel and to grow in the knowledge of God, which Paul prays for the Colossian church when he says, I pray, that your minds, your hearts to be opened, you understand the will and plan of God, and that you're growing in the knowledge of God. And a church that is not growing in knowledge as well as growing in numbers will eventually shrink again, because they've got nothing really to offer to the world if there's no depth of understanding of the Bible, of the story that we're in, or the truth of the gospel, and why Christian theology actually matters. So that's the first thing I'd say that it is a theological education is part of the Great Commission. It's not extra, it's actually part.

I think the second thing I'd say is that the Bible as a whole tells us that the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength. And the word heart in Hebrew, which in the New Testament becomes the word mind, means that we are called to love God with our minds. So we should be able to think for God as well as pray and evangelize and do everything else. And interestingly, the apostle Paul says that he engages in spiritual warfare, that's the language he uses in Corinthians. But what does he mean by spiritual warfare, he says, we are taking captive every thought for Christ. It's an intellectual warfare, for which I don't mean, academic in some obscure sense. But we need to recognize that, as Christians, we live within the Bible story of the God who is the creator, the reality of the fall and sin, the story of redemption and the future hope of new creation -  and that is a different story from the story of our Western culture, which for the last 300 years has been dominated by the myth of human progress, of science and technology being the answer to everything and that we as human beings can solve our own problems. And so God becomes functionally unnecessary and redundant in the public arena. Now, that whole worldview is a different story. It's, in a sense, idolatrous, because it exalts human reason and human power to be God. And so it is important that people in a theological institution like IBI are not only taught as it were to believe the Bible as if that is something that you just add on to your culture, but to believe the Bible as that which enables you to recognize the idolatry of our culture, to understand your culture from within, to realize what is there and to realize that the gospel needs to confront that culture, to recognize what is good and positive, because science and technology come from God, they're God's good gifts. So you acknowledge God's presence within the culture, but you also learn to discern what is of the evil one, what is idolatrous, what is anti the gospel, and then to be able to relate the gospel intelligently to people who think like that, and say, well, this is how we think. And so the importance of theological education is very, very important, I think, for the church, to be able to do what Paul says, to engage in that spiritual warfare of the mind and the heart. This is not to suggest that people are converted simply by being convinced in their heads because God has to change the hearts as well. But we need to go for both. And so we need Christians who are able to think through the gospel and present it in a way which will then be understood and relate to the culture that people are in. So theological education is missional; it's engaging culture. And I think it's crucially important that we give it the attention and the resources and the encouragement that it needs.