John Corrie sets out three aims for this dictionary: help integrate mission and theology; help give greater understanding in the area of contextualisation; and attempt ‘to chart the contours of evangelical missiology’ (xvi). I will assess the dictionary against those aims.

First, the dictionary does limit itself to mission and theology in a narrow sense: if you compare it to The Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, it is different. For instance, there are no articles on significant missionary leaders or countries. There are detailed articles on topics such as ‘Asian theology’ and ‘sacraments’, and so the dictionary will be useful not just for the missionary, but also for the pastor working in a world where they are increasingly finding that peoples from other cultures are turning up in their congregations. It is worth spending an hour flicking through the dictionary to get an idea of what issues are covered so that if you find yourself talking to someone who comes from a background steeped in Shamanism, you can have a good reference to go to. In this respect it is a useful ‘one-stop’ book for introducing major topics and themes of modern missiology from a broadly evangelical perspective.

Second, the dictionary aims to help with understanding the issue of contextualisation. One aspect of the dictionary, which is particularly noteworthy, is that theologians from the two-thirds’ world have written 60% of the articles. And so the dictionary serves two purposes. First, we can see how these writers are working through their issues of contextualisation. Second, we can see how their insights into various issues enrich our understanding of the truth of the Bible. The dictionary gives a snapshot on these two, which is useful for missionaries seeking to help churches in their work of contextualisation, and for Christians who may benefit from seeing how other cultures deal with theological issues.

Third, the dictionary seeks to ‘chart the contours of evangelical missiology’. Corrie outlines some of the distinctive marks of evangelicalism in his introduction, including ‘a respect for the priority of the Biblical text as the authoritative source of theological and missiological thinking’ (p. xvi). But I wonder how far all the contributors go along with this view of Scripture. For instance, in the article on ‘Christology’, Kang-San Tan reminds us that ‘Christology reconstructed in mission contexts needs both the Scriptures as well as historic Christian communities as boundary markers and conversation partners respectively’ (p. 50). As it stands, this statement seems to put tradition and Scripture on an equal footing, so is this a truly evangelical response to Christology? Or take the article on ‘Contextualisation’: although Musasiwa affirms the authority of Scripture (p. 70), his article does not attempt to examine the limits put on contextualisation by the Bible nor does it give biblical examples of contextualisation. I am not saying that these articles are not useful, but I would like to see more commitment to working out the authority of Scripture for these issues. This contrasts with articles such as ‘The Sovereignty of God’ (pp. 367–69) or ‘Witchcraft’ (pp. 428–30), which are saturated with Scripture and attempt to think biblically about these topics. Evangelicals need to work out their commitment to Scripture by thinking biblically about all the areas of missiology today.

So the dictionary (as with all dictionaries) is a useful starting-point, and as with any book, article, or dictionary, we must assess what the author says by submitting it to Scripture. For as the church continues the great task of taking the gospel to all nations and establishing churches, she must live under and work out the authority of Scripture. Otherwise she will lose her ‘evangelical foundations’ which this dictionary seeks to define and establish.