VULNERABLE MISSION

BOOK REVIEWS
J. D. PAYNE. Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration and Mission.
Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012. 206pp. $10.91.
J. D. Payne serves as the pastor of church multiplication for The Church at Brook Hills
in Birmingham, Alabama. Prior to his current position in Birmingham, Payne was a
domestic missionary with the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist
Convention and an Associate Professor of Church Planting and Evangelism at Southern
Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also directed the Center for North American
Missions and Church Planting.
Payne’s book, Strangers Next Door, has a twofold purpose: (1) to educate Western evangelical
churches on the large-scale global migrations that are taking place as the peoples of
the world move to the West as long-term and short-term workers, students, refugees, and
asylum-seekers (18); and (2) to challenge Western evangelical churches to reach, equip,
partner with, and send the least reached people living in their neighborhoods to return
to their peoples as missionaries (19). Payne’s book is neither a theology of mission nor a
practical guide to missional living, though it includes elements of both. Rather, it is an
impassioned plea and a vision, calling for evangelicals in the West to notice and act on a
unique missional opportunity of the twenty-first century: the presence of migrants from
least reached, unreached, and hard-to-reach people groups in Western countries, living
right next door to us.
After defining his terms and outlining his theological assumptions in chapter one, Payne
uses half of the book to make his case first that migration is occurring in the modern era
on an unprecedented scale (chs. 2, 6, 7, and 8) and second that many of these migrants
are moving from unreached or least reached areas of the world to Western countries (ch.
3), by which he means the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many of
the countries commonly referred to as Western Europe. On both accounts, Payne demonstrates
his claims very persuasively with extensive statistical data. However, with regard
to his second claim, Payne reveals a significant theological bias that obscures much of
his data, namely, he considers people groups comprised of less than 2 percent evangelicals
as unreached. He borrows his definition of evangelicals from the Joshua Project (55),
but based on which countries he labels as unreached, Payne clearly excludes most, if
not all, members of Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and mainline Protestantism,
among others. For example, he lists France, Portugal, and Spain as among the most
unreached countries in the world (60), three countries known for substantial Catholic
populations. Although this bias does not diminish the importance of Payne’s overall thesis
and argument, it does limit the usefulness of the book in determining which countries
and peoples are unreached for one who operates with a more inclusive understanding
of Christianity.
The rest of the book focuses on what Payne calls “diaspora missiology,” which brings
migration research to bear on missiology. In chapters four and five, he demonstrates from
Scripture that God has constantly worked through migrations to accomplish his purposes
in the world. In chapter nine, he shares inspiring stories of people who have acted
on this vision to reach the unreached through migrants. Finally, chapters ten through
twelve offer guidelines and a strategy for accomplishing the task of reaching, equipping,
partnering with, and sending migrants back to their home countries as missionaries to
reach the unreached peoples of the world. Payne suggests helpful missiological insights
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