are the ones growing and showing increasing breadth of vision in their approach to the whole range of contemporary human problems, while the WCC is in decline. Newbigin was a brilliant thinker, a humble servant of the Lord, who did a great deal of street preaching before skeptical crowds, traveled to remote, illiterate villages, spending the night in local homes, conducting services in the open air in his passion to reach the lost. He was never a church bureaucrat. Newbigin's greatest impact came after his retirement. He and his wife settled in Birmingham, UK, where he taught at the Selly Oak missionary training college, and from 1980 to 1988 he served as pastor of a small inner city church. He was shocked by the desperate state of British Christianity. He noted that contemporary Western culture is in the power of false gods, of idols; and that people are seeking salvation through the invocation of all the old gods of power and sex and money. He commented that a ministry in England " is much harder than anything I met in India. There is cold contempt for the Gospel, which is harder to face than opposition. England is a pagan society and the development of a truly missionary encounter with this very tough form of paganism is the greatest intellectual and practical task facing the Church." How can the Church reach paganized Western culture? To answer this question Newbigin wrote a series of books and gave many lectures. His books made