For

Paula, Tabor, Nathan, and Rebecca

 American Society of Missiology Series, No. 49

COMPREHENDING MISSION
The Questions, Methods, Themes,
Problems, and Prospects of Missiology
Stanley H. Skreslet
Cover illustration: Codex Sierra, initial page for the year 1551 C.E. Economics, politics, intercultural
encounters, and matters of theology are all evident in this remarkable document, which records the
purchase of expensive vestments and other European goods for a mission church on Spain's colonial
frontier. More contextually, the account book uses traditional pictographs, an indigenous language
(Nahuatl) for an alphabetic text, and a vigesimal Mixtec system of numbering to describe the various
sacred and secular items acquired for the community or payments made for services rendered on its
behalf between 1550 and 1564. From N[icolas] León, ed. and trans., Códice Sierra ([Mexico] Poulat,
Litografió, 1906). Public domain.
Founded in 1970, Orbis Books endeavors to publish works that enlighten the mind, nourish the spirit,
and challenge the conscience. The publishing arm of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Orbis seeks to
explore the global dimensions of the Christian faith and mission, to invite dialogue with diverse cultures
and religious traditions, and to serve the cause of reconciliation and peace. The books published reflect
the views of their authors and do not represent the official position of the Maryknoll Society. To learn
more about Maryknoll and Orbis Books, please visit our website at www.maryknollsociety.org.
Copyright © 2012 by Stanley H. Skreslet
Published by Orbis Books, Box 302, Maryknoll, NY 10545-0302.
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Queries regarding rights and permissions should be addressed to:
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Skreslet, Stanley H.
Comprehending mission : the questions, methods, themes, problems, and prospects of missiology /
Stanley H. Skreslet.
p. cm. — (American Society of Missiology series ; no. 49)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-57075-959-8 (pbk.)
EISBN 978-1-60833-118-5
Missions-Theory. I. Title.
BV2063.S56 2012
266.001—dc23 2011036387
 Contents
Preface to the American Society of Missiology Series
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
1. Who Studies Christian Mission, and Why?
Missiology and Training Courses
To Missiology via Theology of Mission
A Dynamic and Expansive Field of Study
Missiology Redefined
Objectives and Approach of This Book
Style Points
2. Bible and Mission
Mission in the Bible
Biblical Resources for Theology of Mission
The Mission of God
Reconciliation
Universalism
The Bible in Mission
Translations
The Principle of Translatability
Vernacularization and Empowerment
3. History of Mission
Luke the Historian
Ecclesiastical History
Hagiography
Early Modern Ethnography
Historical Missionswissenschaft
Critical Ethnography
 Current Trends in Research
Missions and Imperialism
The Spread of Western Science
Gender Studies and Mission Research
Forward in Mission History
4. Theology, Mission, Culture
Theology and the Study of Mission
Salvation
Ecclesiology
Some Attempts to Relocate Mission Theologically
Social Science and the Study of Mission
Linguistics
Cultural Analysis
Religious and Cultural Change
Gospel and Culture
Christology and Mission Theology
From Incarnation to Contextualization
The Study of Contextualization
Intercultural Theology
Theology, Mission, Culture
5. Christian Mission in a World of Religions
Other Faith and the Apostolic Church
Mission and the Religions
Premodern Attitudes and Practices
Nineteenth-century Trends
Developments since Edinburgh
Three Special Topics: Judaism, Islam, and the Religions of Africa
Comparative Missiology
6. The Means of Mission
 Tactics and Strategies
Methods and Modes of Mission
Social Transformation
Healing
Communicating the Word
Dialogue
Organizational Structures for Mission
Financing Mission Endeavors
Missiology and the Practice of Mission
7. Missionary Vocation
The Profession of Mission
Research on Candidate Screening
Training, Pastoral Care, and Crisis Intervention
Recruitment
Spirituality
Celtic, Franciscan, and Ignatian Spiritualities
Pilgrimage
Spiritual Warfare
Hospitality
Vulnerability
Depicting the Missionary
In History Writing
Biography
Fiction
Film
Missiology Reconfigured
Works Cited
The American Society of Missiology Series
 Preface to the American Society
of Missiology Series
The purpose of the ASM (American Society of Missiology) Series is to
publish—without regard for disciplinary, national, or denominational
boundaries—scholarly works of high quality and wide interest on
missiological themes from the entire spectrum of scholarly pursuits relevant
to Christian mission, which is always the focus of books in the Series.
By mission is meant the effort to effect passage over the boundary between
faith in Jesus Christ and its absence. In this understanding of mission, the
basic functions of Christian proclamation, dialogue, witness, service, worship,
liberation, and nurture are of special concern. And in that context questions
arise, including, How does the transition from one cultural context to another
influence the shape and interaction between these dynamic functions,
especially in regard to the cultural and religious plurality that constitute the
global context of Christian life and mission?
The promotion of scholarly dialogue among missiologists, and among
missiologists and scholars in other fields of inquiry, may involve the
publication of views that some missiologists cannot accept, and with which
members of the Editorial Committee themselves do not agree. Manuscripts
published in the Series, accordingly, reflect the opinions of their authors and
are not understood to represent the position of the American Society of
Missiology or of the Editorial Committee. Selection is guided by such criteria
as intrinsic worth, readability, coherence, and accessibility to a range of
interested persons and not merely to experts or specialists.
The ASM Series, in collaboration with Orbis Books, seeks to publish
scholarly works of high merit and wide interest on numerous aspects of
missiology—the scholarly study of mission. Able presentations on new and
creative approaches to the practice and understanding of mission will receive
close attention.
The ASM Series Committee
JONATHAN J. BONK
ANGELYN DRIES, O.S.F.
SCOTT W. SUNQUIST
 Acknowledgments
This project began indirectly with an unexpected invitation from editor
Jonathan Bonk in 2001 to survey ten years of dissertation research in English
on mission for the readers of the International Bulletin of Missionary
Research. At the time, I had other thoughts in mind about the direction my
future research should take, but the topic of missiology as a distinctive field
of study proved to be irresistible. Nearly a decade later, the idea-seed planted
so long ago has at last come to fruition. For the initial prompting that came
my way via the Overseas Ministries Study Center and its much-appreciated
journal, I am thankful.
No one could ask for better research support than that provided by the
superb collection of the William Smith Morton Library at Union Presbyterian
Seminary and the Morton Library's expert professional staff. Librarians Pam
Wells, Lisa Janes, and Rachel Perky in particular have come to my aid
countless times when I needed to locate and obtain books and articles not in
our collection. Without their assistance, invariably offered with a word of
encouragement, the finish line for this project would no doubt still lie
somewhere over the horizon.
Gratefully, I have also received other forms of institutional and collegial
support over the past few years that have most certainly helped to improve my
work and to speed its progress. I am indebted especially to the trustees of
Union Presbyterian Seminary for their willingness to grant me a sabbatical
leave that extended through the 2009–10 academic year. Without the
provision of this uniquely precious time for writing and specialized research, I
would not have been able to finish this book. On two occasions, colleagues on
the UPSem faculty read and graciously responded to draft chapters of the
manuscript. Those discussions over lunch were rich moments of critique,
challenge, and informed engagement with a number of the most important
ideas to be presented in the pages that follow. I remain deeply grateful, too,
for the consistent encouragement I have received from several past and
current administrators at Union Presbyterian Seminary, including most
particularly Louis B. Weeks, John T. Carroll, and Brian K. Blount.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge the many ways that Paula Skreslet has
contributed to this volume: as an expert librarian, a keen-eyed copy editor, an
experienced missionary, and a supportive spouse whose enthusiasm for this
project never flagged. It is to her and our now-grown triplets—each of whom
has been and continues to be an inspiration to us both—that this book is
dedicated.
 Abbreviations
1–2 Apol Justin Martyr. First and Second Apologies
ABCFM American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
BZNW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche
Wissenschaft
CARA Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown
University
CIM China Inland Mission
Civ Augustine. Concerning the City of God against the Pagans
(de civitate Dei)
CMS Church Mission(ary) Society
Diog Epistle to Diognetus
EH Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Ep Pliny the Younger. Letters
ER Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd ed. 2005)
HE Eusebius. The Ecclesiastical History
IBMR International Bulletin of Missionary Research
IIMO Interuniversitair Instituut voor Missiologie en Oecumenica,
Utrecht
IMC International Missionary Council
IRM International Review of Mission(s)
LMS London Missionary Society
NS New series
QD Quaestiones disputatae
RPP Religion Past and Present
SNTSMS Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series
SVM Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions
UMCA Universities' Mission to Central Africa
WCC World Council of Churches
WUNT Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament
 1
Who Studies Christian Mission,
and Why?
The purpose of this book is to introduce the field of missiology. At first
glance that might appear to be a dry task with little promise of relevance for
today, especially for those Western Christians whose churches now largely
disavow the missionary agendas of their nineteenth-century forebears. Indeed,
just thirty-five or forty years ago, it was widely believed that academic
missiology had seen its day. As Gerald Anderson (1996, 23) has observed on
more than one occasion, the field was perceived to be in “serious decline” in
the early 1970s. Theological faculties were losing interest in the subject. In
some cases, professorships were simply left unfilled. At many more
institutions, chairs of mission studies were reoriented and then connected to
more politically correct areas of the curriculum, such as ecumenical theology,
comparative religion, third world theology, intercultural theology, or world
Christianity.
In part, a need for serious reevaluation had been prompted by the closing of
the modern colonial era, which eventually removed from the scene a number
of state actors that had lent varying degrees of support to churches and
mission societies through the first half of the twentieth century. For some, this
geopolitical development was taken to mean the beginning of the end of
organized efforts to evangelize the world in the name of Jesus Christ. The
explosive growth of secularism in the West at about the same time created an
expectation on the part of some that most if not all forms of religion would
likewise soon be marginalized. Further, a new awareness of the reality of
cultural pluralism within a shrinking “global village” led to an emphasis on
dialogue and other attempts to promote mutual understanding across the
boundaries of religious difference. In this situation, the idea of mission could
appear to be obsolete, if not an outright threat to world peace. And so, as the
missionary impulse faded in many of the churches that had led the way in
world mission from the late eighteenth century (especially among
Protestants), the desire to study mission in those same quarters withered for a
season.
We now know, of course, that Christian mission did not disappear. Over the
last third of the twentieth century, the number of cross-cultural missionaries
seems actually to have grown. Decisions to downsize some longstanding
mission programs were more than offset by new or expanded efforts
undertaken by other Western organizations (Coote 1995). A shift to shorter
terms of service similarly tended to boost the aggregate number of
participants in world mission. Over the same period, a growing number of
churches outside the West began to respond with vigor to their own sense of
call to intercultural forms of mission, pursued on an increasingly global scale
(Jaffarian 2004). Many of these have been Pentecostal. Some of the largest
are Korean, but no one nationality or regional identity dominates this latest
surge of mission energy.
The astonishing and quite unexpected vitality that now marks Christian
mission worldwide invites scholarly attention. The diversity of world
Christianity brought into being over the past few centuries through modern
missions ensures an inherently interesting journey for those drawn to study
this phenomenon. It will no longer do to confine oneself to a Western point of
view or to assume that the decisions of a few North Atlantic Protestant
mission agencies and the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church could
define the universe of present and future possibility for Christian mission. At
the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is impossible to ignore the fact
that the reality of mission is exceedingly complex, with concealed social
processes, political consequences, and complicated organizational dynamics,
among many other factors, complementing matters of theology. An accurate
description of the field of missiology as currently practiced will need to
reflect the highly variegated nature of its subject matter.
MISSIOLOGY AND TRAINING COURSES
Before describing the approach to missiology to be taken here, it may prove
helpful to the reader to have some idea about how others have approached this
subject area. Introductions to missiology written since the 1960s have
generally fallen into two categories, by no means mutually exclusive. One
route to our subject has been curricular in nature. That is to say, a number of
introductions to the field of missiology were developed in connection with
particular courses of study or training programs.
Perhaps the most widely used introduction of this type is the Perspectives
reader and study guide developed by the Institute of International Studies in
cooperation with the U.S. Center for World Mission, both based in Pasadena,
California. Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, now in its third
edition, anchors an elaborate ongoing study program in which tens of
thousands of students in a hundred or more locations have participated
already, primarily in the United States. Senior editor Ralph Winter has
affirmed that the Perspectives course is “essentially” an introduction to
missiology (Winter 1996, 171), despite a statement in the reader itself that
appears to say otherwise (Winter and Hawthorne 1981, xiv).
 In terms of approach, Winter and Hawthorne have chosen to divide their
collection of readings into four “perspectives” on mission: biblical, historical,
cultural, and strategic. This last subject area, by far the largest of the four
sections, is the capstone for the whole and provides a key to the ultimate
purposes of the text. As Winter has indicated elsewhere (1996), the
Perspectives course is aimed at lay volunteers and seeks to enlist them in the
task of world evangelization, which is described above all as a matter of
frontier evangelism among “unreached” people groups. A review of the
materials selected for inclusion in the reader leaves one in no doubt that the
editors have worked almost exclusively from within a conservative
evangelical worldview, albeit on a global scale.
Another example of a basic course book is Following Christ in Mission
(Karotemprel 1996). This set of essays is presented as a “foundational course”
in missiology for Roman Catholic seminarians, religious sisters, institutes of
consecrated life, missionary institutes, and Catholic laypersons already
engaged in some form of mission work. An international team of editors and
contributors headed by Indian academic Sebastian Karotemprel pooled their
considerable expertise to create this “guidebook” for study, which has been
endorsed officially by the Vatican's Congregation for the Evangelization of
Peoples.
Like the Perspectives reader, Following Christ in Mission also comprises
four main sections, but otherwise the two texts barely resemble each other.
Karotemprel and his editorial team have emphasized theology over strategy.
Two of the four primary headings used in the book are self-evidently
theological in nature: “theological foundations” and “theology of religions.”
A third heading, “paths of mission,” is less an examination of missionary
methods from a practical standpoint than a serial treatment of theological
issues arising in connection with particular ways of entering into mission
(proclamation, dialogue, inculturation, liberation, and ecumenism).
Missionary spirituality and the figure of Mary are also considered under the
“paths of mission” rubric. Not unexpectedly, the other main section
denominated “history” emphasizes Catholic experience in mission. Following
Christ in Mission unabashedly calls attention to the documents of Vatican II
(Winter and Hawthorne look instead to the Lausanne process for conciliar
pronouncements), while exposing students to more recent debates over the
interpretation of these seminal Roman Catholic texts.
One of the contributors to Following Christ in Mission, Paul
Vadakumpadan, has since produced a textbook of his own: Missionaries of
Christ (2006). Roman Catholic seminarians in India are the primary audience
for whom this concise “basic course in missiology” has been developed, but
the proposed syllabus also includes chapters that present Protestant and
Orthodox perspectives on mission. Vadakumpadan indicates (5–6) that the
structure of his book is based on Evangelii Nuntiandi, an apostolic
exhortation issued by Pope Paul VI in 1975. Of the several theological topics
highlighted in this resource, particular attention is paid to the theme of
liberation as an integral aspect of “evangelization.”
A final example to be considered in this section does not appear initially to
be a course textbook at all. This is the two-volume “missiological
encyclopedia” developed for use at Utrecht University in the Netherlands,
which was published first in Dutch and then in English under the title
Philosophy, Science, and Theology of Mission in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries. Author Jan A. B. Jongeneel indicates that his intention
was not to dwell on the subject of mission per se (its foundation, purposes,
methods, or organization), but to focus on how this phenomenon has been
studied over roughly the past two centuries (1995, 2). Along the way, he
shows considerable interest in the contributions made by nontheologians to
the study of Christian mission. In this handbook, Jongeneel presents a
systematic description of scholarly research on the subject of mission, broadly
conceived.
The title of Jongeneel's project makes plain his proposed structure for the
field. Major sections are devoted to the philosophy of mission, the science of
mission (in which empirical studies are highlighted), and the theology of
mission. In the first two of these three primary divisions, Jongeneel is at pains
to emphasize the academic character of missiology, which he seeks to
establish by pointing out the intellectual distance these researchers ordinarily
have maintained from their object of inquiry (on this underlying objective, see
Jongeneel 1998). Theologians of mission, on the other hand, are expected to
be committed to the cause of Christian outreach. By proceeding in this way,
Jongeneel makes it possible to portray missiology as a subject fit to be studied
in both secular and church-related contexts.
As more than one reviewer of Jongeneel's impressive resource has pointed
out (for example, Roxborogh 1996), he has arranged his material in such a
way that the presentation responds to a dilemma faced by many European
professors of mission who must be able to offer their courses to secular
university students, as well as ordination-seeking seminarians. Thus, even if
not an actual course book, Jongeneel's “guide through the whole field of
missiology” (1995, 13) shows sensitivity to and has perhaps been consciously
shaped by a particular set of classroom needs. The same is probably true of
the other three introductory textbooks already described, since they, too, were
written with particular groups of students in mind. The marked dissimilarity
of these widely respected course books on missiology does leave one
wondering if the authors are in fact describing the same subject area. It may
be that specific curricular objectives have exerted undue influence on one or
more of these four introductory texts.
TO MISSIOLOGY VIA THEOLOGY OF MISSION
A second way to introduce missiology is to propose that it is a form of
theological reflection. In this case, as Andrew Walls (2002b) has observed,
missiology is taken to be a shorthand term for theology of mission, theology
of the apostolate, or sometimes theory of mission. Nontheological aspects of
mission need not be totally ignored in this approach, but they tend to be made
subordinate to theological concerns or considered useful to discuss only to the
extent that they illuminate, support, or challenge the adequacy of theological
assertions about mission. This kind of introduction to missiology is not so
much focused on the training of missionaries or the mobilizing of volunteers
as it is on defining norms for Christian missionary activity, whether
undertaken by individuals, churches, or other organizations. Theologians of
mission not only seek to uncover fundamental principles that might
recommend one or another form of Christian outreach, but they also raise
questions about the motives that lie behind missionary action, the ultimate
significance of other religious traditions, and the theological potential of
culture. In order to formulate responses to these and other related questions,
missionary theologians are further obliged to determine their positions on
matters of revelation, ecclesiastical authority, and the meaning of salvation. In
keeping with the universal scope claimed for theology in general, the implicit
mandate of mission theology is virtually unlimited, which helps to explain
why this mode of missiology continues to exercise broad appeal.
We have already looked at two introductions to missiology that pay close
attention throughout to issues of theology: Following Christ in Mission and
Missionaries of Christ. Roughly half of Jongeneel's missiological
encyclopedia is likewise focused on theology of mission. If just a few other
notable representatives of the genre may be cited, we will have before us a
fuller picture of this well-traveled passageway to research on mission.
A good place to begin is with David J. Bosch's book Transforming Mission.
Twenty years after its much-anticipated publication in 1991, this remarkably
comprehensive and influential volume (already reprinted more than twenty-
six times including an expanded 20th Anniversary Edition released in 2011,
with a new foreword and concluding chapter; translated into fifteen
languages, with approximately sixty-nine thousand copies in circulation
worldwide [Saayman 2009, 219]) continues to be widely employed as a
foundational text, for both beginning and advanced courses in missiology.
Bosch (1929–92) devoted substantial portions of his magnum opus to an
exposition of mission in the New Testament and to a review of mission
history, but his primary emphasis was on theology, as shown by the subtitle
chosen for the book: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. Bosch handles
the New Testament material in such a way that the reader may be led to
discern more than one biblical perspective on mission, a result made possible
by the fact that the different gospel writers, the apostle Paul, and his several
immediate successors had different challenges to face and a range of
kerygmatic accents they wished to highlight. In a similar fashion, the history
of mission is shown to be composed of a series of theologically driven
understandings of mission, which Bosch characterized as missiological
“paradigms,” following Thomas Kuhn (1970) and Hans Küng (Küng and
Tracy 1989).
Bosch's appreciation for differences in approach to Christian witness and
his willingness to draw on an extensive array of historical and theological
resources for reflection on mission keep his introduction to missiology far
away from any hint of sectarian narrow-mindedness. Even so, Bosch does
have preferences, and these begin to surface in earnest once he turns to sketch
out what he calls “an emerging ecumenical missionary paradigm” (1991,
368–510). The key word in this formulation is “ecumenical,” which Bosch
takes to be the particular feature of the coming paradigm most likely to make
it “relevant” to the next era of Christian history (“toward a relevant
missiology” is the subtitle attached to the last third of the book). Also
significant is Bosch's decision to ground his final paradigm in ecclesiology
rather than another of the classical theological loci often connected to mission
(for example, christology, soteriology, or eschatology), a move that may have
been inspired by the church-centric methodology of Vatican II. The priority
for Bosch is to understand the fundamental nature of the gathered community
to whom God's own mission (the missio Dei) has been especially entrusted.
As he puts it, everything else connected to this emerging postmodern
paradigm will be “already present,” when the church's role in mission is put
under discussion (368).
A book published at about the same time as Transforming Mission, which
shares to a large degree Bosch's theological predilections, is Missiology: An
Ecumenical Introduction (1995; a somewhat different Dutch edition was
published in 1988). General editor Frans J. Verstraelen and his colleagues also
perceive missiology to be a theological discipline, most closely connected to
systematic theology (1995, 6). More precisely, they construe missiology as an
interlocutor for the rest of theology with respect to the world outside the
church. In their view, missiology is responsible for “initiating” and
“mediating” the engagement of theology with its new global context (467).
What qualifies missiology for this role is its long experience with various
kinds of pluralism, which several contributors demonstrate through a series of
regional essays and analyses of some selected contextual theologies. For
Verstraelen et al., ecumenicity implies a resolve to strengthen Christian unity.
Their “ecumenical introduction” to missiology contributes to this objective by
self-consciously balancing Catholic and conciliar Protestant viewpoints and
authors throughout the book.
Ecumenical commitment is likewise evident in another collaborative effort
produced especially for readers of German: Leitfaden Ökumenische
Missionstheologie (Dahling-Sander 2003). In this case, the World Council of
Churches sector of the ecumenical movement receives special consideration
(the volume as a whole is dedicated to Konrad Raiser, on the occasion of his
retirement from the WCC), but other perspectives are also represented in
essays that summarize and reflect on Roman Catholic, Evangelical,
Pentecostal, and Orthodox experience in mission. An unusual strength of this
book is felt in the attention it gives to methodological issues in missiology,
with the historiography of mission receiving substantial treatment. Other
areas of emphasis track closely with the mission and ministry concerns of
many European churches: migration, globalization, partnership, and dialogue.
Contextual developments in mission theology are examined with respect to
Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Similarly hopeful about the promise of an ecumenical approach to the study
of mission is Karl Müller, whose Mission Theology: An Introduction was
published in 1987 (a translation of the original 1985 German edition). In this
textbook, two chapters contributed by Protestant missiologist Hans-Werner
Gensichen supplement a predominantly German Catholic perspective on
mission theology. Throughout the book, conciliar Protestant voices and
documents are considered alongside intra-Catholic exchanges over mission
priorities. Müller and his colleagues are especially keen to identify the tasks
to be assigned to missiology and to underline the cooperative relationships
that should link missiology to the rest of the theological disciplines. In
particular, Gensichen proposes for missiology a responsibility to promote
within “conventional” Western theology the importance of interfaith dialogue,
the formulation of contextual theologies, and Christian responsibility for
development on a world scale (26–27). The chapters that follow Gensichen's
programmatic essay on missiology as a theological discipline then go on to
flesh out the implications of this disciplinary program by defining the biblical
foundation, goals, and work of mission.
In his own way, Johannes Verkuyl also advocated an ecumenical
understanding of mission through his well-known handbook Contemporary
Missiology: An Introduction (1978; first published in Dutch in 1975). Verkuyl
was firmly committed to a postcolonial vision of mission theology that
recognized its new historical context (xiii; 309–40). He explored with
sensitivity the role that might be played by dialogue in a Christian theology of
religions (341–72). Active at a time when the hold of apartheid in South
Africa appeared to many to be unbreakable, he was eager to articulate a
public missio politica oecumenica that could imagine otherwise. These and
other aspects of Verkuyl's point of view would seem to put him in the same
camp later to be claimed by the Dutch cohort of Verstraelen, but the situation
is not quite so cut and dried as that. Verkuyl's approach to mission theology
also lays emphasis on ministries of individual conversion (196–204), raises
hard questions about the false promises of Marxism and other ideologies
(373–404), doggedly insists on the importance of evangelizing the Jews (118–
62), and exhibits a good bit of skepticism with respect to the theological
claims of Islam (on this, see Wessels 2002, 90–92). These latter positions in
particular have won a hearing for Verkuyl among many evangelicals, with the
result that his introduction has been read across a wide theological spectrum
of scholars and students of missiology.
An important Catholic contribution to recent debates over the theological
character of missiology has been offered by Francis Anekwe Oborji, a
Nigerian diocesan priest and professor of missiology at the Pontifical Urban
University in Rome. In Concepts of Mission: The Evolution of Contemporary
Missiology (2006), we find another attempt to forge a theology of mission that
is distinctively Catholic but also aware of broader developments in
missiological thinking. Oborji treats his subject in three parts: “basic issues,”
where the development of missiology as a theological discipline is
considered; “historical perspectives,” which focuses on several classic modes
of mission in a manner reminiscent of David Bosch (mission as conversion,
church planting/church growth, adaptation/inculturation, dialogue, and missio
Dei); plus, “new perspectives” on ecumenism and contextual theologies.
Oborji shows interest in a wide range of Protestant opinion and research on
mission, as he listens not only to conciliar Protestants but also to evangelical,
Pentecostal, and Independent voices. Another distinguishing mark of Oborji's
approach emerges out of his inclination to read Vatican II on mission through
the postconciliar documents of John Paul II's pontificate (including Dominus
Iesus). The result is a renewed commitment to Catholic particularity and
critical support for many of the traditional methods of mission (especially
proclamation), balanced by an obvious desire to participate in ecumenical
dialogue and to foster a spirit of collaboration in mission.
A final example to be reviewed here is Alan R. Tippett, Introduction to
Missiology (1987). Tippett's material (much of it published previously) is
loosely gathered into four categories, characterized as “dimensions” of
missiology (theological, anthropological, historical, and practical). The heart
of the book, however, is to be found in the interaction of mission theology
with anthropology. A casual reviewer might get the impression that
anthropology has the upper hand in this parley of disciplines. After all, most
of the historical and “practical” examples adduced here are related in some
way to Tippett's large store of anthropological field experience, and many of
the theological essays are presented with the kind of charts, boxes, and arrows
commonly used to illustrate social science research. A deeper analysis,
however, will find in this introduction to missiology a theological point of
view that effectively determines what sort of anthropological insights might
be admitted into the conversation. Wisdom from applied anthropology that
could help missionaries better understand the processes of social and religious
change is avidly embraced, especially if this research can throw light on the
dynamics of church growth. Less welcome are studies that dare to raise
questions about the legitimacy of the missionary enterprise. History is
likewise treated as a select repository of data that must be carefully combed in
order to illustrate how “certain basic themes” (220) of expansion and growth
have recurred in Christian history since New Testament times. A specific
contribution of this volume appears in the attention paid throughout to the
task of missionary training, a practical concern that hardly appears in most of
the other introductions to missiology already surveyed. An exception is the
Perspectives course reader, whose lead editor, Ralph Winter, was Tippett's
one-time colleague at Fuller Theological Seminary's School of World Mission
(now School of Intercultural Studies).
A DYNAMIC AND EXPANSIVE FIELD OF STUDY
We have by no means exhausted the riches of mission theology here and a
few more course books could certainly be mentioned. Even so, the works
already described should be able to stand together as a fairly representative
sample of the most widely used contemporary introductions to missiology. As
we have seen, the theology of mission dominates as a conceptual framework
through which to approach the study of mission, whether from a Catholic,
conciliar Protestant, or evangelical Protestant point of view.
This way of going about our missiological business works well in several
respects. For example, the theology of mission is unsurpassed as a way to
demonstrate commitment to particular motives, methods, and/or proximate
goals of mission. The theology of mission has also become an increasingly
effective means to connect critical reflection on the church and its vocation
with many different kinds of mission experience, which opens up the
possibility that more of theology could be infused with missiological insight
and energy (on this as a goal for theology of mission, see Guder 2003). In
addition, over the past several decades theology of mission has demonstrated
a remarkable capacity to become dialogical in ways that can contribute to the
strengthening of ecumenical and interfaith relations. This latter aspect of
mission theology may well be what most profoundly recommends it to
Christians now living in tense situations of religious conflict.
While not disputing any of these gains, I am not convinced that theology of
mission is the best avenue by which to approach the field of missiology as a
whole. My chief concern is not that a commitment to mission makes it
impossible for mission theologians to be objective. In the postmodern
intellectual context in which we find ourselves, authors are expected to have
commitments and so it has become much harder to make the claim that
scientific objectivity is necessarily impeded by religious faith (an effective
rebuttal to this claim is offered in New-bigin 1989, 1–65). Without a doubt,
one can find in the books reviewed above many examples of competent
researchers listening carefully to viewpoints not their own. Ironically,
perhaps, this habit seems to be nurtured and reinforced when mission
theologians commit to an ecumenical posture.
The problem with using theology of mission as the primary frame of
reference through which to conceptualize and introduce the field of
missiology lies rather in the way this angle of approach tends to obscure the
broad scope of contemporary research on mission. We see, for example, that
when theological categories are applied to mission activity, certain kinds of
data are likely to be privileged, while other information is overlooked or
simply not sought. For modern theologians operating in the West, scripture,
tradition, and Christian experience are the sine qua non of their craft. To do
theology means to apply reason to what flows through these indispensable
taproots of Christian faith, using techniques of analysis suggested by the
discipline of philosophy. Issues of culture and the existence of other religious
traditions may enter into these discussions, but they typically do so in the
guise of environmental factors with which the modern theologian is obliged to
deal, on a par we might say with urbanization or class conflict.
Thus, mission theologians are often eager to debate colonialism as an
intellectual problem but show less interest in the conduct of particular
colonial regimes. Or issues of language and discourse may surface with
attendant questions raised about the act of translation, but the task of
communicating actual messages across known cultural and linguistic
boundaries is left relatively unexplored. Or the facts of religious pluralism are
posed in order to challenge notions of Christian chauvinism, but the give and
take of daily dialogue in living communities and the difficulties involved
when attempts are made to share faith on a personal scale may not receive the
same level of attention as more theoretical issues.
My point is that mission theologians are prone to share with their close
colleagues, the systematic theologians, a preference for the abstract over the
particular. In their quest for general principles, the material aspects of mission
experience may be neglected. This way of looking at missiology may also
predispose one to relate first and foremost to the work of other theologians, to
those scholars who are likewise attempting to define norms for Christian
attitudes and practice, instead of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and
other nontheological experts who also focus their scholarly attention on the
subject of mission. And quite naturally, when theological interests are
paramount, the study of mission can easily become just another front for
entrenched theological opponents to wage yet one more round in their
ongoing ideological battles (see, for example, the modernist and
fundamentalist debates over mission in the 1920s and 1930s).
Leading journals in the field of missiology routinely publish or give
recognition to nontheological research on mission. The book review sections
of such noted periodicals as the International Bulletin of Missionary
Research, Missiology, Missionalia, International Review of Mission, and
Mission Studies, just to name a few of the major English-language journals in
the field, regularly include descriptions of books and articles produced by
social scientists, area specialists, religious studies scholars, and a wide variety
of historians. The obvious implication of this fact is that these experts are
themselves functioning as missiologists or at least are conducting research
that reputed scholars in the field consider directly relevant to their own work.
Current patterns in dissertation research, reported in many of these same
journals, point in the same direction. A significant portion, if not a majority,
of younger scholars working in the field today, are approaching the study of
mission primarily from nontheological perspectives, if the findings of my own
research on English-language dissertations in missiology between 1992 and
2001 still hold true and give an accurate indication of global trends more
generally (Skreslet 2003). These younger scholars, together with their
advisors, appear to be pushing the boundaries of missiology ever wider.
Finally, when the most important bibliographic projects in the field are
taken into consideration, the expansive scope of missiology becomes
impossible to miss. A bellwether in this regard is the classified bibliographic
structure that regularly appears in the International Review of Mission. Since
1912 this feature of the journal has functioned as a major conduit of
information about published research in the field. Thousands of articles,
books, and conference reports, among other materials, have been brought to
the attention of the journal's readers by means of this bibliographic tool. At
the same time, the classification system used by the editors can tell us
something about their understanding of missiology and how they think
mission ought to be studied. Unmistakably, as this conceptual structure for the
field has been modified over the years, the profile of nontheological research
on mission has grown, so much so that theology of mission as a formal
category now represents a very small part of the overall scheme (Skreslet
2006a, 173–87). A similar result is obtained when major alternative
bibliographic frameworks for missiology are examined. The International
Mission Bibliography may be taken as a prime example (Thomas 2003; see
also Skreslet 2006a, 187–89). In this project, conducted over eighteen years
under the auspices of the American Society of Missiology and in consultation
with the International Association for Mission Studies, the interdisciplinary
character of missiology is clearly illustrated. Fewer than half of the twenty
subject areas that make up this bibliographic structure are theologically
oriented. The social sciences and cultural studies receive special attention.
MISSIOLOGY REDEFINED
Thus far, my intention has been to describe the typical means scholars have
used over the past few decades to describe the field of missiology. As we have
seen, theological approaches predominate, regardless of denominational
background or doctrinal bent. Having provided a selective review of the
introductory literature, I then put forward a very brief account of current
trends in mission research, based on a general impression of what is now
being published in many of the field's leading journals, buttressed by more
detailed analyses conducted on a fairly large sample of recent dissertation
research and several officially sanctioned bibliographic projects. Without
question, secular research focused on Christian mission has grown in recent
years to such an extent that it now constitutes a significant portion of the
scholarly activity taking place in this subject area. It would appear that the
current crop of introductions on offer (with one important exception) has not
kept pace with the emerging character of missiology as actually practiced in
the postcolonial era. What we have today, by and large, are many
introductions to mission theology but very few treatments of missiology as a
whole.
Jongeneel's “missiological encyclopedia” is the one introduction to
missiology that has acknowledged structurally the contributions of secular
research to the field. He does this by giving formal recognition to philosophy
of mission and science of mission as co-equal branches of missiology next to
theology of mission, as pointed out earlier. Jongeneel's reconceptualization of
the field represents, in my view, a proposal that must be taken seriously. I am
not persuaded, however, that his solution is entirely satisfactory, because his
framework for the field differentiates theological from nontheological
research on mission in a way that may be artificial or confusing. In fact,
Jongeneel has difficulty finding much research at all to fit under the heading
of philosophy of mission and most of what he cites is quite dated. Much more
can be said about the science of mission, especially since history and the
social sciences fall into this category, but it is certainly significant that
theology of mission remains by a considerable margin the largest segment of
the three (more than twice as many pages are devoted to this branch of
missiology than to the other two combined). Thus, the tripartite structure
Jongeneel presents to describe missiology is far less balanced in the end than
his theoretical approach would at first seem to suggest.
Additional questions arise when we scrutinize the subcategories of
Jongeneel's schematic framework. Does it make sense, for example, to
separate “axiology of mission” (studies on the value of mission conducted
from within the philosophy of mission sphere) from “missionary ethics” or
“missionary diaconics/service” (subbranches listed under theology of
mission)? What is the result when the “science of translation” and related
treatments of missionary discourse are handled apart from “missionary
apologetics”? Such fine distinctions as these threaten to obscure the
integrative character of missiology, which may be one of its most distinctive
marks as a discipline (on this, see below and Skreslet forthcoming).
This introduction will proceed on the assumption that missiology includes
but is not limited to mission theology. In doing so, I will be heading in a
direction similar to that mapped out by Jongeneel, but I do not propose to
sequester mission theology from the rest of missiological research as he has
done. My working definition for the field is based on a second description of
missiology supplied by Andrew Walls (2002b): “the systematic study of all
aspects of mission.” Accordingly, missiology is understood here to be an
intersection point among the many disciplines that take an interest in mission-
related phenomena. Some of these disciplines are more often than not
reckoned among the theological sciences, but others would not normally find
their way into the standard seminary curriculum. Put in another way,
missiology has two distinctive “publics” to which it now relates directly, as
Mika Vähäkangas (2010) has observed: those who do mission and university
academics.
There is a cost that comes with this decision. Allowing for the possibility of
more than one methodology makes it difficult to establish missiology as an
independent discipline in its own right. If missiology means simply to apply
the methods of other academic specialties to a common subject matter, then it
may not be a discipline at all in the usual sense but merely an area of inquiry
where different scholarly interests happen to overlap. For this reason, as Walls
(2002b) has noted, some scholars prefer to use the more general term
“mission studies” in place of missiology. To be sure, when its hybrid character
is emphasized, missiology would appear to resemble strongly a number of
other composite academic fields, such as medieval studies, Renaissance
studies, or Middle Eastern studies, more than it does any of the classical
disciplines, including theology.
A case for the distinctiveness of missiology as a scholarly field must be
constructed on grounds other than the possession of a singular, trademark
methodology. One way to do this is by recognizing some of the factors that
consistently mark the work of scholars who are recognized as or call
themselves missiologists. This approach suggests that missiology is an
enterprise carried on by a discernable “community of practice.” As Wenger
(1998, 152–53) explains with primary reference to nonmissiological
endeavors, communities of practice take shape to the extent that their
members acknowledge a common identity, engage mutually with a degree of
accountability to each other in a joint project, and draw from a shared
repertoire of social practices. The practices I have in mind are the particular
scholarly habits that together seem to distinguish missiological study from
other kinds of academic activity.
The first of these constants is the specific interest of missiologists in the
processes of religious change. Whether or not personally involved in efforts
to share the Christian faith with others, missiologists recognize that religious
boundaries are shifting and porous, not static or impermeable. They know that
conversion into and out of Christianity has been a persistent element of the
church's story from the beginning. Their shared goal is to understand better
what these demographic changes might mean, how factors of culture have
shaped patterns of religious affiliation, and the various means by which
Christians have sought to engage people outside the church with the claims of
the gospel. Missiologists have also shown an abiding interest in the reverse
effect mission experience has had on missionaries and their sponsors. In other
words, missiologists also want to know about how contact with cultures,
social traditions, and religious convictions previously outside of the church's
experience has led to the transformation of sending communities and their
emissaries alike. The idea of religious change I am describing here is similar
to the theme of “crossing boundaries” that some missiologists have chosen to
highlight recently as a distinctive feature of the field (see, for example, Ustorf
2001, 75–76, and Phan 2003).
Another enduring characteristic of missiology is the respect generally given
by its practitioners to the reality of faith. Respecting faith in this case means
more than conceding a measure of sincerity to those who hold religious
beliefs. It also implies an unwillingness to begin one's study of mission with
the premise that religious convictions can never be anything except a matter
of illusion or deception. This is not to say that missionaries have never been
deluded, misguided, or wrong-headed, either in their self-understanding or
practice of mission. The point is rather that this discipline consistently
demands from its scholars a substantial degree of critical empathy with their
object of inquiry. They are asked to be critical, which means subjecting every
aspect of mission (including theologies of mission) to rigorous analysis. At
the same time, it is assumed within this community of practice that the
sharing of Christian faith with others can be an honorable undertaking,
whatever flaws and misconceptions might be discovered in the course of one's
investigations. By extension, students of mission must also be willing to take
non-Christian faith seriously. Only so could one hope to understand the
enormous implications involved in religious conversion. If faith did not really
matter, neither would the possibility of conversion or movements of religious
change mean much, except as generators of sociological data.
A thoroughgoing integrative impulse further defines the practice of
missiology today. Obviously, a need for integration is to be expected when the
study of mission is conducted with multiple methodologies potentially in play.
If nothing else, missiologists must be prepared to evaluate the results of
theological and nontheological approaches to the study of mission and to
bring them into conversation with each other. The many possible bases,
methods, and purposes commonly associated with mission likewise beg for
comparative analysis. The complex nature of mission as an intercultural
activity pushes in the same direction. Christian mission is a social
phenomenon that encompasses an unlimited number of local contexts, each of
which may be affected by global trends. Every layer of culture—from the
material to the conceptual—may be engaged when faith is shared across
national, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries. Additionally, in the study of
mission not only does theology meet culture but one also finds the religious
systems embedded in the world's many cultures coming into direct contact
with each other in a variety of ways, ranging from sharp confrontation to
cooperative service. Indeed, next to the interplay of theory and practice one
would expect to find subtly expressed in all forms of mission, the deep levels
of cultural complexity that attend nearly every attempt at Christian outreach
make the integrative task an indispensable aspect of this still emerging field of
study.
My characterization of missiology as an integrative, multidisciplinary
academic field resembles in some respects the position taken by Louis J.
Luzbetak, a leading scholar of missionary (or missiological) anthropology.
Following Tippett (1974), Luzbetak (1988, 14) emphasizes that missiology is
not “a mere conglomeration of disciplines but a network of disciplines that
systematically interact with one another” (emphasis in original). This
indicates to Luzbetak that missiology is a field rather than a discipline, where
all the dimensions of mission demand to be examined carefully.
I find myself only partially agreeing with Luzbetak, however, regarding the
relationship of theological and nontheological scholarship on Christian
mission within this sprawling collection of studies. Luzbetak's position on this
point is nuanced but clearly expressed: secular research on mission is
“essential” but only “supplementary” to theological reflection on the nature of
mission and its normative character. “What counts in missiology above
everything else,” Luzbetak insists (1988, 14), “is what God regards as
genuine salvation activities and what God means by ‘the Kingdom of God’”
(emphasis in original). For this reason, Luzbetak concludes that missiology is
“basically” a theological field, in which theology “holds the place of honor”
among all the disciplines involved.
To be sure, the setting of standards for Christian mission in a pedagogical,
prescriptive sense is the business of theologians, not secular scholarship. So
are questions about the appropriateness of specific mission practices and the
assessment of missionary fidelity to the teaching of scripture and church
tradition. But the study of such norms, including the processes by which they
have been or are now being determined, is a topic of interest to a broad
variety of researchers. Missiology, I believe, properly encompasses every
kind of scholarly inquiry performed on the subject of mission without
necessarily subordinating any group of studies to any other. Perhaps the
closest analogy to missiology to be found is the field of ethics, which includes
but is not restricted to the study of theological ethics (issues of theory and
practice also arise in similar ways in these two fields). Education as an
academic field might constitute another parallel worth considering, so long as
that large-scale scholarly enterprise is understood to encompass the particular
concerns, source materials, and methods of Christian education and
theological education.
OBJECTIVES AND APPROACH OF THIS BOOK
The supply of data at our disposal for the study of mission is huge. This is to
be expected, given the encompassing definition of the field with which I am
committed to work (“the systematic study of all aspects of mission”).
Consideration of more than one disciplinary methodology likewise threatens
to extend our collection of potentially relevant information far beyond the
bounds that an introductory text could reasonably be expected to handle.
 To these considerations of method should be added the fact that Christian
mission as a subject has become a much more complex undertaking than at
any time previously, with an expanding number of actors and types of
organizations involved for many different purposes. The flow of mission no
longer moves exclusively or even predominantly from North to South or from
West to East, which means that it cannot be conceptualized as a North
Atlantic project. A few large-scale organizations do not monopolize the
conduct of this activity, as they seemed to do in centuries past. Mission now is
truly “from everywhere to everywhere.” It involves many laypersons and a
relatively few full-time professionals, who share faith and give witness in
their own neighborhoods and around the world. The profound complexity of
mission today also derives in part from the deep diversity that now marks a
global Christian community.
To help solve the problem of scope necessarily implied in my task, I intend
to use the five analytical criteria indicated in my subtitle as a means to sift and
prioritize what can be known about the study of Christian mission. The first
of these criteria I have designated questions. That is to say, what sort of things
do missiologists want to know about the phenomenon of mission? Are their
questions much different from those posed by other researchers? To answer
their own inquiries, missiologists then employ a selection of appropriate
scholarly methods. As indicated already, the interdisciplinary character of
missiology is partly reflected in the fact that many of its most important
research techniques were first developed for use in other disciplines. Even so,
it may be helpful to describe how such methods are typically applied within
the realm of mission studies. Themes denotes the major results produced so
far by these investigations. What are the primary findings that now define
missiological knowledge? Do certain trends stand out in current research?
Problems, on the other hand, are unresolved issues in the study of mission,
meaning areas of research still waiting for more adequate treatment. Ongoing
arguments over the interpretation of critical data pertaining to the study of
mission would also fit under this rubric. Prospects then looks ahead to the
future of mission studies. If there are inklings of new directions to be taken in
research, these will be explored. On more than one occasion, I will indicate
topics or questions that have not yet received much attention at all, which
nevertheless seem to me to hold promise as subjects worth pursuing.
Readers may recall from the survey of introductions presented above that
these works used various terms to indicate the primary divisions of
missiology. Winter and Tippett, for example, proposed that the field of
missiology could be approached by means of multiple “perspectives” or
“dimensions” of mission. Oborji and Jongeneel preferred to describe
missiology in terms of a few primary “concepts,” although they may not have
used this word in exactly the same way. Bosch, for his part, wrote about a
series of “elements” that constituted the ecumenical mission “paradigm” he
saw emerging toward the end of the twentieth century. The lack of a common
vocabulary to use when talking about the structure of missiology points to a
larger problem of conceptualization. It is simply not possible at this time to
claim that any particular configuration of the field reflects a scholarly
consensus among all or even most missiologists. This fact prompts me to say
something now about the layout of the chapters to come.
I have chosen to divide the body of my presentation into six chapters. Each
of these sections represents a grouping of research around a common theme.
To a certain extent, this arrangement of material is the result of a practical
decision. One cannot talk about everything at the same time and expect to
achieve any measure of coherence. More substantively, the chapter headings
used below indicate, in my view, the major topic areas to have arisen within
missiology since it began to take shape as a formal academic pursuit in the
nineteenth century. In other words, when modern-era scholars past and
present have engaged in missiological analysis, they have tended to
congregate around the following set of major themes or subjects: Bible and
mission, history of mission, theology and culture, interreligious encounter,
means of mission, and missionary vocation. An advantage of this approach to
the study of mission is that it provides a structure within which theological
and nontheological research can be considered next to each other. I have
chosen not to have a separate chapter on women and mission, in order to
avoid giving the impression that this topic can be isolated from the other six
chapter headings I propose to use here. Alert readers will find that feminist
perspectives and gender issues have affected the study of mission in nearly
every part of this evolving field.
Ultimately, decisions on methods depend on the objectives one hopes to
achieve. For this book, three aims have remained paramount. The first is a
desire to describe an academic field of study. Accordingly, I have not set out
to explain what mission is or ought to be. Indeed, in the research to be
discussed there are many different definitions of mission employed. My intent
is rather that readers will discover here a competent description of missiology
as a form of scholarly inquiry. I want them to know what is distinctive about
this field and how it might overlap with other disciplines and scholarly
projects. In the course of this discussion, the literature of missiology will be
introduced, with substantial attention given to widely acknowledged classics
alongside a selection of books and essays that illustrate more recent trends in
mission scholarship. With regard to late modern scholarship on mission,
special emphasis will be given to materials that have appeared since Bosch
and Jongeneel in the 1990s published their comprehensive treatments of the
field. In fact, more than half of the works to be cited in this book will date
from 1995 or later. While I do hope to represent missiology as fairly as I can
by means of this sample of material, it is not my intention to be
comprehensive in every possible area of research (an aim that would
compromise readability). Thus, many other fine resources that could have
been cited will not be referenced here. Throughout, English-language
materials will predominate, in large part because this is the primary linguistic
medium through which a truly global community of scholars is best able to
interact with each other. A successful presentation of this literature, it seems
to me, has to reflect not only the international character of missiology but also
something of our guild's theological diversity. For this reason, I do not intend
to privilege material produced primarily within or for one part of the church.
Others, of course, will have to judge whether or not this aspiration has been
achieved.
A second objective of this book is to show how the field of missiology has
developed over time. I have chosen not to lay out a history for the entire field
in a single chapter, preferring instead to explore how thinking and methods of
analysis have changed in relationship to particular subtopics. At the same
time, one has to keep in mind the fact that the study of mission as a whole
entered a completely new phase in the nineteenth century, as Gustav Warneck
and other pioneering university researchers put the study of mission on a
more scholarly basis. In the premodern era, missionaries and others studied
mission, too, but they usually did so with ad hoc approaches and implicit
methodologies. By the late nineteenth century, these investigations tended to
be more scientific and explicit with respect to scholarly procedures.
Precritical reflections on the processes of mission and modern studies will
both receive their due in the pages that follow.
A third object in mind for this venture is to communicate enthusiasm for
missiology as a field of study. I am convinced that many more students and
scholars will find the intellectual challenge of missiology attractive, once they
come to know better its various dimensions. The remarks made above about
the integrative character of missiology are particularly relevant to this purpose
behind my project. The dynamic of specialization that threatens to overwhelm
and atomize so many academic disciplines today is partly offset in missiology
by an equally strong impulse to make connections among the different aspects
of the field and to allow knowledge about mission gained in one sphere to
inform the work of others. At one point, I had in mind an alternative subtitle
for this study of missiology, which characterized it as “an interpretation and
invitation.” The interpretive element so indicated no doubt remains. I still
have hopes, too, that many readers will find here a compelling invitation to
learn more about this fascinating and complex subject.
 STYLE POINTS
Most of this chapter has been concerned with matters of content, which meant
asking about the limits of the topic to be covered, the points to be
emphasized, and how one intends to structure the overall argument. A select
review of current literature on missiology as a field of study was also
provided in order for the reader to have a sense of the most important
scholarly context within which the present work should be evaluated. Still to
be considered very briefly is the issue of writing style or the manner of
expression that ought to be used. To formulate a response to this question,
another one has to be raised with respect to audience: for whom is this book
written?
Some readers will have noticed already that this chapter has no footnotes.
Nor will those to come. This is not an ideological choice but primarily an
aesthetic preference. For some readers, footnotes can be a major distraction,
however useful they might be to authors as a way to shore up support for
one's position or to add explanatory side comments to an argument (or, it must
be admitted, sometimes to squeeze in extraneous material that a researcher
just cannot bear to leave behind in the file). Since my hope is to lay out a
relatively uncluttered, coherent description of the field of missiology and to
aim this discussion, first of all, at readers just becoming acquainted with the
discipline, technical footnotes seemed inappropriate. But readers at every
level of expertise and background have a right to know the basis of one's
assertions and conclusions, especially when these rest substantially on the
work of others, and so a spare system of citation has been incorporated
directly into the text.
Next to beginners, I have also written with some fellow academics in mind,
in particular those specializing in fields other than missiology, who
nevertheless share an interest in this subject matter. The prediction of Andrew
Walls (1991, 154) that an explosion of demand for mission studies was about
to take place has largely come true, with new journals and chairs devoted to
missiological research having since been founded, a surge of interest in
missionaries and their work expressed among nontheologians in particular (on
this, see Sanneh 1995 and Noll 1998), new regional scholarly initiatives
focused on the study of mission (for example, the Central and Eastern
European Association for Mission Studies), plus a growing cadre of young
scholars in evidence around the world (Skreslet 2003). Yet there still seems to
be widespread confusion about what exactly missiology entails as an
academic enterprise. Thus, a third audience for whom this book is intended is
comprised of my fellow missiologists, who might be expected to want as
much clarity as possible when it comes to defining the objectives, methods,
and scope of our common profession. Many of these colleagues will
immediately recognize that a new proposal for envisioning our field has been
put on the table. I look forward to whatever discussion about the future of our
labors together might be prompted by the appearance of this book.
 2
Bible and Mission
If it is true that missiology includes but need not be limited to the theology of
mission, as argued in the previous chapter, then it becomes possible to
identify more than one way to relate the study of mission to the Bible. Three
fundamentally different connections will be examined here. The first
considers the historical record of faith-sharing that may be discerned in the
canonical scriptures of the Christian community. A second kind of
relationship emerges when these same writings are scrutinized theologically,
in order to identify biblical norms for Christian mission. A third way to
connect the Bible and mission is to consider carefully the career of this
seminal text in mission, including its function as a particular means of
Christian outreach.
MISSION IN THE BIBLE
To look for evidence of missionary activity in the Bible is to take up a part of
the historical task implied by exegesis. Even if one hopes ultimately to apply
ancient insights and scriptural principles to contemporary circumstances, it is
necessary first to consider what the sacred texts may have meant in their own
day. A preparatory step in the exegetical process is to understand the historical
situation of the writings in question. Who was the author and what can be
known about the text's presumed audience? Are there extrabiblical
personalities, ideas, and events to which this part of scripture makes
reference, either directly or indirectly? Does the form of the text tell us
anything about how the people of that time and place communicated with
each other or otherwise constructed their social relationships? Questions like
these probe into the background of a given text, in an attempt to lay bare
contextual details that may not be readily apparent to twenty-first-century
readers. They might also lead one to uncover historical data embedded in the
biblical texts that could be evaluated quite apart from hermeneutical
considerations or apologetic concerns. When this happens, the Bible becomes
an indispensable source of information needed to describe and analyze the
earliest stage of Christian mission history.
We should not expect all the books of the Bible to contribute equally to our
understanding of mission history. Many missiologists who study the biblical
record are naturally drawn first to the Acts of the Apostles, since that book
most obviously focuses on the initial efforts of Jesus' followers to share his
message and story with new groups of hearers after the crucifixion. The
letters of Paul, because they come from the pen of the most famous evangelist
who ever lived, likewise attract their fair share of attention from mission
historians but have to be reconciled with the portrait of the apostle offered in
Acts. Compared to these two all-important sources of biblical data pertaining
to the mission activities of the early church, the other nongospel writings in
the New Testament are only marginally relevant to the historian of mission.
The Gospels themselves are important for two reasons. To the extent that
the early Christians consciously emulated the missionary example of Jesus,
the Gospels can add depth to our knowledge about that shared methodology.
Further, as documents finally produced not in Jesus' time but at least a
generation later, the Gospels may be expected to reflect something of the
church's circumstances as these developed in the subapostolic era. Serious
exegetes will use all of the historical-critical tools at their disposal to
differentiate the life situation of Jesus depicted in the Gospels from that of the
various communities for whom these narratives were initially produced.
By definition, the Old Testament will not bear witness to the history of
Christian mission, although it often figures prominently in more theological
investigations. In contrast, some of the noncanonical Jewish literature of the
late intertestamental period (for example, Josephus and Philo) has proved to
be quite valuable to scholars of apostolic-era missions. These writings afford
another, rare window through which to look at a remote historical milieu,
while also documenting an alternative set of outreach patterns with which
early Christian missionary practices may be compared.
Unfortunately, references to first-century Christians in the secular Roman
literature of the same period are relatively few and tend to be indistinct. As a
result, such sources are not able to tell us much about how the earliest
generations of Christians went about sharing their postresurrection faith in
Jesus, but they can shed light more generally on the status of the Jews in the
Roman Empire. Insofar as Christianity began as a minor sectarian group
within Judaism, some of that background information is bound to prove
useful to anyone attempting to reconstruct the first chapter of Christian
mission history. Finally, to what has been mentioned so far by way of
historical source documents may be added a number of noncanonical books
that circulated widely within the sphere of the early Christian movement.
Where these overlap chronologically with some of the New Testament
literature, as seems to be the case with the Didache, for example, or the first
letter of Clement and perhaps a few of the apocryphal second-century Acts
and Gospels, they provide the historian with yet one more set of resources
from which to extract potentially relevant information about the earliest phase
of Christian mission.
For much of the past century, Adolf Harnack's Expansion of Christianity
(1904–5) was widely regarded as the classic scholarly synthesis of early
mission history. Harnack sought to apply a rigorous scientific method to all of
the source materials outlined above. In a profound way, he showed how a
deep understanding of first-century diaspora Judaism could illuminate and
provide a crucial context for the literary data presented in the New Testament.
After Harnack, no serious scholar of early mission history could be
unconcerned about how factors in the environment (for example,
transportation and communication patterns within the Mediterranean world),
the development of nascent church structures like the episcopate, or Roman
attitudes toward the many different religious traditions contained within the
empire may have aided or otherwise shaped the spread of Christianity in New
Testament times.
Harnack believed the eventual success of Christianity was due, above all, to
its transition from a narrow national religious tradition on the model of
Judaism to a universal worldview more like the intellectual culture of
Hellenism. Even if some scholars now question the extremely sharp contrast
drawn in Harnack's work between Jesus and Paul, his assumption that
Christian mission was a continuation of vigorous Jewish efforts to proselytize
Gentiles in the intertestamental period, or the robust confidence he maintained
in the natural affinity of “true” Christianity with the assimilative spirit of
Hellenism, Harnack's fundamental insight on the cultural dimensions of
mission history cannot be ignored. No contemporary analysis of early
Christianity and the manner of its propagation in the first century would be
complete without proper attention being paid to all the material and social
forces at work in its broader environment. A simple harmonization of the New
Testament's stories of gospel proclamation and apostolic itineration will no
longer suffice for the missiologist seeking to understand early mission history.
A second comprehensive study with which all students of mission in the
New Testament will want to become familiar is Eckhard Schnabel, Early
Christian Mission (2004). In this formidable two-volume work, Schnabel
revisits the documentary, epigraphic, and geographical ground covered so
carefully by Harnack. Even more remarkably, Schnabel also attempts to
engage a whole century's worth of subsequent scholarly activity on his
subject, including a huge collection of secondary literature related to mission
in the Bible, and he largely succeeds. Schnabel's focus is almost entirely on
the first century. He is not, therefore, so concerned as Harnack to connect the
New Testament's account of early Christian mission with its subsequent
course of development up to the time of Constantine. For Harnack, this longer
story was the point of his work. In his view, only by the middle of the third
century had Christianity fully come to terms with its Mediterranean
environment. Paul had initiated a turn to Greek culture that the generation of
Origen brought to a satisfying conclusion (Harnack 1904, 391–97). It was this
form of Christianity that soon thereafter became established throughout the
Roman Empire and Harnack's study attempts to explain how this surprising
outcome came to pass.
A leading concern for Schnabel is to establish the historical value of the
New Testament data pertaining to mission. He is especially keen to defend the
author of Acts as a trustworthy historian (20–35) and to make a case for Jesus
as the ultimate source of the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18–20 and
parallels (34882). In Schnabel's analysis, Jesus of Nazareth does not stand in
opposition to or apart from the ensuing history of Christian mission. Instead,
Jesus is portrayed as the initiator of a universal missionary movement that
encompassed both Jews and Gentiles from the start. According to Schnabel,
the broad extent of Jesus' missionary vision is demonstrated initially by his
readiness to interact with a number of individual non-Jews as they approached
seeking his help and then through those disciples whom he dispatched to the
ends of the earth after the resurrection. Along the way, he surveys an
extensive list of specific locations where the Jewish-Christian and then
Gentile disciples of Jesus were evidently active in the first century, from
Jerusalem and Antioch to Rome and Spain and even India. In this way,
Schnabel reinforces and illustrates his conclusion that “the universal and
international mission of the followers of Jesus…was initiated, inaugurated
and established by Jesus of Nazareth” (386).
Already in this brief discussion of sources and surveys of mission in the
Bible, several leading research questions have been identified. The most
fundamental of these concerns the nature of the New Testament and the value
of its various writings for historical investigations. As noted above, Schnabel
exemplifies a scholarly approach that seeks to establish the New Testament as
a dependable source of reliable data with which the story of early Christian
mission can be reconstructed with some confidence. Other researchers,
following in the modern tradition of critical New Testament scholarship
defined by innovators such as Hermann Reimarus (eighteenth century),
Ferdinand Christian Baur (nineteenth century), and Rudolf Bultmann
(twentieth century), more often tend to cast doubt on the narrative claims of
the New Testament documents. At the center of these debates is the book of
Acts, a self-conscious work of history writing (cf. Acts 1:1–2) that is
nevertheless also infused throughout with the author's theological point of
view. A generation ago, Martin Hengel (1980) offered a deliberately
provocative defense of Luke as a responsible historian and in doing so nicely
framed a number of the most essential historiographical issues at stake in this
discussion. More recent treatments by Fitzmyer (1998, 124–28) and Dunn
(2009, 68–98) bring us nearly up to the present with respect to New
Testament scholarship on the historicity of Acts.
A second group of scriptural studies likely to be of high interest to many
missiologists studying mission in the Bible clusters around the topic of Jewish
mission in the New Testament period. There can be no doubt that the early
Christians avidly sought converts from among Jews and Gentiles alike. To
what extent were they merely imitating the already established missionary
practices of Hellenistic Judaism?
Following Harnack, it was largely assumed that the early church had
learned how to do mission from the Jews, whose tradition seems to have been
passing through an expansionist phase in the Greco-Roman period. How else
to explain the presence of proselytes and “god-fearing” Gentiles in Jewish
assemblies (for example, Cornelius in Acts 10), first-century rites of
conversion for Gentiles seeking to join the Jewish fold, the demographic
growth of diaspora Judaism in the Second Temple era, and evidence from
Josephus (especially Antiquities 20:3448) that seems to point to an eagerness
on the part of Jews to commend their faith to others? Harnack's view has been
vigorously challenged by Martin Goodman (1994), who argues that while
first-century Jews most certainly sought respect for their faith from Gentiles
and might have occasionally used some missionary means to gain political or
social advantages for their community, the case for a widely embraced Jewish
proselytizing mission is too weak to bear much scrutiny. Barriers to admission
remained high throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Jewish attitudes
toward converts were ambiguous at best. Goodman also highlights the fact
that not a single explicit call to first-century Jews to take up missionary
activity has yet been discovered in the literature. Thus, despite the assertion of
Jesus at Matthew 23:15 that zealous scribes and Pharisees would spare no
effort to win converts (“crossing land and sea to make one proselyte”),
Goodman insists that the Christian turn to a universal mission embracing all
of humanity was, in fact, “a shocking novelty in the ancient world” (105).
Subsequently, John Dickson (2003) has argued for the recognition of a strong
Jewish “mission commitment” in New Testament times, largely based on a
more expansive definition of missionary behavior than that employed by
Goodman, Scot McKnight (1991), and others who continue to see little, if
any, indisputable evidence of a mission impulse in ancient Judaism.
Arguments over whether proactive Jewish missions existed in the New
Testament era are related to a larger conceptual problem that hovers over
much of the shared research space claimed by New Testament scholars and
missiologists. Simply put, what kinds of activity encountered in the New
Testament should be reckoned as mission? Analyses that focus primarily on
the verbal proclamation of a distinctive message by the apostles and their
closest co-workers tend to highlight theological issues. In the next section of
this chapter, such approaches will take center stage. In the meantime, several
research perspectives on mission in the Bible that do not begin with
theological criteria may be briefly described.
One pathway that some scholars have used to identify mission in the New
Testament is based on lexicology. The idea behind this research strategy is
that mission, like any defined task or particular concept mentioned in
scripture, is likely to have a distinctive set of terms linked to it. Certain verbs,
for example, may be expected to recur whenever a biblical figure “does”
mission or otherwise engages in some kind of missionary action (for example,
“proclaiming,” “sending,” “gathering,” “making disciples,” “baptizing,”
“working,” etc.) . Other terms may become associated with those whom the
apostles and others hope to share their message (“the nations,” “crowds,”
“world”) or come to stand as characteristic metaphors for the church's
outreach efforts (“planting,” “building,” “sowing,” “reaping,” “fishing”).
Schnabel (2004, 36–37), following Rudolf Pesch (1982, 14–16), has drawn
together a carefully screened list of terms he understands to constitute the
“semantic field” of mission in the New Testament, arranged by category. A
much broader selection of terminology potentially related to evangelism is
presented in Barrett and Johnson, World Christian Trends (2001, 697–738).
Technical commentaries and the standard lexical aids must, of course, be
consulted for detailed knowledge about specific terms, including the history
of their usage in a variety of contexts. An invaluable resource that ought to be
consulted in the course of any lexicological investigation of mission-related
vocabulary is Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament
(1994).
Narrative criticism is another methodology to have arisen within New
Testament studies that has shown potential for the analysis of mission activity
in scripture. In this approach, scholars seek to understand the literary
techniques employed in the Gospels and Acts, looking, for example, at the
ways authors have constructed their plots and described characters. Also
important in this subdiscipline of literary criticism are factors such as tone,
pacing, point of view, and the presence or function of a narrator in a given
story. Within biblical studies, narrative criticism has become a particularly
useful tool for identifying the different roles played in Gospel narratives by
“minor” characters, even ones without names or speaking parts. The work of
Elizabeth Struthers Malbon (2000) is exemplary in this respect. Working
more directly within missiology but with the benefit of a narrative critical
perspective, Skreslet (2006b, esp. 79–117) has also sought to increase
awareness of the background figures in the New Testament and their often-
overlooked contributions to early mission history. Of crucial importance is the
capacity of narrative criticism to prompt thinking about the social roles
assumed by a variety of minor and major New Testament characters engaged
in mission. Thus, in Skreslet, one encounters both well-known and obscure
biblical actors who, in different sets of circumstances, might operate primarily
in public or private spaces, alone or in concert with others, cross-culturally or
within closely knit family networks, while assuming a variety of social
postures for Christian witness (for example, “in front of” an audience of
strangers as a public proclaimer of the gospel or “beside” a close friend or
family member while sharing faith more personally).
Sociologists of religion have also contributed to our understanding of
evangelization in the New Testament era. Such scholars pay close attention to
the processes of religious change as these can be identified within particular
social systems. This might mean, for instance, looking at the church in the
first century as an example of what many scholars are now likely to call a new
religious movement. An assumption that grounds this scholarly methodology
is that whatever differences in doctrine one might discover when comparing
newly founded religious groups, certain sociological factors tend to be critical
for their successful growth and development. Thus, it becomes a priority to
understand how such groups construct social boundaries around themselves in
order to reinforce a distinctive identity. The means by which new members
are assimilated is likewise a matter of deep interest. As might be expected,
sociologists of religion are keenly attentive to broad-based movements of
religious conversion, especially as these can be quantified. Large-scale shifts
in religious affiliation may indicate new trends underway with respect to
values, attitudes, or behavioral norms previously held in common by large
numbers of people and so point to profound societal changes. Less important
in these analyses are matters of theological conviction or professed
motivations for missionary thought and action. A widely read example of a
sociological approach to the results of early Christian mission is Rodney
Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (1996).
Social scientific methods have also become increasingly important within
New Testament studies, beginning in the 1970s. An early contributor was
Gerd Theissen, whose Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (1978) and
many other books and articles stimulated considerable thinking along
sociological lines with respect to the origins of Christianity. Theissen argued
for explanations of Christianity's emergence that took seriously the economic,
ecological (geographic), political, and cultural conditions of its first-century
Palestinian environment. Other New Testament scholars applied the same
logic to Christianity's larger context within the eastern Mediterranean world.
Particularly influential has been Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians:
The Social World of the Apostle Paul (1983). In addition to describing
Christianity's conceptual transition from the world of the village to that of the
city in a particularly vivid way, Meeks examined a number of other social
factors that quite likely shaped the character of the scattered but still
interrelated local religious communities reflected in the Pauline
correspondence. The emphasis in Meeks falls on issues of social status
(gender, class, relative social power), the ekklesia as a distinctive kind of first-
century organizational structure, the “social function” of doctrine, and the
methods of socialization (including ritual) used to create and maintain a
peculiarly Christian subculture within a predominantly pagan and sometimes
hostile Greco-Roman world. Like Stark, Meeks only here and there directly
addresses the missionary processes by which Pauline Christianity came into
being, but his way of writing social history adds much to our understanding of
the now quite unfamiliar setting in which Paul and others shared their faith
and suggests even more about how such processes might be studied in the
future.
BIBLICAL RESOURCES FOR THEOLOGY OF MISSION
Theologians of mission usually turn to scripture for entirely different reasons
than historians. Whereas the latter typically seek from the New Testament
detailed information about how mission unfolded in the time of Jesus, the
apostles, and the generation that immediately followed them, the former are
more likely to be searching for enduring principles that have guided or could
guide Christian witness across time. Even exegetes, when they operate as
investigators of past mission experience need not concern themselves with
any contemporary applications of whatever they might learn about mission in
the Bible. Mission theologians who decide to feature the Bible in their
research, on the other hand, are likely to have at least one eye cast on the
future. A common assumption among these scholars is that the Bible can
function as a wellspring of inspiration and direction for the church's mission
in every age.
More specifically, what mission theologians tend to seek from the Bible are
two kinds of help. The first has to do with the legitimation of Christian
mission. By what authority does any missionary or church dare to share faith
or to invite others to participate in the body of Christ? In other words, where
is the ultimate justification to be found for the giving of Christian witness
through intentional missionary activity? It is quite possible to assert an
extrabiblical foundation for mission, arguing, as many have done especially in
the modern period, that missionaries could contribute to human development
through their educational and humanitarian efforts. In contrast, theological
appeals tend to rely on scripture to make the case that mission is a constituent
element of the Christian life, a matter of inner necessity, which does not
depend on any other philosophical grounds for its justification.
Theologians also often use scripture to evaluate the conduct of mission.
Here a leading issue is the problem of how to prioritize the purposes of truly
authentic Christian mission. Equally important is the need to identify the most
appropriate means to use in the pursuit of these aims. Marc Spindler has
insightfully discussed the different uses of scripture by mission theologians in
his essay, “The Biblical Grounding and Orientation of Mission” (1995).
What follows in the rest of this section is a sampling of particular
approaches to mission in the Bible, conceived from a variety of theological
viewpoints. I am not trying to be comprehensive with respect to this subtopic,
which will also receive attention in several chapters to come. My intention
rather is simply to illustrate some of the different ways mission theologians
have attempted either to anchor their understanding of mission in scripture or
to use the Bible to critique specific sets of missionary methods and the
proximate goals that lie behind them. The order of presentation to be
employed will proceed from what are relatively narrow appeals to scripture to
more complex theological analyses of mission in the Bible. I do not propose
to conclude with or lead up to a normative definition of mission or
evangelization here, preferring instead to survey a range of recommendations
already on offer for a biblical theology of mission.
An obvious place to begin is with William Carey's identification of the
Great Commission (Matthew 28:18–20 and parallels) as a sufficient basis on
which to construct a worldwide program of missionary outreach. Carey, in his
famous 1792 Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the
Conversion of the Heathens, did not seek from the Bible any specific
instructions for how to accomplish his proposed venture. For the apparatus of
his mission program (the “means” to be used), Carey looked instead to the
commercial trading companies that operated internationally in his day.
Mission-minded Christians in England and elsewhere were urged to organize
themselves in a similar manner as private voluntary associations, with boards
of directors, investors (donors), rational policies regarding the recruitment and
training of mission personnel, plus sustainable financial plans. Their cause
would be “propagating the gospel amongst the heathens” (86), rather than the
pursuit of business profits. Crucially, the whole enterprise rested on what
Carey understood to be a biblical principle: “If the prophecies concerning the
increase of Christ's kingdom be true, and if what has been advanced,
concerning the commission given by him to his disciples being obligatory on
us, be just, it must be inferred that all Christians ought heartily to concur with
God in promoting his glorious designs” (77; emphasis added). For Carey and
countless other friends of mission after him, those divine promises and that
mandate from Jesus could supply more than enough motive to justify
whatever sacrifices might be required from those hoping to extend the reach
of the church and its message to the whole world.
Duty is but one of the reasons to be found in scripture that might serve as a
basis of mission commitment. Many others have chosen to highlight instead
their concern for the eternal fate of non-Christian humanity, based on those
passages in the Bible that point to the necessity of Christ's work on the cross
in God's plan of salvation. In essence, this is a biblical argument for Christian
mission founded on the motive of love. As Paul puts it, “the love of Christ
urges us on” in the task of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:14). God's compassion for
the world, which led to the sending of the Son (John 3:16), is taken as a
model for those who wish to follow and participate in Christ's mission. In the
same way that Jesus showed a willingness to search high and low for lost,
precious sheep in his local Palestinian context, some in later generations
would sound a call to emulate his example, but on a larger scale. Bosch
(1991, 208–9) understands such reasoning to have undergirded much Eastern
Orthodox thinking about mission, especially in the patristic period. Johannes
van den Berg (1956) has argued that professions of love for God and
humanity were a common and perhaps decisive feature of British evangelical
pleas for mission involvement in the eighteenth century.
Bosch and van den Berg, among many others, remind us that the love
motive (or any other driving force ostensibly drawn from the Bible) can be
compromised, even among its most passionate advocates. Worldly interests
never rest, with the result that all rhetoric on behalf of mission cast in terms of
our love for God or humanity (or dedication to God's glory) has to be
interrogated and measured against actions proposed or taken in pursuit of
these ideals. Nationalist impulses, for example, or notions of religious
territoriality, can easily subvert benevolent intent directed toward humanity
and turn it instead into a scramble after patently earthbound advantages. The
integrity of the love motive is imperiled whenever it is made subordinate to an
ethnocentric worldview that may be able to accommodate pity and the giving
of charity but resists genuine empathy. Bosch (1991, 286–91) suggests that
the best example in the modern period of something like disinterested love
functioning as a basis for mission may have been practiced by the Moravians
in the eighteenth century.
Another kind of limited foray into scripture on behalf of mission theology
has focused on the means of mission. In these efforts, the Bible is searched
carefully in hopes of identifying the signal marks of apostolic mission. Thus,
on the example of Jesus in Mark 6:7–9 (and parallels), a group or
denomination might decide to send out their missionaries in pairs, perhaps
dressed in distinctive ways. The same passage has been used repeatedly as a
basis on which to stipulate an ascetic ideal for those aspiring to live as the
disciples sent out on mission by Jesus did. The mendicants of the Middle
Ages come to mind immediately in this regard, but we also have later
Protestant groups like the China Inland Mission in the nineteenth century
inculcating among their missionaries a lifestyle of radical dependence on God
in response to the instructions of Jesus: “Take nothing for your journey, no
staff, nor bag, nor bread, nor money—not even an extra tunic” (Luke 9:3).
At times, different parts of the church have made the performance of
miracles a distinctive aspect of their approach to evangelization, in imitation
of Jesus and the charismatic itinerants known to have been active in first-
century Christianity. Based on their own readings of the New Testament
materials, others have insisted on public preaching and/or compassionate
service as indispensable elements of apostolic mission practice. A few
theorists have fixed on one or another relatively obscure detail in the sacred
text in order to promote what they believed to be a biblical norm for mission.
An example of this approach is the peculiar polity John Eliot laid down for
the seventeenth-century Native American converts he gathered into “praying
towns.” In Eliot's view, the decision to designate “rulers of ten, of fifty, of a
hundred,” a scheme of limited self-government modeled on Jethro's
instructions to Moses in Exodus 18, proved that his program of evangelization
was “expressly conformed to the Scriptures” (quoted in Cogley 1999, 168).
A more elaborate theological appraisal of mission in the New Testament
focused on methods that deserves an extended comment because of its wide
influence is Roland Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours? (1912).
Allen's thesis is remarkably straightforward: Paul had a strategy for
evangelization that can be applied directly to contemporary circumstances.
The key to the apostle's success, according to Allen, was his willingness to
leave the churches he had founded in the hands of the converts themselves, as
soon as possible. On the basis of a gospel message simply preached, a set of
common scriptures, and a recognition of local leadership that had emerged
more or less naturally on its own, these new communities could be trusted to
make their own decisions on matters of governance, doctrine, and the details
of worship. Allen's approach is a textbook example of exegesis in the service
of theology. He examines the book of Acts and Paul's correspondence in order
to identify a biblical standard by which to evaluate the mission practices of
his day. He is not interested in the small-scale techniques of mission as
enacted by the apostles but focuses rather on the larger strategic vision that
guided Paul and his colleagues in their choice of tactics.
Similarly concerned to find the right theological basis for mission in order
to choose the most appropriate methods is Donald McGavran, whose proposal
for a theology of mission based on church growth principles has had
enormous impact around the world. A biblical theology of mission,
McGavran insisted, will not be satisfied with a good-faith effort to search for
converts. God's intention is that as many people as possible who are ready to
receive the gospel be found promptly and given the opportunity to respond to
Christ's call: “God wants countable lost persons found” (McGavran 1962,
310). This is why Jesus talks about a ready harvest and an immediate need for
reapers (Matt. 9:38). It is the reason behind his instructions to the disciples
not to waste their time among those unwilling to receive the good news they
have to share (Matt. 10:14). Some of the most memorable of Jesus' parables
highlight the need to be persistent in one's search for what is lost, not resting
until it is found (Luke 15:3–32). And in Acts the apostles are shown to
practice this principle, concentrating their efforts first on the Jews. Only when
that door seems to close do they turn to the Gentiles, thus fulfilling Jesus'
promise that the gospel would be preached sequentially, “in Jerusalem, in all
Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
Beyond the scope of Roland Allen's work on Paul and Donald McGavran's
theology of harvest are those theological treatments of mission in the Bible
that attempt to work more thoroughly with the whole of the canon. Several of
these will now be described, grouped according to their common themes. No
claim is made here that anything like a comprehensive roster of biblical
theologies of mission is about to be presented. Still, it may be possible even in
this restricted space to give an idea about some of the major biblical way
stations visited by mission theology in its journey through the twentieth
century.
The Mission of God
A nearly ubiquitous concept in mission theology today is the phrase missio
Dei. The idea of a single mission rooted in God's nature at the very least
stands in heuristic tension with the manifold and often competing ventures
launched by churches and other organizations dedicated to missionary
outreach. It is customary now to talk about the wide variety of ends to which
the term missio Dei has been put since it came into general circulation shortly
after the 1952 Willingen conference of the International Missionary Council.
As we will see, these different applications of the term draw on more than one
set of scripture passages, as successive attempts have been made using this or
related terms to establish a biblical foundation for the theology of Christian
mission. John Flett (2010) has closely examined the origins of the term missio
Dei. He concludes that the undoubted attractiveness of this formulation in the
postcolonial era has obscured its basic incoherence, due to the illusory or
nonsubstantial way mission theologians have related this concept to the
doctrine of the Trinity.
As originally conceived, “mission of God” language gave theologians a
way to connect the churches and their missionary programs to the entire
history of divine revelation attested in the Bible. Mission is seen not as
something begun by any human organization, but as an eternal reality rooted
in God's sending of the Son and the procession of the Spirit from the
Godhead. Individual disciples and churches could participate in God's
mission, but they were not to presume pride of authorship or claim a right to
initiate something that properly fell outside their sphere of competence. Such
a formulation allows one to tap into an astonishing array of scriptural
resources, including witnesses to the incarnation (God's sending of the Son),
biblical accounts of the Spirit's activity, the history of prophecy in ancient
Israel (God's sending of the prophets), all of what is known about the efforts
of Jesus to establish God's reign through his preaching, demonstrations of
power, and crucifixion, plus the narrative materials found in Acts and
elsewhere that document the work of Jesus' first disciples. Missio Dei
language also invites one to conceive of the church itself as a sent community,
dispatched by the Triune God for witness in the world. As Basel Mission
director Karl Hartenstein observed, Willingen's use of the concept missio Dei
put the missionary idea “within the broadest imaginable framework of
salvation history and God's plan for salvation” (quoted in Richebächer 2003,
590).
Even before the end of the 1950s another application of missio Dei
language had begun to emerge. To the distinction already made between the
mission of God and the missions of the churches (missio ecclesiae) was added
a suggestion that these two forms of action might in fact be opposed to one
another. This could be the case, for instance, if church bodies decided to use
mission illegitimately to further their own institutional interests or merely to
bolster membership rolls. According to some theologians, active opposition
from the churches to the notion that God was working through revolutionary
movements in the postcolonial era or the historical processes of urbanization
and secularization likewise raised doubts about Christian commitment to the
missio Dei. In ecumenical circles, the culmination of this theological
development came in the World Council of Churches study process on the
“Missionary Structures of the Congregation,” whose Western European
working group made bold to assert that many existing forms of the church
may well be “heretical structures” that blocked the way of the missio Dei and
so should be abandoned (World Council of Churches 1967, 19).
Without a doubt, much sociological analysis of varying quality lay beneath
this turn in the fate of the term missio Dei, but some solid exegetical
spadework had prepared the ground beforehand. A key figure in this regard
was Johannes Hoekendijk, whose seminal essay first published in 1950, “The
Call to Evangelism,” put forward shalom as a guiding principle for mission in
a post-Christendom world. For Hoekendijk (1950, 168), the idea of shalom,
understood as “peace, integrity, community, harmony, and justice” not only
served to connect the messianic promises of the Old Testament to Jesus and
his mission, but also fully described the true objective of the church's work in
the present. A church that wants to align itself with the Messiah's mission,
Hoekendijk suggested, will heed the call to put shalom at the heart of its
message (kerygma), to find ways to embody shalom in community (koinonia),
and to translate the Christian experience of shalom into acts of humble service
in the world outside the church (diakonia).
The cause of shalom, swept up as it was into ongoing debates in the 1950s
and 1960s over the meaning of the missio Dei, became one of the primary
ways in mission theology to talk about salvation. Others promoted
humanization over Christianization as the proper goal of mission. From the
1970s, an alternative but still complementary term is met with increasing
frequency in the literature of mission theology: liberation. A preference for
liberationist rhetoric often leads to a different kind of appeal to scripture.
Reduced prominence may be given, for example, to biblical promises of
God's future provision of harmony and justice at the end of time in favor of
stories that feature God-inspired action on behalf of the poor and the
marginalized in real-life circumstances. Thus, with respect to the Old
Testament, less may need to be said about an impending Last Day and more
about the prophets and figures like Moses who challenged the powerful in
their own time. Correspondingly, one should expect fewer citations from
Jesus and Paul about the cosmic dimensions of God's coming reign but an
intense interest in those situations where Jesus confronted the religious
authorities of his generation who blessed the status quo. Within the
hermeneutical trajectory defined by liberation, the first sermon of Jesus at
Nazareth (as recorded in Luke 4:16–30) and the story of the exodus often
function as programmatic texts for this brand of mission theology. The special
attention paid in Luke to the situation of the poor (in Mary's song of the
Magnificat [Luke 1:46–55], for example, or in certain of the parables) also
tends to recommend this Gospel in particular to anyone who believes that
salvation is, above all, a matter of liberation from current forms of oppression.
Reconciliation
Yet another grand theme suggested for a biblical theology of mission is the
idea of reconciliation. As Schreiter (1997b, 379) has observed, in the context
of missiology reconciliation has significance “not only as a way of speaking
of God's good news for the world but as a way of doing mission itself.”
Reconciliation as good news is a widely attested leitmotif in the Bible, even
in the Old Testament. It is suggested, for example, whenever radical social
estrangement is overcome or a profound experience of injustice is rectified.
Peaceful relations between former enemies (when not imposed unilaterally)
can be a sign of reconciliation. In the New Testament, one finds numerous
places in Paul's letters where the idea of reconciliation seems to define his
apostolate and message. According to Paul, not only do Jew and Greek find
their essential unity in Christ (Eph. 2:13–22), but the cross of Christ is the
means by which humanity and everything else in the created order have
become reconciled to God (Rom. 5:8–11; Col. 1:19–20). No wonder then that
Paul could sum up his life's work as a “ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor.
5:18).
Elsewhere in the New Testament, we find the theme of reconciliation
powerfully portrayed in the story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). An
ethic of reconciling love, summed up in the command to love one's enemies
(Matt. 5:44), may be said to lie at the heart of the Beatitudes. Intriguingly,
Schreiter (1998) suggests that all of the resurrection appearance stories in the
New Testament could be read as narratives of reconciliation. When Jesus
appears, the disciples are confronted with their sense of loss and guilt. At the
same time, these encounters are moments of healing, because Jesus implicitly
demonstrates his willingness to forgive remorseful disciples while offering
them encouragement for the future. In this way, as Schreiter shrewdly
observes, acts of reconciliation seem to form the very context in which
disciples are transformed into apostles, the specific circumstances of their
commissioning. The Risen Lord, himself a victim of violence and betrayal,
shows by his actions how reconciliation can permeate the church's mission
“as a spirituality, as a ministry, and as a strategy” (21).
Reconciliation as a master-theme within mission theology can be
reinforced and broadened by pairing it with related concerns. Peacemaking,
for example, is a way to talk about the practice of reconciliation in particular
situations of conflict and violence. Likewise, we find some eco-theologians
calling for greater efforts to heal the earth as an expression of mission
intention put in terms of reconciliation (see, for instance, Langmead 2002 and
2008 on “ecomissiology”).
More often than not, dialogue is championed as the means of mission best
suited for the work of reconciliation. In this case, Jesus' interactions with
strangers like the Samaritan woman (John 4:7–30) or Paul's irenic exchange
with the philosophers in Athens (Acts 17:16–34) are likely to be highlighted.
A dialogical style of mission and ministry might be promoted either as a way
to prepare for reconciliation to take place or to manifest a quality of mutuality
in human relationships thought to be appropriate for a people who understand
themselves to be reconciled with God. In a recent proposal for the renewal of
mission theology, Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder (2004, esp. 348–95)
have linked together commitments to interreligious dialogue, reconciliation,
justice, peace, and care for the environment (plus several other elements)
under the rubric of “prophetic dialogue.”
Universalism
A biblical theology of mission can also be built around the theme of
universalism. This is the path taken, for example, by Donald Senior and
Carroll Stuhlmueller (1983) in their influential introduction to mission and the
Bible, The Biblical Foundations for Mission. By universalism, Senior and
Stuhlmueller mean to indicate the unlimited scope of God's salvific intent as
revealed in the Christian scriptures. No part of humanity is left out of God's
vision for a redeemed world. Further, all of history and the entirety of creation
may be understood to be potential contexts for the revelatory activity of God.
Senior and Stuhlmueller reach these conclusions on the basis of a close
exegetical analysis of nearly the entire Christian canon, where it seems to
them that “every historical event, every layer of the universe, and every
human being that shaped the experience of Israel and the early church are part
of the biblical story” (347).
The potency of this theological approach to mission in the Bible is
demonstrated by the major subtopics it spurs Senior and Stuhlmueller to
confront. To claim that the God of the Bible wills universal salvation requires
a careful study of mission in the Old Testament, where the election of Israel
seems to denote a sense of ethnocentric exclusivity. The assertion of a
universal gospel, “capable of embracing and being expressed by all cultures
and all peoples” (2), immediately raises questions about how the Bible's
message has been and might be inculturated in a variety of cultural contexts.
An insistence that the church be universal presses these biblical theologians to
consider how communities gathered in Christ's name may be guided by
scripture, even as they seek to maintain their distinctive common identity in a
world of many religions.
A second study (also written from a Catholic perspective) that likewise
grapples seriously with matters of universalism and pluralism is Lucien
Legrand, Unity and Plurality: Mission in the Bible (1990). Legrand writes
less extensively than Senior and Stuhlmueller with respect to individual books
in the Bible and their relationship to mission, but his thesis is no less
comprehensive than theirs. In both Testaments, according to Legrand, one
finds a kind of missional dialectic at work, in which an expansive vision of
salvation that encompasses all the nations of the earth is effected through the
formation of communities set apart by God. In the Old Testament that special
polity was Israel and the exclusive quality of Israel's relationship to God is
treated as a paramount consideration, but without totally effacing God's
concern for the nations. In the New Testament, the emphasis falls on God's
turn to the Gentiles and the world as a whole, but the church is still assigned a
special role nonetheless in the divine economy. Universal salvation and
election may thus be considered the “twin poles” of mission in the Bible (15–
27; 152). On the basis of this finding, Legrand will argue that the ways of
mission need not be resolved into a single approach or form. A biblical
theology of mission marked by paradox bids one to consider flexible
methodologies capable of engaging a world full of ambiguity.
Finally, we have the example of David Bosch, whose Transforming
Mission (1991) includes a major section on theology of mission in the New
Testament. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Bosch finds in the New
Testament materials he surveys (Matthew, Luke-Acts, Paul) more than one
standpoint for a biblical theology of mission. This diversity in scripture is
complemented by the church's experience in evangelization, which over two
millennia has encompassed a wide range of normative proposals for how to
conceptualize mission (called in Bosch “paradigms” of mission). Not
surprisingly, Bosch's description of an “emerging ecumenical missionary
paradigm” is also marked by variegation. No single theme is allowed to
dominate the collection of thirteen interrelated “elements” that define the new
direction in mission theory Bosch wishes to recommend. Mission in the
postmodern era has to be multidimensional, he believes, able to embrace
aspects of “witness, service, justice, healing, reconciliation, liberation, peace,
evangelism, fellowship, church planting, contextualization, and much more”
(512). To avoid incoherence, a willingness to tolerate not a little “creative
tension” among the different parts of this very comprehensive definition of
mission is required, as Bosch has acknowledged (367). Ultimately, pluralism
as a challenge to Enlightenment thinking (whether expressed in terms of a
rationalist absolutism or hyper-subjective relativism) becomes the defining
characteristic of his ecumenical paradigm of postmodern mission.
THE BIBLE IN MISSION
Translations
Legions of missionaries and linguists have worked hard over the past two
centuries especially to make the Christian scriptures available in as many of
the world's living languages as possible. One indicator of this fact appears in
the statistics that sum up the current status of Bible translation activity. The
number of different languages in which at least one book of the Bible is
already in print now exceeds 2,450, according to an authoritative count
provided on the website of the United Bible Societies (www.ubs-
translations.org/about_us). Included in this number are 438 complete
translations and 1,168 more languages in which one or the other of the two
biblical Testaments has been fully translated (as of 2007). In comparison, a
writing that has recently been recognized by the Guinness world record
organization as the “most translated document” in the world is the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which by the end of 2007 had been rendered
into slightly more than 360 languages (the United Nations calls attention to
this [erroneous] claim at
www.un.org/events/humanrights/2007/worldtransdoc.shtml). A vigorous
program of Bible translation work continues under the auspices of the United
Bible Societies, with some 268 projects currently under way in languages that
still lack even one published portion of scripture. Additional work is
sponsored by the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible Translators
and a number of other lesser known organizations.
Evangelistic motives lay or lie behind most of these translation efforts, as
missionaries and church leaders have sought either to provide already existing
communities of believers with the Bible in their own language or to create a
means to share this sacred text with new groups of people outside the church.
In either case, it is not unreasonable to conclude, with Jaroslav Pelikan (2005,
213), that for Protestants at least “the Bible translator replaced the monk as
the principal agent…of their strategy of evangelization and missions” in the
course of the nineteenth century.
A warrant for translation is included in the text itself. Even in the Old
Testament, where Hebrew overwhelmingly dominates as the assumed best
medium of communication between God and humanity, a few chapters in the
book of Daniel were recorded in Aramaic. Loan-words derived from a variety
of foreign languages (most often Akkadian, Egyptian, or Persian) are
sprinkled throughout the Old Testament canon (Ellenbogen 1962), an implicit
witness to the dynamic cultural contexts in which ancient Israel conducted its
political, economic, and religious affairs. Well before the beginning of the
Common Era, the Old Testament as a whole had been translated into Greek
and in that version (the Septuagint or LXX) was regarded as an authoritative
form of scripture by many Jews living in diaspora throughout the
Mediterranean basin.
For the earliest followers of Jesus, some form of the Old Testament also
functioned as their Bible. In time, another set of writings generated from
within the Christian community itself attained equal status. Curiously, what
came to be known as the New Testament was not written in the mother tongue
of Jesus and his closest disciples, but in Greek. The Gospels themselves
provide a window onto the linguistic transition that quickly ensued after the
death of Jesus, as certain phrases are reproduced in their original Aramaic (for
example, the cry of Jesus on the cross at Matt. 27:46) and then also translated
for an audience presumably in need of such assistance. Had the Christian
movement remained a small sect within Palestinian Judaism, a shift to Greek
might have been tolerated, since the Jews of that area had also been affected
by the cultural tsunami of Hellenization that had swept through the eastern
Mediterranean region in the preceding centuries (see Fitzmyer, 1979). An
intention to share their message with Jews scattered far and wide in diaspora,
and then with Gentiles too, made the use of Greek necessary.
The Principle of Translatability
The subsequent experience of the Christian church in mission soon broke
through the tacit limits that encircled the Septuagint. The transition from
Aramaic to Greek was followed by other translations of the Christian
scriptures, initially into Syriac, Latin, and Coptic. In the case of the LXX,
accompanying myths of divine intervention on behalf of the translators
(provided in Philo and Josephus) had perhaps been necessary to authenticate
the new version and make it acceptable to a community long conditioned to
revere Hebrew above every other language spoken on earth. The Christian
worldview turned out to be different. According to this understanding of
God's linguistic economy, all the world's vernaculars were equally gifted with
a capacity to receive the gospel. Christianity did not have to make an
exception in the face of exigency and suddenly accept a new rendering of its
sacred writings in a foreign script. It had been founded on the principle of
“translatability” (Sanneh 1989), a circumstance that would have huge
implications for the ensuing history of Christian mission, although not
everywhere and at all times to the same degree.
After Constantine, different attitudes toward translation began to develop in
the Byzantine East and Latin West. In the realm of Eastern Orthodoxy, where
national church cultures were not only recognized but nurtured, the principle
of translatability continued to be expressed with verve, whether in missionary
outreach or in finely contextualized theological traditions. Thus, we find
Ulfila (c. 311–83) devising with colleagues the language tools needed to
translate the Bible into Gothic, as they sought to convert this ethnic group to
Christianity. In Ethiopia, Ge'ez became a medium of scripture at about the
same time that Mesrob (c. 350–439/440) and his students created their
acclaimed Armenian translation. In a number of contexts dominated by Islam,
established Middle Eastern Christian communities felt it necessary to adopt
Arabic for apologetic purposes from at least the eighth century (on this
history, see Griffith 2008). And then we have the celebrated example of Cyril
and Methodius in the ninth century, who do for the Slavs of Moravia and
beyond what Ulfila had done for the Goths when they invent the Glagolitic
alphabet as a basis for the literary and ecclesiastical language that came to be
known as Old Church Slavonic.
The translation activities of Cyril and Methodius and the stiff opposition in
some quarters that rose up against them in Moravia exposed a widening
philosophical gap on mission strategy between Rome and Constantinople.
Unlike the Orthodox in the East, Roman Catholicism in the early Middle
Ages was steadily moving away from the principle of translatability. High
respect for the Vulgate translation of Jerome (c. 340–420) ended up
suppressing the church's natural impulse to translate its scriptures into other
European languages. In a connected development, the wide use of Latin
within Western Christianity eventually became an effective symbol of the
Roman Catholic Church's claim to universality. Reformers like John Wycliffe
(c. 1330–84) and Martin Luther (1483–1546) had to contend with official
censure when they broke with tradition over the issue of vernacular
translations. The Council of Trent (1545–63) reaffirmed for Catholics the
singular status of the Vulgate as inspired scripture and so pronounced against
the notion of translatability.
Because early modern Protestants were slow to take up the cause of
worldwide evangelization, they left unrealized for a very long time many of
the potential benefits of translation for mission. This changed dramatically in
the generation of William Carey. From the late eighteenth century, Bible
translation and the distribution of the sacred text in multiple languages
became for Protestants a major means of mission. Quite soon thereafter, the
printed scriptures and other texts became material symbols that effectively
represented much of what was distinctive about Protestant missions, including
literacy, an educated clergy, and lay access to the scriptures. Focusing on The
Pilgrim's Progress as a transnational religious discourse, Isabel Hofmeyr
(2004) has shown how the principle of translatability could also apply to an
extrabiblical text. According to Hofmeyr, the extraordinary success of
Bunyan's story only partially derived from Western evangelical confidence in
its universal validity. Countless audiences around the world were just as eager
to receive this text in translation (Hofmeyr concentrates on eighty translations
that circulated in sub-Saharan Africa alone) and to appropriate its message on
their own terms. As it happened, the early successes of the Bible societies so
captured the imagination of the Protestant Christian public that their activities
were interpreted as an apocalyptic sign of divine providence on a par with the
great revivals of religion taking place at about the same time in the North
Atlantic region (so observed Leonard Woods [1966] in 1812 on the occasion
of the ordination of the first missionaries sent abroad by the American Board
of Commissioners for Foreign Missions). Writing in 1839, Alexander Duff
would characterize Bible translation and the circulation of the scriptures as
one of three primary methods of evangelization then in use among Protestants
(next to proclamation and education). Indeed, already by his day, some
advocates of the Bible Societies and their methods were arguing for the
distribution of vernacular scriptures without preaching as the purest
expression of the missionary impulse because it was less contentious, a notion
that Duff ridiculed (1839, 375–78) as equivalent to sending harps to the deaf
or passing out medicine to the sick without the advice of knowledgeable
physicians. Steer (2004) has written about the policy of the British and
Foreign Bible Society from its inception in 1804 to circulate the scriptures
“without note or comment.”
So far what I have been summarizing in this section are the largely agreed-
upon results of missiological research focused on the role of the Bible in
mission. For additional details, students will want to consult William Smalley,
Translation as Mission (1991). Historical methodologies have figured
prominently in these efforts, as scholars have attempted to piece together the
record of translation work assembled over the centuries. Exegetical
investigations have added to our knowledge regarding the status of Greek and
other languages in first-century Palestine, while also shedding light on the
evolution of Hebrew during the formation of the Old Testament canon. Some
aspects of Bible translation history have raised theological questions. This is
evident, for example, in the various stances taken on the principle of
translatability among the different families of churches, some of which were
argued along theological lines. Yet even here there is not much controversy to
be found today among Christians with respect to the advisability of translating
the scriptures. Advocates and critics of particular translations or styles of
translation may disagree with one another, but after the Second Vatican
Council (1962–65) opened the door for Catholics to use vernacular forms of
scripture in worship and study, virtually no contemporary supporter of
Christian mission would think to ask if Bible translation is theologically
justified. Translation is now accepted as an indispensable element of mission.
It is a kind of contextualization that the gospel not only allows but seems to
require.
Vernacularization and Empowerment
Even outside the church, it was widely assumed until quite recently that Bible
translation was always a benevolent activity. Where a language group lacked
its own set of scriptures, a new translation provided access to a previously
unavailable resource for spiritual growth. In the situation of a language
spoken by relatively few people, a translator's choice to commit time and
treasure to a minor dialect could be interpreted as a sign of respect for a
marginalized social group. Further, the history of mission is replete with
examples of pioneer translators whose efforts to create writing systems for
oral languages made literacy and the creation of new literary traditions
possible, a development that could only add to the world's cultural richness.
In a few cases, high-quality translations of the Bible (for example, Luther's
German translation) came to be regarded by later generations as particularly
graceful exemplars of good literary style.
In his forceful defense of translatability as a cardinal virtue both for
mission and theology, Lamin Sanneh (1989) elaborates on most of the
arguments briefly noted above and adds a few new points of his own. Sanneh
draws attention, for example, to the collaborative relationships engendered by
translation, as cross-cultural missionaries find themselves quite unable to
cope independently with their task. Native informants and “assistant”
translators never get the recognition they deserve, Sanneh acknowledges, but
the fundamental issue is what happens next in the history of interpretation,
after the translated text has been created. Again and again, the products of
Bible translation work demonstrate a capacity to transcend even the most
grating of missionary ethnocentrisms. Once the scriptures are rendered into
the vernacular, it becomes impossible to keep the Bible in foreign custody. In
the wide open seas of interpretation that lie ahead, native speakers rather than
foreign missionaries are bound to become the master navigators of the present
and future, because they have the deepest understanding of the novel and
complex cultural environment in which the text has come to be situated.
Sanneh concludes his argument by contrasting the basic orientations to
culture displayed within Islam and Christianity (211–38). With its
untranslatable Qur'an and mandated formal prayers in Arabic (salat), Islam
obviously privileges one language and culture at the expense of all others. Its
preferred method of mission is diffusion from a defined center in hopes of
replicating an ideal seventh-century past, rather than translation. At different
points in the church's history, Sanneh observes, Christian propagandists may
have behaved similarly, but adherence to the principle of translatability
invariably promotes cultural pluralism as a norm within the Christian
tradition.
On the basis of the church's experience in sub-Saharan Africa especially,
Sanneh goes on to assert that the practice of translation adopted by most
Western missions eventually undermined Western imperial interests on that
continent. This is perhaps the most unexpected and controversial aspect of his
thesis. In Sanneh's view, vernacularization in mission empowered Africans
among others to resist the control of foreign agents and metropolitan centers.
Even in those situations where missionaries actively supported colonial rule,
their evangelization project, when founded on the principle of translatability,
represented “the logical opposite of colonialism” (105). In many locations,
indigenized scriptures stimulated cultural renewal, which in turn became the
basis of an emerging national identity that could be activated in defiance of
the colonizer. In the Bible's stories of liberation and God's concern for the
oppressed, many African Christians discovered conceptual resources by
which they could imagine a postcolonial existence for themselves.
Coincidently, schools originally established by the missions to increase Bible
literacy also became fertile training grounds for some of Africa's most
successful anticolonial leaders. In these and other ways, Sanneh concludes,
Christian mission was “deliberately fashioning the vernacular instrument that
Africans…came to wield against their colonial overlords” (5).
The notion that the Christian scriptures when translated are necessarily a
means of empowerment for those being evangelized has been stoutly
challenged in recent years. An influential voice in these debates belongs to
New Testament scholar Musa Dube, who contends that missionary
translations often served to advance colonial interests by stigmatizing aspects
of native cultures that might stand in the way of imperial designs. Her case in
point is the 1840 Robert Moffatt translation of the New Testament later
revised by A. J. Wookey, in which the Greek word for “demon” is translated
using the Setswana term for ancestors (badimo). She condemns Moffatt's
choice of words in this instance as an act of violence, a mistranslation meant
to alienate the natives from their own culture (1999, 37–39). Dube finds
similar strategies at work in the handling of other vocabulary related to
traditional Setswana religion, not only in translations of the Bible but in
missionary-produced grammars and dictionaries, too. Thus did missionaries
like Moffatt and Wookey plant many “colonial culture bombs” in the midst of
the non-Western peoples with whom they shared the Christian scriptures,
“minefields” that warned African believers not to reenter their own pre-
Christian cultural spaces. Far from empowering local Christians, Dube
maintained, missionary translations used local languages to create conceptual
structures with which the colonizers could reinforce their physical subjugation
of the natives. Scripture in the vernacular did not mark the beginning of the
end of missionary dominance. It was instead a potent tool of foreign control, a
means by which missionary translators were able to continue to exert their
influence even from the grave. Lovemore Togarasei (2009) sees a similar
pattern at work in the Shona-language Bible translations produced by
missionaries in Zimbabwe during that country's colonial era.
Nowhere in Dube's original essay does the name of Lamin Sanneh or any
other missiologist surface. That connection is made later in the course of the
contentious debate that took place afterward between Dube and contemporary
missionary translator Eric Hermanson. In a provocative unpublished paper
delivered in 1999 at Hammanskraal, South Africa, Hermanson argued that the
earlier translators cited by Dube were not guilty of the crimes with which she
had charged them. They had engaged in an acceptable form of
contextualization, he believed, since the badimo were commonly held
responsible for illness and disease in the nineteenth-century spiritual world of
the Batswana (reported in Maluleke 2005, 368–69). Dube (2001) answered
back with a sharp rejoinder, suggesting that Hermanson was willfully
perpetuating a regime of violent translation by refusing to engage in a proper
postcolonial analysis of these missionary writings.
We have here an ongoing scholarly dispute that extends way beyond the
fine points of how to translate certain Greek terms into particular African
dialects. Each of the parties involved appeals to and seeks to participate in
larger interpretive traditions related to mission history. Hermanson invokes a
point of view already articulated by Sanneh, John Mbiti (1986), Kwame
Bediako (1995, 10925), and Andrew Walls (1996, 26–42). For her part, Dube
is extending the line of reasoning pioneered by historical anthropologists Jean
and John Comaroff (1991, 1997), which has also been espoused by other
biblical scholars, such as R. S. Sugirtharajah (2001). Missiologists should be
interested in every aspect of this conversation, which is largely taking place
within the broad disciplinary arena of sociolinguistics. Indeed, to study the
Bible in mission is to be concerned about the scholarly and social processes
by which different translations may have come into being. It means paying
close attention to the initial reception of these texts and then also the ongoing
history of interpretation that follows with respect to multiple audiences. Even
the physical form of the translations distributed by the missions deserves
examination, since the books themselves were often treated in special ways, if
not reverenced as sacred objects (for one example of this phenomenon, see
Kent 2005, 71–72). For missiologists, technical studies focused on the biblical
languages and social science research on modern translation theory will
continue to be important for these discussions, but so will feminist
perspectives, anthropological critique, and postcolonial scholarship, all of
which can shed light on the sometimes unintended and often subtle effects of
missionary translation activities.
 3
History of Mission
The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a synopsis of mission history.
Other surveys already exist, and, in any case, a single chapter in an
introductory textbook could hardly begin to represent the sprawling narrative
of global Christianity that now stretches over nearly two millennia. Instead I
propose to consider how the missionary aspect of Christian history has been
and could be studied or portrayed.
The chapter will be divided into two major parts. In the first and much
longer section, my primary concern will be to identify and describe what I
think have been the most commonly practiced forms of mission
historiography, reaching all the way back to Luke's account of apostolic
history. Along the way, consideration will be given to a number of alternative
approaches, including ecclesiastical history, hagiography, early modern
ethnography, historical Missionswissenschaft, and microhistories of the kind
now often produced by secular historians, anthropologists, and other social
scientists. My intention is not only to lay bare the variety of historiographical
styles that have been employed by mission historians in the past, but also to
begin reviewing the different kinds of source material missiologists must be
prepared to consult and analyze in the course of their historical work today.
What the reader can expect in this section then is not a history of mission but
something more like a history of the history of mission.
The second part of this chapter will focus more directly on the particular
problems contemporary mission historians are likely to face and the methods
most often used in response to these challenges. Questions about sources will
again be raised, especially in relation to the task of documenting world
Christianity in situations of recent rapid growth. In this regard, one is
prompted to think about how to analyze the complex social processes
necessarily involved in circumstances of widespread religious change.
Another line of inquiry asks how well the various agents of evangelization
(especially women and non-Western actors) are represented in the written
materials that usually make up the archival record. Of special importance, too,
is the matter of perspective or the different points of view that could be
adopted by the mission historian. A related concern has to do with the active
presence of more than one established historical discourse on Christian
mission, a fact that inevitably shapes the intellectual environment within
which every self-aware mission historian must operate today. By the end of
this chapter, we shall have reviewed a series of more technical issues
primarily having to do with data gathering and methods of historical analysis,
while also attending to the creative side of history writing.
LUKE THE HISTORIAN
The Acts of the Apostles occupies a singular place within the Christian canon.
It is not another Gospel, despite the many significant but subtle ties of
language and theological perspective that connect it to Luke's story of Jesus.
Nor do we find a counterpart for the Acts of the Apostles among any of the
other books that eventually came to be included in the New Testament,
whether epistle, exhortation (Hebrews), or apocalypse. In terms of genre, Acts
appears to be a presentation of early Christian history, with mission put at the
heart of the story. If so, we might rightly regard its author, commonly held to
be the evangelist Luke, as the first historian of Christian mission. However,
the kind of history Luke has chosen to put on offer is far from self-evident.
One way to begin to assess the historical character of Acts is to situate this
work within the universe of exemplars available to Luke in his own time. By
virtue of the fact that his community embraced the Hebrew Scriptures, he
would have been familiar with biblical history and the idea of God's
purposeful action in the midst of human affairs. In Acts, divine guidance is
assumed to have taken place at a number of crucial moments in the story of
the early church, most often by means of the Holy Spirit. Luke's choice of
subject also aligns him with a Jewish historiographical tradition that
ultimately concerned itself with God's salvific intentions. He is writing, first
of all, about Heilsgeschichte, the history of salvation, rather than the political,
economic, or cultural circumstances of any particular human society. An
omniscient point of view reinforces the impression that Acts is a story about
God's aims, since it allows the reader to know things that only God could
know and to receive regular assurances that the highest of purposes will be
served in the end, regardless of any setbacks that might be reported in the
meantime. A brief prefatory remark at the beginning of Luke (Luke 1:1–4; cf.
Acts 1:1) indicates that the author writes for and from within his own
community (he and his named correspondent, Theophilus, are identified as
members of a defined “we”), a detail that further heightens the confessional
tone of the book.
The matter of Luke's preface also calls to mind a second historiographical
tradition that operated quite apart from the ways of Jewish sacred history.
There is considerable dispute over the degree to which Luke may have
adopted the habits of ancient Greek historiography, but little scholarly
disagreement with the notion that the author of Acts must have been exposed
through his formal education to some of that tradition's classical treasures.
The speeches inserted into Acts, for example, seem to conform to Greek
expectations for effective rhetoric, at least in terms of structure and style
(Satterthwaite 1993). In any event, Luke's stated intention in the preface to his
Gospel (implicitly reaffirmed at the beginning of Acts) to compose “an
orderly account,” using the best evidence available to him (oral tradition and
eyewitness testimonies), signals an awareness of historical values and
practices not acknowledged anywhere within the canonical corpus of the Old
Testament. He writes knowing that his readers (Theophilus may be just one of
these or a symbol for all of them) would have access to alternative narratives,
a possibility not even remotely considered within the proprietary enclave of
the Jewish scriptures. His professed objective to deliver an account that
conveys “the truth concerning the things about which you have [already] been
instructed” (Luke 1:4) could well mean that Luke has written in anticipation
of reader reaction to his work. Tellingly, he does not make a claim for divine
inspiration, despite the fact that his subject has everything to do with eternal
salvation. To the extent that Luke grounds his appeal to be heard on the
plausibility and thoroughness of his narrative and the strength of his evidence,
he has stepped outside the strict confines of sacred history writing.
Against this background, we may ask again more directly: what kind of
history is Acts? Following Marguerat (2002, 31–34), I consider Luke-Acts as
a whole to be a “narrative of beginnings,” meaning an attempt to account for
the emergence and diffusion of a new religious group. The particular task
imposed on the author of Acts is to explain what happened to the Jesus
movement after the death of its founder.
Intriguingly, we find at the heart of this story a pair of themes somewhat in
tension with each other. On the one hand, Luke is concerned to show how a
nascent faith community coalesced around a consistent set of beliefs, some
common social values, a small number of defining ritual practices, and a
shared sense of evangelistic purpose. Sharp disagreements within the
community are muted. Surprisingly little is said, for example, about infighting
or struggles over doctrine (in striking contrast to the letters of John, in which
readers are warned to be on their guard against false teachers, or Paul's
account of his disputes with rival Judaizers and “superapostles”). When
irreducible differences are reported over whether the whole of the Torah
applies to Gentile converts, an amicable agreement nevertheless is said to
have been reached with the assistance of the Holy Spirit (at the so-called
Apostolic Council in Acts 15). Likewise, Paul and Barnabas will separate
without recrimination, after failing to reconcile their two views of mission
strategy (Acts 15:36–41). Luke's picture of the early church is surely
idealized. While not entirely uniform, the community depicted in Acts is of
one mind on those issues Luke considered essential to its self-understanding.
 A second theme running through Acts has to do with the dynamic character
of early Christianity. This part of the story is about expansion and growth,
about the crossing of boundaries and unanticipated cultural encounters. Luke
has the benefit of hindsight and a sense of confidence about God's guidance
throughout. Yet his narrative gives witness to a process of development or
becoming that takes place in the context of intense missionary activity. Thus,
we see the character of the community evolving over time in substantive
ways, from tight-knit to far-flung, from exclusively Jewish to increasingly
Gentile, from a rural movement to an urban phenomenon. Luke is certainly
responsible for the way in which these shifts are portrayed dramatically in
Acts. He chooses, for example, to use the stories of certain individuals to
show how the early church confronted persecution (Stephen) or the problem
of Gentile believers (Cornelius). An extended series of arrests, legal
proceedings, and (brief) periods of incarceration in which Peter and Paul are
featured demonstrates the community's willingness to submit to imperial
authority, even as the reader is given to understand that a power greater than
Rome's may also be at work. In short, what we find embedded in the
imaginative narrative of Acts is an unfolding story about growth and change
that probably has a basis in reality, at least in broad terms.
Mission historians are indebted to Luke for much of what can be known
about the processes and patterns of first-century Christian evangelism. For
this reason alone, Acts will forever remain an indispensable primary resource
for the study of early Christianity, even though only a portion of the details
included in Luke's account may be able to withstand scholarly scrutiny. The
twin themes running through Acts briefly described above represent another
strong incentive for mission historians to pay close attention to this book.
Luke's history is a first attempt to explain how the church and its universal
message could remain constant in the midst of fundamentally new cultural
circumstances. Not a few missionaries to come after the first century, plus
those historians seeking to understand their actions and intentions, will find
themselves grappling with much the same dilemma.
ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY
Ecclesiastical history is a way to account for a part of the Christian past that
puts a particular form of the church at the center of the story. Mission does
not have to be a major component of church history, but it can be and often is
when the church of the author's time perceives itself to be in a situation of
expansion and flux. In two of the most influential early examples of
ecclesiastical history, those produced by Eusebius (260–339) and Bede (c.
673–735), substantial attention is given to missionary matters. Each of these
ancient historians writes from within his own context, but the obvious
intention of Bede to emulate his groundbreaking predecessor produces an
impression of overlapping interests and common approach. A primary
concern here will be to consider how the use of this historiographical genre
could affect one's presentation of mission history.
At the outset of his most famous work, Eusebius enumerates several
specific aims he hopes to achieve. Among these is a resolve to record “the
number of those who in each generation were the ambassadors of the word of
God either by speech or pen” (HE I, 1). This is a patently missionary topic
and will lead him not only to recount a portion of the church's story covered
by Luke in Acts but also to extend and fill out his received narrative of
apostolic history with material gleaned from “other sources” to which he had
access besides the “divine writings” (preface to Book II). Eusebius goes on to
document the experience of the church in the postapostolic period down to his
own time. He shows particular interest in the church's martyrs, hardly a
surprise given his own direct experience of persecution under Diocletian. He
is also keen to show how unbelief and false beliefs temporarily impeded the
advance of the divine Logos, whether by fomenting extramural opposition to
the church and its mission or by sowing heresy from within its ranks. His
narrative has a conclusion. The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius is
ultimately about the triumph of God's Word over all that had threatened to
hinder its progress in the world up to the moment of Constantine's complete
ascendance to power.
Institutional developments often dominate the narratives of ecclesiastical
historians. In the case of Eusebius, his interest is focused on the office of the
bishop. Lists of bishops are inserted throughout the narrative and provide a
kind of outline structure onto which other information can be grafted.
Apostolic succession, however, is much more than a literary technique for
Eusebius. In this rendition of ecclesiastical history, the bishop becomes an
essential symbol of church discipline and orthodox belief. Indeed, the health
of the church depends on and can be measured by the depth of episcopal
fidelity that may be in evidence at any given time.
Such a pronounced emphasis on orthodoxy and governance carries with it
several implications for the writing of mission history. The first is that long-
established centers of church life, those places where powerful bishops are
most likely to be able to exercise their authority directly, tend to receive far
more attention from the historian than do the peripheries, where active and
possibly irregular processes of evangelization might be taking place.
Coincidentally, as the metropolitan figure of the bishop looms ever larger
within the historian's field of vision, the contributions of more liminal actors
tend to be overshadowed.
 In Eusebius this seems to have happened with respect to the office of
evangelist. The last named person so designated is Quadratus, who lived in
the early second century (HE III, 37). The prophetic gifts of Quadratus are
acknowledged. He and others of his generation are praised for their powerful
preaching, for their ability to work miracles, and for having distributed their
property to the poor in apostolic fashion before engaging crowds of people
“who had not yet heard the word of the faith.” In fact, enough is said in this
chapter about itinerant evangelists to prove that Eusebius was well aware of
this ministry pattern and reckoned it to be a normal part of church life even
after the passing of the first apostles. Eusebius indicates that he had access to
more information on second-century evangelism than he chooses to provide:
“It is impossible for us to give the number and the names of all who first
succeeded the Apostles, and were shepherds or evangelists in the churches
throughout the world” (HE III, 37). He decides instead to concentrate on
literary activities: “It was, therefore, natural for us to record by name the
memory only of those of whom the tradition still survives to our time by their
treatises on the Apostolic teaching.” In other words, from this point forward
his account of mission will feature (in the words of HE I, 1 already quoted)
“ambassadors of the word of God” who expressed themselves “by pen” rather
than “by speech.” Of course, the apologists he will highlight are precisely
those whose statements of theology had been found acceptable by the
church's highest authorities. With many fewer itinerants in the narrative and a
decision to emphasize doctrinal conformity, the charismatic quality of faith-
sharing recedes.
Both Eusebius and Bede show a willingness to designate God's choice in
the political battles raging around them. When Eusebius expresses his
wholehearted preference for Constantine, he sets the stage for the possibility
of a Christian nation and the prospect of a joint mission by church and state.
Eusebius will commit explicitly to such a program in his later writings, but
we can see the germ of this idea already in place when Constantine is praised
for having “cleansed the whole world of all the wicked and baneful persons
and of the cruel God-hating tyrants themselves” (HE X, 4, 60). Bede shows
the same inclination as he evaluates in Deuteronomistic terms the various
kings whose stories have come down to him. Heading Bede's list of model
monarchs are Edwin (“he labored for the kingdom of Christ”), Oswald (“the
most Christian king of the Northumbrians”), and Oswy, who “not only…
deliver[ed] his own people from the hostile attacks of the heathen, but after
cutting off their infidel head he converted the Mercians and their neighbors to
the Christian Faith” (EH II, 20; III, 9, 24).
In their zeal for orthodoxy, ecclesiastical historians are more apt to
emphasize the differences they perceive among Christians than did Luke, who
downplayed controversy while promoting an image of unity within the body
of Christ. Confirmed heretics already delivered over to the service of the devil
may be beyond redemption. Confused or misguided Christians, on the other
hand, could be corrected and so reclaimed for the one true faith. By such
reasoning, ecclesiastical historians created conceptual space in which to treat
the reevangelization of “nominal” Christians as a form of mission. For Bede
this aspect of his historical task became a major preoccupation, because the
type of Christianity he clearly preferred had to contend with established rivals
that did not pattern themselves after Rome. There are moments in Bede's
history when representatives of Celtic Christianity are dismissed editorially as
unbelievers, because they adamantly refused to submit to newly arrived
bishops and missionaries authorized by Rome (EH II, 2). A larger narrative
arc, however, gives witness to an extended process of dialogue and
engagement through which British, Pictish, Irish, and English speakers slowly
become united in one church under Roman jurisdiction. Thus, we find in
Bede a variety of mission initiatives presented together, ranging from pioneer
efforts to create a church in the midst of thoroughly pagan Saxons to the
conversion of Iona and its Irish monks to Roman liturgical customs.
The issues that most agitated Bede with respect to non-Roman Christianity
tell us one more thing about his concept of mission and approach to mission
history. Questions of authority aside, the problems that epitomized for him the
waywardness of Celtic Christianity were two: the date of Easter they observed
and their style of tonsure. From a modern perspective, such differences hardly
seem worth the attention Bede gives them (Eusebius, too, worried about
getting the date of Easter right), until one realizes that these factors of
division were a means to monitor the reception of what this historian
considered to be a normative Christian culture. Ramsay MacMullen's (1997,
150) observation on the aesthetic deficit of early Christianity suggests
something about what had changed since the apostolic era:
In the opening century or two of their existence as a religious
community, Christians lacked a distinctive poetry, rhetoric, drama,
architecture, painting, sculpture, music, or dance…. They had almost no
special language of gestures or symbols in which to expresses their
feelings or their wishes to, or regarding, the divine, such as pagans had
developed.
By the time of Eusebius, the church had been reconceived as a culture-bearing
institution, having finally acquired the means to construct its own religiously
defined social world. Bede will be followed by many more church historians
similarly eager to consider evangelization primarily to be a matter of
Christianization, the spreading of Christian culture.
 HAGIOGRAPHY
Bede has been criticized for having turned the history of mission into a
political narrative (Wood 2001, 44–45). To be sure, his story of the church is
so intently focused on the court of the king that the progress of the gospel in
England from Kent to Northumbria seems to depend almost exclusively on
royal decision-making and the force of arms. According to this way of
understanding the evangelization process, the spread of Christianity normally
proceeds from the top down, as missionaries and influential bishops
successfully redirect the coercive power of monarchs toward divine goals. At
the same time, by including hagiographical material in his account Bede
allows the reader to see another level of religious culture at work, where the
decrees of the sovereign cannot by themselves determine how Christian
identity is formed and expressed. In this realm, saints—not kings—are the
central characters in the drama, and sacred biography, rather than dynastic
lore, is the chief means by which this part of the story is told. It is to Bede's
credit that he made room in his church history for renowned missionary
figures not entirely loyal to Rome, such as Columba (c. 521–97) and Aiden
(d. 651).
For the premodern period, hagiography contributes in two specific ways to
mission history. We have in the Lives of the saints, first of all, much material
that potentially describes how certain individuals may have been active in the
work of evangelism, particularly in Europe. Often, when sainted missionaries
are given extended biographical treatment, their Vitae expand our knowledge
of mission history by recalling the memory of persons otherwise unknown or
obscure. An example might be someone like the aristocratic Sadalberga (c.
605–70), who established a convent in a border region of Frankland at Laon.
Or the abbot Eustasius (d. 629), the successor of Columbanus (c. 543–615) at
Luxeuil, who spearheaded a vigorous regional program of Christianization in
which several strategically located convents like that of Sadalberga and a host
of associated monasteries were vital institutional elements of a sustained
missionary initiative. Frontier monks preached, planted new churches,
disputed with pagans, uprooted their shrines, performed miracles, and
baptized those willing to forsake the old ways. Pioneering nuns prayed
fervently, copied books, served the poor around them, dispensed
encouragement through their correspondence, and created cloistered
communities into which unmarried female converts from paganism could be
gathered and taught (McNamara 1996, 120–47). Other evangelizing saints not
tied explicitly to existing Christian institutions have also been identified, as in
the work of Andrea Sterk (2010a) on captive Christian women and their role
in the conversion of Armenia, Georgia, and Yemen. Had the work of the
hagiographers not survived, much less would be known today about such
individuals or the processes by which monastic foundations participated in the
evangelization of non-Christian peoples.
A second contribution of hagiography to mission history springs from its
capacity to illuminate the everyday contexts in which late antique and
medieval missionaries operated. Incidental details included in the texts can
sometimes prove enormously valuable to the historian, especially when they
point to local conditions or idiosyncratic behaviors that fall outside the usual
expectations for how a saint's life ought to unfold. A group of Vitae produced
soon after the lifetime of their subjects, for example, might help the historian
to reconstruct with more certainty the political structures with which a
generation of missionaries in a particular place had to engage. Other
biographical materials might show how cross-cultural missionaries either
conformed to or defied the dominant social attitudes and practices of the
communities in which they labored, as they interacted with indigenous ideas
about family, food, marriage, gender roles, foreigners, literacy, and social
class. Considered apart from questions of facticity, reports of miracles
performed by the saints can also be utilized to demonstrate how people in that
context may have thought about many of life's basic challenges, such as
illness, poverty, disability, death, and those phenomena most likely to have
induced deep psychological fears (personal and communal).
Hagiography resists facile analysis, which means that reliable information
about missionaries and their work is not always easy to recover from these
documents. That is why it is necessary to use tentative language about the
“capacity” or “potential” of hagiographical source materials to yield solid
historical data. Many difficulties are created simply by the fact that these
documents were never intended to be straightforward reportage.
Hagiographers often wrote out of a desire to promote certain values and
behaviors within the church by linking them to respected heroes of the faith.
They hoped to inspire their audience to follow the saint's example and to
demonstrate their own piety by participating in the cult that had grown up
around the saint's memory. The interests of a particular cult center might even
shape the telling of a saint's story, as Ian Wood (2001, 57–78, 100–122) has
shown with respect to the different Lives of Boniface (c. 675–754) produced
in Mainz, Fulda and Utrecht.
As with visual forms of iconography, artistic conventions soon developed
for written hagiographical discourse that tended to reduce the number of ways
in which a missionary saint was likely to be portrayed. Biblical templates
(Elijah, Peter, Paul, Stephen, and, of course, Jesus) were perennially
attractive. Certain saints like Martin of Tours (c. 316–97), Cuthbert (d. 687),
Willibrord (c. 657739), and Boniface became paradigmatic for succeeding
generations, as their reputations broke through the limits of era and region
(Breisach 1983, 98–99). Paganism, likewise, often lost its local flavoring
when represented in the Lives of the saints. It was usually enough to credit the
devil when opposition arose to Christian outreach or to fit actual pagan
practices into a few familiar categories of superstitious belief and behavior.
Historians have good reason to be suspicious whenever later saints are
shown performing the same (or very similar) acts of confrontation and
wonderworking that made earlier evangelists famous. But even when proved
to be largely fictitious, hagiographical accounts may still have something to
contribute to the history of mission. The production of new Vitae may be
evidence of Christianity having begun to take hold in a new location, since
this literature tended to be used to teach the already baptized (Kuznetsova
2000, 125–26). And even when the interests of the hagiographer appear to
overwhelm the particular concerns of the subject saint, an extant Life can
continue to function as a historical artifact if it sheds light on what the writer's
generation may have considered proper or normative missionary aims and
methods. For a concise but detailed review of current scholarly trends in
hagiographical analysis, students can consult Susan Ashbrook Harvey (2008,
esp. 608–19).
EARLY MODERN ETHNOGRAPHY
An entirely new phase in the writing of mission history began in the sixteenth
century, which should come as no surprise. The circumstances of the Western
churches had changed dramatically since the time of the first evangelization
of northern Europe. Most obviously, an Age of Discovery had opened up
previously unknown worlds to European exploration, creating unprecedented
possibilities for interreligious encounter. Increasingly mobile Western
Christians found themselves face-to-face with many cultures and social
practices not easy for them to understand. The urge to evangelize what was
not Christian was immediate, persistent, and strong. The monarchs of
Portugal and Spain cooperated with the papacy in a joint project of gospel
preaching and church planting that was breathtaking in its worldwide scope.
So it was that a burgeoning contingent of religious figures from the West took
their places within and just beyond the European colonial infrastructures put
together in the early modern period. Henceforth, any attempt to survey the
spread and growth of Christianity would have to account for the effects of this
decisive turn in the geopolitical situation of Christian missions.
The intellectual context for writing about mission history had also changed.
Out of the Renaissance had arisen a humanist tradition of scholarship that
searched for truth using nontheological sources and methods. At first,
humanists focused their attention on the Greek and Roman heritage of
classical antiquity. Thus, in the earliest phase of the Renaissance (fourteenth-
fifteenth centuries), an expanding movement of scholars examined a rich
trove of manuscripts, extant epigraphy, and (ruined) monuments in order to
understand better the languages, literatures, and histories of ancient Greece
and Rome. Eventually, the philological techniques developed in the course of
these studies were applied more broadly, with the result that many more
languages and cultures would take up residence within the disciplinary tent of
the humanities. What tied the whole of these efforts together was a lasting
ambition to describe the world as it really is, with increasing precision. Once
the constant factor of change over time had also been acknowledged, this task
necessarily took on a historical dimension.
No one would argue that Renaissance scholarship per se included within
itself an interest in the history of Christian mission. Yet it seems
incontrovertible that humanist learning shaped the outlooks of countless
Roman Catholic missionaries in the early modern period, while also affecting
their mission agendas. The influence of Renaissance humanism on the
practice of mission is undeniable in the case of the Jesuits. Their schools, part
of a sustained program to reevangelize Europe and disseminate Christianity in
the regions beyond, were built around a curriculum (the ratio studiorum,
finalized in 1599) that made the “humane letters” an indispensable foundation
for the study of advanced philosophical and theological subjects (O'Malley
1993, 200–264). Jesuit scholastics were encouraged to read the pagan classics
of Greece and Rome, in line with the humanist notion that good literature
could stimulate the acquisition of virtue. Long years of study in the rhetorical
arts, the fruits of which were demonstrated in regular public exercises
featuring oratory, disputation, and theater performance, lay at the center of
these educational efforts.
Having seriously engaged the secular aspects of European culture through
their schooling, scores and then hundreds of Jesuit missionaries soon found
themselves immersed in a diverse array of non-Christian contexts around the
world. Not all but many of these missionaries expressed through their actions
and writings a resolve to discover values and social practices in their places of
service that could be affirmed from a Christian point of view. When it appears
in this era, genuine respect for cultural others encountered along the pathways
of mission contrasts sharply with typically less generous medieval Christian
thinking about pagan identity and belief. One has to go back to Origen and the
second-century apologists to find anything remotely similar on this scale. The
most celebrated early modern example of this orientation to cross-cultural
mission is Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), whose careful evaluation of
Confucianism in China is remarkable not only for its openness to a non-
Western philosophical system but also for its theological agility and subtle
pragmatism. Similarly intentioned, though less well regarded today, was the
positive approach taken by Ricci's fellow Jesuit Roberto de Nobili (1577–
1656) to the caste system of India and several related cultural traditions that
defined elite Brahmin identity.
In the work of José de Acosta (1540–1600), we see the humanist impulse
and global Catholic mission experience clearly intersecting with the
development of mission historiography. By Jesuit standards, Acosta spent
only a modest amount of time on the mission field in Peru (1572–86), but his
impact was nevertheless considerable. He was an able administrator of a
young province, a wily representative of Jesuit interests in the halls of
colonial power, and an innovator in mission theory (Burgaleta 1999, 33–55).
For our purposes, Acosta's most important contribution to missiology is to
be found in his groundbreaking 1590 study of the New World and its peoples:
Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Although the actions of missionaries
do not take up much room in Acosta's Historia, the subject of evangelization
is never far from his mind. As he put it in the initial chapter of Book VII
(Acosta 2002, 379–80), his account of the customs or mores (hence “moral”
history) of the Indians shows them to be civilized in some respects, even
“worthy of praise,” and therefore capable of receiving the gospel (a hotly
disputed claim in his own time). His expectation is that knowledge of these
peoples will prove useful to those whom God has sent to labor in their midst
as missionaries, because familiarity with native societies should enable better
communication to take place across cultural boundaries. He hopes that readers
of his book back in Spain who become better informed about this history will
“be able to understand the means chosen by Most Holy God in sending to
these nations the light of the gospels of his only begotten son Jesus Christ Our
Lord.” Even the natural history of the New World can have an evangelical
purpose behind it, since learning more about the climate and physical features
of the Indies and especially its strange natural wonders might well lead one to
contemplate “the Highest and Supreme Artificer of all these marvels” (99).
Anthony Pagden (1982, 146–200) aptly characterizes the Historia and
Acosta's earlier De procuranda indorum salute (1588) as a “programme for
comparative ethnology.” The comparative aspect of Acosta's project is
reflected in the various ways he attempts to classify the native inhabitants of
the New World. The most basic comparison he makes is between the Spanish
and their newly acquired colonial subjects. Here he follows in the wake of the
Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), who also argued for the
common humanity of Amerindians and Europeans. In keeping with his
training in Christian humanism, Acosta also makes reference to the ancient
Greeks and Romans. These, he asserts, were “much superior” in “courage and
natural intelligence” to the people of the New World, but their own heathen
customs could be just as “inhuman and diabolical” as those of the Indians or
even worse (Acosta 2002, 251). Acosta adds yet another dimension to his
analysis by bringing into the discussion some of what he has learned about the
cultures of Japan and China from his fellow Jesuits (for example, 284–85,
335–39). Acosta uses these data to conjecture a developmental scale of non-
Christian barbarism that depends heavily on the acquisition of literacy. This
conceptual scheme then allows him to differentiate among the various Indian
groups of which he has some knowledge—in other words, to compare them to
each other.
The Aztecs and Incas seemed to Acosta to be most like the sophisticated
cultures of the Far East and so the readiest in the New World to receive the
gospel. Their practices of government and social organization, their religious
ceremonies and rites (“many of them resemble those of the ancient law of
Moses; there are others like those used by the Moors, and others that
somewhat resemble those of the Gospel law”; Acosta 2002, 312), their
methods for calculating time (331–34), and their ability to record history
(albeit using images or figures rather than letters and writing) all suggested to
Acosta that a reasoned presentation of Christianity could be successful with
these groups. More primitive forest-dwellers or unsettled nomads, in his view,
could not become Christians without first being “taught to be men” (381).
Acosta's work put mission historiography on a new footing. He did this by
shining a bright light on the physical and cultural environments in which
mission takes place. At no point does he question the overriding effect of
God's providence on human affairs. This conviction alone is enough to mark
him out still as a pre-Enlightenment thinker. At the same time, he is clearly
seeking to understand the natural and human variables that could shape
evangelistic outcomes and so suggest the use of particular strategies for
Christianization in different times and places.
Acosta's ethnographic sensibility would be carried forward into the
seventeenth century, most notably by French Jesuits working in North
America. These missionaries, too, were straining to comprehend the complex
and unfamiliar native societies in which they worked. They recorded their
findings in a series of edited annual letters published in France between 1632
and 1673. The letters, now known collectively as the Jesuit Relations, in
effect constitute a contemporary running account of mission history. As might
be expected, the missionaries highlighted their own efforts to convert the
indigenous tribes of New France to Christianity, while also reporting on
colonial and other European agents whose actions and agendas seemed either
to be helping or hindering the progress of the mission. Mixed in are extended
descriptions of cultural practices the missionaries observed during their long
years of residence in native societies. Included is precious information about
how the Indians hunted and fished, their family structures, social relations,
migration patterns, housing practices, clothing, diet, and means of
communication, plus their stories, myths, and religious rituals (a
representative set of excerpts is presented in Greer 2000). In part, these data
are exotica, a surefire way to excite and sustain enthusiasm for the Jesuits'
work in North America within the mission's support base back in France.
More fundamentally, one can see in this reporting an acknowledgment that
mission history could no longer be written without attending to its cultural
and physical context. The humanist perspective, applied to the experience of
the church around the world acquired in the Age of Discovery, was prompting
mission historians to think more deliberately and deeply about the cross-
cultural aspects of evangelization.
HISTORICAL MISSIONSWISSENSCHAFT
In the aftermath of the Enlightenment, scholars in every field of knowledge
came under pressure to demonstrate the scientific basis of their work, its
essential rationality. Academic theology rose to the challenge, with a variety
of strategies employed to defend the plausibility of Christian faith to publics
less inclined than previous generations to accept the Bible as a self-
authenticating source of truth. Historians of all kinds, including those focused
on mission history, likewise found themselves pushed to adopt new modes of
investigation and argument, as their discipline reached for greater precision
and the elusive goal of scientific objectivity. Earlier forms of mission
historiography continued to be practiced in the post-Enlightenment period,
but they now had to compete with more critical approaches that did not
assume the probability of divine intervention in history or the active presence
of Satan in human affairs.
That Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire (1776–88) was a milestone on the way to more modern forms of
history writing is beyond dispute. Gibbon sought to explain how a great
empire had failed to survive. He wanted to know why a society so gifted in
the arts of war, government, law, commerce, and the pursuit of virtue could
have been undermined by lesser rivals. Gibbon describes in some detail the
eventual success of Rome's barbarian conquerors, but his most fervent and
conceptually significant passages are probably those in which the internal
causes of the empire's demise are analyzed and deplored.
Gibbon understood the decline of Rome to be closely linked to the rise of
Christianity. Thus, as he put it at the outset of chapter 15 in the Decline and
Fall: “A candid but rational inquiry into the progress and establishment of
Christianity may be considered as a very essential part of the history of the
Roman empire.” Underlying this part of his investigation is Gibbon's
intention to understand the social processes by which early Christianity
gained its adherents and spread to new locations, which makes this aspect of
his project a study of mission history. In the end, five reasons are advanced to
explain the triumph of Christianity within what had been a thoroughly pagan
Roman Empire: (1) “intolerant zeal” for orthodoxy, which strengthened the
believers' sense of group solidarity; (2) the promise of a future life; (3) the
primitive church's reputation for miracle working; (4) the perceived capacity
of the gospel to improve morals; and (5) the institutional power afforded the
Christian movement by the social organization of the church.
The adequacy of Gibbon's explanation for Christianity's success is not our
concern here. The fundamental point lies rather in his proposal that
ecclesiastical history (and thus, also, mission history) should be handled just
like every other kind of historical study. Momigliano (1966, 52) puts this
decision in context when he observes that “Gibbon followed Voltaire in
boldly sweeping away every barrier between sacred history and profane
history.” Gibbon famously credits the “convincing evidence of the doctrine
itself” and the “ruling providence” of God for Christianity's victory over the
established religions of its day, but only a very naïve reader would take these
words (again, in chapter 15) at face value. The whole of the Decline and Fall
is about what Gibbon demurely suggests were the five “secondary causes” of
Christian success named above. After the fact, in his Memoirs (1966, 157),
Gibbon indicates plainly enough that a chief aim of his epic work was to
examine “the human causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity”
(emphasis in the original).
The overall effect of Gibbon's methodology is to separate history from
theology. As a result, this new approach cannot be fitted into any of the
categories of mission history reviewed thus far. Becoming more scientific will
mean fewer (and then no) appeals to the guiding hand of divine providence to
explain the workings of history. A key function of ecclesiastical history will
also be lost or at least diminished, as historians of Christianity are relieved of
their long-maintained responsibility to locate and illustrate real-life examples
of theological norms put into practice. Once the historian dispenses with the
metaphysical framework of Christian belief about the “life of the world to
come,” a need will be felt to supply another overarching narrative structure to
take its place. No small number of nontheological candidates will be put
forward in the ensuing centuries after Gibbon to encompass the history of the
church and its mission. In this way, too, we shall find an increasingly
secularized understanding of mission history slowly taking shape.
 It turns out to be quite some time before a self-identified historian of
mission is willing to commit to the path indicated by Gibbon's methods. Even
Gustav Warneck (1834–1910), who may have done more than anyone else in
the nineteenth century to put the study of mission on a scientific basis, still
found the idea of providence an essential tool of historical explanation. Over
long decades of careful research and close argument, Warneck worked
tirelessly to raise the academic reputation of missiology, advancing the cause
especially by founding in 1874 the discipline's first scholarly periodical
(Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift). Yet in his comprehensive handbook to the
field, Evangelische Missionslehre (1892–1903), doctrinal considerations
clearly dominate, so much so that Jongeneel (1995, 79) will not consider
Warneck to be the founder of a Missionswissenschaft (science of mission) but
of the theology of mission (Missionstheologie).
The claims of theology are similarly evident in Warneck's influential
history of Protestant missions (1906), where God is given credit for directing
the actions of his missionary agents by “divine leadings” (173 and passim)
and for choosing the right instruments from among the “explorers, merchants
and colonial politicians” of Europe to “open up the doors of the world” for
new evangelistic initiatives in the nineteenth century (214). In this way
Warneck the historian of mission participates in and perpetuates a venerable
tradition of providential historiography that reaches back to the apostolic era.
Closer to Gibbon's outlook and methodology is the history of early
Christian mission produced by Adolf Harnack, already discussed briefly in
chapter 2. In his approach to mission history, Harnack accepts Gibbon's
insight that social factors of various kinds affected the development and
spread of early Christianity. This conviction will lead him to describe a
number of external and internal “conditions” that contributed to the success of
Christianity, either by preparing the way for its reception or facilitating in
some respect its rapid and far-reaching growth. Numerous communities of
Jews in diaspora, for example, became incubators of small Christian
fellowships, while also representing a more or less tolerated monotheistic
alternative to official pagan belief. Other religious traditions and the ancient
philosophical schools are credited with having cultivated and then failing to
satisfy the deepest longings of those living around the Mediterranean basin.
Above all, Harnack recognized the importance of the political and cultural
context provided to Christianity by the Roman Empire, whose many
nationalities were effectively drawn together by a common Hellenistic milieu
through which new religious ideas could circulate far and wide: “the narrow
world had become a wide world; the rent world had become a unity; the
barbarian world had become Greek and Roman” (Harnack 1904, 23).
Harnack's particular burden in his mission history was to show how
Christianity had fortified itself with the power of Hellenism. This was a
process of assimilation that not only enhanced the appeal of the new faith to
Greek minds but also hastened the collapse of the old forms: “Christianity has
throughout sucked the marrow of the ancient world…. The whole of [third-
century] Catholicism is nothing else than the Christianity which has devoured
the possessions of the Graeco-Roman world” (Harnack 1989, 192).
Like Gibbon, Harnack was also keen to separate history from theology and
so establish it as a fully independent discipline. But he did so for his own
purposes. Gibbon's aim had been to free universal reason from the asserted
prerogatives of revelation. As a committed Christian, Harnack sought to
liberate the gospel from the inertia imposed on it by the accumulated weight
of dogma. In Harnack's view, the science of history was the best means
available to distinguish the eternal essence of the gospel from all time-bound
forms of doctrine (including patristic theology and the historic creeds). For
him, the duty of the historian “is to determine what is of permanent value”
and what has had only a fleeting association with the gospel (Harnack 1957,
13–15). Harnack, therefore, demanded even more than history's right to a
sphere of its own apart from theology. “Dogma,” he maintained, “must be
purified by history” (quoted in Frend 2001, 91).
At first glance, Kenneth Scott Latourette (1884–1968) might appear to be
an unlikely party to the emerging scientific tradition of mission
historiography initiated by Gibbon and Harnack. Latourette by no means
shared Gibbon's regretful suspicion that Christianity had succeeded at the
expense of a virtuously pagan Rome. Nor did he advocate with Harnack for
an idea of pure Christianity against all forms of the church on earth and its
doctrinal patrimony. But he did seek to write as a professional historian,
whose office obliged the modern scholar to differentiate his personal faith
views from the requirements of rational inquiry. That he had such convictions
and wanted very much to share them with colleagues in the academy is
evident from his presidential address to the American Historical Association
(Latourette 1949) and from hints sprinkled here and there within the seven
volumes of his History of the Expansion of Christianity (1937–45; for
intimations of Latourette's faith stance in his history of mission, see, for
example, vol. 1: xvii–xviii, 240–42, 290–9l; vol. 7: 481–82, 504–5). Walls
(2002a, 8) recognizes the tension inherent in Latourette's approach, when he
observes:
As a Christian, [Latourette] believes in a divine purpose for the world
behind history. He is also by instinct and training a post-Enlightenment
Western historian, for whom such factors should play no part in
historical discourse.
Latourette's quest for scientific objectivity led to some crucial methodological
decisions on his part. One was to affect an indirect manner when referring to
the faith claims of Christians. We find this, for example, in the way Latourette
handles the issue of Jesus' resurrection. It was not appropriate for modern
historians to testify that God raised Jesus from the dead, but they might talk
about the confidence of the disciples that such an event had happened (1937,
60). Nor could they substantiate the occurrence of miracles in the time of
Jesus or later, but it was possible to demonstrate that believing in miracles
was a “normal and persistent feature of Christianity” (1937, 323) until
modern times and was often associated in the sources with reports of
conversion. Latourette applies the same logic on a larger scale when he asks
about the influence of Jesus on succeeding generations of Christians. The
“possible cosmic significance” of the “Jesus impulse” is ruled to be an
improper subject for the historian (1937, 168), but “the effect of Christianity
upon its environment” could be studied sociologically alongside “the effect of
the environment upon Christianity” and its mission. When Latourette decides
to put these two interrelated concerns at the heart of his project (they are used
to summarize and evaluate each major era of his mission history), he applies
himself to the same kind of historical Missionswissenschaft project Gibbon
and Harnack had pioneered before his time.
CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY
For a final category of mission historiography, I have chosen to use the term
“critical ethnography.” For my purposes, this designation will represent a
loose collection of subdisciplines whose late-twentieth-century participants
understood themselves to be historians, social scientists, or both. Included in
this grouping are students of mission who have used the techniques of
microhistory, interpretive anthropology, historical anthropology, and
sociology of religion. Ideas and influences from semiotics, feminist studies,
and postcolonial literary criticism permeate these approaches to mission
history. An emphasis on cultural description links this broad-based
community of scholars back to the work of the early modern ethnographers
already discussed. Even so, this kind of history writing about mission is a
departure from long-established points of view and practices in several
respects. Few critical ethnographers today, if any, would presume to occupy
value-free zones of scientific objectivity and, in fact, expect each other to
account for the social positions from which they write. They are wary of past
claims made for human progress in history and insist that the widely assumed
benefits of modernity, development, and globalization be scrutinized carefully
(less skepticism, on the whole, is applied to the idea of secularism). These
experts generally strive to show respect for all cultures, while remaining on
guard against every form of ethnocentrism.
 Critical ethnography is characterized by several habits of analysis that can
affect the practice of mission historiography. One is a preference for intensive
research on a small scale, where the rich detail of a local context can be fully
appreciated. Instead of a bird's-eye view of human experience gathered over
centuries and across continents, these scholars seek to understand how
particular groups of people lived in specific historical settings. In this kind of
history, culture is defined above all by the ordinary transactions of life that
often do not receive explicit attention in the sources, usually because they
seemed routine and therefore unremarkable to the people of that time and
place.
Corresponding to the microdimensions of critical ethnography is an interest
in the less powerful members of the communities under study. From the side
of history, these are the twice-marginalized: first, by the economic, political,
and other hegemonic forces that produced and maintained their social
disadvantage and then through the stories told about their times, in which the
losers are not allowed to play any significant part except as foils for the
winners, who boldly assert through their narratives what they believe to be
immutable standards of orthodoxy and cultural identity. It follows that critical
ethnography can be doubly alternative. Not only does it feature those
previously considered inconspicuous and of little account, but this fresh
perspective “from below” implicitly challenges the veracity and completeness
of many received accounts.
How does one do this kind of history? Two trends stand out. The first is a
move to identify nonliterary sources of data that can shed light on the lives of
the otherwise inarticulate. In the aggregate, for example, the poor and
working classes may have left their imprint in the buildings and other
structures they used for dwelling and working. Additional aspects of material
culture may be revealed when local market economies are studied, if such
research is able to show how, when, and with whom people traded and the
relative value of items used every day by most people (such as foodstuffs,
utensils, and tools). Or, following the lead of interpretive anthropologist
Clifford Geertz (1973), one can seek to understand the symbolic world of the
common person by analyzing ritual performances and other forms of self-
expression. Observable behaviors associated with festivals, games, and burial
practices, for example, represent a different kind of window onto the history
of a people than that provided by the cataclysmic events and dominant
personalities so often memorialized in “high” literary texts and great works of
art.
A second way to get at the life of nonelites is to reread familiar texts
“against the grain,” with an eye for supporting characters and hidden themes.
Especially when using materials created by missionaries (or sending
organizations) to explain their work to supporting constituencies, one has to
consider how the needs of each group may have shaped this literature.
Dramatic stories of missionary success in the face of daunting resistance met
the expectations of many domestic audiences. There were fewer incentives to
highlight native agency and indispensability. Thus, a crucial task for mission
historiography undertaken as critical ethnography is to exegete the archives
(Sebastian 2003), which involves looking around the narrative periphery of
extant reports, journals, diaries, and letters, among other sources, in order to
hear suppressed voices speaking from the past. Assistant translators and Bible
women, native evangelists and rural catechists, plus a host of unnamed but
powerful indigenous witnesses to the Christian faith in countless local
contexts, are among the background figures whose roles in the modern
missionary movement are not well developed in the standard accounts
assembled by missionaries. Similar patterns of under-representation may be
observed for earlier periods of Christian mission, stretching back to the
apostolic era (Skreslet 2006b, 79–117).
The kind of mission historiography I have been describing in general terms
is exemplified in the ethnographic work of Jean and John L. Comaroff (1991,
1992, 1997). Over more than thirty years, the Comaroffs have been writing
about the Southern Tswana, a loose assemblage of African people located
north of the Orange River whose lands were incorporated into the Union of
South Africa in 1910. Much of this research is focused on the social processes
by which the Tswana were brought under imperial control and eventually
dispossessed. British Nonconformist missionaries, most of them sponsored by
the London Missionary Society or the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary
Society, are deeply implicated in the historical account of native subjugation
constructed by the Comaroffs. Having begun their work among the Tswana
early in the nineteenth century, well before the launching of an irresistible,
direct push of colonial power from the south, pioneering evangelists and
educators are portrayed in this story as the leading edge of European advance
into what had been an isolated realm of premodern African culture. Their
role, according to the Comaroffs, was to dominate the consciousness of the
Tswana and so prepare the way for physical colonization. The missionaries
were thus “vanguards of imperialism” (1991, 36), “human vehicles of a
hegemonic worldview” (310), “the ideological arm of empire” (314).
Conversion in these circumstances could mean the acceptance of a religious
message at some level. It necessarily involved the forced induction of the
Tswana into a globalized order of Western modernity (1991, 4; 1997, 407).
The Comaroffs characterize their work as “history in the anthropological
mode” (1991, 38). In this analysis, missionary intentions and professed aims
are less important to understand than the effects of missionary action. Much
attention is paid to how the Tswana are represented in the textual record
produced by the missionaries, since this was a way to objectify and assert
control over those being colonized (akin to the Orientalist discourse so vividly
described by the literary and cultural critic Edward Said). Related to this
concern is the question of native agency: To what extent were the Tswana
able to determine or affect the terms of their colonization? A dialectic or
“long conversation” between two conceptual worlds is proposed as the
interpretive device that best explains what was going on in this missionary
encounter. Both sides of the ledger depend on missionary-generated texts, but
additional materials are needed to reconstruct the Southern Tswana point of
view. What the Comaroffs (1997, 53) say about their use of sources could be
applied more generally to the methods of critical ethnography:
Often we have no alternative but to work with a highly distorted,
disproportionate documentary record. And so we have to make our own
archive by disinterring Southern Tswana gestures and acts and utterances
from the writing of non-Tswana; in particular, by reading these
orthogonally and against each other. But we do not stop there either. We
also look to whatever vernacular traces have been left on the landscape,
whether they be narrative fragments or private correspondence, praise
poetry or buildings, ritual practices or Tswana-authored history books;
indeed any of the manifold signs and artifacts that make their appearance
in the three volumes that [will] compose this study.
Critical ethnography tends to disparage the missionary enterprise as a self-
interested Western intrusion into the lives of others. The work of the
Comaroffs is exemplary in this respect, too. But their perspective is not
universally held within the ranks of those who study the history of mission as
secular historians or social scientists. John Peel's history of the Yoruba in
Nigeria (2000), for example, attends to many of the same issues of power
highlighted by the Comaroffs but does not reduce the idea of evangelization
to a metropolitan project imposed on unwilling non-Western recipients. Peel
puts emphasis on the many ways Yoruba Christians chose to appropriate their
new religious identity, rather than concentrating primarily on how
missionaries attempted to transform mental and physical landscapes (without
denying that they tried to do both). This kind of critical ethnography,
organized around the concept of dynamic religious change, invites the
researcher to consider the broadest possible set of indigenous responses to a
variety of missionary messages (presented on more than one level), without
determining in advance which replies might represent steps forward toward a
fully human existence and which ones necessarily imply regress.
 CURRENT TRENDS IN RESEARCH
Scholarly interest in mission history is remarkably strong today. Forty years
ago, when Harvard Sinologist John King Fairbank (1969, 877) called the
foreign missionary the “invisible man of American history,” few would have
predicted this development. At the height of decolonization in the 1960s,
mission history seemed a quaint relic of a bygone era, so much so that even
church historians were turning away from mission-related topics. A shift of
interest back to mission history became possible in the 1980s only after a
growing number of scholars began to realize how often missionaries and the
cross-cultural work they did were, in fact, intimately connected to a number
of subjects these historians were fully committed to study. Most of this
section will be given over to a brief description of several such clusters of
current research on the history of mission, in order to get a sense of where this
part of the field of missiology seems to be headed. Alert readers will notice
that the last two centuries of mission history receive most of the attention
given in the paragraphs that follow, a reflection not of my own research
interests but of what I perceive to be the most intensely studied mission
history topics at the present time. A few thoughts on some special problems
that bear on the writing of mission history today will round out this chapter.
Missions and Imperialism
The past decade has seen a spate of new publications on the modern
missionary movement and its relationship to imperialism. While no one seems
to be disputing the fact that active collaboration took place, it is by no means
taken as proven that the purposes of European colonialism and Christian
mission were essentially in alignment with each other or that missionaries had
largely conceded the subordination of their project to the needs of the
imperialist system. In this ongoing conversation the position of the Comaroffs
continues to exert force and has attracted enthusiastic support from other
anthropologists, literary critics, and postcolonial theorists (Etherington 2005b,
4). Many historians, in contrast, have been more cautious. Andrew Porter, for
example, argues in his wide-ranging study of Protestant missions and the
British Empire (2004) that their relationship was more often than not
“ambiguous.” He highlights the ever-present need of missionaries to be
accepted by the local societies in which they resided long-term, a factor that
made them more responsive to indigenous values and desires than colonial
officials or settler communities ever wanted to be. Dana Robert (2008) points
to the resolve of many missionaries to “convert” colonialism, to make it serve
the larger purposes of Christian mission rather than the other way around. A
growing number of studies (for example, Brock 2005b) seek to clarify the
crucial role played by local evangelists, whose numbers everywhere dwarfed
those of workers from abroad and so cast into doubt the capacity of foreign
missionaries to control the Christianization process over time. Some of these,
it is true, were on the payroll of the missions, but many more indigenous
witnesses to Christian faith were not and the lack of direct ties to outsiders
may have made them all the more convincing representatives of this new
religious point of view.
The Spread of Western Science
A second group of studies takes up the question of modern missions and their
role in the spread of a Western scientific worldview. The Jesuits in China
continue to figure in some of this research, since the “Learning from Heaven”
they promulgated among the elites of Chinese society included teaching on
scientific subjects (Brockey 2007, 46). The most eminent of the Jesuit
mathematicians and astronomers earned respect for their religious order at the
court of the emperor and through their publications and conversations with
Confucian scholars gained a limited hearing for the Christian message in
academic circles. This was an instrumental use of scientific knowledge, a
matter of creating access for other work and enhancing the reputation of the
Jesuit enterprise as a whole.
Following the Enlightenment, another kind of relationship between
Western science and Christian mission slowly emerged, one in which
modernity itself became an ingrained aspect of the missionary message being
proclaimed by word and deed. Thus, we find missionaries in the nineteenth
century beginning to borrow heavily from the language of the Enlightenment
(a trend already evident within eighteenth-century Evangelicalism) to explain
their purposes and engage audiences. They eagerly incorporated into their
missionary propaganda the latest news of technological advancement in the
West, in order to demonstrate the vigor and generative power of Western
cultures. For some, mission would be entirely reconceived as a civilizing
venture, with education and the improvement of social conditions put at the
center of their efforts. Many missionaries in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries saw great promise in the relentless power of modernity to break
down resistance to Christian outreach within traditional non-Western cultures
and religious systems.
David Bosch can be given credit for stimulating the latest round of
missiological research on the Enlightenment. His fresh and substantial
treatment of “mission in the wake of the Enlightenment” (1991, 262–345)
shows how the modern missionary movement was profoundly a “child of the
Enlightenment” (274). Another landmark in this discussion is the set of essays
edited by Brian Stanley under the title Christian Missions and the
Enlightenment (2001). The contributors to Stanley's volume essentially
reaffirm Bosch's argument that modern Protestant evangelical missions were
deeply influenced by Enlightenment emphases and axioms, often in ways not
fully understood by the missionaries themselves or the leaders of the broader
movement in which they participated.
Subsequent studies have explored a variety of themes related to the
worldwide diffusion of modern ideas and mores by means of Christian
mission. An example is Eliza F. Kent's study of book culture and clothing
norms promoted by British missionaries in colonial South India (2005). Next
to this we might put John M. MacKenzie's work on the aesthetics of the
mission station in southern Africa (2003), where landscapes and social
arrangements were mapped out according to what were thought to be
scientific principles. Yet another direction has been taken by Heather J.
Sharkey (2008), who has examined some missionary contributions to a global
modern discourse on human rights that developed over the course of the
twentieth century. In each of these three cases (and many, many more not
mentioned here), mission history has shown itself to be a fertile environment
indeed for the study of modernity and its manifold effects around the world.
Gender Studies and Mission Research
A third cluster of recent work within mission history has revolved around
gender issues. Some of this research has been biographical in nature, as
scholars have sought to unearth the hidden history of evangelism undertaken
by missionary wives, Catholic women religious, and legions of Protestant
single female missionaries. A first step has been to tell more of these stories in
order to supplement and fill out the master narrative of mission history that
until recently had been defined almost exclusively by the actions and
decisions of men. Next to this desire to encompass more foreign missionary
voices within the archive has been a strong push to know more about non-
Western Christian women and their participation in the modern missionary
movement. Prominent within this group of studies on female missionary
agents is the figure of the native Bible woman, who did much of the daily
work of Christian outreach (especially in rural settings) for which others often
took credit in their official reports and journals. A recent issue of Women's
History Review (September 2008) dedicated to the topic of “transnational
Biblewomen” demonstrates the salience of this subtopic within contemporary
scholarship on the history of women in mission.
As the treasury of biographical materials related to missionary women
became larger, the conceptual tools needed to analyze both new and old data
have also been revised. Intense interest has been focused on the question of
gender roles in mission. It is established beyond doubt that many foreign
women missionaries found in their work abroad unprecedented opportunities
for stepping outside the professional constraints placed on them back home.
In certain circumstances, women missionaries preached, itinerated as
evangelists, and produced new translations of the Bible (Robert 1993). Some
were able to lead congregations (Grimshaw and Sherlock 2005, 188). Many
more served as professional educators and administrators, with some
founding their own schools or institutes. Others practiced medicine. Equally
clear is the fact that exposure to literacy and other forms of mission-based
training and education enabled countless indigenous women to reenvision
their professional and personal identities.
Of course, new roles for women in mission did not develop in isolation
from everything else taking place under the banner of cross-cultural
evangelization. Some male missionaries and mission executives, for example,
were motivated to reconsider their own conceptions of the missionary task in
the light of women's mission experience, as Rhonda Anne Semple (2003, esp.
206–28) has shown with respect to a select group of British missions in the
Victorian era. In North America a rising tide of female candidates after the
Civil War prompted the creation of autonomous women's mission
organizations that to some degree cooperated with but also competed against
male-dominated denominational structures. A slogan developed at the time
—“woman's work for woman”—lent conceptual coherence to this departure
from earlier patterns of mission practice, which had tended to feature
ordained male missionaries, the planting of local churches, and aggressive
conversionist tactics. As the cadre of female missionaries from the West grew,
a turn was also made to address more directly the particular needs of women
and girls in traditional societies, especially by devising ways to visit women
kept in seclusion (so-called zenana missions), establishing orphanages, and
increasing access to female education. In this approach to mission, mothers
and future home-makers were thought to be the critical hinge on which the
Christian conversion of any society absolutely depended.
In fact, “woman's work for woman” was just one of the ways that female
perspectives were applied to mission theory over the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. An earlier formulation centered on the ideal “Christian home” that
missionaries and their wives were encouraged to establish in non-Western
societies as an object lesson for the curious. “Woman's work for woman” was
centrifugal in nature, an impulse that sought to engage the woeful realities of
women and children outside the missionary compound. Antebellum notions
of the “Christian home,” on the other hand, assumed that missionary wives
would be too busy caring for their own families in primitive circumstances to
be able to function as full-time professional missionaries. Theirs was to
exhibit for all to see what a model evangelical home looked like, in hopes that
indigenous neighbors would be attracted to the underlying religious
philosophy of what was in truth an amalgam of Western domestic cultural
practices and faith-based commitments.
The work of Dana L. Robert (1993, 1997, 2008, esp. 134–65) is
foundational for an understanding of women and their role in the crafting of
mission theory in the modern era. Beside her observations on “woman's work
for woman” and the “Christian home,” Robert has identified a third theory of
mission grounded in female experience: “world friendship” (1997, 255–316).
In this approach to mission, developed after the devastations of the World War
I, issues of justice, world peace, and internationalist concern received priority.
The idea of sisterhood continued to be vital but was reinterpreted in terms of
mutuality and reciprocity rather than resting on a sense of maternal
responsibility to lift mission daughters up out of the cultural degradation that
was their unfortunate lot. The new watchword for mainline Protestant women
in mission became “partnership.” A strengthening ecumenical movement in
the early twentieth century reinforced this shift toward the theme of world
friendship.
FORWARD IN MISSION HISTORY
The mass of research surveyed in this chapter brings to mind several
problems that pertain to the writing of mission history today. The first has to
do with perspective. If one accepts the expansive definition of missiology
with which we began (“the systematic study of all aspects of mission”), then
it should be expected that those contributing to mission historiography will
bring more than one point of view to this task. There will be proponents of
Christian mission among these historians as well as diehard critics. Some
scholars may have actual mission experience in their background, which
raises again the old conundrum about whether insiders or outsiders are better
positioned to write objective history. Competent historians, in any case, will
have to sort out the usual questions of agency and causation in history, about
what might constitute an objective fact and the need to differentiate between
perceptions of an event and the actual occurrence itself.
Mission history can be controversial, especially when ideological or
theological convictions are put into play. Apologetics on behalf of Christian
mission, as a rule, cannot be substituted for serious historiography. Strident
secularism, likewise, can impede understanding by deciding for others what
religious beliefs and behaviors necessarily signify. A challenge for the near
future is to expand the dialogue among scholars of mission history, so that it
will continue to grow into something more than an intramural squabble over
cultural values among Westerners. As Tinyiko Sam Maluleke (2000) has
observed, what is required for the next stage of mission historiography is
much more than a matter of including new voices from the past. Old
frameworks of interpretation and established discourses about mission (both
positive and negative, in my view) also have to be interrogated. This means
including in the conversation historians of mission from around the world
who identify as Christians or even as converts to Christianity, along with
others in those same societies who write critically about the history of mission
from outside the churches.
Another set of needs pressing hard on the agenda of mission historiography
has been created by the unprecedented growth that has taken place in world
Christianity. Thanks to the work of Andrew Walls (2002a, 3–71), Lamin
Sanneh (2008), and others, it is now a commonplace to observe that
precipitous twentieth-century declines in North Atlantic Christianity have
been offset by significant additions elsewhere. These gains cannot be
attributed to the natural growth of existing Christian communities. Especially
in China and sub-Saharan Africa, movements of conversion to Christianity
seem to have taken place in response to fervent and sustained evangelistic
appeals. That the rate of growth has been so strong in these particular places
over the past half century has come as a great surprise to many. As noted at
the beginning of this book, it was widely believed at the end of the colonial
era that newly established churches outside the West would quietly disappear
once the coercive power of imperial rule had been withdrawn, bringing the
latest phase of missionary expansion to a firm and decisive close.
Writing about the history of mission since decolonization has just begun,
but already several new problems associated with this endeavor have become
evident. Chief among these is the situation of the archives. With what
resources will scholars in the future write this history? Unlike the previous
few centuries, when relatively few mission organizations accounted for much
of the activity taking place at any given moment, we now have a plethora of
groups spearheading a polycentric array of projects and initiatives. The
number of languages employed is virtually unlimited. Few of these
organizations have the wherewithal to keep good records of their work and,
increasingly, documents are not published on paper any more but kept
electronically for uncertain periods of time. If we can be sure of one thing, it
is that scholars of postcolonial mission will not have at their disposal the same
kind of documentation and archival resources on which those studying the
history of modern-era missions have come to depend.
Whatever the challenges might be, the prospects for mission historiography
are nevertheless bright. One reason to be hopeful is grounded in the capacity
of the Internet to provide wider access to existing archival holdings. Mission
photography, for example, is increasingly available in digital formats, with
many collections now posted on the website of the University of Southern
California's Internet Mission Photography Archive. We can expect
considerable numbers of current and future images of mission to be preserved
in this way. Many libraries are likewise acting to digitize older manuscript
materials and other documents, a move that will reduce the need of some
researchers to travel to collections.
New ways for scholars around the world to collaborate on historiographical
projects are also beginning to emerge. The Dictionary of African Christian
Biography (DACB)—multilingual, open-ended, and presented entirely online
—has already rendered invaluable service to the study of Christianity and
mission in postcolonial Africa. An accompanying program (Project Luke) to
train historians as regional consultants to the DACB is another model worthy
of emulation. Finally, mention should be made of the Documentation,
Archives, Bibliography, and Oral History Study Group (DABOH) of the
International Association for Mission Studies. Most recently, DABOH has
focused on the difficulties involved in documenting world Christianity in the
twenty-first century. Consultations organized through DABOH have enabled
librarians from around the world, plus historians, mission professors, and
others, to share information and experience regarding the collection of oral
history materials, to seek new ways to increase international cooperation
among institutions, and to advise each other about how best to organize and
manage the next generation of mission document depositories in support of
future scholars and their research.
 4
Theology, Mission, Culture
Within the realm of missiology, culture becomes a primary conversation
partner with theology, on a par with philosophy or science. Cross-cultural
missionary encounters especially invite questions about how faith convictions
interact with cultural realities. At issue is not just the need to recognize the
inevitable effects of culture on the practice of theology or on the performance
of faith in community. Missiologists also want to know about the
communication of religious (and other) messages across linguistic and
cultural frontiers, the role of missionaries as agents of social change, the
complex processes that shape the formation of new churches, and how
nascent communities of faith work out their own theologies in a variety of
local circumstances.
Since no culture is static, one can assume that even established theological
positions have to be in constant conversation with matters of culture, whether
explicitly or not. In the context of mission, this dialogue speeds up and often
takes on a sense of urgency. What may have been contemplated only in the
abstract now confronts the would-be evangelist in an embodied form.
Submerged values and taken-for-granted assumptions about Christian norms
may be brought to the surface and demand to be examined. In some cases,
mission experience completely transforms the messengers, with the result that
initial or received views on proper belief and appropriate ritual practices or
the evaluation of particular faith cultures, including one's own, undergo
radical revision. At other times, evangelistic encounter is ultimately about the
effect of missionaries and their organizations on others. Persistently, the
global scale of Christian mission and the thoroughly international character of
the worldwide community produced by these efforts push theologians to
consider ever larger slices of human experience as they reflect on universal
questions of meaning and truth.
The aim of this chapter is to explore how missiology relates both to
theology and the study of culture. I propose to begin by considering several
classical topics connected to systematic theology with proven relevance for
the conceptualization of mission. At several points, this discussion will
expand on material initially presented in chapter 2 (Bible and Mission). A
second major section will consider culture studies as an aspect of missiology.
Emphasis here will fall on the capacity of such research to explain what might
be taking place in the midst of missionary encounter besides a contest of
beliefs. The ground having been prepared, we will then look at several kinds
of missiological analysis that self-consciously build the work of theologians
and cultural scholarship at the same time. A brief concluding section will
suggest how this part of missiology might pertain to students of theology and
culture more generally.
THEOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF MISSION
Salvation
Some notion of salvation lies at the base of every theology of mission. In fact,
it could be said that this aspect of theology is more likely to determine the
character of one's mission practice than any other doctrinal consideration.
Biblical thinking about soteriology presupposes the active participation of
God in the salvation process, since it assumes that human beings cannot save
themselves. Within the smaller circle of the New Testament canon, a similar
consensus has formed around the idea of Jesus Christ as God's indispensable
mediator of saving grace. Beyond these two basic convictions, the Christian
scriptures offer support for multiple understandings of salvation as a
theological construct.
Through the centuries, debates within the church over the meaning of
salvation have typically revolved around a series of key questions. Some of
these ask, for example, about the nature and scope of salvation. Is salvation
about human fulfillment, unity with God, eternal life for believers, or some
other end? Who or what might be involved when God acts to save: the souls
of individuals, a community of faith, all of humanity, the entire cosmos?
Equally perplexing is the issue of timing. Is salvation something that
essentially takes place in the past, the present, or the future (or outside of time
altogether)? All at once or in stages? Theologians also wonder about the
mechanisms of salvation. How is it accomplished? Can human beings
participate in God's saving activity? The various metaphors invoked to
represent the idea of salvation in biblical theology give vivid witness to its
many possible facets. Salvation has been portrayed as a matter of deliverance
from danger, redemption from judgment, victory over the powers of evil, the
making of friends among enemies.
When an attenuated understanding of salvation becomes a primary lens
through which to view mission, the set of practices adopted to express this
conception may appear to be eccentric or unbalanced. Some world-denying
gnostics in antiquity, for example, picturing salvation in terms of escape from
a created order altogether compromised by evil, made it their mission to find
a few worthy candidates to initiate into the mysteries of their select and
insular company. What then to make of the command to love one's neighbor
(an alternative approach to mission widely embraced by the early church and
then enacted through many works of compassion) or the joyous declaration of
Jesus that God's rule had already begun to transform the creation? Oddly
skewed, too, was the behavior of the first missionaries with Columbus in the
New World, who rushed everywhere to baptize quickly as many children as
possible in the midst of the Amerindian genocide going on around them (Las
Casas 1992, 48–53). Sometimes the future aspect of salvation receives undue
emphasis in missionary preaching. The result can be a reading of current
events that too confidently fits them into precise apocalyptic scenarios and
then makes those scripts the content of the church's message to the world.
Christian proclamation based on this kind of soteriological foundation may
end up reducing the community's missionary mandate to little more than a
matter of disseminating speculative information about a largely unknown
near-term future.
In Bosch's view (1991, esp. 393–400), the story of mission theology since
the Reformation can be summed up as a long struggle to generate more
comprehensive models of salvation. The first challenge was to break free of
entrenched medieval atonement theories that supposed salvation to be a kind
of metaphysical transaction, as in the formulation of Anselm (c. 1033–1109)
where Christ's expiatory sacrifice on the cross is thought to have satisfied the
wounded honor of God. Alternative approaches developed through the
modern era increasingly emphasized the human ethical response to whatever
God may have accomplished in Christ. Salvation, seen from this perspective,
is more about the attainment of well-being in the here-and-now than it is a
future state, and human beings are given substantial responsibility for the
realization of God's promises. Liberationist proposals developed from the
1960s represent one form of this aspiration, with justice made the standard by
which the achievement of salvation could be measured. More expansive yet is
the concept of salvation put forward by Johannes Hoekendijk (1950), noted
earlier, which features the biblical value of shalom as its primary motif. For
Hoekendijk, shalom stands not only for the divine future vision of an ideal
social order but also for God's desire that peace and harmony be restored
throughout the creation now. Mission initiatives based on the ideas of
Hoekendijk or some form of liberation theology tend to be socially activist in
their orientation. A premium is put on doing the will of God as exemplified in
the earthly career of Jesus, who identified with the poor and addressed their
most urgent human needs, while opposing the religious and civil powers that
oppressed them. This is quite a different agenda for mission than that usually
assumed in premodern times, when most missionaries thought it their
particular task to inform new groups of non-Christians about what God had
done on their behalf elsewhere and to offer an effective means (preeminently
baptism) by which the transcendent benefits of divine action could be
transferred to sinners.
Calls to integrate the “horizontal” and “vertical” elements of salvation
within mission theology intensified over the last quarter of the twentieth
century. Bosch's own contribution to this effort (1991, 511–19) was to
juxtapose “six salvific events” portrayed in the New Testament (incarnation,
cross, resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, and parousia) that, together,
suggested to him the direction in which mission theology should go next.
Bosch insisted that no theology of mission could be truly comprehensive
unless it encompassed and reflected the whole of what God had done (or
promised to do) through Christ on behalf of a fallen creation.
The inchoate nature of Bosch's proposal reflected his sense of an
“emerging” postmodern paradigm for ecumenical mission theology that
hadn't yet coalesced by the end of the 1980s. Writing over the following
decade, Robert Schreiter (1992, 1996) and others made a case for
reconciliation (the biblical roots of which have already been briefly described
in chapter 2) as the integrative metaphor for mission and ministry that spoke
most directly to the circumstances of the church in a rapidly changing global
environment. The end of the Cold War, the fall of apartheid in South Africa,
and the return of democracy to several Latin American countries previously
under harsh military rule were all welcome developments that pointed to the
possibility of a fresh start in geopolitics. But what should be done with the
unpleasant residue left behind in each of these situations: legacies of violence
that continued to haunt the survivors, histories of collaboration with unjust
regimes, and the lingering hope of countless victims to be made whole? The
New World Order in no time also bore on itself the tragic marks of savage
interethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Brutal acts of
destruction carried out in the name of Islam soon became another
distinguishing characteristic of the new age.
Reconciliation is a response to suffering that yearns for more than the
punishment of past crimes. It presupposes the establishment of justice,
according to Schreiter (1992, 18–25, 65), and then asks about how to heal
societies and human relationships disfigured by violence. Reconciliation
requires a truthful accounting of the past, in order to lay bare the need for
genuine repentance. Here salvation is a matter of repair, an intention to
rebuild or restore what power and coercive force have battered and damaged.
Christians cannot claim to be the world's only possible human agents of
reconciliation, but Schreiter reminds us (1992, 61) that they bring to this task
a singular asset: a foundational narrative in which violence, suffering, and the
profound difficulties standing in the way of reconciliation are honestly faced.
On the basis of this story (perhaps only on these grounds), it becomes possible
to construct a “theology of embrace” (Volf 1996) strong enough to withstand
the unforgiving logic of retaliation. At its last quadrennial meeting (2008), the
International Association for Mission Studies chose to focus on “the gospel of
reconciliation” and the problem of human identity. The continuing appeal of
reconciliation as an organizing concept for mission theology is further
reflected in the recent call to recognize this form of peacemaking as the “heart
of mission” (Langmead 2008, 18).
Ecclesiology
Sooner or later, every discussion of salvation in Christian theology is obliged
to take up the topic of ecclesiology. By the same token, many theologians
have found it difficult to understand the nature of the church fully without
also considering its relationship to mission. Thus, it often happens that the
concepts of salvation, church, and mission are bound up together in
systematic theology, although not always with the same result.
When Jesus sent his disciples out to proclaim the reign of God and to heal
(Luke 9:1–2), he initiated the church's mission. Subsequently, an experience
of the Holy Spirit compelled the followers of Jesus to speak in many
languages about “God's deeds of power” (Acts 2:11). Within the first
generation after Pentecost, the church's efforts at outreach extended far
beyond the territory of Palestine, resulting in the establishment of
congregations from Damascus to Rome. The particular gifts of apostles and
evangelists were recognized within the company of believers, but the need for
corporate witness was nonetheless maintained. Even Paul, perhaps the most
independent of the apostles, made it clear in his correspondence that he
expected the churches he founded to partner with him in preaching the gospel.
In fact, we might well conclude that Paul had the freedom to decide to work
where there were no churches (a preference announced in Rom. 15:20 and 2
Cor. 10:15–16), only because he could count on the effective witness of
already existing congregations, as in Thessaloniki: “For the word of the Lord
has sounded forth from you not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but in every
place your faith in God has become known, so that we have no need to speak
about it” (1 Thess. 1:8).
Reflecting on this experience, the early church concluded that mission was
one of its constituting marks. This conviction was memorialized in the
Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381, in which the essential nature of the
church is defined in terms of four fundamental attributes: not only “one, holy,
and catholic,” but also “apostolic.” Henceforth, any expression of church that
did not follow Jesus into mission ceased to be itself in a full sense. The other
side of the coin also became an article of faith within early Christianity quite
soon after the age of the apostles and itinerant evangelists had passed. This
was the idea that evangelization depended on the church, which is to say that
it was not just one of several instruments of mission but a necessary means of
salvation. Cyprian's (d. 258) influential dictum, endlessly repeated within
Western medieval Christianity and afterward, cast this theological conclusion
into its most memorable form: extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“no salvation
outside the church”).
A collective decision to understand the church as the exclusive locus of
salvation had profound implications for mission theology. The integrity of
Augustine's position on the visible and invisible churches notwithstanding,
most Christians fell into the bad habit of identifying the physical church, as it
existed in the world, with the kingdom of God on earth. Priests and bishops,
the church functionaries who controlled access to life-giving sacraments,
were commonly regarded as the guardians of salvation too. Once the interests
of states and the church became substantially intertwined after Constantine,
the possibility also arose that political realms might be divinized alongside the
church. Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire are the two most famous
examples of this mindset, but these great imperia were emulated by a number
of regional actors, who likewise sought to increase their legitimacy through
religious sanction (Hungary in St. Stephen's time is one example of this
phenomenon; the promotion of Moscow as the “Third Rome” is another). In
the worst-case scenario, repeated far too many times for comfort today,
missionaries and their political sponsors justified the use of force to compel
submission to Christian social norms (including the acceptance of baptism) by
appealing to the perceived capacity of the church alone to secure salvation for
sinners.
Ecclesiological issues continue to be discussed vigorously within mission
theology today. Critical studies of past practices are largely agreed that
territorial definitions of the church—the notion of Christendom—cannot fail
but to distort the nature of the gospel by subordinating the church's saving
message to its institutional interests. Likewise, one will search in vain today
for proposals that favor the use of violence on behalf of the church and its
mission, although some may be willing to consider the use of “soft” power to
create openings for Christian evangelism within resistant cultures
(particularly those dominated by Islam). Wide open is the question of whether
the church is a proper object of mission. Many mission organizations still see
church planting or the extension of the church's hierarchical structures as a
primary goal of mission. Others worry about the danger of taking the needs of
the church too seriously and so emphasize ministries of service and witness
not necessarily intended to lead to the creation of new congregations or
church bodies. Overall, the degree to which the missionary identity of the
church has been reaffirmed over the past two generations is remarkable. The
declaration at Vatican II that the church is “missionary by her very nature”
(Ad Gentes 2) finds deep resonance within Orthodoxy (Anastasios 1989) and
among Protestants all across the theological spectrum.
Some Attempts to Relocate Mission Theologically
Johannes Hoekendijk was among the first to sound the alarm on the dangers
of ecclesiocentrism in mission theology. Talking about mission as an activity
initiated by older churches that culminates in the establishment of new
ecclesial bodies seemed to him to be entirely misguided: “Church-centric
missionary thinking is bound to go astray, because it revolves around an
illegitimate centre” (1952, 332). Hoekendijk's greatest fear was that a genuine
desire on the part of God's people to give obedient witness to the gospel
would be subverted by the church's organizational needs. Such motivations
had relentlessly driven missionaries into questionable arrangements with
European colonizers, he believed. With the passing of that era, was it also not
time to renounce every kind of ecclesiastical colonialism? Denominational
competition, rife in the first half of the twentieth century, indicated to
Hoekendijk the waywardness of most mission programs. The usual supporters
of mission rallied enthusiastically when the goal was to replicate existing
church structures or to extend the limits of Christendom. Where was their
passion for the radical, disinterested venture of faith announced by Jesus?
From another perspective, Karl Barth (1886–1968) also cautioned against
church-centric theologies of mission. The presenting problem for Barth was
not so much the church's pursuit of worldly advantage (such disappointing
behavior was to be expected from every human institution) as it was a matter
of the Christian community losing sight of its essential and constituting task.
When other worthy projects are allowed to interpose themselves between the
church and its primary calling, “faith in the Gospel degenerates into
religiosity, love becomes devotion to certain ‘ideals,’ hope becomes
confidence in all kinds of social and individual progress” (Barth 1948, 70).
Barth's corrective response to this situation is to remind the church that its
singular function is to proclaim the word of God. It was created for just this
work and has no other reason to exist (Barth 1962, 795–801). Seen from this
perspective, the church appears to be less an initiator of mission than it is the
recipient of a special vocation. Barth urged that God be recognized as the one
who both calls the community into being and sends it into the world for the
purpose of witness.
Hoekendijk's critique and Barth's constructive proposals prepared the way
for new approaches to mission theology in the second half of the twentieth
century that did not begin with the church and its standard missionary agenda.
What ties most of these efforts together is a common desire to put mission
into a larger theoretical context than that provided by ecclesiology or the
practical concerns of applied theology. Thus, we have Barth in the Church
Dogmatics deciding to locate the topic of mission (and his treatment of the
church) within an extensive discussion of justification or atonement (“the
doctrine of reconciliation”), which he considers to be the work of God alone.
Carl Braaten (1977, 29–36) observes that mission theology in this period
more generally takes a turn in the direction of eschatology, with a resulting
emphasis on Kingdom of God imagery to explain the goal of mission. In
addition, we can see in the widespread adoption of missio Dei language,
beginning in the 1950s, a sign that many now wished to treat mission as an
aspect of the Trinity rather than as a function of the church. One particularly
influential example of mission theology developed on the basis of a
Trinitarian framework is that offered by Lesslie Newbigin (1978). Building on
the ideas of Newbigin and others, Timothy Tennent (2010) has gone on to
argue for a Trinitarian understanding of both mission and missiology, in order
to keep the missio Dei and the mission activities of the churches linked
together.
Emerging alongside more fully Trinitarian systems of thought are
theologies of mission that give special emphasis to pneumatology. These
approaches, too, seem to have arisen at least in part as alternatives to more
ecclesiocentric thinking about mission. The explosive growth of
Pentecostalism in the twentieth century has raised the profile of
pneumatology within missiology, not only with respect to mission theology
but throughout the field. Pentecostal theologies of mission consistently
highlight gifts of the Spirit, especially as these are manifested in sudden
outbreaks of ecstatic speech or instances of healing. When new hearers of
Christian proclamation exhibit evidence of these spiritual gifts, their presence
may be taken as a sign that successful evangelism has occurred (above all,
baptism in the Spirit). Since testimonies about such events having taken place
in the past are often featured in Pentecostal preaching, the phenomena of
tongues-speaking and miraculous healing are also usually considered in these
circles to be among the ordinary means of missionary outreach.
Until quite recently, Pentecostal theologies of mission tended to be implicit
and performative, a matter of “theology acted out” (Anderson 2004, 197)
instead of written down. Of course, such theologies of mission, when put into
writing, would have to be rational in order to be understood but they still
might resist the impulse to systematize knowledge of the Spirit and its
unpredictable effects. Nevertheless, mention of a few recurring elements can
give a sense of the approach to mission theology suggested by a
pneumatological perspective. One is the expectation that spiritual rebirth
should include an extraordinary physical experience of some kind, in contrast
to more noetic conceptions of conversion that emphasize assent to doctrinal
statements or the recitation of creeds. The power of the Spirit is also
acknowledged in the assertion that the promised “latter rain” of prophecy and
tribulation have already begun (Wacker 2001, 251–65). A sense of impending
calamity spurred legions of twentieth-century Pentecostal believers to set out
in mission, sometimes without much advance planning. Confidence in the
Spirit's guidance could likewise make formal training and official ministries
seem beside the point. In exchange for a “low” ecclesiology that
deemphasized order and lines of institutional authority, Pentecostals gained an
appreciation for lay ministry and the spiritual gifts of women rarely matched
until recently by mainline Protestants, Catholics, or Orthodox.
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE STUDY OF MISSION
As we have seen (in chapter 3), not a little early modern ethnography took
place in the context of Christian mission, with the Jesuits leading the way.
Some missionaries also played active roles in the development of the
discipline of anthropology. Henri Junod (1863–1934), Wilhelm Schmidt
(1868–1954), and Edwin W. Smith (1876–1957) are among those
missiologists still remembered today for having successfully bridged the
professional worlds of anthropology and mission in the early twentieth
century, while contributing substantially to each (Anderson 1998, 347–48,
600–601, 625–26). Even so, a strong majority of anthropologists would
eventually turn against Christian missionary activity in principle, believing
that cross-cultural evangelism, however intended, inevitably hastens the
destruction of primitive cultures around the world, the very subject matter of
anthropological science, classically understood (Stipe 1980; a trend toward
partnership is asserted in Bonsen et al. 1990).
Whatever hostility may have come to missionaries and their supporters
from the direction of anthropology over the years, the fact remains that the
social sciences are relevant to the study of mission. Anthropologists,
sociologists, and other social scientists have made it their business to study
culture, which is the natural workspace of Christian mission. While it may be
possible to discuss mission in the abstract or strictly from a theological point
of view, neither methodology is equipped on its own to explain everything
that happens when faith is shared cross-culturally in the midst of actual life
circumstances. Missionary encounters are necessarily shaped by a variety of
crucial factors specific to each social setting and historical moment. For
example, the perceptions of those involved and how they interpret their
experience may be limited or enabled in particular ways by cultural
determinants. These same individuals participate in complicated social
networks, which in part define their personal identities and outlooks. No way
has yet been found to avoid the effects of large-scale social forces at work in
one's environment, whether fully understood or not. To comprehend these and
other matters of context, missiologists need the help of the social sciences.
Quite soon after the emergence of missiology as a distinct field of study in
the late nineteenth century, room was made within its precincts for social
scientific data. Influential in this regard was the work of Commission V at the
1910 World Missionary Conference held in Edinburgh. After conducting an
exhaustive, unprecedented two-year investigation into missionary training
with substantial input from missionaries serving around the world, executives
of sending agencies, and many scholarly experts, the commission concluded
(World Missionary Conference 1910 [V], 155–79) that “sociology” was an
integral part of the missionary syllabus, one of five “necessary subjects” that
should be studied by all candidates for mission service (along with “the
science and history of mission,” “world religions,” “pedagogy,” and “the
science of language”). Training in sociology and world religions was meant to
furnish mission workers with the analytical tools they would need to
understand their fields of service. It was no longer thought enough that
evangelists and other missionaries should be spiritual exemplars and well
versed in the Christian message. To be truly effective, they also had to grasp
the full complexity of their social setting. Programs of missionary preparation
that had already begun to incorporate such ideas, in particular at Yale under
the leadership of Harlan Beach, were held up at Edinburgh as models to be
replicated elsewhere (the Yale missions curriculum for 1910–11 is fully
described in an appendix to the report of Commission V). The
recommendations of Edinburgh on missionary training were most fully
implemented at Hartford, where Commission V chairman William Douglas
Mackenzie served as president. What soon became known as the Kennedy
School of Missions at the Hartford Seminary Foundation put the study of
anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and world religions at the heart of its
educational program (Capen and Hodous 1936). A related effect of Edinburgh
is felt in the inclusion of social scientific topics within the “International
Missionary Bibliography” section of the International Review of Missions, a
scholarly periodical founded in 1912 (Skreslet 2006a, 171–80).
Thus far, I have been writing in general terms about the social sciences and
their importance for the study of mission. In the next few subsections of this
chapter, a selection of this research (regrettably, very limited) will be
discussed, in order to show in more detail the kinds of social scientific
scholarship most often encompassed within missiology after Edinburgh 1910.
To be sure, missiologists did not necessarily get from social science what
many of them expected a century ago, when it was widely believed that
secular studies of religion and culture would “prove” the superiority of
Christianity. Such was the assumption of James Shepard Dennis, whose
influential study Christian Missions and Social Progress (1897–1906)
earnestly expressed the expectation of many social gospellers committed to
foreign missions that a better understanding of social problems and world
religions would naturally lead one to appreciate how Christianity is best
suited to meet the needs of modern men and women worldwide. Others
looked to the emerging discipline of comparative religion (or history of
religions) to support their argument that Christianity stood at the evolutionary
apex of ethical and social development among all the world's religions
(discussed in Masuzawa 2005). While these early missionary hopes for social
science were not realized over the course of the twentieth century, missiology
has nonetheless been enriched by a wide range of social scientific studies,
many of them focused on matters of culture.
Linguistics
Since language is a primary building block of human culture, the field of
linguistics has been an indispensable part of the social sciences. Students of
mission have had more than one reason to be on alert for advances in
linguistics scholarship. First of all, missionaries and their sending agencies
have looked to language experts for help in the development of better
methods of foreign language instruction. At a theoretical level, this interest
might include consideration of basic research on the biological and behavioral
processes by which human beings acquire language. More immediately
relevant to missionary training are those investigations that examine the
practical challenges involved in teaching foreign languages to adults. Near the
beginning of the twentieth century it was hoped that the emerging science of
phonetics might provide a comprehensive framework for efficient language
learning by newly commissioned missionaries. We see this aspiration
reflected, for example, in the respect shown at Edinburgh for the ideas of Carl
Meinhof, professor of African languages at the Colonial Institute in Hamburg
(appendix X in the report of Commission V is a lengthy communication from
Meinhof that sets out the advantages of language learning methods based on
phonetics). Later in the century, language instruction for missionaries and
others began to incorporate new forms of audiovisual technology developed
with the assistance of language scholars. In addition, many missiologists over
the years have paid close attention to what linguists have had to say about the
best use of native speakers in language teaching, the proper ordering of skills
to be taught (oral, aural, reading, composition), and the advantages of
inductive learning.
Scripture translation is a second area of impact for modern linguistics on
missiology. Linguists are not prepared to answer the theological questions that
inevitably arise when the Bible is translated, but their work has clarified some
of the social issues that surround the task of translation. Biblical research
informed by linguistics, for example, has contributed to a better
understanding of the material to be translated. This has meant not only
helping translators to recognize the different literary genres possibly
embodied in the sacred writing that sits in front of them, or the history of
composition that molded it into canonical form, or the underlying
grammatical structures of the source language, but also to grasp the probable
functions of the text in its own time. The point of these exegetical labors has
been to understand as fully as possible what this part of scripture may have
meant in its original cultural context.
At the other end of the translation project is the audience into whose idiom
the text is being rendered. Perhaps the most important insight to be gained
from modern studies of language in this regard concerns the active role
necessarily played by those on the receiving end of translation work.
Corresponding to the best efforts of the translator to recast an existing
message into a different language medium are acts of decoding that have their
own integrity. In this way of looking at the hermeneutical process, translators
cannot reserve to themselves the right to assign final meanings to texts. They
must expect interpretation to continue even after the finished written product
has been created and distributed. Concern for the insider's (emic) perspective
on language is evident in the work of Kenneth L. Pike (1912–2000), the
longtime president of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, who helped to train
thousands of missionary translators for Wycliffe Bible Translators while also
developing a formal theory of language and culture he called “tagmemics”
(Pike 1967). An early collaborator with Pike was Eugene A. Nida
(19142011), who went on to have a distinguished career of his own with the
American Bible Society. Nida's theoretical model of “dynamic [or functional]
equivalence translation” (discussed in Smalley 1991, esp. 105–52) has proved
extremely influential around the world through the work of the United Bible
Societies. Translations based on this approach (such as the Good News Bible
in English) show less interest in the goal of achieving “formal
correspondence” with source texts. The focus instead is on the recipients and
their anticipated understanding and experience of the translation. Ideally, in
Nida's model, “the relationship between the receptor and message should be
substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors
and the message” (Nida 1964, 159).
Bible translating is but one kind of language-related missionary activity.
Evangelists and others intending to share the biblical story with non-
Christians may employ any number of media in their work and multiple styles
of expression (including nonverbal forms of language). For this reason,
missiologists have long been concerned to understand the larger universe of
communications theory in which Bible translation occupies an important but
relatively small place. Eugene Nida (1960, rev. 1990) has provided a
comprehensive introduction to the field of communications theory, written
from a missiological point of view. His approach to communication takes into
account not only the many functions and forms of language that humans
employ but also the impact of social structures and psychological attitudes on
interpersonal relations. David J. Hesselgrave (1978) offers another substantial
treatment of communication for intercultural mission workers. Particularly
insightful is his observation that missionaries have to recognize at least three
different cultural situations when preparing for intercultural communication
on behalf of the gospel: the respondent's culture, the missionary's culture, and
the cultures of the Bible. Hesselgrave's “three-culture model of missionary
communication” (67–78) builds on the earlier work of Nida (1960, 33–61)
with respect to structures of communication. The suggestion of Hesselgrave
that missionaries ought to master communications theory in order to
“possess” other cultures for Christ (95–105) is strikingly modernist in tone.
Cultural Analysis
Culture is an elusive concept that continues to elicit multiple definitions.
Equally plentiful are the many methodologies developed by social scientists
over the years for the purpose of studying cultural phenomena. Thus, the
results of cultural scholarship are still in process, but the research undertaken
as a whole remains critically important to the study of mission. As Louis J.
Luzbetak (1988, 133) has put it: more and better knowledge about culture is
“anthropology's most significant contribution to missiology,” because “the
human dimension of mission action” cannot be understood without an
adequate sense of the meaning of culture. Luzbetak's comprehensive study,
The Church and Cultures (1988), shows just how extensive that contribution
to missiology has been and continues to be.
Out of a huge mass of anthropological scholarship on culture two
approaches may be highlighted to illustrate how this kind of social scientific
research has figured in the development of missiology. The first of these
revolves around the idea of “worldview.” As applied within cultural
anthropology a half-century ago (see, for example, Geertz 1957),
“worldview” refers to the distinctive outlook of a social group with respect to
its most deeply held common values, notions of proper behavior, and shared
symbols of meaning. Worldview in this sense is not a personal life
philosophy, an ideology, or a psychological state. It is a more or less tacit
conceptual framework within which a given society (or dominant majority)
articulates its own peculiar identity and attempts to exert indirect control as a
collective over the behavior of its individual members. Religious beliefs,
practices, and symbols may be featured in some expressions of worldview. A
heightened awareness of ethnic identity can be another vital factor. If they are
to be sustained, worldviews must be taught from generation to generation.
Worldviews are not static, but resistance to a fundamental change in outlook
is typically high and the weight of tradition accumulated over time can be
great.
“Worldview” has lost much of its currency within cultural anthropology;
evidence of this shift is provided by the second edition (2008) of the
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, which no longer includes
an entry for this term. The influence of this approach to cultural analysis has
nevertheless persisted within missiology, primarily through the
anthropological work of David J. Hesselgrave (1978), Paul G. Hiebert (1983,
2008), and Charles H. Kraft (1996, 2008). In fact, many students of mission
have been introduced to anthropology through textbooks written by these
three scholars. In each case, the idea of worldview has been employed to
demonstrate the importance of anthropology for missiology.
Kraft's argument on behalf of worldview analysis is founded on the
conviction that the Christian gospel “is intended to influence and change
people at the deepest possible level—the worldview level,” where basic
assumptions guide one's perception and interpretation of reality (1996, 57).
Cross-cultural missionaries, therefore, should strive to become “advocates of
change” (398–413), who give witness to “alternative assumptions, values, and
allegiances, and commend their acceptance” (442). Hiebert agrees that
“transforming worldviews” is the point of mission. While acknowledging that
a fully comprehensive “biblical” worldview lies beyond the grasp of limited
human beings (2008, 267), Hiebert maintains that “tentative models” of
reality drawn from scripture may still be used to critique any and every
possible understanding of the world and our place in it that a missionary
might adopt or encounter.
Semiotics is a second method of cultural analysis developed within
anthropology that some missiologists have found especially useful. In this
way of looking at culture, patterns of communication and signification are
examined closely in order to discern how particular societies create and
express meaning. The whole in each case is an “imaginative universe” of
symbols (Geertz 1973, 13) that can be read out of a people's verbal language,
gestures, rituals, and artifacts, as the anthropologist observes them performed
or used in actual social situations.
Missiologist Robert J. Schreiter sees in semiotics a creative means by
which to listen carefully to another culture. He argues (1985, 57–61) that
those using this method of cultural analysis can be aided by its focus on the
insider's experience of culture, its equal concern for the perspectives of
hearers and speakers, and the attention it gives to messages that pass among
the general (non-elite) population. Luzbetak (1988, 155) further emphasizes
the advantages of the “holistic” approach to culture provided by the semiotic
model. Important in this regard is the idea of semiotic domain, defined by
Schreiter (1985, 69) as “an assemblage of culture texts relating to one set of
activities in culture (economic, political, familiar), which are organized
together by a single set of messages and metaphoric signs.” These domains
(religion is another one) are naturally interlinked with each other. They may
be arranged hierarchically and a single one may clearly dominate the rest. All
of these elements (and the relationships among them) are susceptible to
change. Whether one intends to construct a local theology (the larger topic
Schreiter is discussing) or to engage in cross-cultural communication of some
kind, a thoroughgoing semiotic analysis of indigenous culture could help to
prepare the way.
Religious and Cultural Change
There was a time in the development of anthropology when its most scientific
practitioners showed relatively little interest in the topic of cultural change.
Especially under the influence of functionalism (strongest in the period
between the 1920s and 1970s), many anthropologists were predisposed to
view primitive societies as self-contained, almost timeless social worlds.
Suddenly inserted into one of these alien environments, their great challenge
was to comprehend and describe as completely as possible the totality of
native life, including its everyday activities and rhythms, language, social
roles, patterns of kinship and marriage, child-rearing practices, rituals, myths,
institutions, and taboos. Fieldwork reports composed later rendered a picture
of what the anthropologist had seen and heard. It was customary for these to
be written in the present tense (“the ethnographic present”), a stylistic nuance
that accentuated the photographic quality of the scholarly product. In the
brand of functionalism championed by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942)
especially, an overriding concern to portray well-balanced non-Western
indigenous social orders sympathetically may have led many researchers to
ignore or correct for evidence of dysfunction, social tension, and historical
development in the life of their subject group (Harris 2001, 559–62; see also
Taber 1991, 93–110).
The attention of anthropology having largely been focused elsewhere in the
first half of the twentieth century, it was left to other social scientists to
consider the interrelated subjects of cultural and religious change. The still
developing disciplines of psychology and sociology each had important
contributions to make in this regard with implications for the study of
mission. The work of William James (1842–1910) on religious experience,
for example, provided missionaries and others with a modern, more technical
vocabulary to use when talking about what happens to those who commit to
the Christian faith with fervor (James 1902, esp. 166–258). Another classic
study of conversion by historian Arthur Darby Nock (1902–63) used an
analytical framework essentially borrowed from James to answer the question
of Christianity's success in the ancient world. How can we account for the
beginning of a widespread movement of people into Christianity throughout
the Roman Empire by the third century? Not because of Jesus' powerful
personality, Nock maintained (1933, 210–11), in opposition to nineteenth-
century idealism. Christianity triumphed instead because it met the most basic
psychological needs of human beings:
It satisfied the inquiring turn of mind, the desire for escape from Fate,
the desire for security in the hereafter; like Stoicism, it gave a way of life
and made man at home in the universe, but unlike Stoicism it did this for
the ignorant as well as for the lettered. It satisfied also social needs and it
secured men against loneliness.
To what extent such an individualistic (Western) understanding of the human
self and the making of life decisions can be applied cross-culturally and over
time is a matter now under active discussion in more than one scholarly
discipline. Zeba A. Crook (2004, esp. 13–52), for example, cautions against
the longstanding tendency of biblical scholars to assume that people in
ancient times had the same psychic and emotional needs as those living in
modern industrial societies. If it is true that “the mental and emotional
experiences of humanity cannot be separated from the cultural context in
which they exist” (Crook, 46–47), then Crook is correct to suspect that
religious conversion in Western societies and in other cultural settings may
not always mean the same thing.
Sociologists have also taken an interest in the complex processes of
religious change. As one would expect, these scholars have not typically
focused on the individual but more on society-wide trends and movements.
Much of this work has been concentrated on the fate of religion in the
postindustrial West, but not all of it, as the voluminous writings of Max
Weber (1864–1920) on Asian cultures and religions demonstrate. In fact, the
ideas of Weber loom large in what I consider two of the most significant
contributions of modern-era sociology to the study of mission. The first of
these has to do with Weber's basic classification of Christianity, Judaism,
Islam, and Buddhism as “world” religions, whose highly “rationalized”
systems of belief and practice have enhanced their social power and
attractiveness to modern people. These were contrasted in Weber's analysis
with “primitive” or traditional religions that have had, on the whole, weaker
structures of authority, less intellectual coherence, fewer effective means at
hand to control orthodox belief, and narrower or more local fields of vision.
Weber's ideas were easily swept up into evolutionary schemes of
civilizational development, which many hands were eager to do especially at
the beginning of the twentieth century. A more subtle and enduring benefit of
his thinking was provided to those social scientists and missiologists who
wanted to study what happens when different kinds of religious systems come
into contact with each other, especially in the context of modernization. Robin
Horton's now classic essays (1971, 1975a, 1975b) on conversion to
Christianity and Islam in sub-Saharan Africa show how Weber's analytical
categories could be applied to the problem of religious change. Robert W.
Hefner (1993) has provided a stimulating survey of the long and
consequential discussion sparked by Weber's classification of Christianity as
an evangelizing “world” religion.
A second mission-related topic intensely debated by sociologists for over a
century is secularization. One understanding of secularization takes it to be
that aspect of modernity that works against traditional forms of religion by
eroding their explanatory power and perceived relevance to many segments of
life (Weber famously called this process “the disenchantment of the world”).
Certainly by the late nineteenth century, numerous proponents of mission
were prepared to accept the assistance of secularizing forces as these were
becoming increasingly manifest in the non-Western world. Indeed, through a
vast network of schools established around the world, Christian missions were
self-consciously helping to extend the reach of what Presbyterian mission
executive Robert E. Speer (1904, 669) called “the tremendous subversive
power of our Western movement,” which at that time he saw directed
primarily against the non-Western religions. As it happened, Speer (1867–
1947) would later join with other leaders of the missionary movement
gathered in Jerusalem in 1928 to sound the alarm at the possible threat
secularization also posed to Western societies. For a growing number of
missionaries and their supporters, secularism had begun to mean the
dechristianization of the home base and the rise of relativist thinking.
Throughout the twentieth century, sociological research on the processes of
secularization remained vital to missiology, whether one had in mind the
position of the church and its message in the West or the role played by
modernizing forces worldwide.
Evidence of increasingly fast-paced cultural change now seems to be
everywhere. It is simply a fact that new forms of communication, faster
means of transportation, human migration on a larger scale than ever before,
and an expanding system of global capitalism are tying together more closely
communities of people that had once been quite separate from each other,
with the result that cultural isolation and cultural stability have both become
more difficult to assert conceptually or to maintain in practice. Modern-era
missions have been a part of this globalizing trend and so it is virtually certain
that social scientists in a variety of disciplines will continue to feature
missionaries in their studies of cultural change.
We can anticipate that a major portion of this burgeoning collection of
scholarship will continue to be focused on colonialism and the roles played by
Western missionaries in situations of imperial rule. In a few cases, it may be
that conversion to Christianity can best be explained as a result of coercion
(the influential argument of Beidelman [1982] with respect to an East African
mission station). Other researchers have proposed models of religious change
that give more recognition to the capacity of indigenous people to make their
own religious choices and to initiate innovation within their own culture (an
example is Whiteman 1983, esp. 1–28). Especially intriguing are social
scientific studies in which movements toward Christianity are documented
with respect to locations where foreign missionaries may have once been
active but are no longer permitted to operate (as in China after 1949 or with
the Uduk people in postcolonial Sudan after the departure of the Sudan
Interior Mission, considered in James 1988, esp. 207–52). There can be no
doubt that missiology as a whole has much to gain from the kind of social
scientific research cited here and from scholarly projects that succeed in
bringing together anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and missiologists
for the purpose of studying religious and cultural change (Peggy Brock's
edited volume, Indigenous Peoples and Religious Change [2005a], is a recent
example of this kind of collaboration).
GOSPEL AND CULTURE
This chapter began with the assertion that missiology is a field of research
where the concerns of theology regularly engage with issues of culture. In
large part, the nature of cross-cultural Christian witness explains the reason
for this creative intersection of scholarly interests. Having looked at a
selection of material generated from within systematic theology and the social
sciences with relevance for missiology, we may now turn to consider some
work that quite deliberately participates in both of these arenas at the same
time. Our discussion will begin with the particular theological basis on which
much of this missiological scholarship rests: the doctrine of the incarnation.
Christology and Mission Theology
We do not find many missionaries through the ages involving themselves in
technical arguments over christology. The “how” of the incarnation is not a
matter of primary concern, because the truth of the gospel for most
missionaries is not thought to hang on precise definitions. It is nevertheless
true that some examples can be produced from the history of Christianity in
which missionaries dedicated themselves to the propagation of distinctive
christological positions. The Nestorians in China quickly spring to mind in
this regard. Those evangelizing the Goths in the fourth and fifth centuries
likewise communicated their own peculiar (Arian) understanding of
christology alongside the gospel, a development deplored by the champions
of Nicene orthodoxy. A colorful story survives of christological competition
within the sixth-century imperial household of Justinian and Theodora. In this
case, the Byzantine emperor and his wife sponsored rival missionary
delegations to Nubia that either supported or rejected the results of the
Council of Chalcedon (451) with respect to the divine and human natures of
Christ.
What these examples prove (again) is that missionaries often reflect the
obsessive concerns of the churches that send them out to evangelize and
serve. Something more basic and less time-bound than this is indicated by the
doctrine of the incarnation. “The Word became flesh and lived among us”
(John 1:14; see also Gal. 4:4–5; Phil. 2:5–8; Col. 2:9; 1 Tim. 2:5; Heb. 2:14)
is a powerful declaration that not only establishes a scriptural premise for
speculation on the natures of Christ but also says something vital about the
manner in which God has chosen to effect salvation. Instead of remaining
separate from our reality, God decides to plunge into the midst of human
history. Without surrendering the right to act as judge, God commits utterly to
the role of advocate. While remaining mysterious, God seeks in a new way to
become fully known. Theologies of mission that take seriously the doctrine of
the incarnation are challenged to be world-affirming in the same way that God
has been. In turn, they demand a missionary commitment to the created order,
no matter how many signs of brokenness and alienation from God might be
discovered. The doctrine of the incarnation has also been taken as an
invitation to think deeply about human culture as the particular sphere within
which Christian outreach necessarily takes place.
From Incarnation to Contextualization
The New Testament writings of Paul show the apostle beginning to grapple
with the prospect of a multicultural church (for him, both Jewish and Greek).
The Acts of the Apostles and the Gospels likewise point ahead to a Christian
community that will not be confined within the ethnic and legal boundaries
largely maintained by first-century Judaism. The resurrected Jesus sends the
disciples with the gospel on their way to “the nations.” At Pentecost, a
representative gathering of all the world's peoples (Acts 2:5—“every nation
under heaven”) receives Peter's preached word that “everyone who calls on
the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Acts 2:21). Even at this very early stage
of Christian history, the logic of the gospel appears to be universal. No
cultural enclave may be said to stand outside of God's salvific intentions.
The further one moves away from the generation of the apostles, the greater
the percentage of Gentiles in the church. At some point, Jewish religious
culture lost its normative status within Christianity. Several of the second-
century Apologists perceptively grasped the critical theological challenge
implied in this demographic shift. How should the church evaluate the
cultural heritage of those many and increasingly numerous converts who had
not come to Christianity via Judaism? For Justin Martyr (c. 100–165), the
doctrine of the incarnation suggested a basis on which to embrace the best
parts of Hellenistic culture. Without endorsing idolatry or Greek polytheism,
he thought it possible to incorporate the Greek philosophical quest for truth
within a Christian understanding of salvation history. The key element in this
theological position was the Logos of John 1, which Justin understood to have
been active as the “seminal Word” sowing seeds of truth among humanity
even before the birth of Christ (2 Apol 13; see also 1 Apol 46 and 2 Apol 8,
10). The significance of Justin's breakthrough only partially lay in his startling
conclusion that certain of the philosophers and pre-Christian prophets had
been inspired by the Word. He was also preparing the way for the sources of
Christian revelation to be brought into a profound conversation with the very
idiom of Hellenistic learning, including its special vocabulary, classic texts,
enduring philosophical problems, and authoritative figures from the past.
Origen is the church father who most thoroughly exploited the cross-
cultural opportunity created for Christian theology by Justin and his fellow
Apologists. So concludes Andrew Walls (1999, 101), who credits Origen (c.
185–253) with the self-confidence needed to plunge into the deep
philosophical and literary depths of Hellenism. While Justin showed his
willingness to induct a select company of the ancients into the Christian
pantheon retroactively, as it were, Origen took on the additional risk of
exposing Christian knowledge based on the scriptures to the power of their
intellectual arguments. Based on his own experience, Gregory Thaumaturgus
(c. 213–70) described the spirit of inquiry cultivated in Origen's classroom
(Gregory 1998, 122):
So to us nothing was beyond words, nor was anything hidden and
inaccessible. We were permitted to learn every doctrine, both barbarian
and Greek, both the most mystical and the most pragmatic, both divine
and human; we pursued the ins and outs of all these more than
 sufficiently and examined them closely, taking our fill of everything and
enjoying the good things of the soul.
Just a few authors remained off-limits for these young scholars: anyone
who had “abandoned common human beliefs” by denying the existence of
God and Providence altogether (Gregory 1998, 116). Otherwise, Origen's
students were encouraged to examine everything in Greek culture with a
critical eye in the light of scripture, in order to discern what could be used
therein to glorify God. Just as Israel had refashioned the gold and precious
items plundered from Egypt (Exod. 11:2) into costly furniture and expensive
fabrics for the Holy of Holies, Origen (1998, 190–91) urged his charges to
apply the whole of Greek learning to the sacred task of theology. The ultimate
result of Origen's program was more than a simple repurposing of philosophy.
Christian theology itself was forever transformed by a dynamic encounter
with the heritage of Athens. Besides furnishing theology with new materials
with which to work and many useful tools for analysis, Walls (1997, 149)
observes that “the Greek world posed questions for Christian thought that did
not naturally arise in the Jewish world of its origins.” At the same time, Neo-
Platonism provided the Christian theologian with an entirely new standpoint
from which to consider what was already known from scripture about God's
revelation in Christ. Thus did the incarnation give rise to the risky but
potentially rewarding venture of contextualization.
The Study of Contextualization
For having been the first to put theology into cross-cultural perspective, Walls
(1999, 104) suggests that Origen be recognized as the “father of mission
studies.” The notion is apt, but many generations would have to pass before
the innovator could claim many scholarly descendents. We know, of course,
that the processes of contextualization, largely unexamined, continued to
work themselves out in countless locations, as missions brought the Christian
faith into contact with a growing number of languages and cultural matrices.
An intense encounter with Latin culture, influenced in decisive ways by
Germanic customs and values (Russell 1994), produced by the early Middle
Ages a powerful form of Christianity that would be spread around the world
as Roman Catholicism. The history of Bede and the letters of Boniface,
among many other sources, show medieval missionaries having to decide
whether to accommodate or reject (or attempt to modify) the traditional ways
of the peoples with whom they hoped to share the gospel. It is reasonable to
assume, even in the absence of extensive documentation, that missionaries in
countless other settings also found themselves confronting a host of
unanticipated cultural dilemmas with no obvious solutions. Again and again,
missionaries attempted to maintain control over the reception of Christianity
but achieved only partial success. In many settings, societal Christian norms
were worked out over long periods of time with local actors in the end having
far more influence over the results of contextualization than the foreign
missionaries themselves.
It is only in the modern era that the study of contextualization becomes
rigorous and scholarly. Ethnographers and historians led the way. Since a
number of these were already discussed in chapter 3 (history of mission), it is
not necessary to recount their contributions here. My focus instead will be on
the contextualization of theology and the scholarship that has helped the most
to explain this process and its significance.
As a technical term within mission theology, “contextualization” first
emerged within ecumenical Protestant circles in the early 1970s as an
alternative way to describe what had often been called inculturation (Ukpong
1987). The need for new terminology was prompted by the closing of the
modern colonial era. Earlier it had been assumed that mission usually
occurred as a movement of diffusion spreading out globally from recognized
centers. Missionaries took with them already-worked-out theologies, which
needed only to be adjusted slightly to fit novel circumstances. Whether one
talked about the necessity of indigenization or inculturation, the initiative was
thought to remain in the hands of foreign evangelists, who alone were
considered qualified to determine how orthodox beliefs and settled practices
ought to be expressed in new situations.
The terminology of contextualization indicated a shift of emphasis from the
center to what had been considered the periphery and from the missionary to
the local church. The task of theologizing now became more dialogical and
less a matter of one-way applications. The experience of indigenous
communities took on a much greater importance, first by suggesting which
problems were most in need of a theological response and then by supplying
the idioms and conceptual frameworks within which these conversations
would be conducted. The universal pretensions of Western theology were
about to be seriously tested.
Initial efforts to do contextual theology tended to reflect the immediate
postcolonial moment of world Christianity in the early 1970s. At this point,
contextualization stood for the development of non-Western, or third-world,
theology. The most pressing issues needing to be addressed first were thought
to be political and social, as the impoverished victims of foreign exploitation
claimed their independence and voice. It seemed to many that political
decolonization ought to have its ecclesiastical counterpart. In several churches
outside the West, calls were issued for a moratorium on missions. A global
turning point for theology arrived with the publication in English of the
groundbreaking work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (1973;
first published in Spanish in 1971). Complementary analyses were soon
underway in a host of locations and by 1976 an international professional
society had been organized in support of these efforts: the Ecumenical
Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). Missiologists were
paying very close attention to these developments in theology. A telltale
measure of their interest was provided by William A. Smalley, who surveyed
a large collection of dissertations in English on mission completed between
1982 and 1991. According to Smalley (1993, 98), about a third of the 512
theses he reviewed focused on liberation theology, indigenous theologies, or
issues of contextualization, compared to less than 3 percent of missiological
dissertations devoted to these same topics between 1945 and 1981.
With every passing year, new participants and more contexts are added to
the accumulated record of contextual theology. One way to regard this
growing corpus of work is to recognize and applaud its rich diversity, well
represented in reference tools like the Dictionary of Third World Theologies,
edited by Virginia Fabella and R. S. Sugirtharajah (2000). Other scholars have
been asking questions about the possible relationships that might exist among
these disparate theological responses to specific sociohistorical
circumstances. Can one do no more than simply put these different analyses
side-by-side in ever-larger collections of theological creativity?
In the next stage of work on contextual theology, the contributions of
Robert Schreiter have had a large impact both within and beyond missiology.
In Schreiter's analysis, the political edge of contextual theology is
acknowledged, but an effort is made to understand better the social processes
that shape this kind of theology. Contextual theology, according to Schreiter
(1985), is a matter of devising “local” theology, which is often a product of
community-wide reflection. The manner of its construction can be “mapped,”
with the assistance of the social sciences (especially semiotics, as discussed
above). One may also venture to evaluate specific expressions of contextual
theology, with respect to their authenticity or genuineness. Schreiter suggests
that this judgment will depend on a given theology's dual relationship to its
concrete situation and to a larger Christian tradition that transcends the
particularities of geography and history (in a subsequent study of
“catholicity” [1997a], Schreiter explores further the universal aspect of
Christian identity). Schreiter points out that theology draws on and responds
to more than one level of religious experience (both popular and more formal
or official). The tangled array of questions Schreiter raises about contextual
theology exposes the complexities that surround this apparently simple term,
while also exploring the variety of functions that theology can play in the life
of a church and its larger community.
 A second major contribution from Schreiter has been felt in his suggestion
that there are types of contextual theology, which can be separated
methodologically from each other. His initial list of three categories is refined
and expanded in the work of Stephen B. Bevans (2002). Bevans identifies and
describes six different “models” of contextual theology: translation,
anthropological, praxis, synthetic, transcendental, and countercultural. A
distinguishing mark of Bevans's approach is the emphasis given to social
change as a constant factor at work in every cultural context (complementing
the notion of more fixed cultural identities that endure over time). Bevans also
attempts to clarify the relationship of contextual theology to scripture and
tradition, concluding: “contextual theology is done when the experience of the
past engages the present context” (2002, xvii). In the end, Bevans (2002, 139–
40) refuses to rank his six models, insisting that Christians in different
situations may find one or another or a combination of these approaches most
suitable to their needs, depending on the context. Bevans and co-author Roger
P. Schroeder have also conducted a contextual analysis of mission theology
since the beginning of Christianity in their book Constants in Context (2004).
The growing realization that every performance of theology is, in some
sense, contextual was bound to lead to a reevaluation of Western theology,
too. Within missiology, the latest phase of this discussion has largely been
conducted around the topic of “missional” theology. While this brand of
adjectival theology was coined only recently, the presenting problems that lie
behind it may be traced back many decades. In the 1930s, for example,
Hendrik Kraemer wrote vividly about a crisis that had suddenly come upon
Western theology. Modernization, he warned, not only threatened traditional
societies in faraway places and their ancient religious traditions. In the form
of strident secularism, relativist thinking, and the totalitarian ideologies then
taking root in twentieth-century Europe, modernity also posed severe
challenges for the church in the West. The ultimate source of the problem,
according to Kraemer (1938, 9), lay in the basic conviction, increasingly
embraced in the West, that humanity is “the standard and creator of all truths
and norms and values.” In this historical context, how does one proclaim the
Christian message in what has to be recognized as a truly non-Christian
world, even in the West?
Writing some forty years later, after a full missionary career in India and
with the benefit of having seen the emergence of many contextual theologies
around the world, Lesslie Newbigin reassessed the situation of Western
Christianity. What Kraemer had earlier perceived as incipient
disestablishment was fast becoming a reality in Europe. The church in the
West could no longer operate on the basis of Christendom assumptions. While
some church leaders may have found this to be an occasion for mourning,
Newbigin applied himself to the missiological task of cross-cultural analysis
and theological response. His ideas were widely shared in Foolishness to the
Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture (1986). The increasingly pluralist
character of Western societies, not yet evident to Kraemer, was further
explored in a hugely influential study, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
(1989). The point for Newbigin was not just to understand Western society
better. His aim was to help the church in the West to prepare for “a genuinely
missionary encounter between the gospel and the culture that is shared by the
peoples of Europe and North America, their colonial and cultural offshoots,
and the growing company of educated leaders in the cities of the world—the
culture which those of us who share it usually describe as ‘modern’” (1986,
1). In another place, Newbigin succinctly rephrased his essential question in
these terms: “Can the West be Converted?” (1987).
Because of Newbigin's advanced age and the size of the task he had
described, it was left to others to elaborate and attempt to carry out the
program he had begun to outline. The Gospel and Our Culture Network
(GOCN), based in North America with affiliates in several other English-
speaking countries around the world, has supplied an organizational
framework for many of these efforts. This is the point at which the language
of “missional” theology makes its appearance (Guder et al. 1998). Besides
supplying a distinctive vocabulary for this approach to mission, the network
also seeks to foster experiments in evangelization conceived in the light of
postmodern Western circumstances (Barrett 2004). For some followers of this
trend in theology, Newbigin's ideas about the gospel as public truth (1991) are
taken to be the heart of the matter. The GOCN website provides a handy
portal through which much of the latest research conducted in support of
missional approaches to Christian outreach can be accessed.
Contextual theology does not have to be written. For some missionaries
and indigenous Christians, a driving aim has been to contextualize the
Christian faith in visual or material terms supplied primarily by local cultures.
Naturally, missiologists have been keen to study these efforts, too, which are
nonverbal forms of theological discourse. The Jesuits in the sixteenth century
were perhaps the first to think systematically about inculturation as both a
theological and a social process. Influenced by the Jesuits, the Propaganda
Fide issued in 1659 a directive for new vicars apostolic appointed to the Far
East, instructing them to ensure that Catholic missionaries under their
supervision take care to communicate a basic Christian message to potential
converts, while leaving aside the nonessential aspects of their own cultural
background (quoted in Ross 1994, 185):
Do not attempt in any way to persuade these people to change their
 customs, their habits and their behavior, as long as they are not evidently
contrary to religion and morality. What could be more absurd, indeed,
than to transport France, Italy or some other European country to the
Chinese? Do not bring them our countries but the faith, which does not
reject or harm the customs and habits of any people, so long as they are
not perverse; but, on the contrary, wishes to see them preserved in their
entirety.
Experience gained under the direction of the pope's influential Visitor to the
East, Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), had prepared the way for this
extraordinary “Instruction.” As the ranking Jesuit missionary in the Far East,
Valignano carefully reviewed what had been accomplished up to his time and
then worked out a set of principles that not only allowed but encouraged
Jesuit missionaries to conduct a variety of inculturation exercises around the
world. Roberto de Nobili's adoption of several distinctive Hindu customs
pertaining to dress and conduct is one well-known example (Nobili 2000, 53–
231). Some missionaries working in colonial Mexico produced art and
liturgical resources that drew heavily on the visual imagination of pre-
Christian Mesoamerican societies (Lara 2008). Valignano himself directed the
Jesuits in Japan to consider carefully the styles of their buildings and to
conform to Japanese architectural expectations whenever possible (these
instructions are discussed in Schütte 1985, 187–89). He advised, for example,
that missionary residences in Japan should include a reception space in which
the tea ceremony could be properly conducted, in deference to the Buddhist
sensibilities of elite Japanese society. To be sure, most mission architecture in
this period and later was unmistakably foreign by design, with just a few local
flourishes added here and there, but Valignano's ideas had opened up other
possibilities for incarnated Christian witness in stone and decoration. In the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Catholic missionaries tended to be less
adventurous contextualizers than the early Jesuits. In the century just past,
however, the spirit of Valignano was substantially reclaimed.
Protestants, on the whole, were slow to recognize indigenous arts and
architectural forms as suitable media for Christian witness. Wary of
syncretism and the threat of idolatry (the besetting sins of Catholics, in their
view), most Protestant missionaries through the nineteenth century preferred
to put their faith in the power of the Word (and words) to communicate a
compelling message of salvation. While a few organizations advocated the
adoption of native dress by their missionaries (the most famous example
being the China Inland Mission), none saw a pressing need before the
twentieth century to translate whole visual programs into local idioms. But a
change in attitude did finally come. An important figure in this shift was
Union Theological Seminary (New York) professor of mission Daniel
Johnson Fleming (1877–1969), who began in the late 1930s to publish a
series of books on non-European Christian art. Each with His Own Brush:
Contemporary Christian Art in Asia and Africa (Fleming 1938; reprinted
many times) was a particularly influential volume in this series. Arno
Lehmann followed with two substantial studies of Christian art (1957, 1969),
which brought the work of many new artists in Asia and Africa especially to
the attention of Western audiences. The incarnation, Lehmann suggested
(1969, 49), is the “ultimate and real reason” why the church ought to
encourage the production of indigenous art everywhere: “the condescension
of God permits us to preach in pictures (Gal. 3:1).”
In the studies of Fleming and Lehmann we can see the first steps being
taken in the development of what would become world Christian art. Initially,
missionary patronage provided crucial support for relatively unknown native
artists. Missionaries also helped to create some important institutional
structures that nurtured indigenous painters, sculptors, graphic artists, and
others, such as the School of Art at Makerere University in Uganda
(established in 1937). Organizations completely outside the control of
missionaries and their sending bodies now take the lead in promoting non-
Western Christian art (for example, the Asian Christian Art Association,
founded in 1978), while participating fully in a global exchange of artistic
ideas and initiatives.
Intercultural Theology
Since the 1970s, intercultural theology has become an increasingly attractive
way for some West European scholars to describe the task of missiology. In a
positive sense, this new term expresses a desire for theology to engage the
whole of what is now a global Christian community. Thus, intercultural
theologians are expected to recognize and facilitate dialogue among the
different contextual theologies being generated from within a thoroughly
multicultural, worldwide church. At the same time, the “inter-” in
intercultural theology indicates a need for this diverse body to be in
conversation with all of its neighbors, including those who identify
themselves in terms of other faith commitments or no religious faith at all.
Both of these objectives are highlighted in a recent position paper prepared
for discussion by a group of German academics and the Administrative Board
of the German Association for Mission Studies (Mission Studies 2008).
More negatively, intercultural theology represents a defensive response to
the ambivalence many Western Christians feel about some past practices and
theologies of mission. Werner Ustorf (2008, 229), in fact, has characterized
intercultural theology as “an act of theological repentance in the North,” made
necessary by the hegemonic impulses widely thought to be embedded deep
within the modern missionary movement. In this sense, intercultural theology
is a mode of missiology especially well suited to destabilize vested
theological positions on mission, especially when these appear to be
triumphal or overly confident with respect to the truth claims of classical
theology. A genuine dialogue of equals, after all, demands that one set aside
any presumption of hermeneutical privilege, in exchange for the prospect of
mutual understanding.
Intercultural theology also has its practical aspect. In the state-funded
university systems that dominate higher education in most European
countries, missiologists have to compete with scholars in many other fields
for scarce faculty positions and program support. To the extent that the field
of mission studies is perceived to be a sectarian enterprise, its case for state
patronage may be weakened. As the position paper cited above puts it, albeit
obliquely: “In both contemporary public and theological discourse, the term
‘mission' often leads to confusion and stereotyping, which is why the
traditional subject title ‘Mission Studies' is frequently the cause of
misunderstandings” (Mission Studies 2008, 103). In this context, intercultural
theology seems to offer an approach to the study of mission that could
cooperate with and complement secular research on religious subjects, while
maintaining its standing within the curricula of European theological
faculties.
Volker Küster (2005, 429) sees the “project of an intercultural theology” in
competition with such disciplines as theology of religions, global ethics, and
comparative theology. In another place, he depicts intercultural theology as a
stage of development issuing out of the “plural discipline” of religious
studies, missiology, and ecumenics and calls for it to be established as a
discipline in its own right within systematic theology (Küster 2009). Some
recognition is given to the study of culture in this configuration of missiology,
but the particularities of contextualization as a missionary problem tend to be
overshadowed by more theoretical concerns. In 1975, three pioneers in the
study of intercultural theology—Hans Jochen Margull, Walter Hollenweger
and Richard Friedli—launched a new book series: Studies in the Intercultural
History of Christianity. Over the years, this still-active set of publications has
been a major venue (150+ volumes as of 2010) through which much
dissertation research and many other high-quality studies have reached
missiology.
THEOLOGY, MISSION, CULTURE
Writing about fifteen years ago, Lamin Sanneh perceived that Western
theology was just about the last discipline in the modern university to show
serious interest in missionary experience. While numerous scholars in the
humanities and even a few scientists kept coming back to the missionary
archives in support of their research, he observed, his Yale Divinity School
colleagues tended to keep their distance (Sanneh 1995). The theologians were
quite happy, it appeared, to celebrate the wonderful diversity of a truly global
church, but they were doing so, in Sanneh's view, without showing proper
respect for the historical processes that had brought world Christianity into
being.
Perhaps Sanneh was too pessimistic. One finding of this chapter is that
theological reflection and the study of mission have been subtly connected to
each other for some time and that a mutually beneficial relationship exists
between them. Without a doubt, missiologists are paying attention to the work
of the systematic theologians, especially when they write about the topics
highlighted here (salvation, conversion, ecclesiology, incarnation, etc.). In
turn, missiology poses to theology an implicit cross-cultural challenge that is
getting harder and harder to ignore. If consideration of the “other” is indeed a
valuable bridge that potentially links the theological and nontheological
disciplines of the modern university (Schultze 2004, 326), then missiologists
have important contributions to make to these discussions, whether out of
personal experience as cultural aliens or as students of religious and cultural
difference. One also stands to gain when the hermeneutical questions of
theology are examined in the light of what missionaries and missiologists
have learned over the course of centuries about cross-cultural communication
and the processes of contextualization. In the work of Robert Schreiter
already cited, we can see theology and missiology fully engaged with each
other. Some other major theologians whose recent writings have shown more
than a passing awareness of missiological research are Timothy J. Gorringe
(2004), Max Stackhouse (1988, 2005; Pachuau and Stackhouse 2007), and
Kevin Vanhoozer (Kirk and Vanhoozer 1999).
Missiology and the social sciences share a long history of interaction, even
if relationships between missionaries and some social scientists have not
always been cordial. The fact that a leading journal in the field (Missiology)
was for a time called Practical Anthropology says something important about
the serious regard many missiologists have given to the study of culture. As
noted already, students of mission have made substantial contributions to
ethnography. Their work among the world's vernaculars, sometimes grounded
in decades of firsthand contact with the people of another culture, continues to
inform linguistics research. Other forms of communication routinely fall
within the overlapping provinces of missiology and the social sciences, as do
the many ways humans organize their social activities in the religious and
secular spheres. Not fully appreciated, perhaps, is the way in which sustained
research on culture has served to keep missiology closely connected to
everyday life, which lessens the risk that its theological concerns will be
treated only in the abstract.
 5
Christian Mission in a World of Religions
Matters of religion and culture often rise into view bound up together. Where
else but in culture can religious conviction find the means needed for its
expression? Ritual behaviors, religious institutions, and sacred texts all find
their wherewithal in the bailiwick of culture. Even the most abstract notions
of belief require language of some sort if they are to transcend the natural
limits of personal experience. At the same time, religion has repeatedly
demonstrated its sure capacity to embody and transmit cultural values. Ethnic
or linguistic groups, for example, may use religious terminology to reinforce
the cultural distance they perceive between themselves and others. When
widely dispersed and mixed in with social rivals, these same communities
may appeal to the categories of religion in order to maintain a common
identity and sense of solidarity. Too sharp a division between religion and
culture can be artificial and potentially misleading, whether in missiology or
in any other discipline that concerns itself with the study of social
phenomena.
Without denying a close relationship between religion and culture, some
good reasons may nevertheless be submitted in support of the separate but
still connected treatments of each to be rendered in this chapter and the one
preceding it. For starters, we should acknowledge that cultural pluralism is
not the same thing as religious pluralism. While the former raises questions in
particular about the nature of the church and the degree to which Christianity
can be made at home in any cultural environment, the latter asks about the
universality of the Christian message with respect to other assertions of truth.
Many missiologists concern themselves with both of these challenges, but
typically they do not study them in just the same way. A deep understanding
of contextualization will not solve the puzzles of religious pluralism. For that
task, one needs expertise in matters having to do with revelation.
Coincidently, mission scholars with at least one eye trained on the religions
have to consider the problem of proselytization alongside the danger of
syncretism. We find, also, that missiologists tend to seek help from a different
set of scholarly collaborators outside the field when their emphasis moves
from culture to religion. In this case, historical studies of interreligious
encounter become increasingly valuable. So does the work of those who
specialize in the history of religion. As the profile of history grows within this
part of missiology, the influence of the social sciences tends to decrease
proportionally.
 Mission in the midst of interreligious encounter is the theme of this chapter.
An opening section considers how first-century Christians conceptualized
other forms of religious devotion (apart from Jewish faith and piety), while
exploring the possible influence of these understandings on mission practice.
A lengthy review of postapostolic missionary thinking about non-Christian
religion then follows in several subsections. It is at the end of this survey that
we will find the theology of mission contending with postmodern theories of
religious pluralism. In a separate section some additional attention will be
given to a few of the special problems attached to the study of Christian
mission undertaken among Jews, Muslims, and the followers of African
traditional religions. The chapter will conclude by taking up the question of
mission in other religious traditions, a comparative subject that is just
beginning to secure its place on the research agenda of academic missiology.
OTHER FAITH AND THE APOSTOLIC CHURCH
Within the context of the Roman Empire, an expanding community of early
Christians constructed a novel religious identity for themselves that variously
puzzled, threatened, and attracted others. The character of their common self-
understanding rested partly on the universal scope of Christian faith claims.
According to what the New Testament portrays as standard Christian
preaching in the first century, the Jesus event (his birth, life, death, and
resurrection) represented the decisive turning point in human history. Not
only had the coming of Jesus fulfilled Jewish expectations for a Messiah, but
the consummation of God's rule at the end of time, which would involve the
entire creation, was also thought to depend on him. In such terms the early
church put its case for the indispensability (or finality) of Christ and his
uniqueness.
The universal significance of Jesus was also reflected in the nature of the
church that gathered in his name. Missionary appeals were directed both to
Jews and to many different kinds of Gentiles and so led to a high level of
ethnic diversity within the body of Christ. New members came from a variety
of social and economic backgrounds, which immediately differentiated an
emerging church from many other Roman-era religious associations that
sought only to draw small slices of elite society together for civic and cultic
purposes (Rives 2007, esp. 105-31). Over decades and then centuries, the
church developed into an increasingly well integrated group of institutions,
with an extensive geographical reach that stood in sharp contrast to what were
mostly local forms of pagan religious practice. Far-flung outposts of
Christianity built relationships with each other, and sometimes their leaders
met together in regional councils in order to strengthen ecumenical bonds and
to regulate doctrine. Thus, while the origins of Christianity may be traced
back to a specific time and place, the tradition quickly turned into more than a
Galilean religious movement or a Jewish offshoot that needed the physical
backdrop of Palestine or a central cultic location in order to make sense.
But a narrow staircase led up to the early church's wide-open front door.
Which is to say that the church's missionary call, while broadly inclusive,
came with a stiff set of demands for those inclined to enroll themselves into
the company of faith. This was the other defining aspect of Christian identity
at the outset of the movement: its exclusive dimension. If God is one (as the
Jews and Christians believed), then the polytheistic logic of the Greek
pantheon must be rejected. If Jesus is Lord, then sacrifices to other deities
represent a form of idolatry. If Christians are indeed called to be saints, then
they ought to strive for purity and trustworthiness, while avoiding debauchery
and the pursuit of power for its own sake.
Christianity did not ultimately adopt all the practices that made Judaism
seem strange to Roman eyes (especially circumcision), but it did strike many
as counter-cultural and off-beat and so something a right-thinking majority
ought to avoid. According to the historian Tacitus, Christians could be blamed
for setting fire to Rome in the days of Nero because they were generally
thought contemptible for their “hatred of the human race” (Annals 15.44).
Pliny the Younger, a contemporary of Tacitus and the Roman governor of
Bithynia-Pontus between 111 and 113 C.E., reported to Emperor Trajan that
he saw in Christianity an insidious threat to Roman order, which he thought
could be safeguarded by making those accused to be Christians call upon the
traditional gods using a formula supplied by the governor, offering incense
and wine before an image of the emperor, and cursing the name of Christ (Ep
10.96). Not quite Jewish but certainly not pagan, Christians came to be
regarded as a “third race” that stood apart from an established framework of
accepted religious traditions within the Roman Empire (Harnack 1904, 336-
52).
What I have tried to offer in the last few paragraphs is a very brief
description of the intellectual setting in which the early Christians formulated
their initial ideas about other kinds of religious devotion. This way of
proceeding accords with the experience of early Christianity, which
commenced with urgent appeals and fervent proclamation, after which came
more measured reflection on what had been learned about the religious others
met along the way. The observation of Martin Kähler (1835-1912)—that
mission is the “mother of theology” (cited in Bosch 1991, 16)—is especially
apt with respect to the apostolic church and its different responses to other
kinds of piety. At this stage in the development of theology, when the memory
of personal encounter with Jesus was still fresh and the Spirit's power visibly
palpable, evangelists did not wait for systematicians to work out a program
for them to follow. Instead, believers plunged ahead with a saving message
for the world and only afterward thought systematically about the alternative
belief structures lying behind the various reactions coming back to them. First
mission praxis, then theology; this is how the first generations of Christians
seem to have worked out their basic approach to the theology of religion.
Of course, the early church already had at hand a familiar set of categories
that could have been utilized to assess religious phenomena. By the first
century, it had become normative within the Greco-Roman world to evaluate
religious practices in terms of civic interests and popular approval. A
remarkably broad grouping of cults and traditions fell within the expansive
limits of what Roman and provincial opinion was willing to consider
acceptable forms of religion (in other words, religio licita). An intention to
secure the well-being of a city or region by honoring its divinities is the
common element that recurs among these different expressions of piety. In
addition, the elastic quality of Greek paganism disposed many communities to
recognize previously unknown local cults, when these were transplanted to
other areas of the empire (including Rome itself). Unacceptable religious
customs were most likely to be labeled superstitio, a designation that stood
generally for bizarre or hopelessly unsophisticated religious behavior meant
to manipulate the actions and attitudes of the gods. In a treatise entitled On
Superstitions (a lost work excerpted in Augustine, Civ 6.10), for example, the
philosopher Seneca shows particular disgust for acts of self-mutilation he
associated with certain religious rites. Then there were those who raised
questions about the integrity of believing in the traditional gods of Rome
altogether. Such were liable to be called “atheists,” especially if their
unconventional thinking was perceived to be harmful to society (disrespecting
the divine patrons of a city might lead to community disaster). Up to the
fourth century, Christians who refused to participate in particular pagan rites
could be condemned to death in times of persecution for their perverse
“atheism” (Fox 1987, 425-28).
For the apostolic church, the acceptability of any religious practice could
not possibly depend on its secular legal standing or aesthetic appeal. As with
the Jews and their insistence on the oneness of God and the inadmissibility of
divine images, matters of ultimate truth were thought to be at stake. God's
revelation in Christ, set within a broader narrative of Jewish salvation history,
and the reign of God announced by Jesus became for early Christians the
primary interpretive framework through which to evaluate religious attitudes
and behavior. Upon close inspection, we find something more subtle than a
simple true-false standard being applied to non-Christian religiosity. Even
within the New Testament, diverse motivations behind and purposes for
religious behavior are recognized. This is the beginning point of Christian
reflection in the context of mission on the nature of religion.
Cast into an extremely negative light are those characters in Acts, for
example, who appear to be participating in religious culture for selfish
reasons. Elymas (or Bar-Jesus) “the magician” (Acts 13:6-12), dismissed by
Luke as a “Jewish false prophet,” is one such figure. No particular act of
wonder-working is attributed to Elymas, but he seems to have been acting as a
religious advisor (possibly an astrologer) to Sergius Paulus, a Roman official
on Cyprus. In this story of successful evangelization, Elymas is temporarily
blinded after failing to keep the proconsul from hearing and believing the
message of the gospel. In part, Paul's action appears to be a judgment against
Elymas as a religious role-player. The sorcerer is condemned as a shyster
(“full of all deceit and villainy”) and opponent of righteousness, who serves
Satan and thereby impedes the progress of the Word (“will you not stop
making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?”). Cursed by Paul, the once-
powerful (false) prophet finds himself groping pathetically in the darkness for
someone to guide him by the hand.
A similar impression is created with respect to the seven sons of an
otherwise unknown Jewish “high priest” named Sceva (Acts 19:11-20), who
had formed themselves into a group of itinerant exorcists. Having learned
about the miracles of Paul, they are said to have emulated his technique by
invoking the name of Jesus in their healing ministry. In this case, an evil spirit
and a possessed man become the instruments of their dramatic unmasking.
The spirit challenges their right to tap into the source of Paul's power (“Jesus I
know, and Paul I know; but who are you?”) and then the man drives them out
of the house “naked and wounded.” That this is a story about the wrong use of
religion is made clear at its conclusion, when it is reported that a number of
new believers in Ephesus, who had previously engaged in magic, “disclosed
their practices” and then publicly burned a valuable collection of secret
books.
Explicit reference is made to a profit motive in the story of the fortune-
telling slave girl Paul heals at Philippi (Acts 16:16-21). When the “spirit of
divination” or “python spirit” empowering her gift is confronted and flees, her
owners faced a fiscal crisis. Having lost their livelihood (“their hope of
making money was gone”), they lodged a complaint with the authorities
alleging that Paul and Silas as Jews threatened the public order of their
Roman city. An awareness of religion as business is thus made evident in this
story, as it is later in Acts (19:23-41) when the silversmiths of Ephesus are
shown instigating opposition to Paul after his activities there appear to
threaten the viability of a thriving cult center dedicated to “Artemis of the
Ephesians.” Given the very small scale of Christianity in the first century, the
fears of the craftsmen, who depended on a steady flow of pilgrimage traffic to
the renowned shrine, would seem to have been exaggerated. Yet not long after
Luke's time, we hear Pliny the Younger telling Trajan about how his decision
to intimidate Christian believers had already begun to improve the financial
metrics of the religious marketplace operating within his governorate: “There
is no doubt that people have begun to throng to the temples which had been
almost entirely deserted for a long time; the sacred rites which had been
allowed to lapse are being performed again, and flesh of sacrificial victims is
on sale everywhere, though up till recently scarcely anyone could be found to
buy it” (Ep 10.96). In the eyes of his enemies, it would appear, the actions of
Jesus in the outer precincts of the Temple (Mark 11:15-18) posed a similar
challenge to the economic infrastructure of the Jewish cult in Jerusalem.
What had set the Ephesian silversmiths and their tradesmen allies on edge,
according to Luke, was the suggestion of Paul that “gods made with hands are
not gods” (Acts 19:26). This is a theological assertion, which is not focused
primarily on the alleged self-interest of the parties involved but is more
concerned with what their religious customs may be implying about the
nature of God. The charge of idolatry, it seems to me, represents a second
framing device used by the early Christians to interpret much of the religious
behavior taking place around them. Very little needs to be said about this
understanding of paganism. It is a familiar line of attack in the Old Testament
that the Jews had been using for centuries to delegitimize the nature religions
of the ancient Near East. In Acts, an argument against idolatry is employed
with some frequency and not only to undermine the foundations of Greek
pagan worship (as at 17:24-25, 29 and 14:15, in addition to 19:26). In the long
speech of Stephen before his execution, the decision of Solomon himself to
build the original Temple is called into question on the grounds that “the Most
High does not dwell in houses made with human hands” (Acts 7:48, with a
supporting quotation from Isa. 66:1-2).
A third critical assessment of piety to be found in the New Testament
addresses the problem of co-religionists who self-identify as followers of
Jesus but are judged to have deviated in some important way from the
theological or ethical norms of the community. Luke offers up an archetype
for this behavior pattern in the figure of Simon Magus (Acts 8:9-24). The
whole of Samaria, it is said, acclaimed him as an exceptional magician (“this
man is the power of God that is called Great”). Nevertheless, in response to
the preaching of Philip, Simon believes and submits to water baptism.
Subsequently, a baptism in the Spirit is administered through the agency of
Peter and John, sent down to Samaria from Jerusalem. This is the occasion of
Simon's grave misjudgment: he offers to buy access to the source of the
apostles' power, perhaps in a bid to regain his former status as a sorcerer.
Stiffly rebuffed, Simon then appears to see the error of his ways and asks
Peter for prayers on his behalf.
Later Christian writers routinely treat the Simon Magus story as a
cautionary tale that warns against the practice of selling church offices (hence
simony). Some speculate on a possible connection here to second-century
Gnosticism. My interest in Simon as an example attaches rather to the
possibility portrayed in this narrative that members of the community might
find themselves ostracized, despite the fact that their practice of faith in most
respects appears to be the equivalent of what others are doing. Simon's
essential problem, in the words of Peter, is one of intention not form: “your
heart is not right before God” (8:21). Thus, even though he professes to be
seeking a worthy end (“give me also this power, so that any one on whom I
lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit”) and otherwise conforms to
established norms (he seems to acknowledge apostolic authority, for example,
and respects the importance of the baptismal rite), Simon has put himself into
mortal danger by threatening to corrupt what is holy and good by turning it
into a commodity that can be bought and sold. In the memory of the church,
Simon is universally regarded as a heretic. The Acts story ends ambiguously,
however. Whether or not Simon will be reintegrated into the community is
left open.
Luke does offer at least one positive view of pagan religion in Acts. Paul's
visit to Athens (17:16-34) and an encounter at Lystra (14:8-18) provide
occasions for the apostle to show a measure of respect for a religious tradition
other than Judaism and Christianity. To be sure, Paul is shown firmly rejecting
the forms of pagan worship he observes in both locations. At Lystra, the
crowd's intention to honor Paul and Barnabas as gods come to earth provokes
the apostles to rend their garments in dismay and to characterize the sacrifices
about to be made on their behalf as homage to “worthless things” (14:15). In
Athens, the narrator tells the reader of Paul's distress (even anger) at all the
idols he sees in the city (17:16). But these negative evaluations are not the
whole story. Beside them Luke provides an alternative, more charitable
explanation for some of the pagan religious behavior taking place in the
presence of the apostles. He suggests through Paul that the artifacts and
practices of Greek paganism he is describing might indicate something
positive about a deep human instinct to know God. In this spirit, Paul
carefully commends the Athenians for their public expressions of piety: “I see
how extremely religious you are in every way” (17:22). He also shows a
willingness to understand the inquisitiveness of the philosophers as a kind of
earnest reaching for knowledge about God (17:27). His conviction that the
seasons and bounty of the earth give continuous witness to an ultimate source
of providence (14:17) stands as another reason for Paul in Acts to hope that
an impulse to understand the world as it is could prepare one to appreciate its
creator.
We are not left on our own to guess at the possible implications for mission
practice wrapped up in these different conceptualizations of Greek
religiousness. Since each of the stories recounted briefly above is already set
in a missionary context, some kind of evangelistic response to the situation
encountered naturally follows and often serves to conclude the various
narratives. No two stories in Acts portray this dynamic in exactly the same
way, but some patterns may be detected. In cases of egregious self-interest
(especially when fraud or deception is suspected), the apostles may be
expected to act forcefully, sometimes issuing a powerful word of rebuke that
has the capacity to effect severe punishment. When the issue is idolatry,
forthright proclamation is likely to follow, but these speeches tend to be
delivered as entreaties, with an educative function. Somewhat unexpectedly,
given his notorious reputation, even Simon Magus is given an opportunity to
repent of his wickedness (8:22). At Lystra and Athens, Paul embodies an
approach toward other faiths that is remarkably generous, courteous, and
culturally sensitive, but he does not hesitate at the same time to assert that
pagan religious culture as a whole is founded on a misunderstanding of divine
reality.
MISSION AND THE RELIGIONS
Premodern Attitudes and Practices
Constantine's decision to legitimate Christianity immediately put the church
and its mission on a new footing. Imperial patronage not only validated but
also lent prestige to what had been a socially marginal religious group within
the empire. This change in the circumstances of Christianity had implications
for paganism, too. Except for a brief period of official reinstatement during
the rule of Julian (361-63), the standing of paganism steadily eroded over the
course of the fourth century. At first this meant simply a diminishing of
government concern for the advancement of pagan interests. By the time of
Theodosius (379-95), the apparatus of empire had been put at the disposal of
an anti-pagan agenda that included legislation authorizing the destruction of
temples and the suppression of certain public rites (MacMullen 1997, 1-73).
Pagan religiosity by no means disappeared in this era, persisting especially in
rituals and traditions closely connected to family life and the rhythms of
agriculture, but the official status of paganism had been substantially
degraded.
As the political situation of the church improved within the Roman Empire,
new patterns of pagan-Christian relations also emerged. Socially empowered
Christians less and less felt the need to engage paganism intellectually. Thus,
second-century apologists like Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria
lacked counterparts of a similar stature in the post-Theodosian church. In that
earlier era, at least some Christians had been keen to win the respect of
regional neighbors by stressing their commonalities. In the Epistle to
Diognetus (second-third centuries), for example, an assertion is made that
Christians have no peculiar culture of their own (Diog 5). In dress, diet,
language, and ordinary conduct, they are more likely than not, it is said, to
follow local customs. When Justin and Clement of Alexandria decide to
present the claims of the gospel in terms borrowed from Greek philosophy,
they imply a common quest for truth that extends beyond the limits of the
church in time. Justin goes so far as to suggest that Socrates and Heraclitus,
among other pre-Christian wisdom seekers, had lived under the inspiration of
the divine Word (1 Apol 46; 2 Apol 8). Bediako (1992, 436) contends that
Justin and Clement were approaching their Greek heritage as an alternative
“tradition of response” to the reality of the transcendent, a bold interpretive
move that allowed them to separate high-minded philosophical activity from
the unacceptable excesses of popular religion. Dupuis (1997, 53-83) considers
the universal history of the Logos outlined in the early church fathers to be a
proper foundation on which to construct a Christian theology of religious
pluralism.
One of the last of the great Christian thinkers in antiquity to take paganism
seriously is Augustine. In his world, Catholicism was but one of several
religious traditions in lively competition with each other. Even if the church's
situation within the empire had taken a decisive turn for the better during the
lifetime of Augustine (354-430), its earthly future was hardly secure. Strong
advocates of paganism and other ways of faith were still active in all the
places Augustine would find himself in the late fourth century (including
Carthage, Rome, and Milan) and among these opponents were men of great
reputation and power (such as the prefect Symmachus, who had appealed
unsuccessfully to the emperor in 384 for the restoration of pagan symbols and
rites within the Roman Senate).
In Augustine's writings, we see an eloquent spokesman for Catholic
Christianity engaging a variety of people inside and outside the church with
respect to doctrinal issues and matters of religious practice. Famous
exchanges with adversaries like Faustus are conducted more or less out in the
open, as public skirmishes. His letters and sermons (all of which could stand
to be examined more carefully from a missiological perspective) show
Augustine confronting alternative points of view in the context of his pastoral
responsibilities. A full-length argument against the false gods of paganism is
mounted in what many consider to be his greatest work, the City of God. In
that book, Augustine repeats and elaborates on the many warnings in scripture
against idolatry. At the same time, he does his utmost to demonstrate the
powerlessness of Rome's traditional deities, using the same non-Christian
texts to which his opponents could be expected to appeal. Intriguingly,
Augustine adds another original layer of analysis that considers the social
functions of religion in public life. He is led in this direction by an earlier
work of the historian Varro (116-27 B.C.E.), who had discussed religion in
terms of its divine and human aspects. Augustine does not accept Varro's
argument that “civil theology” or “natural theology” could be disentangled
from the “fabulous” or “mythical” theology of the theater (Civ 6.5-8), but he
does seem to respond to the suggestion that religion involves more than
humans showing devotion to one or more deities. In a key passage, Augustine
reviews the vocabulary of religion, including the terms commonly used for
worship (latreia, servitus), cult (cultus), and piety (eusebeia). He concludes: it
is wrong to confine the idea of “religion” to the worship of God, since this
concept normally refers to “an attitude of respect in relations between a man
and his neighbor” (Civ 10.1). Augustine suggests further that true “piety” is
realized through “acts of compassion,” which God not only commands but
also prefers “even more than sacrifices.”
Coercive measures, applied with increasing comprehensiveness from the
time of Theodosius, dramatically reduced the public profile of paganism
within the empire and destroyed its institutional infrastructure (temples and
schools). Plenty of support for this aggressive policy could be found in
Augustine's own writings and in other patristic literature, where far less subtle
descriptions of paganism than that offered in the City of God ruled the day.
Outside the church, it was commonly thought, one ventured into the realm of
demons. The proper response to nonorthodox religious behavior was to
oppose it outright as an expression of human depravity. Tolerance in the face
of what the church considered evil was unthinkable and unfaithful. In this
context, the irenic stance of Paul in Athens had difficulty holding its ground
when appeals were made to the polemic of Paul in Romans: “For the wrath of
God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those
who by their wickedness suppress the truth…. Claiming to be wise, they
became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images
resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles”
(Rom. 1:18, 22-23; on missionary appropriations of this passage, see Walls
1996, 55-67).
In his life of St. Martin of Tours, Sulpicius Severus (c. 363—c. 420) lays
down a much-imitated template that countless hagiographers and precritical
historians after him will use to interpret the different forms of paganism
encountered by the medieval missionaries of Europe. According to his
biographer, Martin (c. 316-397) campaigned tirelessly to root out false
religion, which he seemed to find everywhere in the lightly evangelized
countryside around Tours. Thus, he tears down an altar dedicated to the
memory of what the rural population thought was a group of Christian
martyrs, after learning through interviews with the oldest members of the
community (plus a vision given in answer to prayer) that a robber instead had
been buried in that place (Life of Martin 11). On many other occasions,
Martin is shown destroying pagan shrines, often in the face of fierce local
resistance. These confrontations are depicted as contests between the forces of
the devil and God's champion, whose solitary strength is augmented by
angelic allies and timely divine interventions into the normal processes of the
natural world. In one particularly vivid passage, it is said that the devil “thrust
his visible presence” onto Martin, using a variety of shapes: “Sometimes he
presented himself with features disguised to resemble Jupiter, very frequently
Mercury, often even Venus or Minerva” (Life of Martin 22). There seems to
be no curiosity here about these names, their significance in this part of Gaul,
or the specific rites attached to these sacred locations. As Régine Pernoud
(2006, 87) has observed, pagan temples “symbolized error” in the narrative of
Sulpicius Severus. The will to understand the motives and purposes behind
non-Christian piety, so evident in the City of God, is nowhere to be found.
Apparently, it is enough for the reader to learn that the miraculous triumphs of
Martin led many to abandon their traditional practices for Christianity.
When Christianity understands itself to be unique, exclusive, superior,
definitive, normative, and absolute (Knitter 1985, 18), its adherents have little
incentive to understand or value the religious lives of others. Based on such a
self-confident worldview, Christian mission tends to be a matter of
displacement and conquest (Bosch 1991, 475). By and large, this was the
prevailing attitude of European Christianity through the medieval and early
modern periods, which meant that few missionaries or mission theorists in
those centuries critically interrogated their own truth claims or sought to
engage alternative belief structures at a deep level. But there were some
exceptions and this experience is worth recounting briefly, too, not least
because many to come later will find in these examples instruction and
inspiration for how to imagine a basis for interfaith encounter that does not
aspire necessarily to Christian political and social domination.
The Jesuit experiment in the East has already been discussed (see chapter
3). We may recall that Valignano, Ricci, and several generations of missionary
colleagues in China did not treat all forms of religious behavior equally. After
extended contact with Buddhism, they concluded that irreconcilable
differences in theological outlook separated Christianity from that tradition.
The decision to stop wearing Buddhist religious dress demonstrated the
rejection of what the Jesuits considered to be an unacceptable way of faith.
They were similarly negative about many of the “superstitions” observed by
ordinary Chinese, but made room in their theory of mission for Confucionist
philosophy and “cultural” traditions judged to be free of theological content.
Rites associated with the veneration of ancestors eventually became the test
case that juridically invalidated the Jesuit position back home in Europe (the
so-called “Rites Controversy”). The idea that a non-Western form of
philosophy could stand in the place of Aristotle with respect to theology and
so offer a pathway by which missionaries could relate to a comprehensive
system of meaning and values outside of Christianity has proved more
enduring.
Ramon Lull (or Llull) is another premodern figure (c. 1232–1316) who
stands out when viewed against the usual background of medieval missionary
indifference toward the particulars of other faith communities. Lull dedicated
himself to the evangelization of Muslims especially, but he worked for the
conversion of Jews and others as well. In the pursuit of his lifelong calling, he
studied Arabic, the Qur'an, Muslim theology (kalam), and the philosophical
traditions of Islam. Lull's many books in Arabic, Latin, and his native Catalan
show the deep imprint of these studies on his own thought, with influences
felt especially from Sufism (as in his Book of the Lover and the Beloved) and
the Muslim theological practice of describing God in terms of divine
attributes or uncreated virtues (reflected in Lull's Art, among other works). In
an imagined situation of interreligious dialogue (The Book of the Gentile and
the Three Wise Men) arguments for Judaism and Islam are presented through
fictional spokespersons with remarkable candidness. For more background on
Lull and his extensive output of texts, students may want to consult the
anthologies edited by Bonner (Llull 1985, 1993). Lull's proposal that
monasteries throughout Europe establish programs of language study to equip
missionaries for cross-cultural work among Muslims and others was partially
realized in his own time but would not be sustained.
Eastern Christians living under Muslim rule provide a third major example
of premodern reflection on mission and apologetics in the midst of intense
inter-religious encounter. In this case, the political and demographic trends
were moving in the opposite direction from what Ramon Lull and his
contemporaries were experiencing in the context of Spain's Reconquista.
Muslim domination of the Middle East not only diminished the social status
of many Eastern Christians but also transformed their cultural milieu. One by
one, the ancient Christian communities of the region adopted Arabic and
began to rearticulate their religious identities using the idiom of Islam. The
literature produced in this situation is largely defensive in its orientation.
Arabophone theologians wrote primarily for their co-religionists, who needed
encouragement in the face of decline and arguments with which to defend
contested Christian doctrines (especially the Trinity and the Incarnation). Yet
the fact that these documents circulated in Arabic created an opportunity for
Christian apologists also to speak to Muslim neighbors. We know that
Christian intellectuals participated in Muslim debates over the merits of
Greek science and philosophy, contributing especially as translators of ancient
texts and teachers of philosophy. Sidney Griffith (2008, esp. 106-28) draws
attention to an extraordinary “community of discourse” on religion and
philosophy that Christians and Muslims assembled together in ninth-and
tenth-century Baghdad.
Nineteenth-Century Trends
At the beginning of the modern Protestant missionary movement, cross-
cultural evangelists and their sending bodies were confident that most of the
world's inhabitants were sure to perish eternally, because they had no means
of knowing Christ. Thus, William Carey surveyed the state of humanity in
1792 and concluded that evangelical Protestants had an “obligation” to do
something about the situation of the multitudes living unaware in “pagan
darkness” (62). Likewise, when the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions ordained its first group of missionaries in 1812, the
preacher implored the congregation in attendance to put itself in the condition
of the “poor degraded Africans…the thousands of children sacrificed in the
Ganges…the throngs of miserable pilgrims pressing forward to devote
themselves to the impure and sanguinary worship of Moloch.” If that were not
enough to move Christian hearts to “benevolent exertion,” one's own family
could be interpolated into the picture: “Imagine your children, parents,
brothers, sisters this moment in the midst of India, worshippers of the horrid
idol of Juggernaut” (Woods 1966, 258-59).
More experience in the field tended to confirm Protestant missionary
assumptions of wholesale heathen degradation and lostness, at least through
the first half of the nineteenth century. One result of the fact that missionaries
were among the few Westerners living for long periods of time in relatively
unknown, exotic societies was that they came to be seen back home as experts
on those civilizations. Because church members and wider publics learned
much of what they knew about the religious traditions of the world through
missionary reports, they, too, became accustomed to regard non-Christian
religious behavior as evidence of barbarism and futility (the role of
missionary periodicals in spreading these views is explored in Oddie 2006,
203–30). Even the most learned missionary writers of the period emphasized
the coarsest aspects of what they considered to be false religions. An
influential example is William Ward's description of the “history, literature,
and religion of the Hindoos,” published in many editions from 1811. Another
is Alexander Duff's study of the “gigantic system of Hinduism,” first
compiled in 1839. Ward and Duff agreed that popular religion, in all its lurid
idolatrous detail, was the proper level at which to take the measure of a
religious tradition, because that is where the effects of belief and doctrine
were most widely felt. In good post-Enlightenment style, they insisted that
bad religion is a human problem more than it is the work of the devil. (This
approach allows Duff also to critique the Roman Catholics for corrupting the
pristine apostolic faith handed on to them; cf. Duff 1839, 179.) The modernist
sensibilities of Ward and Duff show up especially in the way they make a case
for their own interreligious expertise. At a distance, Ward cautions (1817,
xcix), “this system of idolatry” may appear to be beautiful, but up-close the
fog clears and the deception is exposed. Missionaries with long residence on
the subcontinent know that Indian religion is perverse, because they have
witnessed at first-hand its ill effects. This is an empiricist argument that gives
considerable weight to observable “facts” on the ground. In this approach, the
basic compatibility of reason and Christian revelation is assumed. Maxwell
(2001) explores further how Enlightenment perspectives decisively shaped
European Protestant discussions of mission in the late eighteenth-early
nineteenth centuries.
The nineteenth-century examples given so far are all drawn from the
history of mission in India. Vigorous and consequential debates over Indian
religion, which were taking place outside the church, are the reason for this
focus. These were an important part of the background against which initial
evangelical missionary appeals for public support were issued in this period.
Especially crucial at the start of the modern Protestant missionary movement
was the matter of Britain's religious policy in India. As Penny Carson (2001)
has shown, arguments over what missionaries should be allowed to do in
British India touched on many of the era's most explosive religious issues,
including Catholic-Protestant relations, the principle of religious toleration,
whether or not to export Britain's ecclesiastical establishment, and the civil
rights of colonial subjects.
Besides having to negotiate their way through the thickets of imperial
politics, the advocates of mission were also obliged to contend with a
gathering Orientalist discourse on religion that was inclined to affirm
Hinduism as an ancient and venerable wisdom tradition. In Ward's comment
above about viewing the religions of India at a distance through fog is a
gentle critique of the academics back in Europe who knew Hinduism only
through a few of its classic texts. Duff is more direct. He sees in the scholarly
attention lavished on Hinduism and Sanskrit in the late eighteenth century an
analogue to Gibbon's unbounded admiration for pre-Christian Greece and
Rome (1839, 45). What is the reason for the obvious enthusiasm of the
European professors (and poets) when they describe the cultural and religious
heritage of India that so fascinated them from afar? According to Duff (16–
25), Western scholarship could not help itself. It had been swept up into a
much broader trend of admiration for the mysterious East that was essentially
a romantic impulse. First, the Portuguese fell under the spell of Mogul
splendor. Then the generation of the renowned philologist Sir William Jones
(1746–94) convinced itself that Sanskrit was the most perfect language in the
world and its literature the most sublime. In response, Duff and other
missionary apologists will offer what purports to be a more scientific
appraisal of Indian religion, with emphasis placed on those aspects of
contemporary practice that seem the most out of sync with modernity.
According to this line of argument, Hinduism has to be opposed, not only as a
form of religious idolatry but also because it impeded the social development
of non-European civilizations.
To a large degree, Protestant missions proceeded through much of the
nineteenth century on the basis of a theology of religion very close to what
had been suggested by Alexander Duff. Not everyone agreed with his
recommendations on methods. (Duff emphasized the advantages of mission-
sponsored institutions of higher education.) But relatively few would have
taken issue with his dim estimate of most non-Christian piety. Representative
in this respect is the discussion of religion offered by James Dennis in the
context of his 1893 Students' Lectures on Missions at Princeton Theological
Seminary. According to Dennis, whose appointment as the inaugural lecturer
in this prestigious series stood near the beginning of a marked upsurge of
American interest in the academic study of mission, a sharp line of division
still separated all false religion from Christianity. The difference between
them was not simply one of degree. The “human religions” or “ethnic
religions” of the world are held to be “corruptions and perversions of a
primitive, monotheistic faith which was directly taught by God to the early
progenitors of the race” (Dennis 1893, 250). They are “lapses from the true”
(252), which bear only faint traces of an original divine imprint. Whatever
greatness may be recognized in the genius of their founders, “their ideals have
crumbled, and their followers have lived and moved only amidst the ruins of
ideal systems” (257). Indeed, according to Dennis, “the manifest and colossal
failure of every human system of religion to satisfy the wants of humanity”
(292) has prepared the non-Christian world in a negative way for the
optimism and hope finally made available to it in Christian mission. In his
most famous publication, Christian Missions and Social Progress (1897–
1906), Dennis will go on to document those perceived failures in detail, while
presenting an upbeat sociological analysis of the Protestant missionary record.
For all his bravado, Dennis gives hints that he sees some serious challenges
on the horizon of the modern missionary movement, some of which hail from
the realm of the religions. He speaks, for example, of a proposed Muslim
mission to America (1893, 281), which would compete with Christianity on
its “home” ground. The allusion here may be to the activities of Mohammad
Alexander Russell Webb (1846–1916), a Western convert to Islam who
founded a Muslim mission in New York City and officially represented his
adopted faith tradition at the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions in Chicago
(Abd-Allah 2006). Webb's story in some respects parallels that of the better
known Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902), who spoke persuasively for
Hinduism at the Chicago meeting and then established two organizations in
America to carry on his efforts at Hindu outreach to the West, the
Ramakrishna Mission and the Vedanta Society.
In retrospect, this cluster of events near the end of the nineteenth century
presages an impending transformation of the religious landscape of the United
States, with much greater diversity becoming the norm and more American
Christians getting an opportunity to hear the adherents of other traditions
explain their own beliefs and practices. For many scholars of mission to come
in the next century, an awareness of this fundamental shift in the religious
demography of the West will cause them to question the very idea of dividing
the world conceptually into Christian and non-Christian territorial zones (the
notion of Christendom).
The rise of comparative thinking about religion from a secular standpoint is
a second challenge to mission theology addressed in the lectures of Dennis.
He plainly worries that some in his Princeton Seminary student audience will
be swayed by the results of comparativist research, such as that conducted by
the renowned philologist Max Müller (1823–1900). A lengthy epigraph
(1893, 244) borrowed from Monier Monier-Williams (1819–99) warns
against any proposal to regard the Bible as just one of many “sacred books of
the East.” (Müller edited the monumental fifty-volume series issued under
this general title; Monier-Williams was Müller's great rival at Oxford.) A key
point for Dennis is whether or not Christianity should be studied alongside
other religious traditions, using the same scholarly methods and tools of
analysis. The problem, as Dennis sees it, is that “modern” students of religion
might lose sight of the fact that the non-Christian religions are false, in their
eagerness to discover “naturalistic” explanations for the origin and
development of religion (249). James Frazer's influential study of magic and
religion (The Golden Bough, first published in 1890) may well have been
among the scholarly works giving Dennis pause. The theory of Dennis
(represented in the quotes above) that all other religions are human
corruptions of an original, divinely granted monotheism essentially preserved
in Christianity is thus a counterassertion forcefully made in opposition to the
findings of much late-nineteenth-century anthropology and the study of
religion.
Dennis also rejects the idea of fulfillment theology, reckoning it to be
among the illegitimate offspring of comparative religion (278–79). Yet this is
precisely the direction that was to be taken by a growing number of mission
theorists at the turn of the twentieth century. The best known of these is
probably J. N. Farquhar (1861-1929), whose interpretation of Christianity as
The Crown of Hinduism (1913) put the fulfillment thesis into one of its most
widely read forms. Eric Sharpe's intellectual biography of Farquhar (1965)
continues to be an excellent introduction to his thought. Among those who
may have influenced the development of Farquhar is T. E. Slater (1840–
1912), whose work with highly educated Indian nationals over some forty
years induced him to formulate what was a remarkably positive missionary
view of Hinduism for its time. Slater appears to be the first Christian
missionary in India to suggest in print that Christianity was not the antithesis
of Hindu religion but rather its consummation (the publications of Slater are
discussed in Sharpe 1965, 94–105; see also Cracknell 1995, 108–19).
Early in his career especially, Slater was very much swimming against the
tide of majority nineteenth-century missionary and church opinion in the
matter of the non-Christian religions, as illustrated above in the remarks of
James Dennis. By the turn of the twentieth century, Farquhar and others
would have an easier time of it, not least because many of that generation's
leading missionary theologians had come around to the view that the world's
“great” religions ought to be treated more sympathetically than in the past.
Several powerful factors were influencing this shift in thinking about the non-
Christian religions. One was the fact of slow progress nearly everywhere in
Asia through the course of the nineteenth century, a time during which
antagonistic methods of public dispute and confrontation dominated
missionary practice. Did it make sense to continue with the same tactics that
had produced so little evangelistic return up until then?
By the late nineteenth century, many thoughtful students of mission also
knew that the religious traditions criticized so forthrightly by their forebears
had begun to change. The pressure of missionary propaganda and higher
levels of education had stimulated internal movements of reform in more than
one non-Christian religious tradition. Reformers often took aim at the cruelest
social customs still practiced in their time (for example, widow-burning in
India or foot-binding in China) and those forms of folk religion most like
superstitious magic. To the extent that such practices were abandoned or
effectively recharacterized as nonreligious aspects of popular culture (Oddie
2003, 175–77), the old missionary arguments against them could be deflected.
As the non-Christian religions modernized in this way, mission theorists had
to adopt new apologetic strategies, among which were proposals to treat other
kinds of faith in a more positive manner.
A third factor influencing the way many missionaries in the early twentieth
century looked at non-Christian religions is the principle of evolution.
Darwinist logic, when applied to the matter of religious truth, allowed
missionaries to affirm the supremacy of Christianity while also recognizing
what they considered to be the partial but still laudable achievements of other
faith traditions. Fulfillment theology more precisely asserted that the
universal religious aspirations expressed through the non-Christian religions
could be fully realized in Christianity (or in Christ). In this way, it becomes
possible to speak of the non-Christian faith traditions as providential means
by which God prepares their adherents to receive the gospel, with some (the
“higher” religions) thought to be doing this more effectively than others (the
“lower” or primal religions). A scriptural warrant for something like this
approach seems to have been supplied by Jesus himself, who represented his
own ministry as a quest to fulfill the law and the prophets, not to destroy them
(Matt. 5:17). Paul's irenic apologetic stance at Athens and the Logos language
of John 1 are two other biblical resources often invoked in support of
fulfillment theology (other passages are discussed in Hedges 2001, 17–21).
The World Missionary Conference of 1910, convened at Edinburgh, is
rightly considered a pivotal moment in the history of mission and ecumenism.
The two-year study process leading up to the conclave itself, involving
hundreds of missionaries and church leaders worldwide, was also a
missiological event of the first order. Never before had such a comprehensive
and systematic effort been mounted to evaluate the long-term results of
modern missions (albeit focused almost exclusively on Protestant activities).
The conference also sought to identify the major problems that still lay in the
way of further progress and the best methods to recommend for the future.
Conference organizers decided to sideline those issues of doctrine and polity
that regularly divided missionaries and so impeded their collaboration,
including the episcopacy, the details of eschatology, particular schemes for
church unity, and the advisability of Protestants evangelizing Catholic and
Orthodox Christians. The topic of mission and the religions thus became a
leading theoretical concern at the Edinburgh conference, which otherwise
tended to concentrate its energies on more practical questions of method and
technique. In Brian Stanley's recently published account and expert analysis
of the World Missionary Conference, the extensive deliberations and
negotiations conducted with respect to the agenda and procedures of the
meeting are discussed at length (2009, esp. 18–72).
Commission IV (“The Christian Message in Relation to Non-Christian
Religions”) was the primary location within the Edinburgh structure at which
the problem of the religions was most directly engaged. The Report of
Commission IV shows the Protestant missionary movement as a whole
seeking after ways to relate constructively to people of other faith, while
continuing to affirm the urgency of Christian proclamation and conversion.
Just how difficult it was in practice to satisfy these two great aims at the same
time is revealed in the detailed answers submitted to the commission in
response to its questionnaire (these replies are examined most thoroughly in
Stanley 2009, Hedges 2001, Cracknell 1995, and Sharpe 1965). Many of
those participating in the survey process indicated their preference for a
fulfillment perspective. One sees this, for example, in a number of the replies
that came back from missionaries serving in India (including C. F. Andrews,
T. E. Slater, Nicol Macnicol, and J. N. Farquhar). Many of these distinguished
figures in the global Protestant missionary community were clearly prepared
to find in Hinduism aspects of religiosity already in tune with gospel values.
One of the questions put to the commission's correspondents in the field may
have stimulated some of these data by prompting reflection on “points of
contact” with other religions that might be regarded as “preparation” for
Christianity (question #6).
The final form of the commission's report was self-consciously constructed
using a scale that moved from the “primitive” to “higher” religions (that is,
from animism to Hinduism, with the religions of China and Japan, plus Islam,
placed in between). As such, the overall structure of the report embodied an
evolutionary approach to religious difference that many advocates of
fulfillment theology would have considered apologetically useful and
theologically appropriate. Sharpe (1965, 288–97) and Stanley (2009, 222–27)
have nonetheless drawn attention to language in the “General Conclusions” of
the report that qualify its broad acceptance of the fulfillment thesis. They both
credit Indian missionary A. G. Hogg with having influenced chairman David
Cairns to balance the report's implicit endorsement of fulfillment theology
with other statements that stressed the “absoluteness of Christianity” (as at
World Missionary Conference 1910 [IV], 268). Hogg was not advocating a
return to the antagonistic methods of the early nineteenth century or pushing
for a triumphal tone in mission. His driving concern was to respect the
integrity of the non-Christian religions by recognizing the human needs they
actually met and the particular functions each one played in its own society.
Hogg's sophisticated essay on karma and Christian redemption (1909)
illustrates his method, which emphasized the need to identify the distinctive
teachings and moral aims of each religious tradition.
Further evidence of Cairns's apparent ambivalence about fulfillment
theology is supplied in a “Concluding Note” added to the report after the
meeting (World Missionary Conference 1910 [IV], 275–80). To an unnamed
critic, Cairns explained that Hinduism was not to be regarded “as a
preparation for Christianity in anything like the same way as the Old
Testament is such a preparation” (276). According to Cairns, the
commission's intention was rather to suggest that the Hindu tradition stood in
relationship to the gospel in much the same way that ancient Hellenism did,
with its “noble philosophy” offered up to the apostolic church alongside “its
beautiful but poisonous mythology, its corrupt sexual morality, [and] its cruel
system of slavery.” Cairns indicates that he had solicited further comments
from a “friendly critic” who had spoken during the discussion period at the
conference and then quotes extensively from the letter submitted to him by C.
H. Monahan, a Wesleyan Methodist missionary working in South India.
Monahan was prepared to endorse the commission's generous view of the
religions, provided that the everyday “cruelty” of the Hindu system be
squarely addressed. In his view, the “moral situation” of Indian missions
called for a more nuanced handling of the fulfillment thesis than that
presented to the conference:
There is much that must be destroyed before that which is best can be
fulfilled. Much rubbish has to be carted away before the foundations of
the city of God can be firmly laid in India's life…. There are things to be
broken down before we can build up. There are chains to be smashed
that souls may go free. (277–78)
Cairns declared himself to be in “full agreement” with this statement and
welcomed the opportunity to include it as a “supplement” to the report of
Commission IV. He went on to suggest that “the completeness of the
Christian idea” required two complementary “types” of mission, which he
saw exemplified in the approaches taken to the religions of their day by
Tertullian and Origen: “the one dwelling most on the evils of those religions
and the newness of the Gospel; and the other seeking to show that all that was
noblest in the old religions was fulfilled in Christ” (279). Cairns urged
precisely the same attitude toward Hindu religion: “No man can really
penetrate to the innermost heart of the higher thought of Hinduism unless he
antagonizes the manifold evils of its popular religion: and on the other hand,
that no man can successfully attack its evils unless he has a true and
sympathetic understanding of its nobler thought and life, and so is able to
build up as well as destroy.” This is the last word from Cairns on fulfillment
theology given in the context of the World Missionary Conference.
 Edinburgh 1910 subsequently became a touchstone for the theology of
religion, but more than one evaluation of the meeting's significance has been
offered. Ariarajah (1991, 28–31), for example, sets the work of Commission
IV off against the overall aim of the conference, with the latter standing for a
desire to conquer the world's religions and the former to understand them. In a
similar spirit, Cracknell (1995, 259–60) hails the approach of Commission IV
as “an incipient theology of dialogue.” Sharpe (1965, 336–37) reminds us,
however, that early twentieth-century fulfillment theology generally assumed
the eventual replacement of other religious traditions by Christianity as a
result of mission. Brian Stanley (2009, 222) sounds a similar note of caution
when he observes: “Adherence to fulfillment theology did not imply any
diminution in belief in the impending universal triumph of Christianity: it had
merely (though radically) reconceived the process which would effect that
triumph of displacement.” Thus, while it may be true that some missionaries
were groping theologically for an entirely new approach to the non-Christian
religions, the literature of the conference (including the report of Commission
IV), which represented the collective mind of the gathering, had not yet
broken with its Protestant missionary past. On the topic of the religions, it
would seem, the World Missionary Conference was still a nineteenth-century
phenomenon.
Developments since Edinburgh 1910
The Continuation Committee created at the end of the Edinburgh meeting
almost immediately decided to launch a scholarly periodical devoted to the
science of mission. Begun in 1912, the International Review of Missions
(IRM) soon became an indispensable source of careful reflection on the
practice of Christian mission in a world of living religions. Founding editor J.
H. Oldham built directly on the extensive research efforts carried out in
preparation for the World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh (for details on
this point, see Skreslet 2006a, 173–80). At the same time, the direction taken
by the journal under Oldham's leadership shows how the study of mission in
relation to the non-Christian religions was quickly beginning to expand its
scope.
The first thing to notice about the IRM is that Oldham solicited articles and
other contributions from Catholic missiologists, which signaled an intention
to foster an even broader ecumenical approach to mission research than that
pursued at Edinburgh. He also pushed to include nontheological materials in
the mission bibliography section of the IRM, an editorial decision that further
expanded the pool of scholarship on the religions to which the journal's
audience would be exposed on a regular basis. Within the “Ten-Years'
Selected Bibliography” published in volume 11 of the IRM (1922), for
example, we find a burgeoning collection of research presented under the
category of “Christianity and the Non-Christian Religions,” encompassing
books and articles from many different fields of study, including
anthropology, comparative religion, ritual studies, and the history of religion.
The importance of this subject to early twentieth-century missiology is
indicated by the fact that more space was given to the section on non-
Christian religions in this cumulative bibliography than to the topics of
mission theory, the methods of mission, missionary training, cooperation and
unity, and the social relations of missions—combined. Particularly
noteworthy is a series of articles published in the IRM over its first decade
that treated the “vital forces” of Buddhism and Islam.
The Continuation Committee of the World Missionary Conference finally
gave way to a more permanent structure in 1921: the International Missionary
Council (IMC). Over the next few decades the IMC became a primary
sponsor of research on mission and the religions. Much of this scholarship
continued to appear in the IRM, which had been made the responsibility of the
IMC at its formation. Other materials were produced in connection with a
series of international missionary conferences convened under the auspices of
the IMC. At the Jerusalem conference in 1928 and at Tambaram (India) in
1938, conference participants struggled to clarify further many of the same
interfaith issues that had engaged the missionary movement since at least the
late nineteenth century, but they had to do their work in quite different
historical circumstances than those faced by their predecessors. A
disillusioning European conflict, for example, left many advocates of world
mission wondering about the true character of Western civilization. The future
prospects of European imperialism also had to be reassessed, especially in
places such as China, India, and Egypt, where impassioned arguments against
colonial rule were often peppered with rhetorical jabs aimed more directly at
Western Christian missions as just another kind of unwanted foreign intrusion
into the social and religious affairs of one's nation.
Timothy Yates (1994, 94–124) should be consulted for a cogent overview
of missionary thinking during the interwar period on the relationship of the
Christian faith to other religious traditions and commitments. Werner Ustorf
(2000, 83–127) broadens this discussion by focusing on continental European
perspectives just before and during the Nazi era. These were years during
which the Protestant missionary enterprise as a whole moved away from the
language of conquest and occupation expressed so freely at Edinburgh. An
expanded definition of religion was also adopted, with secularism put beside
the non-Christian traditions as yet another dangerous rival seen to be
competing for the ultimate allegiance of modern men and women. The paper
of Rufus Jones, “Secular Civilization and the Christian Task,” given at
Jerusalem in 1928, sharply articulated the profound challenge presented to the
church by a rising tide of secularism, evident especially in the Western “home
base” of missions. Jones (1928, 273) called on a worldwide Christian
community to reconsider its message alongside the devoted followers of other
religions, who might be expected for their own reasons to resist the growing
influence of materialist philosophies.
The unity of the Protestant missionary movement became more difficult to
maintain after the Jerusalem meeting of the IMC. A major issue over which
fractious disagreements soon emerged centered on the proper missionary
attitude to be struck with respect to the non-Christian religions. One line of
thinking continued to stress the idea of continuity among the religions. For
some, this meant reasserting the fulfillment thesis in terms not all that
different from those used before Edinburgh. Robert Speer's paper on the
“value of the religious values of the non-Christian religions,” composed soon
after the IMC meeting at Jerusalem as a kind of summary of its proceedings
(Speer 1928), faithfully reproduces this argument. A few others, some of them
finding inspiration in the presentation of Rufus Jones at Jerusalem, began to
search for ways to promote collaboration among the adherents of the world's
religious traditions as a new form of Christian mission.
It was in the service of this latter vision that the Laymen's Foreign Missions
Inquiry was organized in 1930 under the direction of Harvard philosophy
professor, William Hocking (1873–1966). For our purposes, the importance of
the Laymen's Inquiry is not based solely on its conclusions, but is also
attached to the study process carried out in the preparatory phase of the
project. With funding provided by John D. Rockefeller Jr., Hocking's select
Commission of Appraisal (which included Rufus Jones but no serving
missionaries) proposed to evaluate the overall state of Protestant missions
worldwide by investigating a few of the places in Asia (China, Burma, India,
and Japan) where relatively large numbers of American missionaries and
mission-related institutions were then concentrated. After a period of
preliminary fact-finding conducted by staff, the commission traveled to Asia
and spent the better part of a year interviewing missionaries and national
church leaders, in large groups and more personally. They also engaged a
number of non-Christian elites, in order to gain Asian perspectives on mission
work that were not beholden to any part of the foreign missionary
establishment. An impressive seven-volume final report was issued in 1933,
after a summary version had already appeared under the title Re-Thinking
Missions (Hocking et al. 1932). In these publications, recommendations were
made to reduce the number of Western missionaries sent abroad while raising
their intellectual and professional standards, to devolve responsibility for
mission institutions more quickly onto national bodies, and to put the existing
mission board structures of the denominations under a central authority in
order to realize a more efficient use of resources.
A firestorm of controversy over the Laymen's Inquiry raged through the
1930s. Without a doubt, this extensive study of evangelization pushed
advocates and critics alike to question whether the routines of early twentieth-
century missions ought to be maintained indefinitely. Even more
fundamentally, the Laymen's Inquiry suggested that the aims of Christian
mission needed to be reconceptualized. According to the Commission of
Appraisal, a long period of “temporary” mission activities was drawing to a
close, an era during which it had been appropriate for foreign workers to
focus on winning converts, preaching, and church planting. It was now time
to take up what the report called the “permanent functions” of mission, which
were characterized as a kind of “foreign service” or “ambassadorship” on
behalf of Christianity (Hocking et al. 1932, 23–28). At the bottom of this new
approach lay a particular view of the non-Christian religions. The finality of
Christ, according to historian William Hutchison (1987, 170), was the “do-or-
die” issue in this debate over the future of the modern missionary movement.
Hocking and his colleagues were arguing for an end to religious competition
in favor of a joint quest for “world understanding and unity on a spiritual
level” (Hocking et al., 328). To participate fully in this common venture, the
next generation of Christian missionaries would have to reimagine themselves
as “co-worker[s] with the forces within each…religious system which are
making for righteousness” (327).
Spinning off in quite another direction after Jerusalem was a view of
mission and the non-Christian religions that stressed the uniqueness of the
gospel. The impetus for this development within the IMC came particularly
from three sources: a developing continental European perspective on the
nature of religion influenced heavily by the work of Karl Barth, the
experience of most missionaries in Muslim lands, where major differences in
theological outlook between Islam and Christianity appeared to be
irreconcilable, and the persistent testimony of adult converts to Christianity
from other religious traditions. In these quarters, Christian mission made no
sense unless it rested on the sure conviction that in Jesus Christ the church
had something of utmost value to offer the world that could not be found
anywhere else.
Hendrik Kraemer (1888–1965) turned out to be the missiologist of the
hour, who put the case for radical discontinuity into its most influential form
during the interwar years (1938, esp. 100–141). The Christian revelation, he
insisted in concert with Karl Barth, stood in some degree of opposition to
religion in all of its expressions, including historical Christianity. Therefore,
according to Kraemer, it was beside the point to argue that Christianity is the
best religion, in the manner of a fulfillment theologian, or to assert with
Hocking that people of goodwill could construct better religious answers to
human problems together by using insights selected piecemeal from the
world's many faith traditions. Yet Kraemer was still willing to discuss how
God might be active outside of Christianity, a move that put some distance
between him and Barth. In his view, it was undeniable that the non-Christian
religions and even secular culture had within them qualities that gave witness
to a genuine sense of God's goodness. Kraemer proposed that it was possible
to perceive these glimpses of God's presence in human culture and history, but
only with the assistance of the light provided by God in Christ.
Kraemer forcefully presented his argument for discontinuity among the
religions in a preparatory volume commissioned by the IMC in advance of its
1938 meeting at Tambaram: The Christian Message in a Non-Christian
World. Yates (1994, 94) has called this book “the most substantial piece of
theological work to emerge from the IMC's life.” Even so, many delegates to
the conference took issue with Kraemer's approach to the non-Christian
religions. Most were puzzled by the term “biblical realism,” a shorthand
designation he used to stand for the essential core of the Bible's message.
Kraemer was never able to explain to the satisfaction of his critics how one
could describe the positive content of the Bible (“the Christian revelation”)
apart from the Christian tradition or the experience of an actual interpretive
community. How then could Kraemer (or Barth) or anyone else claim to stand
apart from all the religions and so evaluate them by what is supposed to be a
completely objective standard? For A. G. Hogg (1939), the fundamental
problem with Kraemer's position lay in his treatment of non-Christian faith.
While Kraemer concedes the theoretical existence of such faith outside of
Christianity, the wholesale judgment leveled against the religions as unfaith
(Unglaube) appeared to Hogg to render this possibility virtually moot.
Kraemer does seem to have convinced many of his readers to regard the non-
Christian religions as integrated, independent systems of life and thought (or
totalities). When this point is accepted, it becomes more difficult to treat other
kinds of religion simply as inferior versions of Christianity.
At Vatican II (1962–65), the Roman Catholic Church thoroughly
reexamined its approach to the non-Christian religions. The context of this
exercise was a larger project of critical appraisal and renewal
(aggiornamento) that focused on the church's self-understanding and its
mission. Among the sixteen official documents produced by the Council was
a “declaration” on the relationship of the Catholic Church to the non-Christian
religions (Nostra Aetate), plus a “decree” on the church's missionary activity
(Ad Gentes). A “dogmatic constitution” on the nature of the church (Lumen
Gentium), issued in advance of these two other pronouncements, anticipated
and influenced the final positions to be taken on mission and the religions at
the Council. The very interesting story of the lead-up to the conclave, the
results achieved there, and the exceedingly complex social processes that
surrounded the Council's deliberations are discussed at length in a
monumental history of Vatican II (Alberigo and Komonchak, 1995–2006).
Vatican II developed a personality of its own and several of the great
themes that marked this singular event in conciliar history also affected the
approach taken to the religions at the Council. A crucial example is the
pastoral character of Vatican II, which suggested to most participants that the
church ought to engage the reality outside of itself in a patient, constructive
manner. Accordingly, the Council committed to a more dialogical stance than
had been assumed in the past, both with respect to the modern world that had
come into being since the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century and to the
many contemporary religious traditions existing alongside the Catholic
Church in that world (including Orthodox and Protestant communities of
Christians). Dialogue in this setting meant a willingness to learn from others
and to exchange points of view on matters of ultimate significance. For the
first time, the church also gave extended thought to the problem of
communicating its message in a global environment increasingly dominated
by the mass media. With these and related priorities defining the character of
Vatican II, issues of doctrine and discipline became relatively less prominent
than they had been in previous general councils of the church.
Without question, the Catholic Church at Vatican II spoke in an
exceptionally positive way about the non-Christian religions and their
adherents. Eschewing the language of judgment and condemnation, the
Council chose instead to name some admirable qualities in several other
religious traditions that Catholics were bound to honor, such as Hindu
asceticism, the monotheistic impulse in Islam, and the desire for illumination
that permeates Buddhism. Coincidentally, by recognizing these differences
among the religions, the church was also deciding not to lump all non-
Catholic religious observance into an omnibus category of unbelief or
idolatry. The Council did not waver in its conviction that the church has a
permanent responsibility to evangelize the nations through its missionary
activities. Cross-cultural programs of outreach were expected to continue and
to include most of the traditional tasks associated with world mission,
including preaching and the gathering of converts into newly planted
congregations. Nevertheless, the Council encouraged the faithful to cooperate
with others on behalf of social, economic, and moral progress. It recognized
that some of these potential collaborators would be motivated by deeply held
religious beliefs of their own, which Catholic Christians were urged to take
seriously.
It is with respect to the non-Christian religions as religions that the Second
Vatican Council seemed to break the most new ground. Besides
acknowledging that religious behavior of all kinds can indicate a desire on the
part of individuals to know God, the Council also taught that the non-
Christian religions themselves have a positive value and are, in some sense,
related to God. The general principle put forward to guide the church in its
relations with the non-Christian religions is this: “The Catholic Church rejects
nothing that is true and holy in these religions.” The theological basis for this
conclusion is also supplied in the Declaration Nostra Aetate (2): other “ways”
of faith, “comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites,” must be
respected, because they “often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all
[human beings].”
The position taken at Vatican II on the non-Christian religions continues to
be vigorously debated even today, nearly fifty years later. Discerning what the
Council may have intended to say at the time of its meeting is only a very
small part of this involved conversation. Not a few theologians have been
prompted by the “spirit” of Vatican II to construct increasingly generous
views of the religions, in line with what they see implied but not completely
developed in the Council's documents. Paul Knitter may be taken as an
influential representative of this interpretive trend. In his critical study of
Christian attitudes toward the world religions, Knitter (1985, 120–35) labels
Vatican II a “watershed” moment in the history of the church's understanding
of non-Christian faith, because it signals to him an intention on the part of the
Catholic magisterium to break away from exclusivist thinking. Knitter shows
appreciation for Karl Rahner as an architect of Vatican II with respect to this
topic, but he does not think Rahner goes far enough with his own proposal to
recognize faith expressed through other religious traditions as forms of
“anonymous Christianity.” Rahner's approach seems to Knitter to be too
circumspect. It allows for the non-Christian religions to be considered
“lawful” from the standpoint of Catholic dogmatic theology, but only up to
the point at which the Christian religion and the church become “historically
real” (Rahner 1966, 121) to the adherents of these other traditions,
presumably through mission. Thus, even if these religions are seen to possess
“supernatural, grace-filled elements” and to have the capacity to function as
instruments of salvation in certain circumstances, these attributes and benefits
are not considered to be permanent. Knitter will argue, on the contrary, that
the non-Christian religions are among the ordinary, enduring means by which
God reveals truth and saves humanity. They are “ways of salvation” that do
not expire in the presence of Christianity, but in fact complement the efforts
of the church to give witness to God.
 Within this conceptual framework, Knitter then proceeds to reevaluate the
purpose of Christian mission (1985, 220–31). It is, above all, to promote the
Reign of God, and to do so in cooperation with others. Mission means also to
spread abroad the knowledge of God, but without an assumption that the
church already has in its grasp all divine wisdom. In some situations,
conversions to Christianity may still be appropriate, but missionaries should
be prepared to rejoice with equal fervor whenever Buddhists, Hindus, and
others become more devoted to (God's) truth while remaining in their own
faith traditions. A global church is now being called to construct a global
theology, according to Knitter, which can be accomplished only through the
most searching forms of interfaith dialogue. In several subsequent
publications, Knitter (1995, 1996) has described in more detail what such a
global theology might entail. Hans Küng is another Catholic theologian who
has likewise emphasized the ethical responsibilities he believes Christians and
other religionists ought to be sharing together (see, for example, Küng 1991).
Official Catholic thinking since Vatican II on mission and the religions has
not been entirely uniform. Across the writings and speeches of Pope John
Paul II, for example, one can see a persistent resolve expressed to engage the
world in a dialogical manner, to show respect for other religious traditions,
and to explore carefully what the Holy Spirit may have been doing outside the
church. On this last point especially, John Paul II seems to have been keen to
develop further, albeit cautiously, what the documents of Vatican II had
suggested about the “seeds of the Word” widely sown by the Spirit throughout
humanity (Ad Gentes 15; Redemptoris Missio 28–29, Dominum et
Vivificantem 53). All of these commitments were in evidence on the occasion
of the pope's famous meeting with other religious leaders at Assisi in 1986, at
which they prayed for peace.
At the same time, it is not hard to find language in the papal literature that
warns against the notion of universal salvation effected through the religions.
Indeed, much of what the magisterium has had to say about the official
teaching of the church on the religions since Vatican II has been formulated in
response to proposals made by venturesome Catholic theologians on this
subject, which are thought to be in error or gravely defective because they are
liable to be misconstrued as endorsements of theological relativism. Dominus
Iesus is the quintessential example of this more negative postconciliar official
Catholic perspective on the religions. Issued in 2000 as a “declaration”
formulated by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, but “ratified and
confirmed” by the pope, the document is dominated by a sharp tone that
reinforces its plain-spoken rebuttal of several theological positions considered
to be incompatible with Catholic faith. Among the critical points of doctrine
addressed in Dominus Iesus are these: the sacred writings of other religions
may not be considered on a par with the Bible, which alone is held to be
inspired scripture (8). To suggest that God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ
needs to be supplemented by other sources of revelation, due to its “limited,
incomplete, or imperfect” character, is said to be inconsistent with the
teaching of the church (6). Any attempt to separate the activity of the Spirit
from the work of the incarnate Word is “in profound conflict with the
Christian faith” (9–10). Interreligious dialogue is permissible and to be
welcomed, but only when situated within a broader program of evangelization
(2, 22).
For more on Catholic thinking about the non-Christian religions from
Vatican II to Dominus Iesus, students may want to consult the concise but
quite substantive article of James Fredericks on this subject (2003). Another
valuable resource is Miikka Ruokanen's study of Nostra Aetate, which
includes in an appendix (1992, 133–56) an exchange of views between
Ruokanen and Paul Knitter regarding the teaching of Vatican II on the non-
Christian religions. Here I will make just two further remarks by way of a
brief conclusion to this section. The first is that the meaning of Vatican II with
respect to mission and the religions is not yet settled. We are, in fact, still in
the midst of an ongoing struggle between the papacy and the theologians to
define the legacy of the Council, as William Burrows (2006, 3) has pointed
out in his analysis of John Paul II's mission perspective. To be sure, issues of
power have figured during this period, but the larger conceptual challenge
imposing itself on the church has been the fact of religious pluralism. Over
the last third of the twentieth century, a more conscious awareness of living
within a religiously plural world slowly took hold throughout much of Roman
Catholicism, such that later interpreters of Vatican II perceived themselves to
be living in circumstances of which the Council at the time was only very
dimly aware. Increasingly, Catholics have come to understand their situation
to be one in which “every religion which exists in the world is…a question
posed, and a possibility offered, to every person” (this is how Rahner [1966,
117], with extraordinary prescience, put it on the eve of Vatican II).
A second observation is this: contemporary mission theologians outside of
Catholicism are also more likely than not to understand themselves to be
inhabiting the same intellectual context as postconciliar Catholics with respect
to global religious diversity. As a result, we find a broad swath of mission
theorists, operating across the theological spectrum within Protestantism and
beyond, attempting to grasp what this aspect of postmodern life might mean
for the church and its mission. Conservative evangelicals (for example,
Pinnock 1992, Ramachandra 1999, Netland 2001, and Tennent 2002) and
Pentecostals (Kärkkäinen 2002, 193–239, and Yong 2005), among others, are
now participating alongside Protestant mainline theologians such as Lesslie
Newbigin (1989) in a sprawling discussion about mission and the religions
that at one time had been completely dominated by Protestant liberals in the
mold of William Hocking. In a more organized way, groups of evangelical
mission theologians have also studied the problem of religious pluralism
through the processes of the Lausanne movement (see, for example, Claydon
2005, 1:61–115). Having observed this broad upsurge in research energy
since the 1980s, with its intense focus on interreligious issues bearing on
mission, Lalsangkima Pachuau (2000, 549–52) concludes that the theology of
religions has become the “essential integrating principle” or “hub” of
missiology as a discipline.
THREE SPECIAL TOPICS: JUDAISM, ISLAM, AND THE
RELIGIONS OF AFRICA
Over the bulk of this chapter, I have chosen to emphasize mission research
related especially to the dominant religions of India and East Asia. The
relatively high numbers and prominence of (early) modern-era missionaries
sent to these locations partially justifies this focus. Another reason to
concentrate on these regions is that quite a lot of comparative research on
religion, a scientific literature to which some missionary scholars have
contributed heavily (a prime example being James Legge, whose role in the
development of modern sinology is exhaustively described in Girardot 2002),
has tended to give an inordinate degree of attention to the “Eastern” faith
traditions. Nonetheless, it has never been the case that the study of mission
and the religions has been confined to these parts of the globe. To help fill out
the picture sketched thus far and so reflect better the breadth of research
conducted in this part of missiology, I propose next to highlight a few
materials connected to the study of mission that make special reference to
Judaism, Islam, and the primal religious traditions of Africa.
The roots of a Christian mission to the Jews may be traced back all the way
to Jesus, who is remembered as having restricted his own efforts at outreach
in first-century Palestine to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt.
15:24). In Acts, Paul is shown likewise to be in constant contact with Jews,
often preferring to begin his visits to new mission centers with a call on the
local synagogue. In addition, Paul's reflections on the salvation of the Jewish
people (especially Rom. 9–11) continue to be foundational for theologies of
mission that seek to address the issue of Jewish evangelization. Students of
mission with an interest in apostolic-era initiatives directed toward Jews will
want to refer to all the standard exegetical resources at their disposal when
examining the relevant New Testament passages. Also valuable, because it
ranges well beyond the boundaries of Paul's missionary program, is the
lengthy review of Jewish-Christian mission assembled in Schnabel (2004,
729–910). As Schnabel describes the activities of Peter and his closest
ministry associates, he examines a huge collection of evidence pertaining to
the establishment of Christianity within and beyond the penumbra of diaspora
Judaism, whether in Antioch, Rome, Egypt, North Africa, Syria,
Mesopotamia, or India. Although it is generally agreed that organized
Christian missionary efforts among the Jews dissipated in the early patristic
period, the primary cause of this shift is not clearly understood. Did the
church simply lose interest in the evangelization of the Jews, perhaps due to a
lack of contact as Judaism withered away on its own (so Harnack)? Or was it
more a matter of an anti-Jewish attitude (expressed through Justin Martyr and
others writing in the adversus Ioudaeos apologetic tradition) overwhelming
the church's concern for the salvation of the Jews? Missiologists concerned
with such questions have to become conversant with the current research in
early Christian studies (for example, Becker and Reed 2007), where Jewish-
Christian relations in late antiquity have been intensively examined.
The universal horizon of post-Enlightenment Protestantism quite naturally
encompassed the Jews. Accordingly, as the modern Protestant missionary
movement got under way, agencies specializing in missions to the Jews soon
became part of this larger project to evangelize the known world. The London
Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews or the London Jews'
Society, founded in 1809, would be followed by many more such
organizations. Most of these began with a focus on European Jewry or the
propagation of Christianity in the Holy Land. Toward the end of the
nineteenth century, more intensive efforts to present the gospel to fast-
growing Jewish immigrant communities in North America were begun. In
1923, a department of Jewish evangelism was established at the Moody Bible
Institute, with the aim of professionalizing this special ministry function. As
Yaakov Ariel (2000) has shown, missionary appeals to American Jews up to
the 1960s tended to assume that converts would assimilate into Gentile
Christian congregations. Over the past fifty years, an alternative view has
asserted itself through the rise of messianic Judaism, a social and theological
phenomenon described carefully in the work of Carol Harris-Shapiro (1999)
and Dan Cohn-Sherbok (2000), among others. Many missiologists would
recognize in messianic Judaism an attempt to contextualize the gospel by
adopting the institutional forms, ritual gestures, religious symbols, and
discursive habits of contemporary American Judaism.
Initial attempts to study Jewish evangelization in a systematic way tended
to focus on the practical aspects of the subject. Thus, at Edinburgh in 1910
and within the structure of the mission bibliography section of the IRM for
several decades afterward, Judaism is treated as a mission “field” and not
primarily as one of the religions. In fact, Commission IV at the World
Missionary Conference does not discuss Judaism directly. In the aftermath of
the Holocaust, issues of strategy and technique have had to accommodate and
respond to more strictly theological considerations. In this situation, the most
pressing question asks whether or not it is still appropriate to seek the
conversion of Jews to Christianity. One can get a sense of this discussion by
looking at the most recent study papers generated from within the circles of
the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism (for example, Claydon
2005, 3:377–433). Gerald Anderson (2003) presents a case for the
evangelization of the Jews that likewise takes into account the perspective of
messianic Judaism. The extreme sensitivity of this subject for many in the
historic Protestant churches is illustrated by the fact that the European
academics who edited the volume in which Anderson's essay appeared felt
compelled to add a note of disclaimer to his article (no other essay in this
festschrift to Jan Jongeneel is so treated). Anderson not only argued as a
Methodist that a mission to the Jews is the “keystone of the Christian
mission,” without which a slide into complete theological relativism is
inevitable (2003, 126), but that his position fully corresponded to the teaching
of Vatican II on this subject. The vehement objections raised to Anderson's
argument show that this is another aspect of mission and the religions
connected to the Council over which many Roman Catholics now strongly
disagree.
Islam is a second faith tradition not easily subsumed under a general
discussion of mission and the religions. Established some six centuries after
the time of Jesus, Islam represents more than just another alternative to
Christianity next to the rest of the religions. To the extent that its scripture and
teaching embody a self-conscious rejection of the New Testament in its
present form, in addition to a number of core church doctrines, Islam is a
“reproach” to Christianity (Gairdner 1909). The comparative position
developed in the nineteenth century regarding the religions—that they be
approached as preparatory foundations for Christian belief—is only with great
difficulty applied to Islam, since its explicit claim is to “correct, complete and
supersede” the church's witness to God and God's son (Gairdner 1909, 310–
12, quoting from an earlier CMS document; discussed in Shelley 1999). The
relative paucity of Muslim converts to Christianity over the centuries likewise
raises questions about the capacity of Islam to function as a preparatio
evangelica.
Several kinds of research on Islam relevant to missiology may be
identified. One group of studies has focused on the broad history of Muslim-
Christian relations, a long story of community encounter all too often defined
by mutual hostility and bloody conflict. A sensitive recounting of this history,
which takes into account both Muslim and Christian experience, is offered in
Goddard (2000). In Goddard's view (4), an honest evaluation of Muslim-
Christian engagement in the past has to take place before the current
prospects for dialogue and collaboration can be expected to improve. Jane
Smith (1999) gives extra attention to the cultural dimensions of Christian-
Muslim interaction, while concentrating on the medieval record. Clinton
Bennett's more recent treatment of Christian-Muslim relations (2008)
complements these other efforts by adding a post-9/11 perspective and an
extended discussion of developments in dialogue since the 1970s.
A second set of research has less to do with the geopolitical and
intercultural factors influencing Christian-Muslim encounter than it does with
Christian perceptions of Islam as a religious tradition. The importance of this
work to missiology springs from the fact that every attempt to evangelize
Muslims necessarily rests on a particular understanding of Islam. Thus, an
early interpreter of Islam, John of Damascus (c. 665–749), considered the
religion of the “Ishmaelites” to be a new form of heresy and so a
misunderstanding of orthodox Christian doctrine that needed refutation and
correction. Many Enlightenment-era commentators (for example, Voltaire)
will decide that Islam is a fraudulent religion, invented by Muhammad for his
own purposes. Temple Gairdner (1928, 211) was among those who believed
that Christian missions progressed so slowly in Muslim lands because they
had to contend with an entrenched religion not completely false but full of
“half-truths.” More generously, Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1981, 124) has
suggested that Islam and Christianity be considered “religious sub-
communities” of something greater than themselves, in which case the two
traditions are really more alike than different. Smith's views reflected his
conviction that religious pluralism is a normal aspect of the world's present
social condition and his hope that an evolving global theology would
eventually transcend all the historical religions. Other committed pluralists
(for example, Kimball 2004) have emphasized the common ethical intentions
expressed through these two faith traditions, a circumstance that could be
expected to stimulate cooperation on behalf of social justice and concern for
the poor. In the survey articles of Jane Smith (1998) and David Kerr (2002),
one will find helpful discussions of Christian missionary attitudes toward
Islam far more detailed than I am able to present here.
The missiological study of Islam also includes reflection on the best ways
to approach Muslims with the message of the gospel. This research typically
builds on what is known already about the history of Christian-Muslim
relations and often takes into account various Christian understandings of
Islamic religion but then pushes on to consider the next steps in mission
outreach to Muslims. Up to the early decades of the twentieth century, a solid
consensus stood behind the strategy of arguing with Muslims over matters of
doctrine. Thus, numerous scholar-missionaries sought through their writings
to expose weaknesses they perceived in Islam, whether in terms of theological
deficiencies or social ills thought to be caused by Muslim culture, in order to
prepare the ground for more effective presentations of the Christian message.
These materials fall readily into the category of religious polemic.
Other mission researchers have focused on the task of identifying potential
bridges to the imaginative world of Muslim believers. Among these efforts
have been numerous proposals for how to bypass the roadblock of doctrinal
solidarity that seems to be preventing missionary access to the followers of
Islam. Thus, we have Paul Hiebert (1989), Rick Love (2000), and Dudley
Woodberry (2008) exploring the realm of power encounters and spiritual
warfare, where it is thought that missionaries might be able to engage the
worldview of “folk” Islam. A subset of this research concerns itself with the
phenomenon of dreams and the potential of visionary experiences to draw
Muslims to Jesus (Musk 1988). Others (for example, Parshall 1983) have
speculated on the possibility that Islamic mysticism (Sufism) might provide a
way into popular Islam for Christian missions.
Kenneth Cragg may also be considered a bridge-builder between Islam and
Christianity; his prodigious literary output and wide influence within
missiology invite a special mention. In his case, it is the conceptual heart of
orthodox Islam with which he wants to be in conversation, rather than some
experiential corner of Muslim faith and feeling. He has endeavored to make
this connection over more than a half-century of scholarly writing by focusing
on topics of undoubted interest to both Muslims and Christians, including
prophethood, revelation, christology, human freedom, idolatry, and the nature
of God. He has been asking, often in the company of Muslims, what God
might require from faithful people, while also examining carefully our various
expectations of God. As Christopher Lamb (1997, 100-122) has pointed out,
the theological goal of Cragg's work has remained quite consistent over his
long career—not only to foster mutual understanding across the boundary
lines of confession but also to commend the gospel to Muslims using terms
made available in the Qur'an and the literary traditions of Islam. Put another
way, Cragg's lifelong quest has been to discover “Islamic reasons for being
Christian” (Cragg 1981, 166). Uncounted missionaries to Islam since the mid-
twentieth century have drawn inspiration from Cragg, although his writings
have also attracted not a little criticism and puzzlement.
A final category of research to be mentioned here in connection with
Muslim evangelization concerns the planting of new churches in Muslim-
majority societies. This is not an easy subject to document, because security
fears often prompt authors to adopt a pseudonym or in some other way to
obscure the identity of those about whom they are writing. Precision is also
impeded by the fact that the later stages of these initiatives tend not to be
discussed openly. In other words, new proposals for this kind of church
planting are put into print on a regular basis, but published follow-up pieces
on the results of such efforts are much harder to come by. Another
distinguishing mark of this literature is to be found in the number of
specialized terms attached to this topic, including “insider movements,”
“Jesus mosques,” “Christian-Muslims,” “MBBs” (Muslim-background
believers), and “followers of Isa.”
Many of those who have written most fervently in recent decades about the
evangelization of Muslims and the goal of gathering converts from Islam into
Christian communities of faith have understood their particular challenge to
be one of contextualization. From this perspective, the basic problem for
evangelists is that conversion often entails extraction from Muslim-majority
societies, even when indigenous churches already exist, a situation that tends
to short-circuit the development of any large-scale movement out of Islam
toward Christianity. Another hindrance to evangelistic progress is the off-
putting connection assumed by many Muslims to exist between Christianity
and Western culture. A number of experiments have been undertaken to
overcome these obstacles to Muslim evangelism. What many of these efforts
have in common is an intention to use institutional forms and social practices
borrowed directly from Islamic religious cultures. A scale of contextualization
in these circumstances has been developed (C1-6; outlined in Travis 1998).
C4 believers might call themselves “followers of Isa,” for example, while
continuing to practice certain aspects of Islam, such as the Ramadan fast. The
C5 pattern, resembling in many respects the model of messianic Judaism,
allows converts, who may or may not have submitted to some form of
baptism, to remain in their communities as Muslims. The C6 grouping
designates secret believers in Christ. As might be expected, the wisdom of
these approaches has been vigorously debated, with special attention given to
the problem of syncretism (for example, in Parshall 2003 and Tennent 2006).
A welcome addition to this literature has recently appeared in the published
dissertation of Jonas Jørgensen (2008). The distinctive value of this work
derives in part from the unusually detailed description he provides for a
particular group of Muslim-background Christian believers (the “Jesus
Imandars,” located in Dhaka, Bangladesh). In Jørgensen's book, the
experience and significance of the Jesus Imandars are compared to another
example of hybrid Christianity, the Hindu-background “Christ Bhaktas” of
Chennai, India (on whom, see also Hoefer 2001 and Tennent 2005).
Missiologists have not always demonstrated a high level of interest in the
indigenous religions of Africa, which contrasts sharply with their sustained,
intense desire to lay hold of Islam intellectually. In the early modern period, it
may be argued that the Catholic missionaries of the era simply lacked the
analytical tools needed to comprehend what they were experiencing. Later,
most Protestant observers of the African scene assumed that the primal
religions of the sub-Saharan regions were doomed to extinction as a
consequence of modernity and so did not need to be pondered except as
cultural artifacts of a dying age. Many apparently were all too ready to bid
them good riddance, if the comments of Indian missionary Nicol Macnicol
submitted to the Jerusalem meeting of the IMC do, in fact, represent the
majority view at the time: “No one doubts that the religion of the Bantu or of
the native of the Congo must go—and the sooner the better—and this is not
less the case with the animistic worships that are to be found still alive and
powerful in so many regions of India as well” (1928, 3).
The “virtual absence of Africa” (Stanley 2009, 97–102; see also 235-45) at
the 1910 World Missionary Conference has been noted on many occasions.
For Catholics, a similar dynamic may be observed at Vatican II, where the
African religions are not named alongside the monotheistic faiths, Buddhism,
and Hinduism, but are more vaguely represented as “a certain perception of
that hidden power which hovers over the course of things and over the events
of human history” (Nostra Aetate 2). As Teresa Okure (2009) has pointed out,
the sin of Edinburgh against Africa was not only a matter of demographic
imbalances in the distribution of delegates; it was also felt in the way the
conference misrepresented the needs, gifts, religious aspirations, and cultural
richness of the continent. Yet there were a few signs even then that the
Protestant missionary movement was about to reassess its stance toward the
religions and cultures of Africa. Stanley Friesen (1996), for example, has
called attention to the contributions made to the Edinburgh study process by
several experienced African missionaries with anthropological interests.
Despite a widespread commitment to evolutionary models of cultural
development (with Africans usually placed at the bottom of the ladder) and no
discernible desire to challenge the European colonial order, contributing
scholar-missionaries such as Henry Callaway (through his writings), Henri
Junod, and R. H. Nassau at least showed respect for African religion by
treating it as a serious subject, worthy of study. Few conference participants
were yet in a position to appreciate how anthropological research could help
them relate more effectively to the religions of Africa, but some of these data
would soon begin to affect the discussion of and planning for mission
activities in Africa going forward.
After Edinburgh, missiology and African studies directly converged when
IMC administrator J. H. Oldham, the German Africanist and former
missionary Diedrich Westermann, and a collection of mission advocates and
scholarly experts joined forces in 1924 to establish the International Institute
of African Languages and Cultures (Clements 2004, 178). A few years later,
the institute began to publish the academic journal Africa. This same
coalition, with the participation of some European colonial officials
responsible for African education, was also deeply involved in the 1926 Le
Zoute conference on mission in Africa. We can see in these institutional
developments between the two World Wars a missionary intention not only to
“save” and develop Africa but also, increasingly, to understand the cultural
and linguistic particulars of the region more completely. An additional figure
of considerable importance from this period, whose contributions to the study
of African religions undoubtedly influenced both anthropology and
missiology, is Edwin Smith (1929).
Toward the end of the colonial era, a more consistently positive reading of
the African religions had begun to emerge in missionary circles. This is not to
say that dismissive attitudes entirely disappeared. But alongside the many
devout evangelists who still viewed the African religious landscape as an
undifferentiated wasteland of superstition and futility rose another voice
within the missionary ranks that wanted to talk about the meaning and
function of traditional spiritualities in local contexts and the potential
relationships that might be identified between these ways of being religious
and the outlook of Christianity. Andrew Walls gives credit to Geoffrey
Parrinder (1954) for putting the study of African religion on a new footing
within missiology (and beyond) through the creation of a new conceptual
category he denominated “African traditional religion” (ATR). In his tribute
article, Walls (2004, 213–15) also lays stress on the importance of Parrinder's
basic insight that Christianity and the older religions of Africa had become
inseparably linked since the nineteenth century, with each now able to
influence the development of the other. Another scholar whose work during
this period would later prove to be seminal for African studies and missiology
alike is Bengt Sundkler (1909–95). When Sundkler published Bantu Prophets
in South Africa (1948), he opened up a scholarly pathway into an African
religious world up to then barely known to outsiders: the African Independent
Churches (AICs).
Decolonization spurred new efforts to understand the still expanding
universe of African religion from many perspectives, including missiology.
To comprehend all this scholarly activity is not an easy task, but Adrian
Hastings (2000) has produced an invaluable guide to a large segment of this
sprawling field of inquiry: African Christian studies. David Maxwell (2006)
subsequently added some remarks of his own on this same subject, also
penned from behind the editor's desk at the Journal of Religion in Africa. As
Hastings points out, political independence had its academic counterparts.
Within the creative context of an emerging postcolonial African environment,
full-scale searches were mounted to find evidence of African initiatives in
religion that would offset the pronounced scholarly emphasis previously
given to foreign missionary activities. An explosion of studies highlighting
the African Independent Churches and the so-called New Religious
Movements coming to life across Africa was the uneven but happy result of
this quest. The work of Harold Turner (1967) on the Church of the Lord
(Aladura) and David Barrett's study of new African religious movements,
Schism and Renewal in Africa (1968), led the way for many others to come
after them. A number of African theologians of this same generation, such as
Bolaji Idowu and John Mbiti, also contributed original research with broad
significance. A major theme up for discussion at the time and ever since then
was how to relate the abiding concerns of Christian theology to the traditional
religious heritage of Africa. Kwame Bediako's study of modern African
theologians shows how a selection of pioneering figures negotiated this
conundrum (Bediako 1992, esp. 267–444). As Bediako makes clear, the
underlying issue powering much of this research in theology has been the
need to construct authentic African Christian identities in all the places on the
continent where the church now finds itself. Evaluating the missionary past of
one's community is part of this project. The indigenization of theology in this
context also means coming to terms with the whole of African religious
experience. To the extent that theologians, historians, and sociologists of
religion specializing in African Christianity are paying serious attention to
these tasks, a once-absent African perspective will be able to play its rightful
part in the study of mission and the religions.
COMPARATIVE MISSIOLOGY
Christianity is not the only religious tradition to exhibit a missionary impulse.
Certain ideologies and worldviews likewise appear to contain within
themselves strong desires to be spread abroad, whether by word or by deed.
Despite these obvious facts, relatively few missiologists have applied
themselves to the problem of comparative missiology, which I understand to
be the study of mission (or some aspect of mission) undertaken with direct
reference to its occurrence in more than one religious tradition or ideology.
An introduction to missiology that recognizes the possibility of
comparative analysis is the “missiological encyclopedia” of Jan Jongeneel
(1995–97). According to the outline of the field presented in Jongeneel's
project, a set of comparative topics is proposed within the major division he
designates “philosophy of mission” (Missionsphilosophie). However,
Jongeneel is able to report only a small collection of material, all of which he
lists under the subtopic “phenomenology of mission.” I consider just one of
the studies cited by Jongeneel to be a full-fledged example of comparative
missiology. This is the article by religious studies scholar Frank Whaling, in
which an attempt is made to compare the social processes and religious values
involved in the “transplanting of the Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim
traditions into different cultures” (1981, 319). Whaling identifies a short list
of common elements that help to explain the missionary success of these three
traditions in the locations studied. Of paramount importance, in his view, is
the crucial combination of “external opportunity” for expansion and “inward
dynamism.” Whaling also thought he detected in the missionary experience of
each community evidence of one or more “hermeneutical bridges” over which
new religious ideas could pass into second cultures (323, 325–26, 329-30). Of
particular interest here is the attention Whaling pays to the methodology of
comparison. He does not think a phenomenological approach will be helpful,
because superficial similarities are likely to obscure the substantive
differences that separate the religions from each other (316–18). Recognition
is given to “an incipient comparative theology of mission” (314), but Whaling
intends instead to begin working on a nonnormative “comparative religious
study of mission” (316). In any case, Whaling understands himself to be
operating in largely “unexplored territory” (319), owing to a lack of extant
literature on this subject.
Subsequent to the publication of Whaling's article, comparative
investigations of mission have not been particularly numerous and, when they
appear, tend not to make reference to each other. The result (with one
important exception to be noted below) is a scattered, uncoordinated
discourse related to comparative missiology, begun from multiple starting
points. A few outstanding resources may nevertheless be recommended. The
first is a major article, “Missions: Missionary Activity,” included in the
Encyclopedia of Religion. Max Stackhouse authored the original entry,
published in 1987, and then updated his work for the second edition of the
encyclopedia, which appeared in 2005. Stackhouse looks beyond the usual
group of religions considered to be persistently missionary (Christianity,
Buddhism, and Islam), in order to carry out “a systematic overview of
organized proselytism and the basic ideational, social, and institutional
foundations” on which such activities may be said to rest (2005, 6069).
Several themes are shown to be pertinent to a variety of religions and their
missionary practices, including con-textualization, resistance to mission,
relativistic thinking about religion, the roles played by informal and more
professional agents of mission, plus the relationship of mission to expressions
of nationalism and imperialism. Stackhouse also considers how rival
missionary programs have affected each other.
A comparativist perspective is also present in the set of essays published
together under the title Mixed Messages (Scott and Griffiths, 2005). While the
first half of this interesting volume centers on the material culture of Christian
missions, several of the essays in part 2 offer accounts of mission in a select
group of other religious traditions. These chapters are similar to each other in
two respects: (1) they concentrate on contemporary developments rather than
long since passed eras of missionary expansion; and (2) their scope is further
limited to the study of Islamic, Buddhist, and Hindu missions to the West. One
other chapter looks at some of the leading institutions of Western, liberal
democracy (such as the World Bank) and concludes that something like a
secular missionary discourse of civilizing uplift has developed to explain their
global purpose. Although not finally brought into conversation with each
other, these different treatments of mission do provide data potentially of
great value to comparative missiology. Another essay collection to be
mentioned here is Learman (2005). In this case, the primary focus is on cross-
cultural Buddhist missions to the West and elsewhere, but many of the
essayists make reference to research on Christian mission.
By far, the most developed sector within comparative missiology is that
focused on Christian mission and Islamic da'wa. Sustained attention has been
given to this subject, with earlier work factoring into more recent scholarship.
Much of this activity is reviewed in David Kerr (2000). In addition to the
materials cited in Kerr's article, there are other studies with which the
comparative missiologist will want to become familiar. Robin Horton's
several articles (1971, 1975a, 1975b) on conversion to Christianity and Islam
in sub-Saharan Africa, cited earlier, is one example. We also now have a
preliminary statistical study of cross-cultural missionaries working on behalf
of Islam worldwide and for Christianity within the Muslim world (Johnson
and Scoggins 2005). Critical research has begun to appear, too, on the
missionary schools of Fethullah Gülen, organized on behalf of Turkism and
the renewal of Islam especially in Central Asia after the fall of the Soviet
Empire (see Balci 2003). Perhaps the most influential and penetrating
comparative treatment of mission in Islam and Christianity made available so
far is the analysis offered in Lamin Sanneh's Translating the Message (1989,
esp. 211–38). Sanneh argues that the essential difference between Christian
mission and Islamic da'wa lies in the principle of “translatability.” The
Christian community declares its preference for translatability whenever it
decides to do theology in a local idiom or renders its scriptures into another of
the world's languages, in contrast to the privileging of Arabic within Islam.
Andrew Walls (2002a, 121), among many others, has confirmed this
judgment, observing with respect to mission practice in Africa (also Sanneh's
primary test case): “it is Christianity, not Islam, that has struck its roots into
the vernacular past.”
 One more factor adding depth to this strain of comparative discourse on
mission is the fact that Muslims and Christians have both been participating.
On occasion, Muslim and Christian scholars have met together in structured
dialogue events in order to discuss Christian mission and Islamic da'wa. A
milestone gathering of this type took place under the auspices of the World
Council of Churches in 1976 at Chambésy, Switzerland. The papers presented
at that meeting, plus a transcript of the discussions that ensued, were
published in the IRM later that year. More recently, the South African
Missiological Society invited Islamic scholar Farid Esack to share a Muslim
perspective on Christian and Muslim forms of mission in the context of the
Society's 2006 annual congress (Esack 2006). Also relevant to this part of
missiology are discussions of mission conducted by Christians and Muslims
in less formal circumstances. Heather Sharkey's work (2004) on Arabic
language anti-missionary treatises illuminates one side of this conversation, as
it unfolded in the postcolonial half of the twentieth century. Earlier, the
Muslim reformer Rashid Rida (1865–1935) had commented more than once
on the effects of Christian mission in the Muslim world in the pages of the
short-lived but influential periodical he edited (al-Manar). A remarkable
exchange of views between Rida and the Danish missionary Alfred Nielson
on the subject of mission is described in Umar Riyad (2002).
 6
The Means of Mission
When Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) sketched out a “brief outline”
for the study of theology, he made a passing reference to mission and
suggested that a “theory of missions” might be included among the concerns
of “practical theology” (1988, 153). Since Schleiermacher indicates (134,
140) that this part of his curriculum had to do with “church leadership,”
meaning “church government and service to the congregation,” his
conception of mission was unnaturally constricted. Outreach was thought to
take place ordinarily in the vicinity of congregations already in existence,
whose activities non-Christians could observe for themselves (153). Left
unexamined were the evangelizing processes by which entirely new
communities of faith might come into being.
Nearly a century later, when the field of missiology began to take shape
formally, the parochialism of Schleiermacher had been left far behind. By the
turn of the twentieth century, the global dimensions of mission were self-
evident to all, and most Christians in the West took for granted that
Christianity by nature was a vigorously expansive faith tradition. Yet in at
least one respect Schleiermacher's perspective on mission lived on. This was
his assumption that mission ought to be studied primarily from a practical
standpoint, as a technical subject. So thought Gustav Warneck, whose
groundbreaking introduction to the study of mission (1892–1903) emphasized
the operational challenges to be faced on the mission field. Warneck's
counterpart in the world of Catholic missiology, Joseph Schmidlin, took a
similar approach, arguing that scholars of mission had two fundamental
questions before them (1931, 4). The first asked about the “why” of mission,
which required the theorist to furnish an adequate philosophical basis for the
mission enterprise (appealing, for example, to dogmatic, biblical, or ethical
principles). A second major question concerned the “how” of mission, which
invited scholarly discussion of possible mission agencies, personnel policies,
funding mechanisms, ways to share information about mission, and the
special demands of ministry work abroad, among other topics. At about the
same time, at Edinburgh 1910, one can also perceive a heightened concern for
the effective management of what had become a rather unwieldy, complex
global campaign of religious activity on behalf of Christianity. Here, too, it
was hoped that the study of mission might help those leading the modern
missionary movement to do their work more efficiently.
With these roots, it comes as no surprise that academic missiology has
always included a significant portion of research devoted to practical issues.
As a way to organize my analysis of this material, I have chosen to structure
this chapter into four parts. An initial section concentrates on large-scale
studies of mission strategy, in which the benefits and liabilities of different
tactics are contrasted with each other. Next is a discussion of research more
narrowly focused on particular mission techniques and modalities. In a third
section, my intention is to treat the organizational aspects of evangelization,
which means especially to consider how scholars have investigated the
institutional means of mission. A final section will center on the subject of
mission finances, after which it should be possible in a brief conclusion to say
something about the place of methodological studies within missiology as a
whole.
TACTICS AND STRATEGIES
No missionary endeavor in history has had access to unlimited human
resources. Supplies of time, money, and opportunity also inevitably grow
short at some point, in which case hard choices have to be made with respect
to priorities and the most workable solutions to missionary problems. We may
assume that the leading proponents of Christian mission in every generation
have had to think strategically at some level about how best to advance the
cause of the gospel. The apostle Paul, for example, may be appreciated for his
organizing genius, in addition to his evangelical zeal and theological acumen
(on Paul's various roles in mission, see Skreslet 2006b, 193–203). The Jesuits
in the early modern period were similarly astute planners of mission, who
took care to gather information and experience from around the world and to
adjust their practices based on what had been learned. However, the
systematic study of these and other attempts to strategize about mission (the
focus of this section) is a more recent scholarly development.
Perhaps the first to publish a comprehensive account of missionary
methods was Alexander Duff. It may be recalled from the previous chapter
that Duff authored an influential description of Hinduism in the late 1830s, in
part meant to establish the need for Christian missions in India. In the same
book, Duff advocates a specific kind of missionary venture, one featuring
Western forms of education presented in English to a student body drawn
particularly from the higher castes of Indian society. Duff's home audience,
for whom this proposal was initially prepared, contained more than one
constituency. Besides a general church public spread out across England and
Scotland and the various judicatories responsible for mission in the Church of
Scotland, he was also speaking to a colonial establishment that had the power
to restrict or to promote missionary activities on the subcontinent.
Duff identified three basic mission methods used up to then in India. He
shows awareness of the fact that each mode of mission had its defenders in
the church and that rational and scriptural arguments could be made in
support of all three. The most pressing Indian mission question to be
answered was essentially strategic: “How, or in what way can the Gospel be
most speedily and effectually brought to bear on the entire mass of the
people?” (1839, 284). In Duff's view, missionary preaching was a noble
pursuit founded on the example of the apostles, but the results after decades
of effort had been so meager that it made no sense to him to depend on this
method to evangelize the vast population of India, so long as the preachers
were a relatively few foreign agents. Alternatively, some advocates of mission
had proposed that translation and the circulation of the Christian scriptures
ought to be the primary task of those sent abroad by the churches. Duff
likened this scheme to a plan to distribute healing drugs to the public without
providing any guidance for their use (376). A third way to approach mission
was to focus on Christian education, which Duff considered to be a form of
preaching directed toward the young (286–87). This method, he believed, was
the only one that could reasonably be expected to renew India and to
Christianize its population. But to be effective, he argued, mission educators
had to stop allocating so many of their resources to the elementary grades and
to the lowly village school, in favor of more specialized institutions that could
influence the children of India's elites, who would one day hold the future of
the nation in their powerful hands.
Duff's ideas about methods became the basis of an enduring model of
mission, which the Presbyterians in Scotland, by and large, embraced as their
own through the nineteenth century (Walls 1993, 571–72; see also Maxwell
2001). According to this theory, the goal of mission was to renovate
“heathen” societies wholesale, using the power of modern education to break
down outmoded customs and traditional value systems. It was quite possible,
however, to study the situation of Protestant missions in Duff's era and to
draw quite different conclusions about what evangelizing activities should
receive the highest priority. An alternative approach favored by the leaders of
the two largest nineteenth-century Protestant missionary organizations, the
CMS and the ABCFM, emphasized the importance of preaching and other
forms of direct evangelism. Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson were agreed
that educational initiatives were appropriate in some circumstances. Like
doctors, missionary educators and their schools were sometimes welcomed
into resistant societies when preachers were not and so had the capacity to
open closed doors. The schools were also unquestionably justified to the
extent that they served to train up an educated native clergy. Venn and
Anderson were nevertheless keen to keep their missionaries focused on
spiritual activities, which meant avoiding civilizing functions not expected to
lead anytime soon to widespread movements of conversion or the gathering of
new believers into native congregations.
A substantial literature has accumulated around the figures of Venn and
Anderson and their shared goal of the “three-self church” (self-supporting,
self-governing, and self-propagating). Henry Venn's “strategic vision” is well
described in an essay that emphasizes his persistent support of native
episcopacy (Williams 2000). Also still relevant is the book-length treatment
Peter Williams gives to the “ideal of the self-governing church” (1990). The
application of Venn's ideas through the Sierra Leone Native Pastorate is
thoughtfully explored in Hanciles (2001). Two of Venn's most important
policy documents are reproduced in appendices to Shenk (1983, 118–37). For
Anderson, we now have a fine intellectual biography (Harris 1999) that
examines his strategic thinking about mission against the backdrop of
domestic pressures bearing down on the ABCFM in the decades leading up to
the American Civil War and the hopes for social advancement and economic
improvement met everywhere on the mission field. Anderson strongly
resisted the idea of putting the larger program of mission he directed under
any “civilizational” aim, including the abolition of slavery. He also worried
that providing too much education would undermine missionary efforts to
create a competent native clergy eager to evangelize their own society, above
all else. These positions drove Anderson to advocate a “theory of missions to
the heathen” (1845) that valued oral preaching and strictly religious activities
over all other forms of mission. While this judgment had to be defended on
theological grounds, of course, the most impassioned segment of Anderson's
argument (indicated by a unique mix of typefaces used for emphasis at this
point in the document) touted the element of efficiency: “holding up CHRIST
AS THE ONLY SAVIOR OF LOST SINNERS” is “the only effectual way of prosecuting
missions among the heathen,” because
…it requires the fewest men, the least expense, the shortest time. It
makes the least demand for learning in the great body of laborers. It
involves the least complication in means and measures. (19–20)
Whatever pragmatic benefits might have accrued to this approach, Harris
nevertheless concludes (1999, 163) that Anderson's strategy was inherently
flawed, because it sought “to foster native agency by suppressing indigenous
aspirations” for advanced forms of education.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Venn-Anderson model of
mission gradually yielded pride of place to another set of priorities not so
focused on the creation of independent national churches. The new fashion in
mission was to build up non-Western societies by permeating them with
Christian institutions. A variety of factors influenced this shift in approach,
including the rise of the social gospel movement in American Christianity (on
this connection, see Fishburn 2004). Others have suggested (for example,
Robert 1997, 129–30) that the end of the American Civil War left a generation
of women ready to mobilize their resources for benevolent activity throughout
the world. Protestant women were not only volunteering for missionary work
abroad in ever greater numbers, but they also set about creating their own
mission organizations at this time, further boosting the variety of service
opportunities available to them. Barred from preaching in most
circumstances, these new recruits were ready and eager to engage in other
forms of missionary labor. A surge of aggressive European imperialism from
the 1880s also influenced the course of the modern missionary movement at
this point in its history (an explanation for how this happened is offered in
Hutchison 1987, 91–124). Colonial governments had their own preferences
respecting mission methods, which ran strongly in the direction of education
and social services and away from conversionist activities that might incite
native resistance to foreign rule.
Missionary efforts to preach the gospel and to establish churches by no
means came to an end at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, some
organizations (for example, “faith missions”) continued to specialize in
precisely these activities, epitomized in the figures of the vernacular street
preacher and the itinerant rural evangelist. What began to change was the
proportion of missionaries appointed to what many in previous generations
would have considered secular occupations, as teachers, physicians, nurses,
social workers, administrators, college professors, literacy experts, printing
press operators, and industrial educators. The status of these roles within the
overall missionary enterprise was also on the rise, at least within those parts
of the church that considered them to be suitable means by which God's
Reign could be made visible in the modern age. This was not a return to the
ideology of Alexander Duff. He had hoped to use education to “explode and
tear up” the traditional structures of Hindu society, in order to clear a way for
Christianity to be accepted (Smith 1881, 108–9). This was a moment rather to
share from the abundance of Western civilization, widely considered at the
time to be among the best gifts of God to humanity. The decision of the WCC
during the 1960s to embrace “humanization” as the primary goal of Christian
ministry (World Council of Churches 1967) gave new life to this longstanding
mission impulse.
In the early twentieth century, Roman Catholics, too, had their debates over
mission strategy. In this ecclesial context, the key question did not revolve
around the value of civilizing activities to mission, as it tended to do in
Protestant circles. Instead, Catholic strategists focused on which of the
traditional missionary functions ought to be given the highest priority. One
school of thought, commonly associated with the theological faculty at
Louvain, emphasized the need to extend the visible structures of the
institutional church. The aim of mission, according to this way of thinking,
was to plant new communities of faith in places where the church did not
already exist and to replicate the organizational structures of settled church
life as quickly as possible. Pierre Charles (1883–1954) is widely recognized
as the leading theoretician of the “school of Louvain.” An alternative view,
often linked to Joseph Schmidlin and his colleagues at Münster, stressed the
importance of gospel proclamation (even to nominal Christians) and the
conversion of individuals (Müller 1987, 34–38).
After Vatican II, the differences thought to separate the rival schools of
Louvain and Münster soon receded in significance, which helps to explain the
relative lack of current research on these topics within missiology. Vastly
more important to postconciliar discussions of mission strategy within
Catholicism has been the concept of liberation. In this case, the concerns of
theology are very closely tied to methodological issues, due to the
praxiological edge put on liberation theory right from the start (Gutiérrez
1973; see also Haight 1985).
Reflection on mission methods from a liberation perspective initially
focused on problems of injustice, felt especially in the political and economic
spheres. For some, this meant identifying and exposing the deep causes of
poverty (Romero 1985). Others helped to organize resistance, often by
undertaking projects of education that could empower the poor to free
themselves from various kinds of exploitation (Freire 1970). Yet others have
heard in the mission theme of liberation a call to action to create new social
structures that better reflect the Reign of God announced by Jesus (Costas
1982, 21–42). Over time, additional emphases related to liberation have
surfaced within the literature of missiology, including concerns for gender
justice (Kang 2005), human rights (McCormick 1979), and promoting respect
for religious and cultural minorities (Pachuau 2002). An emerging area of
research concentrates on the interface of Christian mission and
environmentalism (Jenkins 2008). Of course, non-Catholics of various
persuasions have been participating fully in all of these discussions. In a
remarkable way, the work of missiologist Inus Daneel (2001) on African
“earthkeeping” demonstrates the integrative capacity of a liberationist
perspective on mission. All, or nearly all, of the different applications of
liberation theology mentioned in this paragraph figure in the approach to
mission described by Daneel. Different kinds of African Initiated Churches in
Zimbabwe are shown leading the way in this story of earth healing, working
in concert with like-minded African traditionalists.
 Before closing this section, mention must also be made of the strategic
analysis offered in the work of Donald McGavran (1897–1990), especially
since the church growth methods he advocated have been a magnet for
missiological research. McGavran was active as a theorist in the second half
of the twentieth century, but his thinking built on the earlier insights of
Roland Allen and the Indian mission experience of J. Waskom Pickett (1933).
Based on his time in China (1895–1903), Allen faulted the missionary
establishment of his day for restraining the power of the Holy Spirit. In his
view, they did this by relying on the vitality of their own institutions instead
of God's strength (Allen 1927, esp. 131–95). He observed that missionaries as
a rule were eager to control the behavior of those converting to Christianity
but reluctant to entrust them with any real authority. Missionaries routinely
fostered a culture of dependence on the mission field, which ensured that
foreign workers would always be needed. Most assumed the universality of
Western church forms. A more faithful course of action, Allen proposed
(1912), would be to emulate the apostles, who did not spend most of their
time constructing and servicing complex social organizations. Theirs was a
light and very temporary missionary presence. They concentrated on the
initial stages of proclamation and quickly baptized those who responded to
their message. As soon as possible, they transferred responsibility to local
leaders, who took charge of the new faith communities that had sprung to life.
Allen was struck by the spontaneous manner in which the church seemed to
expand over its first century. He feared that the modern missionary
movement, symbolized in his era by the all-too-stationary mission compound,
was in danger of losing its momentum altogether.
Donald McGavran gladly received Allen's critique of modern Protestant
missions (1955, 88–89). Alongside Allen, he also advocated a return to
apostolic methods, by which means he expected episodes of mass conversion
based on “people movements” to multiply. As Newbigin has observed (1995,
130), Allen wanted the missions to stop over-planning, so that God's Spirit
could do its work unfettered by human schemes. McGavran, on the other
hand, pushed for a new kind of strategizing that incorporated a sociological
perspective. He urged mission leaders to concentrate their resources on those
initiatives with the greatest promise for numerical success. Where popular
movements toward Christianity were already underway, these should be
supported to the utmost. When established institutions no longer served to
draw new people to the church, the huge sums usually needed for their
upkeep should not be allowed to monopolize mission budgets. McGavran
counseled the abandonment of an old strategy based on individual
conversions and small Christian colonies maintaining stable but separate
existences apart from the dominant social groups in their contexts. Significant
growth would occur, he believed, only when more missionaries began to
understand how communities of people decide to convert together to a new
religious point of view. They have to be able to recognize when a clan, tribe,
or caste suddenly becomes receptive to the gospel. According to McGavran
(1955), these are the surest “bridges of God” over which the greatest number
of people have been and will continue to be drawn to Christ.
The ideas of McGavran concerning evangelism have been intensively
studied and debated within missiology. One of the most controversial aspects
of his theory has been the “homogeneous unit principle,” which holds that
people are generally more responsive to evangelists from their own culture
and want to join churches “without crossing racial, linguistic, or class
barriers” (McGavran 1970, 198). While this principle may be sociologically
valid (contra McClintock 1988) and usefully warns against (Western) cultural
imperialism, many commentators (for example, Padilla 1982) take McGavran
to task for appearing to bless the formation of churches based on cultural
differences assumed to be more or less permanent. What then to make of the
radical unity effected in Christ between Jews and Gentiles in Paul's day? Was
this not a template for the future? Similarly, McGavran's argument (1962) that
God intends the church to find lost sheep and not merely to seek after them
half-heartedly may well be an appropriate challenge to missionary
complacency with the religious status quo, but his insistence on numerical
growth as the leading indicator of faithfulness in mission has been vigorously
disputed (for example, by Newbigin 1995, 121–59).
McGavran (1955, 150–54) recommended that the dynamics of people
movements be studied more carefully and that “controlled experiments” using
his recommendations be conducted around the world in order to discover the
most effective methods to use in connection with this kind of evangelism. His
own Institute of Church Growth and the School of World Mission McGavran
helped to found at Fuller Theological Seminary sponsored a great deal of this
work. Others have concentrated on the preliminary step of identifying and
understanding the world's different people groups and their languages (on this
research, see Johnstone 2007). Another of McGavran's emphases—the
importance of counting for mission strategy—has been developed into the
subdiscipline of “missiometrics” (Barrett 1995). Two editions of the World
Christian Encyclopedia (1982, 2000) stand as the most visible products of
this impulse within contemporary mission studies. David Barrett and Todd
Johnson (1990, 25-40) have also contributed to missiology the strategic
notion of dividing the world's population into three groups, based on their
response to the Christian faith: unevangelized, evangelized non-Christian, and
Christian, or Worlds A-B-C. A related concept that some have used to focus
thinking about the deployment of missionaries worldwide is the “10/40
Window” (discussed in Coote 2000). The current state of statistical research
on mission is substantially (and attractively) represented in the Atlas of
Global Christianity (Johnson and Ross 2009).
METHODS AND MODES OF MISSION
In this section I propose to discuss a selection of research primarily having to
do with particular mission methods. No attempt will be made to present a
comprehensive roll call of techniques at the disposal of the church and other
mission agencies. It should be possible, however, even in just a few pages, to
illustrate the wide range of topics I see falling within this part of a larger
scholarly discourse on the means of mission. Practices that have already
received extended treatment above, such as translation or church growth
methodologies, will not be discussed again in this section, in order to leave
room for scholarship on methods not yet described in much detail. Four broad
areas of research will be highlighted: social transformation, healing,
communication strategies, and dialogue.
Social Transformation
Christian missions in the modern era have persistently incorporated or
featured commitments to improve the social conditions of those being
evangelized. In some cases, these intentions substantially influenced the
choice of methods used on the field. A growing body of researchers continues
to investigate these ministry initiatives, a few of which stand out as
particularly well subscribed missionary projects. From the late eighteenth
century, for example, the issue of slavery and the problem of its abolition
became inextricably bound to African missions. In part, this was because
many of the same personalities advocating an end to British involvement in
the slave trade were also behind a missionary push to found the Sierra Leone
colony in West Africa. A key figure in this regard is William Wilberforce
(1759–1833), whose story has been told many times. An African protagonist
from the same era is Olaudah Equiano, whose slave narrative concludes with
his unsuccessful application to the bishop of London to return to Africa as a
missionary and then an account of his role in outfitting the first Sierra
Leonean cohort (1995, 220–36). As Lamin Sanneh (1999) has shown in his
study of “abolitionists abroad,” many different motives lay behind the Sierra
Leone venture, not all of them large-hearted. Beside a desire to evangelize
Africa and so affirm the essential oneness of the human race in God's eyes
were other interests that hoped even more for commercial profits or saw in the
establishment of a distant colonial outpost a political opportunity to offload
some of London's least desirable inhabitants (the initial group of settlers
included scores of destitute blacks and white prostitutes). If religious purposes
were ultimately served in Sierra Leone, it was largely due to the fact that
thousands of freed slaves intercepted on their way to the New World by
British warships after 1807 were resettled in the colony. This population
became the focus of an extraordinary community-wide social experiment, in
which the teaching of democratic ideals, Western social habits, and gospel
truth commingled in missionary programs.
The Sierra Leonean model could not be replicated elsewhere, dependent as
it was on a steady inflow of African “recaptives” to the colony, but the idea of
combining abolition, mission, and the promotion of commerce continued to
figure in African missions well into the nineteenth century. Missionary
support for Western commercial undertakings abroad sometimes rested on the
conviction that increased trade would boost the civilizational prospects of
“backward” societies, thereby paving the way for eventual Christianization
(on this view, see Porter 2004, 91–115). A less complicated argument on
behalf of international trade could also be constructed, if the abolition of
slavery stood near the center of one's missionary agenda. Perceptive
supporters of mission devoted to the cause of abolition recognized that some
form of “legitimate trade” had to be substituted for the social and economic
advantages provided by the slave system to native elites, Western traders, and
other interested parties.
Sanneh (1999, 139–50) shows how recaptives led the way into Nigeria for
Christianity and commerce from the 1830s. At about the same time, Thomas
Fowell Buxton (1786–1845) was agitating in Parliament as the successor of
Wilberforce on behalf of aboriginal rights and further measures to restrict
slavery in Africa (his influential study of the African slave trade, published in
1839–40, is discussed in Walls 1994). The leaders of the CMS recognized in
Buxton's proposals for new forms of commercial activity to displace the slave
trade a means to extend their work in Sierra Leone to other parts of Africa. So
they eagerly participated in a government-funded expedition up the Niger
River in 1841, the purpose of which was to persuade African rulers to
renounce slavery in exchange for favorable trade relations with Britain. The
whole venture is examined critically in Temperley (1991). A CMS
representative on that expedition was an African recaptive, Samuel Crowther,
in whose published journal (Crowther 1970) a missionary perspective on
Buxton's grand scheme is articulated. A contemplated CMS Niger Mission
was intended to work alongside government and private commercial entities
in order to advance an ambitious program of evangelism and social
transformation. As a character in his own account, Crowther the missionary
was ready and willing to speak not only on behalf of the Christian Deity and
the Bible and against the evils of slavery (and the dangers of Islam), but also
in favor of agriculture (314), the dignity of legitimate commerce (331), and
the benevolent intentions of Britain's monarch (307, 315).
 The leading edge of the anti-slavery campaign eventually moved to East
Africa. David Livingstone (1858) captured the imagination of his generation
with a stirring call to cooperate with Providence by opening the Zambezi
basin to the benefits of Protestant Christianity and commerce, at the expense
of a regional slave-trading system that thrived on inter-tribal conflict (for a
recent description of Livingstone's missionary career, see Ross 2002; the
slogan “Commerce and Christianity” is expertly examined in Porter 1985). A
Catholic counterpart to Livingstone was the founder of the White Fathers,
Cardinal Charles Lavigerie, whose missionary program not only stood in
opposition to slavery (Renault 1994, 367–85) but also testified to the virtues
of Christian civilization. With the help of colonial power, Lavigerie hoped for
nothing less than the transformation of a continent.
Adrian Hastings (1994, 282–93) has written perceptively about how
average missionaries were apt to translate the large-scale civilizational
objectives expounded by the likes of Livingstone and Lavigerie into daily
activities. Theirs was not the realm of geopolitics or complicated financial
transactions (stock offerings, mining contracts, etc.). While a few may have
instigated high-profile campaigns of protest against social injustice, such as
William Sheppard and Samuel Lapsley, who exposed the cruelties of King
Leopold's Congo to the world (recounted in Benedetto 1996), most did not
operate at that level. In local contexts judged to be in need of social
improvement, more modest techniques were often the only ones that could be
applied. The missionary decision might be to introduce the plough alongside
the gospel or to teach simple industrial skills or to suggest new ways to
irrigate and plant. Part of the mission might be to advocate or model a
radically different approach to personal hygiene or to suggest new patterns of
marriage and child rearing. Of course, every effort made to advance literacy
had enormous social implications. Particularly when education was made
available to women, previously unthinkable opportunities for work outside
the home or new civic involvements suddenly became possible to imagine.
Oddly enough, almost all of the great social projects proposed by the most
prominent advocates of mission in Africa (and many other places) ended in
collapse and failure. The accumulated effects of many small-scale missionary
actions, on the other hand, proved to be thoroughly transformative in many
circumstances, although not always in the ways the strategists may have
intended.
Healing
Even before the advent of modern scientific medicine, doctors had claimed a
small but secure place for themselves within missionary ranks. Colleagues on
the field, especially those living in less salubrious climates, knew that their
survival might one day depend on the quality of medical care available to
them and so were eager to have trained physicians stationed nearby. Many
missionaries and mission executives were also persuaded that medical doctors
could win a hearing for the gospel in some places otherwise closed to
Christian outreach, as noted earlier. Of course, the most powerful argument in
favor of medical missions was the one based on scripture. Jesus had healed
the sick and the apostles followed his example. Even if later generations were
not able to work similar miracles, were they not still obliged to respond with
compassion to the same kinds of physical, emotional, and psychological
distress that had so moved the heart of Jesus? In the modern era, some
Western sending agencies have given a high priority to medical service and a
few have specialized in this form of mission. In their own way, Pentecostals
have also endeavored to blend together ministries of healing and evangelism.
Students of mission with a particular interest in health ministries may now
consult Christoffer Grundmann's detailed survey of medical missions (2005).
Here one will find an extremely full bibliography covering the literature up
through the 1980s and a careful account of how this special form of mission
service took shape in the nineteenth century (somewhat updated in
Grundmann 2008). The work of the early pioneers is described, with
particular attention given to the careers of Karl Gützlaff, Thomas Colledge,
and Peter Parker (on Parker, now also see Anderson 2006). Grundmann not
only recounts the stories of exceptional individuals. He also treats the
institutional aspects of missionary medicine (the founding of medical mission
societies, for example) and investigates the theological significance of work
done abroad in the name of Christ by nurses, doctors, and other health care
professionals. Another basic orientation to medical missions is offered in the
introduction to Good's study of the “Steamer Parish” operated by the UMCA
on Lake Nyassa between 1885 and 1964 (Good 2004, 1–49; see also
Etherington 2005a, 275–84). Jansen (1995) has contributed a valuable set of
reflections on what he calls “medical missiology.” Additional scholarship on
women missionary physicians is available in Singh (2005), Blaufuss (2005),
Francis-Dehqani (2002), and Brouwer (2002, 34–95; 2006). A recent study of
Canadian nurses laboring in north China (Grypma 2008) sheds light more
generally on the development of missionary nursing. In a still-relevant classic
essay, Andrew Walls (1996, 211–20) adroitly situates the figure of the
medical missionary within the milieu of nineteenth-century missions. Rennie
Schoepflin (2005) takes a further step by examining critically how medical
missionaries were portrayed in a selection of juvenile and children's literature
prepared for American church school audiences between 1880 and 1980. In
what appear at first glance to be simple, winsome stories of missionary
service meant to inspire children, Schoepflin finds a complex tangle of social
values and implicit messages related to healing, superstition, race, and gender
(562). The culture of medical missions is analyzed from another perspective
in Nancy Rose Hunt's study of childbirth in the Belgian Congo. Special
attention is given in this book (Hunt 1999) to mission-trained midwives,
nurses, and teacher-evangelists. John Stanley (2010) considers mission efforts
in China to develop nursing into a profession for a new “female medical
elite.”
In the postcolonial period, many mission hospitals and other church-related
public service institutions passed from foreign to national control.
Coincidently, some governments outside the West began to restrict the
number of new visas issued to missionary physicians and others, often with
the intention of promoting the development of their own domestic health
professions. In the 1970s, some new organizations dedicated to international
health also began to appear, such as Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans
Frontières) and Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde). Among other
things, these groups represented an increasingly attractive secular alternative
to missionary medicine on the world stage.
As the postcolonial context of evangelization evolved, some new patterns
of mission service emerged with respect to health ministries and these topics
have also become research subjects within missiology. The short-term
medical missionary represents one such trend. These might be individual
specialists or teams of health care workers. In many cases, the delivery of care
to underserved areas is still the primary objective, but sometimes there is also
an intention to provide advanced training to indigenous colleagues. The
number of North Americans involved each year in short-term missions is
substantial. Wuthnow (2009, 23) and Priest et al. (2006, 432) are convinced
that well over a million Protestants now participate annually. Just how many
of these volunteers are performing medical tasks cannot be determined with
certainty, however. In the research of Dohn and Dohn (2006) and
Montgomery (1993, 2007), the efficacy and unintended consequences of
short-term medical missions are thoughtfully analyzed.
Increasingly, missionary medicine has been practiced within a global
network of humanitarian organizations. This is a second trend reflected in the
recent literature. It is simply a fact that the critical problems many churches
and denominations hope to address through their international health
ministries now tend to be so huge in scale that cooperative arrangements,
involving many different kinds of organizations, often represent the only
possible way forward. Furthermore, the factor of poverty often adds deep
complexity to what might have appeared in the past to be strictly medical
problems. As a result, church-sponsored health workers and their sending
agencies have had to think more and more in terms of social solutions and not
just individuals in need or the technical problems of disease eradication.
Gerard Jansen (1999) has described the international health order within
which many Christian ministries of healing are now self-consciously
operating. The WCC has sponsored several conferences in which an
integrative approach to mission, health, and healing has been explored
(Matthey 2006). In a remarkably fresh study of mission experience and
theological reflection, Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator (2005) explores the
ecclesial identity of African Catholicism in the light of that tradition's
engagement in Africa with HIV/AIDS, refugees, and poverty.
As Horsfjord observes (2007, 10), the rhetoric of healing became more
prominent within the WCC when this part of the ecumenical movement
committed itself to serious theological conversation with Pentecostal
churches. Pentecostals have not only taken their expectations about divine
healing into dialogue situations with other Christians but have also carried
these convictions into mission on a regular basis. It could hardly have been
otherwise, since the idea of salvation often featured in Pentecostal preaching
typically embraces every sphere of human life, including physical well-being.
Asamoah-Gyadu (2007b) shows how an intense concern for evangelism
might intersect with an equally strong Pentecostal emphasis on the benefits of
exorcism and healing. In the West African context he studies (Ghana),
confidence in the power of the Spirit to restore the sick to health is sometimes
made to stand in opposition to the practice of modern medicine, especially
when the primary causes of illness and misfortune are assumed to be
demonic. A more complementary relationship is also possible to imagine, in
which case Pentecostal church leaders and theologians may explicitly
recognize the importance of both spiritual and scientific means of healing (for
example, in Onyinah 2006). Another dichotomy often imposed on the study
of Pentecostal missions pits social concerns against ministries of deliverance
and healing. Allan Anderson (2004, 206–42) suggests that the “full gospel”
experience so ardently promoted within Pentecostalism worldwide may be
expected to lead to “holistic” concepts of mission that are inherently
expansive, not narrow. In the research of Miller and Yamamori (2007),
numerous examples are produced to illustrate a global Pentecostal movement
in which social engagement and deliverance ministries happily coexist.
Communicating the Word
Just as the church in mission from the beginning has had to think about how
to communicate its message effectively, so have many generations of
missiologists taken an active interest in the study of the various means used to
pursue this objective. Bible translators and their work, discussed earlier,
represent one aspect of this topic. At one time, the missionary sermon was a
particular focus of scholarly attention (Jongeneel 1997, 267–89), but this
seems not to be the case more recently. Throughout the modern period,
missionaries have embraced a wide array of communication techniques
besides the circulation of Christian literature or formal addresses from the
pulpit, and many contemporary researchers have been drawn to study these
other forms of missionary discourse. Most recently, advances in technology
have created entirely new ways for churches and mission agencies to share
the Word of God with those outside the fellowship of Christian faith.
Already in the early modern period Catholic missionaries were
experimenting with new strategies of communication. In part, this was a result
of the fact that the Age of Discovery was thrusting waves of Catholic
evangelists into an expanding universe of societies quite unlike their own.
Preliterate groups encountered outside of Europe posed a special challenge to
those who hoped to evangelize them. Jaime Lara's study of sixteenth-century
Mexico (2008), for example, explores the deep complexity that often marked
missionary attempts to communicate their purposes in colonial Mesoamerica.
Of particular importance here is the attention paid in this superb work of
cultural analysis to missionary creativity, as many different means of
expression were employed to overcome the problem of illiteracy (in this case,
the Mexica were visually literate but unlettered) by constructing new ways to
achieve cross-cultural understanding. In this historical context, missionaries
could not depend on the written Word alone to convey their meaning. Their
message had to be spoken, depicted, and enacted (Lara 2008, 9), using
indigenous media and familiar metaphors. So it was that the sacraments and
many other aspects of the church's liturgical life (including architecture,
religious art, taught devotional practices, and music) became dynamic
instruments of religious encounter, through which the processes of
evangelization took hold at a very deep level. In Lara's view (13), Nahua
Christians were partners with the friars in this highly imaginative work of
cultural translation.
Other scholars have focused on the Jesuits and their particular interest in
drama as a means of proclamation. Châtellier (1997), for example, studied
Catholic rural missions in France and Italy over the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and found that some of the best-known evangelists of the era
became successful, in part, because they learned how to communicate in
theatrical fashion with large audiences in open fields and other public settings.
In these circumstances, penitential processions and outdoor performances of
the gospel story became teaching events for the rural poor, most of whom had
only a superficial grasp of the Catholic faith they may have nominally
confessed. The Jesuits' use of “missionary theater” in an urban environment
(in this case, seventeenth-century Naples) is examined in Selwyn (2004, 211–
42).
Missionary contacts with preliterate societies have continued right up to the
present time. In many of these social contexts, modern-age missionaries have
decided to emulate the example of their forebears by creating written
languages for the benefit of those with whom they might hope to share their
message. This has been a useful strategy, with obvious benefits, but
researchers who focus exclusively on text-centric missionary communication
may be missing a large part of what happens in multilingual, cross-cultural
evangelistic encounters. Even in highly literate societies, some people prefer
to communicate or to receive new information without primary reference to
written texts, perhaps seeing themselves as visual learners. Others are
constantly switching back and forth between printed texts and other forms of
communication. In any case, literacy is never completely achieved in any
society, so there will always be some groups remaining outside the reach of
the written Word.
Many recent studies of missionary communication have focused on
interactions that occur alongside or apart from written texts. Much of this
research touches on the idea of “orality,” which has become something of a
buzzword within certain mission circles. From a recent issue of Missiology
(April 2010) constructed around the theme of orality, one can get a good idea
about what this concept has come to mean to a number of mission researchers
(along with many citations of current research). Scholars who study orality
and missions often concern themselves with the social processes associated
with storytelling and the use of narrative in various cultures. Jesus the teacher
of parables figures in some of this research, for obvious reasons. Others want
to explore how stories have been or might be told using nonverbal forms,
such as drama, music, art, and dance. The work of Walter Ong (1982)
continues to stand as a foundation for much of this research. In his analysis of
orality, Ong highlighted the word as event, impermanent but powerful. He
describes the special techniques used to convey meaning in oral cultures, such
as repetition and formulaic phrasing, while drawing attention to the
intersubjectivity of oral communication (in contrast to written texts, which do
not need the simultaneous involvement of two human parties). Although Ong
himself did not focus directly on missionary matters, his ideas have
stimulated many evangelists and their sending organizations (and those who
study them) to think again about nonprint forms of gospel communication
(Hill 2010).
A final collection of research to be considered in this section has to do with
new communication technologies put to use in mission situations over the
past two centuries. A number of these innovations have proved to be truly
revolutionary, in much the same way that the printing press profoundly
influenced the course of the Protestant Reformation. Viggo Søgaard (1993)
has provided a still-useful survey of modern communications media and their
place in mission and ministry. Included in this introductory text are
discussions of television, radio, video, audio cassettes, film, and computers
(plus sections on print and the arts). Søgaard is especially concerned to help
churches and mission organizations improve their media strategies. To that
end, he not only describes a variety of modern media but also lays out a set of
basic principles underlying communications theory, before suggesting how
religious organizations might evaluate their own use of these available
technologies.
A few other studies more narrowly focused than Søgaard may also be
mentioned. Several treat the magic lantern, which was the preeminent visual
aid carried into mission through the nineteenth century (Simpson 1997 and
Martínez 2010). The development of missionary radio broadcasting,
pioneered in the 1930s by Clarence Jones in Ecuador, is critically discussed in
Stoneman (2007). As Stoneman shows, Jones blazed a trail for international
religious broadcasting that eventually reached around the world. Further,
Stoneman argues that some of the techniques Jones developed in connection
with Station HCJB in Quito (“Voice of the Andes”), including the idea of
distributing pretuned radios to the poor (the “Radio Circle”) and the concept
of broadcasting through “mechanical missionaries” into village settings
otherwise inaccessible to missionaries, substantially helped to prepare the
way for the phenomenal growth of evangelical Christianity in the global
South many decades later. On Protestant Christian radio broadcasting to the
Arabic-speaking world, one may consult the comprehensive study of Jos
Strengholt (2008). Other forms of media besides radio rose to prominence in
the second half of the twentieth century, most notably television, motion
pictures, satellite broadcasting (Schmidt 2007), and the Internet (Asamoah-
Gyadu 2007a). The Jesus film, in particular, has been intensively studied
within missiology (for example, Bakker 2004). Communication is an area of
research likely to flourish in coming decades, as evangelists around the world
avidly embrace new technologies that promise access to remote peoples,
especially when these live in societies where Christian missionaries are often
viewed with suspicion.
Dialogue
Advocates of interfaith dialogue are largely agreed that this activity should
not be employed as a mission tactic. A common argument in support of this
position holds that authentic dialogue, intended to achieve mutual
understanding and sympathetic relations among the adherents of different
religions, is undermined when one or more of the parties involved subordinate
these irenic aims to some other more sectarian concern, such as conversion.
This judgment about the purpose of dialogue appears to have been embraced
within missiology as a whole, based on the principal bibliographic structures
that attempt to represent the field (see Skreslet 2006a). Dialogue is not
typically classified as a “method” of mission, whether in the cumulative
bibliography of the IRM, the Bibliographia Missionaria, the abstracts section
of Missionalia, or the International Mission Bibliography (Thomas 2003).
Across the board within the field, dialogue is considered rather to be a topic
that properly falls under the category of “the religions.” This makes sense to
the extent that interfaith dialogue is a conscious response to the demographic
facts of religious pluralism.
If missiologists were also agreed that dialogue stood in simple opposition
to mission, there would be no reason at all to discuss this subject in a chapter
on methods. But no such consensus exists. While many theologians and
commentators who write most fervently in support of dialogue do see it as the
antithesis of Christian mission in its most traditional forms (for example,
Brockway 1984), self-identified missiologists tend to perceive a more
nuanced relationship. In this latter group, dialogue may not be characterized
as a “technique” or “instrument” of mission, but it still might be described as
a “mode,” “aspect,” “dimension,” or “expression” of the church's missionary
impulse. Insofar as discussions about dialogue occur within missiology in
response to questions about the “how” of mission, this topic is rightly
construed to be part of a broader discourse focused on the “means” of
mission.
Sustained reflection on dialogue and its relationship to other kinds of
Christian outreach has marked Roman Catholic missiology in particular since
Vatican II. Positive descriptions of several non-Christian religious traditions
at the Council prepared the way for an entirely new stage in the conduct of
that church's approach to interfaith relations. Vatican II may also be said to
have initiated a more-than-theoretical move toward the new era by inviting
the Catholic faithful “to enter with prudence and charity into discussion and
collaboration with members of other religions” (Nostra Aetate 2). After the
Council, several of the popes themselves engaged in dialogical encounters,
while sponsoring theological activity meant to clarify the church's position on
evangelism and dialogue. Several official church documents were
subsequently produced that have since become major reference points for
missiological work respecting dialogue, whether carried out by Roman
Catholic scholars or others. Among the most influential of these postconciliar
documents are Dialogue and Mission (1984), Redemptoris Missio (1990), and
Dialogue and Proclamation (1991). Additionally, issues of dialogue and
mission are addressed in Dominus Iesus (2000).
A common theme that runs through these official pronouncements of the
Roman Catholic Church is that dialogue is a constituent element of a larger
task given to the church by Jesus, which is usually referred to as
“evangelization.” Exactly how this might be so is not consistently stated,
however. If dialogue can be set apart from other outreach activities, such as
proclamation, one might be led to conclude that evangelization is a matter of
aggregation, whereby different discrete means are used in a variety of
circumstances by a loose collection of possible missionary agents. A version
of this position is articulated in Dominus Iesus (22; with a reference back to
Redemptoris Missio 55), which declares that interreligious dialogue, “as part
of [the Church's] evangelizing mission, is just one of the actions of the
Church in her mission ad gentes.” Another line of thinking emphasizes the
leavening capacity of dialogue, which may be expected to affect every other
aspect of Christian mission it touches. A forthright statement along these
lines, often quoted, appears in Dialogue and Mission (29):
Dialogue is…the norm and necessary manner of every form of Christian
mission, as well as of every aspect of it, whether one speaks of simple
presence and witness, service, or direct proclamation. Any sense of
mission not permeated by such a dialogical spirit would go against the
demands of true humanity and against the teachings of the gospel.
Following Vatican II, Protestants and Orthodox Christians have also
engaged in serious reflection on dialogue in the light of the church's
missionary mandate. Much of this work has taken place in the context of the
World Council of Churches (WCC), which signaled its particular interest in
this subject by creating a new program structure on dialogue in 1971 (an
office that eventually became known as the Sub-unit on Dialogue with People
of Living Faiths and Ideologies). Subsequently, the Dialogue subunit of the
WCC has coordinated a series of high-level interfaith events around the
world, in which official representatives of many faith communities
participated, alongside theologians and other experts in the study of religion.
These activities and the various reports they generated are recounted in
Selvanayagam (2004). Two documents issued by the WCC deserve special
mention because of their wide influence. Guidelines on Dialogue, initially
adopted by the WCC Central Committee in 1979 and then revised as
Ecumenical Considerations for Dialogue and Relations with People of Other
Religions (2004), sets out a basic conceptual framework for interreligious
encounter, along with some practical advice about how to smooth and deepen
the social processes of faith-sharing in community. An Ecumenical
Affirmation: Mission and Evangelism (1982) presents a comprehensive
approach to mission that respects the new possibilities for Christian witness
offered to the church through dialogue.
Within missiology, interest in dialogue and mission continues to be strong.
A few resources may be cited here from among those publications pertaining
to dialogue that are persistently referenced by mission scholars operating
across the theological spectrum. William Burrows (1993), for example, is
widely appreciated for having pulled together an edited volume in which
authoritative commentaries are provided alongside the official texts of
Redemptoris Missio and Dialogue and Proclamation. The usefulness of this
book is further enhanced by the inclusion of several critical responses to the
Vatican documents, gathered from a diverse group of mission practitioners
and theologians. Lesslie Newbigin has written many times on the subject of
the religions and the purposes of dialogue in the context of mission. A
succinct statement of Newbigin's views appears in his now-classic The Gospel
in a Pluralist Society (1989, esp. 155–83). Similarly influential and equally
relevant to the concerns of this section is the comprehensive study of mission
theology authored by Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder (2004). Bevans
and Schroeder suggest that Christian mission be reconceived as “prophetic
dialogue,” by which means they believe insistent late-twentieth-century calls
for proclamation, liberation, and dynamic witness could be synthesized. A
compatible proposal has been put forward by the Federation of Asian
Bishops' Conferences (FABC), which has endorsed an understanding of
mission as dialogue that responds to the situation of the poor in Asia, their
cultures, and their religions. Jonathan Tan (2004) characterizes this approach,
thoroughly imbued with the spirit of dialogue commended at Vatican II, as
missio inter gentes (“mission among the nations”), which he sees replacing
the more traditional locution, missio ad gentes (“mission to the nations”). For
further comments on Bevans and Schroeder and the work of the FABC, one
may also refer to Peter Phan (2008).
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES FOR MISSION
Strategies and programs do not implement themselves. Individuals may be
able to supply energy and vision, but organizational structures are also usually
needed, if intentions and plans are to be turned into realized ministry
objectives. Some mission structures are brought into being with deliberate
care. Others, especially in premodern times, may appear to have arisen
organically within specific historical circumstances. In either case, it is
possible to study these particular means of missionary action, too. In so doing,
one quickly discovers that this is an area of missiology in which theological
convictions may be observed interacting with powerful social dynamics. As a
result, it is not unusual in this part of the field to find the scholarly concerns
of historians, sociologists, organizational theorists, and theologians
overlapping with each other.
The missionary orders of the Roman Catholic Church are an obvious place
to begin. The importance of these complex social instruments to the cause of
Christian mission has been noted on a number of occasions (see, for example,
Bosch 1991, 230–36, on “the mission of monasticism”). Mission studies
focused on the sociological functions of these groups are less common than
flattering recitals of their achievements, but they do exist and help to explain
how organizational factors can shape evangelistic outcomes. Jo Ann Kay
McNamara, for example, has written incisively about monasteries as “frontier
outposts” in early medieval Europe (1996, 120–47). The institutional
character of these establishments influenced the behavior of the monks and
nuns residing in them and the means of mission they were able to employ.
These included educational initiatives, the production of religious literature,
the provision of hospitality, invalid care, acts of charity, and even the
governance of nearby villages. Wealth accumulation, out of the question for
the voluntary poor but acceptable when practiced by Christian institutions,
made all of these activities possible.
Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) may have been the first strategist to
realize that the church's missionary program could be harnessed to the engine
of monasticism. When he dispatched Augustine and his comrade monks to
England, they left with a plan to create a network of foundations loyal to
Rome, which could be related to and draw support from the church's
institutional assets already established in Gaul. Bede's narrative vividly
portrays the many twists and turns encountered on the way to the fulfillment
of Gregory's vision. The pope's devotion to Benedict of Nursia (Markus 1997,
68–71) naturally inclined him to favor that pattern of monastic life and its use
as a primary instrument of mission. An appreciative discussion of the early
Benedictines in England and their importance to the church's mission there
and on the continent is conducted in Rees (1997, 1–64).
A crucial element in the study of premodern and early modern mission
organizations, sometimes overlooked because precise data can be difficult to
isolate, concerns the formation of local Christian institutions. While it is
probably true that foreign church structures were simply transplanted to new
locations in some cases, one suspects that the deep reality was often much
more complicated than that. Liam Brockey provides a sterling example of a
sophisticated analysis of institutional church life emerging from within a
missionary context in his study of the Jesuits in China between 1579 and
1724. Half of this substantial book is given over to several aspects of a broad
theme he denominates “building the church.” Within this section is an
extended discussion (Brockey 2007, 328–401) of the local and provincial
community associations that helped knit together many widely dispersed but
still interconnected groups of believers in China, who could not yet be
organized using standard diocesan structures. Brockey examines in particular
how the Jesuits experimented with the idea of Catholic lay confraternities, in
light of what they were learning about the different kinds of traditional
voluntary societies (hui) they encountered in China. Brockey (2007, 332)
agrees with Standaert (2001, 457–58) that these organizations did not have to
be imposed on Chinese Christians, who were already accustomed to
participate in community associations drawn together for religious and secular
purposes. As it turned out, Christian hui sustained the church through times of
crisis and involuntary periods of missionary absence, while also providing
fertile seedbeds in which indigenous local leadership could be cultivated and
trained.
Because Protestants did not accept the institution of monasticism on
principle, they denied themselves the use of this tried and true instrument of
mission. In compensation, perhaps, they devised another social structure to
take the place of the Catholic religious order, which was the private voluntary
association or mission society. William Carey is widely recognized as an
innovator with respect to this development, although predecessor
organizations like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts (founded in 1701) anticipated his approach in some respects (Cox 2008,
22–60). In his 1792 Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians, to Use Means
for the Conversion of the Heathens, Carey pleaded with Protestants to take up
Christ's missionary mandate, founded on the Great Commission (for him, the
ultimate basis of their “obligations”). At the end of his appeal, he sketched out
a plan for an institutional structure through which a renewed effort to
evangelize the world might be carried out. This was the mission society,
whose sole purpose was to enable more evangelical Protestants to become
effective missionary agents in faraway places. He proposed that it might do
this under the authority of an independent governing board, which would take
responsibility for fundraising, public relations on behalf of missions, the
recruitment and screening of candidates, and the evaluation of their work. The
benefits of this organizational concept were well demonstrated over the next
two centuries, as hundreds of mission societies were founded along lines very
near to those suggested by Carey.
What did this new turn in the history of organized Christian outreach mean
conceptually for the church and its mission? Fundamentally, missionary
societies represented a rare moment of renewal, according to Andrew Walls
(1996, 241–54). Their emergence became an occasion for the “fortunate
subversion” of the church. They did this, Walls maintains, by disturbing
settled views on church government (247), by opening up new opportunities
for lay involvement in mission (249–51), and by internationalizing the scope
of interchurch relations (253). Brian Stanley (2003) covers some of this same
ground when he discusses the “polarities” involved when particular mission
structures are chosen for use. Some of these structures are essentially
communitarian, for example, while others are institutionally oriented.
Voluntarist organizations, likewise, stand in tension with more established
ecclesiastical structures. Three other polarities are defined in these terms:
denominational vs. nondenominational, national vs. international, and
unidirectional vs. multidirectional. Ultimately, what Stanley provides is an
interpretive grid that allows one to analyze a wide variety of mission
structures and the institutional values potentially embedded in each of them.
Not a little scholarship within missiology has gathered around the topic of
the mission society. Walls (2001), for example, clarifies the significance of
Carey's initiative by situating it in the context of an evangelical awakening
that began long before his time. Hartmut Lehmann (2008) adds a number of
crucial details to this picture, when he describes some late-eighteenth-century
developments in Central European Pietism and the seminal role played in that
context by the Baselbased Christentumsgesellschaft (the “Christianity
Society,” a forerunner of the Basel Mission Society). As Lehmann points out,
the “mobilization of God's pious children” for mission at this time within
Britain and German-speaking lands may well have been spurred by a common
fear of Revolutionary France. In any case, some powerful connections were
made between these two cultural spheres at a very early stage of the modern
Protestant missionary movement. Unusual levels of international cooperation
among mission institutions (such as what developed between the Basel
Mission and the CMS) pointed ahead toward the possibility of even deeper
commitments to ecumenical mission unity in the future. Along the way
toward this outcome, some mission societies acted to construct additional
layers of relations among themselves that expanded beyond bilateral
agreement. Several large-scale para-church organizations that developed in
the second half of the nineteenth century, such as the YMCA/YWCA, the
Student Volunteer Movement, the Student Volunteer Missionary Union, and
the World Student Christian Federation, became increasingly important
instruments of inter-institutional communication and coordination during this
era. By and large, these newer social structures were not themselves mission
societies but cooperated closely with them in the cause of world
evangelization. Showalter (1998), Parker (1998), and Putney (2001, esp. 127–
43), among others, have examined the importance of these organizations to
the history of Protestant missions.
 Another set of relationships had to be created among the denominations,
the mission societies, and the domestic church publics that supported both of
these expressions of Protestant Christian identity. Such partnerships were by
nature very complex and sometimes fraught with difficulties, as independent
institutional actors sought to influence each other while competing for support
within overlapping constituencies. Susan Thorne's fine study (1999, esp. 57–
72, 124–54) of English Congregationalism, the London Missionary Society,
and British imperial culture in the nineteenth century gives insight into the
interplay of these evangelical institutions at the height of their influence
within British society. A more extensive, transatlantic network of mission
societies and their relations with each other through the first half of the
nineteenth century is examined in Porter (2004, 116–35).
Special mention must also be made here to research on women's mission
organizations, particularly since this continues to be an active topic within
contemporary missiology. Patricia Hill (1985) may be said to have initiated a
new round of scholarly work on the women's foreign missionary movement,
when she published a study of the four mainline Protestant women's mission
organizations (Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Baptist) that
together dominated the American church scene between 1870 and 1920. Dana
Robert's widely appreciated social history of American women in mission
enlarged on Hill's findings, especially with respect to the Woman's Foreign
Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church (1997, 125–88).
Robert also treated the emergence and experience of some American Catholic
women's missionary orders (317–407). Institutional factors that affected the
mission efforts of American Catholic women in the twentieth century are also
discussed in Dries (2002) and Guider (2002). Amanda Porterfield's (1997)
study of Mount Holyoke and its early relationship to the ABCFM shows
further how this new kind of institution, the female seminary, prepared
substantial numbers of American women for mission service abroad. Selles
(2006) has carefully described how women participated in the formation of
the World Student Christian Federation and several other movements and
organizations that came earlier.
From within this scholarship on women's mission organizations have come
several important findings, which had resisted discovery or emphasis when
mission institutions of all kinds were studied together. The first of these
insights has to do with the contributions of women to mission theory. As
Dana Robert has shown, Protestant women in the last third of the nineteenth
century increasingly organized themselves into independent mission societies
at precisely the same time that they developed a distinctive theory to explain
their approach: “woman's work for woman.” These organizational structures
and the theory that undergirded them considerably strengthened the position
of the single woman missionary, who now had a conceptual place to stand
that did not depend on a male sponsor, along with a relatively independent
source of funding. A fairly sizable shift in the demographic makeup of the
Protestant foreign missionary workforce ensued, as a growing network of
women's mission societies moved to appoint ever-greater numbers of (single)
women missionaries (Hutchison 1987, 99–102).
How these new missionaries and their sending organizations then related to
the male-dominated structures that preceded them in time has also been
closely investigated. Rowbotham (2002), for example, looks at the rise of
ladies missionary societies in the British context and the various ways they
responded to the expectations of the majority regarding the subordination of
women to men. Dries (1998b, esp. 262–67) describes the different leadership
roles assumed by women and men over the history of American Catholic
missions. Hardesty (2003) discusses the wide influence of some mission
periodicals produced by women's organizations, drawing attention especially
to the publishing efforts of the Central Committee on the United Study of
Missions between 1901 and 1938. In terms of gender relations, the decisive
issue often came down to money. Male mission executives were more apt to
give public praise to energetic and resourceful churchwomen who gathered
support for missions, so long as these funds stayed under the firm control of
men. The struggle of women's mission organizations to maintain their
independence is thoughtfully explored in Yohn (2002), who further observes
that the “business of mission” conducted by these institutions provided
unprecedented opportunities for women to develop entrepreneurial skills and
to gain experience in civil affairs to a degree not yet available to them in any
other professional sphere.
Yet one more specialized lens through which some researchers have chosen
to examine the mission society is the nongovernmental organization or NGO.
The fact that many mission agencies are now accustomed to do their work in
concert with a variety of nonreligious NGOs and several kinds of government
entities is a basis for some of this research. This is certainly the case within
the international health order described by Jansen (1999), already cited.
Similar levels of cooperation have been taking place among various religious
and secular humanitarian organizations focused on issues of poverty, disaster
relief, social justice, and the empowerment of women. Within the realm of
faith-based NGOs and development, World Vision International seems to
have played a uniquely influential role, whether as a generator of
theologically informed theory (for example, Myers 1999) or as an object of
research attention (Bornstein 2003). The NGO as a particular kind of mission
structure is examined in Skreslet (1997 and 1999) and Brouwer (2011).
 Besides Catholic religious orders and Protestant mission societies,
missiologists have studied several other kinds of social structures that have
figured in the spread of Christianity and the giving of Christian witness. One
of these is the “house church,” which refers in the first instance to the
domestic settings in which many groups of early Christians were accustomed
to gather for worship and fellowship. With exegetical thoroughness and
sociological awareness, Roger Gehring (2004) has demonstrated the
importance of the house church to apostolic Christianity on several levels. In
terms of social function, for example, the house church was a means by which
to order church life and to organize outreach. The small scale of the house
church also reflected the political and economic realities experienced by
many early Christians, who had good reasons in times of persecution to avoid
the attention of the authorities and, in any case, were not yet in a position to
erect grand public buildings. At the same time, this social arrangement
acquired a theological meaning, especially in Paul's theology, where the oikos
became a master metaphor for the church.
In Gehring's last chapter he discusses the house church as a possible model
for mission today. In so doing, he relates the results of New Testament
scholarship on the institutional structures of the early church to the efforts of
many contemporary mission practitioners around the world who understand
themselves to be followers of an apostolic pattern of church planting and
evangelism. Some other mission researchers who have studied modern house
church movements include Xin (2008), Jamison (2007), and Wang (1997).
According to Lian Xi (2010) the idea of the house church has surfaced with
some regularity in popular Chinese Christianity since at least the beginning of
the twentieth century, recurring alongside millenarian theologies of salvation,
vigorous expressions of worship, irrepressible urges to evangelize the poor,
and anti-foreign sentiments. Chao (2010) recognizes John Nevius (1829–93)
as an early missionary advocate of the house church model in China.
Another organizational form intensively studied within contemporary
missiology is the base (or basic) ecclesial community. The concept is Latin
American in origin and was promoted in that region after Vatican II as an
alternative to institutional Catholicism. More generally, it now refers to local
church structures in which the poor participate fully in a hermeneutical
process of ecclesial discernment that directly addresses their needs and the
requirements of God's Reign. All the major mission bibliographies include
research on base communities within their schema, but they do not agree on
precisely where this topic belongs. Thus, we find base ecclesial communities
characterized as a form of mission in the abstracts section of Missionalia.
This is in contrast to the IRM mission bibliography, which treats the base
communities as an aspect of ecclesiology, or the International Mission
Bibliography, which locates them within a larger section having to do with
local church renewal. Within official Catholicism, base ecclesial communities
tend to be discussed under the rubric of evangelization, in line with the
perspective articulated in Evangelii Nuntiandi, a 1975 papal document. In
some contexts, a more specific linkage to social activism has been established
(Adriance 1995). Two older texts that continue to be cited quite frequently
within the literature devoted to base ecclesial communities are Boff (1986)
and Cook (1985).
On occasion, missionaries have endeavored to settle new Christians
together in constructed social environments they intended to keep separate
from their converts' birth cultures. The result is the so-called Christian village
or reduction, which is one more specialized institutional structure in which
missiologists have shown a persistent scholarly interest. The Jesuit reductions
in Paraguay are probably the best known examples of this social arrangement,
thanks to the popularity of the film The Mission. Scholarly treatments of this
subject are rendered in Caraman (1976) and Ganson (2003), with Ganson
taking care to emphasize the agency of the Guaraní. Catholic missionaries
elsewhere also experimented with the idea of creating more or less
exclusively Christian settlements, as in China (discussed in Charbonnier
2007, 337–49) or East Africa (Kollman 2005). In this latter case, the village
of converts established at Bagamoyo by French Spiritans solved an immediate
practical problem they faced, which was what to do with the young captives
they were redeeming in the nearby slave markets at Zanzibar. Their ultimate
hope was to raise up a cadre of fully-formed native Catholic priests out of this
group, who would then lead the way in the evangelization of Africa's interior.
In Kollman's expert analysis, it becomes very clear that the Spiritans' choice
of this particular organizational means rested on several critical assumptions
the missionary group held in common with regard to priestly formation, the
importance of indigenous clergy, the theological value of Muslim culture, and
proper social relations, including the use of discipline with the young.
For their part, many Protestants were also attracted to the idea of the
mission village throughout the modern period, beginning with John Eliot and
the establishment of his first “praying town” of Native American Christians at
Natick in 1650 (Cogley 1999, esp. 105–71). Some early Protestant
missionaries to Africa likewise attempted to use this institutional means to
further their evangelistic aims, as at Genadendahl and Bethelsdorp in southern
Africa and in Sierra Leone. Nearer to the end of the modern Protestant
missionary movement is the example of the mission village established at
Chali in southern Sudan by the Sudan Interior Mission in 1951 (considered
from an anthropological point of view in James 1988, esp. 207–52). Whether
Protestants or Catholics are involved, the mission village often appears to
represent in physical form what a given group of missionaries believed at the
time to be Christian civilizational norms. Hastings (1994, 197–221) presents a
wonderfully nuanced discussion of the mission village as that concept was
applied across sub-Saharan Africa through the nineteenth century.
FINANCING MISSION ENDEAVORS
No matter what organizational mission structures might be chosen for use,
financial obligations are sure to follow. Even mendicants can incur regular
expenses, the more so when their missionary work involves extensive long-
distance travel, the founding and maintenance of schools, church construction
projects, the employment of native agents, or the provision of charity to
sizable groups of needy people. Thus, to remain viable over the long term,
every mission institution has to attend to budget realities, which means paying
attention to how funds gratefully received are eventually spent. Initially, of
course, these monies have to be solicited and gathered, a matter that usually
entails the costs of a publication program to inform the mission's most likely
supporters and a larger church public about the group's successes and most
critical needs. Due to the fact that substantial financial resources were and
still are required for most forms of organized Christian outreach, this subtopic
clearly belongs to a larger discussion within missiology about the means of
mission. In what follows, I will divide the scholarship on this subject into two
sections, with research on the practicalities of mission finances leading the
way. In a smaller group of studies, we find a focus on the moral issues raised
when missionaries and their organizations embrace particular patterns of
sponsorship and expenditure.
Some mission initiatives have depended on the financial support of
powerful patrons. These might be royal figures, members of the nobility, or
private philanthropists. For a variety of reasons, many of Europe's kings and
queens over the centuries have been eager to underwrite the expenses of
missionary work. Most famously, we have the example of the Portuguese
padroado and the Spanish patronato, which together propelled the institutions
of the Catholic Church and its message far beyond the limits of Western
Christendom. These two systems of early modern ecclesio-political
cooperation are briefly described in Hughes (2010) and Bakewell (2004, 137–
47). The French monarchy, especially under the influence of Cardinal
Richelieu, committed its support to Catholic missions in New France, in part
for reasons of state (Crowley 1996, 2–19). With respect to the Belgian Congo,
King Leopold sought to enlist the church in his plans to exploit the natural
and human resources of that region by maintaining a firm managerial hand
over all mission activities taking place within his colonial realm (Leopold's
African regime is vividly described in Hochschild 1998). Administrative
policies skewed in the direction of certain mission organizations constituted
one method by which Leopold and other European monarchs attempted to
control missionary behavior. Subventions and grants to loyal Catholic
missionary orders was another.
Countless other wealthy individuals and families below the level of royalty
have also chosen to use their financial and social power to promote and secure
the cause of Christian mission. Many of these actors were historically
important for other reasons, so an extensive biographical trove has built up
around them over the years, out of which a few outstanding research projects
oriented more toward missiological questions may be highlighted. On the
Catholic side, for example, we now have a set of primary documents,
transcribed and annotated, along with an introductory essay that describes in
very fine detail how Maria Theresia von Fugger-Wellenburg (1690–1762), a
noblewoman in southern Bavaria, became deeply committed to the Jesuit
missions of Asia and their financial well being (Hsia 2006). What is
particularly striking about this research is the light that it sheds on the
logistical challenges involved when funds were transferred from Europe to
the missions or gifts were exchanged halfway around the world in the early
modern period. Hsia's work also gives insight into the practice of piety by
upper-class German Catholics of the era and the strong attraction the East
Asian missions held for some of the most devout laypersons in that church
community.
Protestants also had their aristocratic patrons of mission. This was true,
despite the arguments of Dutch Reformed theologian Gisbertus Voetius
(1589–1676) against the right of princes and magistrates to send missionaries
abroad on behalf of the church (Jongeneel 1991, 58–59). Perhaps the most
famous member of the nobility to lend material support to Protestant missions
was Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon (1707–91), who was an
extraordinarily active proponent of early Methodism in the time of the
Wesleys. While most of her efforts were centered in Britain and so might be
classified as attempts to spark church renewal, the countess also involved
herself in a few missionary projects undertaken abroad, chiefly through her
close association with George Whitefield. Lady Huntingdon's engagement
with overseas missions is discussed in Schlenther (1997, 83–95).
Eventually, a new form of aristocracy founded on business success
produced another set of wealthy mission philanthropists who sought through
their giving to shape the development of the modern missionary movement.
From within this group, two figures stand out: Robert Arthington (1823–
1900) and John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1874–1960). Arthington gave a number of
large donations to a variety of mission projects over many decades during his
lifetime and then left most of his million-pound estate to the Baptist
Missionary Society and the London Missionary Society (discussed in Stanley
1998). Rockefeller's involvement with the missionary movement of his day
was substantial and pervasive, whether through his relationship with John R.
Mott and a developing ecumenical movement, his sponsorship of the
Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry in the early 1930s, or the funding he gave
to a number of key medical and educational facilities in East Asia, many of
which were mission-related institutions. Rockefeller wanted to use his vast
wealth to “modernize” missions, which meant bending them toward
progressive liberal values and away from conversionist practices. Schenkel
(1995) has examined Rockefeller's mission philanthropy in the context of a
long life dedicated to benevolence in multiple spheres.
No matter how much attention might be paid to elite munificence, modern
missions were largely sustained and expanded by thousands upon thousands
of small gifts intentionally cultivated from the middle and lower classes. In a
remarkable way, Justinian Welz (1621–68) anticipated the potential of more
democratic approaches to mission fundraising when he proposed that a new
“Missionary (Converting) Society” constituted for the purpose of spreading
evangelical faith outside of Germany ought to seek regular support from local
pious merchants (Welz 1969, 62–68). According to the plan of Welz, these
members of the rising middle class would make annual contributions to a
common money chest that would be kept under the watchful eye of a trusted
merchant member of the Society. William Carey drove the logic of Welz's
fundraising impulse to another level when he suggested that a broad-based
campaign carried out among the Baptist faithful in Britain, asking for as little
as a penny a week from interested congregations, could build a fiscal
foundation strong enough to support the worldwide program of evangelization
he was outlining in 1792 (Carey 1934, 84–86).
As in so many other aspects of Protestant mission strategy in the modern
era, Carey's ideas about fundraising would prove to be seminal, if not
prophetic. Most mission societies and all the denominations eventually
concluded that their success in world evangelization would depend on legions
of small givers participating faithfully over long periods of time in well-
organized programs of support. Much creativity was applied to solving the
problem of how to engage broad church publics in the venture of global
mission, and many of these efforts have been studied by missiologists. For
example, we have the research of Thorne (1999, 126–36) on Sunday School
collections taken up in support of mission by nineteenth-century English
Congregationalists. More broadly, the complex network of fundraising and
interpretation structures put together by the five largest nineteenth-century
British mission organizations is examined in Maughan (1996). Dries (1998b,
124–25) has discussed the use of women's circles to raise funds for overseas
projects and personnel in American Catholicism between the 1920s and
1960s. An innovation begun at the suggestion of Southern Baptist missionary
Lottie Moon in 1888—the special congregational offering on behalf of
mission—has long since become a standard feature on the mission funding
landscape of most denominations. In several of Catherine Allen's publications
regarding the Woman's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention
(for example, Allen 1987, 146–64, and 2002, 117–18), the scale of the Lottie
Moon Christmas Offering, its historical origins, and its symbolic importance
within Southern Baptist church culture are all discussed. In a pair of articles,
Dawson (1990, 1991) has examined the role of selected (or designated) giving
for mission within American Presbyterianism. An issue that seems to recur
with some frequency within this literature is the struggle for control over
mission funds, especially when these are raised locally in campaigns that are
coordinated nationally (see Tew 2006).
In order to meet operating expenses and to provide additional wherewithal
for expansion, some missionaries and their organizations have turned to
various kinds of entrepreneurial activity. The silk trade, for example, became
a highly controversial source of income for the early Jesuits in East Asia
(discussed in Ross 1994, 54–55 and 91–92). Just as famously, the Basel
Mission Trading Company gained an international reputation for high-quality
tile work and other manufactured items. Danker (1971, 79–142) gives a
sympathetic but detailed account of the Basel Mission and the different
commercial activities performed on its behalf, especially in India and West
Africa. Besides tile making, the Trading Company and the Mission both
eventually came to be identified with high-quality weaving, bookbinding, and
the production of cocoa. A portion of the profits generated from these
ventures, plus a regular dividend, went straight to the bottom line of the Basel
Mission, which was for many decades the single largest shareholder in the
Trading Company. Apart from the income the Basel Mission received through
trade for its primary work in evangelism, education, and church planting, its
supporters also tended to see religious value in the lessons good business
practices were able to teach about the importance of industriousness, wise
management, thrift, self-support, and generous service to human need.
Additionally, some converts shunned by their families and communities found
much-needed employment in church-related business ventures. For purposes
of comparison, Danker (1971, 16–75) also describes the economic activities
of the Moravians through the nineteenth century.
In some circumstances, missionaries have also looked to agriculture as a
means by which to sustain themselves on the field. The point in these cases
was usually not to produce extra income that could be spent on “religious”
activities so much as it was a practical way to make the missions more self-
sufficient. On the small scale of the mission station, well-tended gardens did
this by producing food for missionary consumption. Larger farms might yield
surpluses, which could be traded for other needed items. Founders and heads
of mission villages especially had to pay close attention to their balance
sheets, because chronic deficits run up abroad were not likely to be covered
over the long term by mission committees back home. Several factors often
worked in the favor of these enterprises, including access to cheap labor,
experience with market economies, and the possession of technological
advantages not available to indigenous competitors. On occasion, colonial
authorities made huge grants of land to favored mission groups (Hastings
1994, 424–27). As the Comaroffs (1997, 119–65) have sharply observed,
missionary agriculture, like trade, was never just a matter of economics.
Certain methods of cultivation were thought to have the capacity to teach
gospel lessons and bedrock cultural values that exemplified Christian
civilization. Similarly, in Kollman's analysis (2005), the Spiritans at Zanzibar
understood their mission workshops and the agricultural colony they
established at Bagamoyo to be, above all else, contexts for Christian
formation. Arguably, no one did more than David Livingstone (1858) to stoke
missionary confidence in the evangelizing potential of land, as he imagined
for eager audiences in Britain the commercial potential of Africa's rural
interior.
Here it might also be appropriate to mention several research projects that
have used or suggested unusually comprehensive approaches to the study of
mission finances. In one of these (Langer 1995), the immediate object of
study appears to be quite narrow: Franciscans working among the Chiriguano
Indians of southeastern Bolivia during the republican period. The analytical
framework Erick Langer applies to this restricted context, however, is
anything but simple. This mission, he insists, was a frontier institution that
functioned on several levels at once: as a source of labor, a developer of
infrastructure, a place of production, and as a market for goods (51). These
factors were not constant but fluctuated over the lifecycle of the institution,
such that a descriptive snapshot of the mission taken at any point in time
cannot be assumed to represent its exact economic situation either earlier or
later than that. Another example of a more comprehensive analysis is offered
in Clossey, who examines how a global “Jesuit financial network” began to
take shape in the sixteenth century (2008, 162–92), supported by an
increasingly sophisticated “information network” (193–215) that linked great
numbers of far-flung Jesuits mission outposts to each other and to a central
planning body in Rome. Porter's treatment of the slogan “Commerce and
Christianity,” cited earlier, represents an additional attempt to grapple with
mission finances in a systemic way, taking into account shifting attitudes
among British missionaries toward commercial involvements over the course
of the nineteenth century. As Porter (1985, 621) observes, theological
concerns on occasion did raise tough questions about how the church in the
world was going about its financial business, but the practices of everyday
missionary life tended to be shaped by factors other than theology.
Finally, at the level of the individual missionary, a recent trend toward tent-
making may be observed. At the heart of this concept is the idea of self-
support, which can lay claim to biblical sanction through the example of St.
Paul and his tentmaker colleagues in Corinth (Acts 18:1–5). This pattern of
missionary work has become more prominent since the 1960s for several
reasons, in my view. One is the fact that within many of the sending
organizations that dominated the modern Protestant missionary movement
during the colonial period, the career missionary appointment gradually lost
its normative status. At the same time, more and more dedicated laypersons
from the West were finding short-term work abroad in an era of jet travel and
international development initiatives. Adding to the attraction of bi-vocational
service is the experience of many secular workers with sought-after technical
skills and an interest in mission who have been able to secure visas and
therefore entry into sensitive national contexts when most fulltime
professional missionaries could not.
J. Christy Wilson's influential survey of tentmaking (1979) initiated a new
round of research on this specialized form of mission service. Among those
who have reflected on the strategic value of tentmaking are Blair (1983),
Yamamori (1987), and Ginter (1998). Most recently, the idea of “business as
mission” has been vigorously promoted, for example, by C. Neal Johnson
(2009) and a host of contributors to Yamamori and Eldred (2003). In the
“business as mission” model, lay missionaries are not content to work for
others but seek rather to create jobs and investment opportunities abroad
through innovative business strategies. In parallel with domestic “marketplace
ministries,” these companies are often founded on the hope of bringing Christ
into the workplace (Johnson 2009, 129–52).
When material considerations appear to govern evangelistic practice, even
strong advocates of Christian mission may become uneasy. In some cases, the
worry is that unintentional financial entanglements or some other worldly
social factor will eventually overwhelm the mission's spiritual aims, despite
every sincere desire to keep this from happening. On occasion, missionaries
and their organizations have been suspected of willful collusion with forces
and interests at odds with the ethical demands of Christ's gospel. Some groups
have sought to keep the corrosive influence of the world and its financial
systems at bay by relying on the power of prayer to meet the material needs of
their workers (on this aspect of “faith missions,” for example, see Svelmoe
2008, 63–75 and 192–202). A wider circle of practitioners and theorists has
focused on missionary lifestyles. This is a topic that not only asks about
missionary standards of living (including issues of salary, housing, and access
to education for missionary children) but also about matters of authority and
missionary autonomy with respect to local church structures.
Orlando Costas (1982, 58–70) exemplifies the inside critic who becomes
unsettled when mission advocates seem to assume or to push for close ties
with capitalist structures and ideologies. Costas warns especially against the
encroachment of entrepreneurial language into the domain of mission
theology. In his view, “mission as enterprise” and “[free] enterprise as
mission” are equally problematic formulations. Either way, if missionary
vocations are subordinated to some larger domesticating project (modern
forms of colonialism, for example, or neoliberal capitalism), the liberative
nature of the gospel is likely to be compromised. From another angle,
Jonathan Bonk (1991; rev. 2006) looks at the condition of affluence as a
particular Western missionary problem. One emphasis in this work falls on
the individual missionary in the modern period, whose lifestyle and all the
means of mission put at his or her disposal, in Bonk's view, ought to be
carefully evaluated in the light of the message being preached. Bonk also
recognizes that personal choices are almost always made in contexts shaped
by powerful social forces that dwarf the capacity of individuals to effect
large-scale change. His critique of missionary affluence, therefore, extends
outward from the self to the family, to the missionary community on the field,
the cultures of sending agencies, and the entire network of social structures
that stands in support of cross-cultural religious workers.
MISSIOLOGY AND THE PRACTICE OF MISSION
A century ago, missiologists as a group were very keen to study every kind of
missionary institution in order to assess and improve their effectiveness. An
equal degree of interest was shown in the figure of the individual missionary,
whose particular challenges and special needs were considered problems that
many thought could and should be addressed through scholarly research. That
the practice of mission was an overriding concern of missiology in the early
twentieth century is indicated by the way in which this part of the field was
treated at and just after the 1910 World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh.
At the conference, a majority of the commissions focused on pragmatic
issues, including relations with governments, inter-mission cooperation,
missionary preparation, and how to maximize the contributions of the church
back home to world mission. Even the subject of interfaith relations was
largely approached in a practical manner, as delegates struggled to identify
more effective ways to present the Christian message to adherents of other
faith traditions. Just after Edinburgh, the IRM began its life as an academic
review of mission studies on much the same basis as the conference.
Continued interest in practical topics was demonstrated especially in the
missionary bibliography section of the IRM, a feature of the journal that was
configured along lines suggested by the commission structure of the
conference (on this similarity, see Skreslet 2006a, 173–80).
Today, it appears that the means of mission is no longer the dominating
subject it once was within missiology. While it is true that questions about
missionary methods still attract research attention in some quarters, in such
journals as Missiology, Evangelical Missions Quarterly, and the International
Journal of Frontier Missiology, for example, there are signs elsewhere that
this interest is not as widespread as it may have been in previous decades. In
the IRM itself, issues of theology and social analysis clearly predominate now
and tend to crowd out an earlier emphasis in the same journal on the
techniques of mission (on this change, see Skreslet 2006a, 180–87). Brian
Stanley makes what I think is a telling but quite defensible decision in this
regard, when he chooses not to include much comment on two of the
Edinburgh commissions in his otherwise comprehensive treatment of the
World Missionary Conference. According to Stanley (2009, xxi),
Commissions V and VI could be treated more lightly, in part because they are
now “of less interest than the others to scholars of missions and world
Christianity.” A similar approach was adopted by the Scottish Toward 2010
Council, whose study process leading up to the centenary of Edinburgh 1910
likewise paid relatively little attention to Commissions V and VI (Kerr and
Ross 2009). Focused as they were on the topics of “missionary preparation”
and the “home base,” these two Commissions had very practical concerns at
the center of their work.
 7
Missionary Vocation
Thus far, most of our attention has been focused on forces and ideas that have
persistently shaped missionary contexts. With respect to the history of
mission, for example, missiologists have been working alongside scholarly
colleagues in many other fields to show how the expansion of the church has
been affected by factors such as geography, economics, politics, and
technological advance. They have concerned themselves with the study of
culture, knowing that Christian witness by nature wants to move across the
boundaries of kinship, ethnicity, nationality, language, and class. With
imagination and increasing precision, they have explored the processes of
religious change as these have occurred within and across cultures. They have
also looked carefully at the many means used in Christian mission over the
centuries, which has meant examining strategies of evangelization,
organizational models, fundraising techniques, and methods of
communication, among other subjects. As for ideas, missiologists have been
eager to identify themes in Scripture that have powered a variety of mission
theologies. Different understandings of incarnation, salvation, reconciliation,
liberation, and ecclesial authority have figured prominently in these
investigations. Many missiologists have likewise found the concepts of
conversion, contextualization, and dialogue to be of enduring interest. Such
ideas and scriptural themes have shaped missionary contexts by altering the
perceptions and expectations of those involved.
Still left to be considered is the figure of the missionary. This person might
be salaried or volunteer, full-time or just occasional, working close to home or
abroad, but in every case is acting self-consciously to give witness to Jesus
Christ in some way. Among the many aspects of missionary vocation that
have been studied over the years I have chosen three to highlight here. The
first of these has to do with professional missionaries and the work they do.
Sending organizations have sponsored much of this research, hoping to learn
more about how to make their chosen representatives more effective on the
field. Thus a researcher might ask about the recruitment of promising
candidates, the best ways to train and support them, or the most suitable
methods by which to evaluate their work. A second area of interest revolves
around the subject of missionary spirituality and the call to mission. For this
subtopic, the emphasis falls not so much on the physical activities associated
with Christian outreach as it does on personal qualities or attitudes that can
add a certain tone or texture to missionary service. A third major section in
this chapter will survey a range of scholarship connected to the trope of the
missionary. Here, we will find ourselves on highly contested ground, because
“missionary” has become a problematic designation in some circles even
within the church while still being revered in others. In this part of the
missiologist's brief, depictions and discourses related to missionary vocation
take center stage.
THE PROFESSION OF MISSION
Missionary recruitment and the screening of candidates are organizational
functions obviously related to each other. Intuitively, one would think that
recruitment is always the prior concern, but screening has been the larger
issue through most of mission history. This is because the attraction of
mission has been quite strong within the church over the centuries, although
not always with the same force. On occasion, waves of volunteers have
stepped forward for missionary service, often without much effort at all being
made to attract them. The influence of charismatic leaders, such as Francis of
Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, or Hudson Taylor, sometimes helps to explain why
legions of potential evangelists suddenly appear ready to devote themselves
wholeheartedly to the cause of Christian mission. In early-twentieth-century
Pentecostalism, when an uncoordinated surge of believers set out for parts
quite unknown, the Holy Spirit was widely held to be leading the way for a
burgeoning movement of Christian testimony unfolding around the world. In
not a few instances, highly motivated coalitions of mission-minded volunteers
have forced ecclesiastical bodies to recognize their call to mission, even when
church leaders were reluctant to do so. A prime example of this phenomenon
is met in the story of the origins of the ABCFM, when the testimony of a
small but earnest group of seminary students deeply affected by what had
happened to them at a haystack in a storm near Williams College finally
spurred their more cautious elders in the church to found North America's
first foreign mission society. In some circumstances, the mere mention of a
critical need on the mission field has been enough to prompt a vigorous
response. This was the case at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in the early
1840s, when a visiting speaker reported on the death of Judith Grant in Persia
and asked if anyone at the school might be willing to take her place. More
difficult than recruiting in this situation was the task of selecting the most
qualified candidate out of the forty young women (both students and teachers)
who immediately volunteered for service (Robert 1997, 109).
Research on Candidate Screening
While the actual criteria used to screen missionary candidates are not always
accessible after the fact, scholars have been able to show how some
organizations have gone about evaluating potential workers. The experience
of the early Jesuits has been studied extensively in this regard. These
investigations have been helped by the fact that a rather large collection of
petitions from Jesuit novices to their superiors asking for placement abroad in
the missions has been preserved. Selwyn (2004, 95–137), for example, offers
an analysis of such letters, now collectively known as the Indipetae. She finds
the number of letters submitted extraordinary in itself, a sign of the strong
appeal exercised by the missions on the imaginations of many young Jesuits
back in Europe. According to Selwyn, the letters also show how foreign
missions were affecting Jesuit initiatives undertaken closer to home. One
effect was conceptual, as laborers in the lightly evangelized context of
southern Italy that Selwyn primarily studies began to regard their service as a
missionary call to the “Indies down here” (137). As Clossey (2008, 232–33)
notes, Jesuit leaders applied the metaphor of the Indies to a number of other
locations in Europe, too. More pragmatically, many petitioners wrote about
their experience in domestic missions as a credential that demonstrated their
untapped potential for effective work in more exotic locations. The superiors
to whom these letters were sent sometimes added their own marginal
comments on the documents, which give insight into the processes of
evaluation taking place. Selwyn concludes that certain personal qualities
eventually emerged as key criteria for judging applicants, including “good
health, piety, sound judgement and obedience, as well as [an] ability to exploit
patronage networks” (98). Brockey (2007, 225–33) has examined a selection
of Indipetae that relate more specifically to Jesuit mission work in China. One
other angle to consider here is the screening process stipulated in the Jesuit
Constitutions (Loyola 1970, 95–102), a method of testing vocational aptitude
ordinarily applied in the early centuries of the organization to anyone hoping
to join the Society of Jesus. At the heart of this process was a series of six
probationary experiences, several of which implied some kind of missionary
activity (service to the sick, for example, or preaching in an unfamiliar
setting).
Another good example of research on screening is Rosemary Seton's work
on the Ladies Committee of the LMS, which allows us to see how one
Protestant group scrutinized its candidates around the turn of the twentieth
century. Seton (1996) describes a rigorous selection process, which eventually
required not only paperwork and a personal interview, but also a period of
training, a medical examination, and a final evaluative exercise before a
permanent appointment could be made. Nearly half of those who applied to
the Ladies Committee of the LMS between 1875 and 1907 were turned away
after the initial interview (56). Seton finds on the basis of her research that the
committee was looking in particular for candidates who gave evidence of
“education, culture and refinement,” in addition to a strong sense of vocation,
some domestic mission experience, robust health, and a personal status free of
family obligations. Peter Williams (1980) has looked at the evaluative
procedures of the LMS as a whole during this period, while also considering
similar data pertaining to the CMS, the China Inland Mission, and the
Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. In his view, these societies in the
second half of the nineteenth century were selecting and training candidates
for a “clerical” model of missionary identity. Successful candidates showed
evidence of “orthodoxy, obedience and strong motivation” (306). High
educational attainments were not required, but deference to authority most
certainly was, alongside a capacity to learn and a willingness to submit to an
extensive process of missionary formation.
With an eye on training as well as the selection of missionary candidates,
Stuart Piggin (1984) has focused on a defined geographical area (India) in
which thirteen different British mission organizations were working up to the
middle of the nineteenth century. Like Seton and Williams, he is attentive to
the class backgrounds out of which the bulk of those sent to the subcontinent
as evangelical Protestant missionaries were coming, but he pays even more
attention to their formation in courses of training organized by the most active
British mission societies of the time. A useful complement to the work of
Piggin is Alvyn Austin's study of the China Inland Mission, in which an
analysis is made with respect to the different patterns of candidature followed
in Britain and North America by the same organization (see, for example,
Austin 2007, 312–31). Seton, Williams, Piggin, and Austin have shown the
way for much more work to be done in the archives on the topic of missionary
candidacy.
Beside historical studies, one now also finds a growing collection of
literature focused on contemporary applicants for mission service and the
problem of how best to evaluate them. Much of this scholarly activity has
been pursued within the realm of the social sciences, with special emphasis
often given to the discipline of psychology. Many of the scholars contributing
to this part of the field specialize in personnel matters and/or work for
agencies that provide mental health services to mission-sending organizations.
This research tends to be presented initially in short articles published in
periodicals such as the Journal of Psychology and Theology, the Evangelical
Missions Quarterly, or the Journal of Psychology and Christianity. Several
substantial collections of articles and essays related to this area of study have
also appeared over the past quarter-century (for example, O'Donnell and
O'Donnell 1988, O'Donnell 1992, Taylor 1997, O'Donnell 2002, and Hay et
al. 2007). The leading concerns of those most deeply involved in this kind of
missiological writing emerge quite clearly in these collaborative volumes.
Missionary effectiveness is the common objective that drives much of this
research, which is largely undertaken by scholars personally committed to the
task of world evangelization. The advantages of careful prefield assessment
are widely acknowledged, since this is an efficient way to avoid having to
respond after the fact to cases of extreme team dysfunction or situations of
high stress that otherwise must be solved by emergency measures. The
capacity of the candidate to adapt to any new culture is one aspect of the
evaluation problem to be solved. An ability to learn other languages quickly
and to communicate effectively using a variety of idioms is another obvious
qualification for mission service that has long been recognized.
In some studies of assessment, particular stress is put on the importance of
psychological balance and the need of candidates to be able to adjust to
situations of disorientation (culture shock) or rapid social change. Mission
organizations are urged in this literature to make greater use of personality
inventories and face-to-face interviews, in order to identify those applicants
most likely to be well adjusted socially. Schubert (1991), among others, has
underlined the potential advantages gained when a testing instrument like the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is incorporated into an
organization's routine screening process, since applicants with personality
disorders are not likely to be effective on the mission field. Diekhoff (1991),
with several collaborators, has questioned whether or not an “ideal”
personality profile should be assumed in the case of cross-cultural mission
work. Even if their comparison between East Asian and “Moslem” contexts is
too simplistic, Diekhoff et al. broke new ground with their suggestion that
different cultural contexts might call for more than one personality type (in
their study, the key factor to be measured was assertiveness). In Schubert
(1999), we find a comprehensive approach to candidate screening described.
While the importance of psychological evaluation is forthrightly emphasized
in this suggested process, the potential financial costs involved in such
procedures are also discussed in a realistic manner.
Training, Pastoral Care, and Crisis Intervention
When the gaze of the scholar moves from screening to the missionary at
work, one still often finds a concern for effectiveness at the bottom of the
research agenda. Several clusters of studies may be identified. The first of
these has to do with training, which might be administered before deployment
and/or take place on the field. It may be recalled that missionary training has
been studied extensively within missiology for more than a century. As noted
earlier, the primary topic discussed by Commission V of the 1910 Edinburgh
World Missionary Conference was “missionary preparation.” In advance of
the gathering itself, experts around the world collaborated over a two-year
period to find out as much as possible about how best to train cross-cultural
missionaries for a lifetime of service abroad. Two particular outcomes from
this intensive study project should be noted here. First, the Commission made
recommendations for a comprehensive training program modeled on the
example of what Harlan Beach had already instituted at Yale (discussed
above, in chapter 4). Second, the Commission produced a bibliography of the
most important scholarly and practical resources its members had consulted in
the course of their work together. Published as a part of the Commission's
report, this bibliography essentially defined a whole sector of missiological
research (“the training and qualifications of missionaries”) to which many
additional materials were subsequently added through the “International
Missionary Bibliography” feature of the IRM (on which, again, see Skreslet
2006a, 171–80).
A recent issue of Missiology (January 2008) devoted to the subject of
training illustrates well the continuing appeal of this subtopic within mission
studies. Of course, many new emphases have arisen since Edinburgh 1910,
including a strong interest in the preparation of short-term missionaries (see
Koll 2010). Another way in which the character of this research has changed
is reflected in the number of studies that no longer assume a North Atlantic
home address for the personnel to be trained. The collection of articles
presented in Taylor (1997) is exemplary in this respect, as care is taken
throughout this volume to include the perspectives of both “new” and “old”
sending countries. In the Missiology issue cited above, Whiteman (2008)
provides a thoughtful analysis of current training practices followed by many
North American mission agencies, while making suggestions about how these
programs could be made more immediately relevant and effective.
A second cluster of studies focuses on the pastoral care needs of today's
mission worker. This professional interest sits in some tension with the
dominant ethos of an earlier age, when a willingness to sacrifice oneself in the
cause of outreach was widely considered to be the sine qua non of a fully
realized Christian life. A rather long and distinguished history of missionary
monks, all committed to lifetimes of poverty, likewise stands as a
counterpoint to this more recent trend in thinking about missionary vocation.
In any case, much research energy has been applied since the 1970s to the
problem of missionary care, now often denominated “member care.” Among
those issues most intensively studied within this area of scholarly inquiry are
health care for missionaries stationed abroad (physical and psychological),
professional development after deployment, team building on the field, best
practices in personal financial planning, how to cope with family adjustment
problems and the special needs of “third-culture kids,” plus the challenges of
reentry at the conclusion of one's final term of appointment. Within this group
of studies, attrition is a particular concern that many researchers are
attempting to help agencies manage well. It is generally agreed that early
repatriations short-circuit some of the most valuable benefits to be gained
from long-term service in cross-cultural environments (realized, for example,
in greater language fluency, specialized work experience that can be acquired
only on the field, and increasing levels of influence within local social
networks). Shorter terms of service also tend to multiply the financial costs
associated with the selection, training, and outfitting of missionary
candidates.
A third group of studies to be noted here has gathered around the problem
of crisis intervention. Many Christian missionaries today find themselves
working in locations where they must do ministry in the midst of catastrophe,
situations of violence (including violence directed at them), or overwhelming
human need. In the risk-averse societies from which many missionaries are
still coming, these threats to well-being have made it necessary for sending
organizations to plan carefully for a variety of contingencies, lest they be held
liable for not having protected their personnel from avoidable dangers. In the
anthologies already cited, at least two kinds of research connected to this
issue may be identified. The first of these has to do with the safety of
missionaries and the conditions under which it might be advisable to evacuate
families and workers. In a second group of studies, the primary problem to be
examined is psychological trauma and the proper way to help those who
suffer from its effects long after the immediate moment of crisis has passed.
In this regard, several researchers have written about missionaries and their
experience of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including Grant (1995),
Jensma (1999), and Bagley (2003).
Recruitment
The subject of recruitment has not yet been addressed directly in this section
but it is another critical topic connected to vocation on which many mission
scholars have focused. We may suppose that mission organizations have
always had to consider issues of recruitment, so long as they hoped to enlist in
their company the most able co-workers possible and not just take into their
midst anyone who happened to show up with enthusiasm on their doorstep.
Especially in the last two centuries, as missionary work became increasingly
professionalized around the world, modern strategies of recruitment slowly
took hold among many sending organizations and these techniques have been
subjected to missiological analysis. I propose to conclude my discussion of
research on the profession of mission with some comments about how
missionary recruitment has been investigated.
Several target audiences for recruitment into professional mission service
have been identified. Special attention has been paid to young adults and
students. The reasons behind this emphasis are not difficult to imagine. When
one is younger, one's health tends to be better and new languages can be
acquired more quickly than at later stages of life. In addition, long periods of
service are a possibility for this age group, which means that a significant
investment in training might pay dividends over several decades of work.
Relevant here, too, is the fact that for some groups of young people programs
of formation can be particularly effective, giving organizations an opportunity
to construct and apply through their recruitment efforts a consistent and
coherent approach to mission theory and practice.
Catholic attempts over many centuries to attract young people into mission-
focused religious orders may be considered an early form of missionary
recruitment. The practices of the Society of Jesus have been examined
carefully in this regard, due to the sophisticated manner in which the order
has used its educational infrastructure to support its missionary aims. Through
their schools and colleges, the Jesuits put the idea of a call to mission in front
of innumerable cadres of youth (both in Europe and around the world), while
beginning to prepare the ablest among them for service in a variety of cultural
contexts. At the higher levels of the system, some of these students made
pledges to become Jesuit missioners and so were recognized as “scholastics”
within the institutional framework laid down in the Jesuit Constitutions. Jesuit
scholastics took simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. A final
decision to admit them either to profession or as formed coadjutors was not
guaranteed. Liam Brockey's description of the Jesuit educational system and
its relationship to the order's religious activities in China is wonderfully
detailed with respect to curricular matters, while also capturing the missional
spirit of the venture (2007, 207–42). On Jesuit education more generally, one
should consult John O'Malley (1993, 200–242). Clossey (2008) reflects
carefully on the various reasons why so many early modern Catholics were
attracted to the Jesuit order and the means used in Europe to promote the
missions.
Protestants were generally slower than Catholics to think systemically
about how to involve large numbers of young people in the missionary
enterprise. Here again Justinian Welz was a pioneer with respect to theory,
although once again he could not in the end find enough support to launch the
organizational scheme he had in mind. To his seventeenth-century
contemporaries he proposed not only that pious merchants ought to fund the
running of his “missionary (converting) society,” as mentioned in chapter six,
but that unemployed university graduates in theology ought somehow to be
drafted into service abroad (Welz 1969, 62–76). Discussing this possibility,
Welz speculated on some of the different motives that might impel students
into mission, including their desire for travel. As Welz (67) put it, they have
“a hankering for going places.”
Within continental Pietism and early American evangelicalism, a few
Protestant students were drawn into cross-cultural mission ventures as early
as the eighteenth century. The names of David Brainerd, Bartholomäus
Ziegenbalg, and Heinrich Plütschau immediately come to mind. Large-scale
efforts to recruit students into mission could not begin, however, until the
second half of the nineteenth century, when a thick network of youth-oriented,
mission-minded Christian organizations began to form across the North
Atlantic region. Within this broad set of interrelated groups, the Student
Volunteer Movement (SVM) stands out with respect to student recruiting.
Lautz (2009, esp. 5–8) has reviewed the personal qualities most avidly sought
in candidates who presented themselves to the SVM. In Michael Parker's
analysis (1998), the spectacular success of the SVM, its methods and
institutional structures, and its historical context are all carefully described,
alongside the reasons for the organization's rapid decline in the 1920s.
The SVM cooperated with and recruited for a host of other mission
organizations, including many denominational boards and the
YMCA/YWCA. It was tied into an international fellowship of student groups
that largely shared its evangelizing aims, including the Student Christian
Movement and the World Student Christian Federation. The literature
attached to each of these organizational structures to which the SVM related
closely is substantial and can be found easily. Less studied and more difficult
to access because of the non-European languages involved are the various
national counterparts to the SVM established outside the West from the
beginning of the twentieth century. Yihua Xu (2009) has provided a
stimulating example of such an investigation, focused on “The Committed
Chinese Student Volunteer Movement for the Ministry.” In keeping with the
ethos of the SVM, the strategy behind this indigenous effort to mobilize
students for mission was to win Chinese converts to Christ by calling young
Chinese Christians to join in and add to the evangelizing work already
underway across their developing nation. Many more local studies of this
kind are required before the full impact of a worldwide SVM movement can
be adequately assessed.
After World War II, another major surge in student recruitment took place
in North America. The Student Foreign Missions Fellowship prepared the
way for this development by organizing a number of small-scale events meant
to rouse student interest in evangelistic missions, beginning in the mid-1930s
(Norton 1993). Following a merger in 1945 with the InterVarsity Christian
Fellowship, leaders from the two organizations planned for what would
become a massive triennial recruiting event that eventually came to be known
by the name of the Illinois city in which most of the conventions have taken
place: Urbana. Attendance at these conferences continues to be robust, with
Urbana 09 drawing over fifteen thousand participants (see the Urbana.org
website for more attendance statistics). Harris (2002) is right to point out that
the Urbana phenomenon increasingly sits in the middle of a Web-based
recruiting environment for Protestant evangelical missions that does not stop
working between conventions. Harris also emphasizes in her article the
perceived benefits of short-term missions, not least their potential to function
as an “early identification program for the missionary vocation” (46). The
Perspectives course (Winter and Hawthorne 1981), aimed at laypersons, is
now another basic tool of mobilization that continues to spur students and
many others to consider missionary service.
Women form another group toward which some mission-sending
organizations at certain times in their history have directed a good portion of
their recruiting energy. The founding of many women's mission societies in
the second half of the nineteenth century helps to explain much of this
activity. To be sure, some women were also students and so cannot be
separated completely from that population, but efforts to seek after women
candidates for specialized, cross-cultural work among women and children is
a discernible subtopic on its own within the broad rubric of recruitment. In
this regard, several research strategies have already been deployed to good
effect. Peter Williams (1993), for example, has studied how some late-
nineteenth-century English mission societies attempted to increase the
number of women missionaries serving in their ranks, focusing especially on
the China Inland Mission under Hudson Taylor. Other investigators have
looked into the enlistment of indigenous female workers, such as Biblewomen
(Wood 2008). More broadly, Dana Robert (2006) has suggested that world
Christianity, which includes the history of modern missions, should be re-
analyzed as a women's movement. Proceeding in this way, Robert argues, will
enable researchers to recognize many overlooked examples of female
religious leadership. According to Robert, women leaders, in a “cycle of
female activism” (185), by their actions and community standing drew many
other women and girls into the church and the modern Protestant missionary
movement, where they, too, found opportunities to develop and exercise their
leadership gifts.
Class considerations led to yet one more set of recruiting initiatives that
took aim at the higher reaches of Western and other societies. Again, there is
overlap here with other efforts at student recruitment, since advanced levels of
education tended to be restricted to well-heeled social elites, at least until
quite recently. Many Protestant missionaries in the early nineteenth century,
including some of the most widely celebrated at the time, came out of
relatively humble circumstances (Piggin 1984, 28-54). In this respect, the
lower-class backgrounds of William Carey, Robert Moffett, and David
Livingstone were emblematic of an age when piety and resourcefulness could
count for more than wealth and formal education as credentials for missionary
service. Livingstone himself was a catalyst for change, however, as he
challenged those attending Britain's great universities near mid-century to put
their manifold advantages to good use in the cause of Christian mission.
Andrew Porter (2004, 225-54) provides a nuanced account of what was
shifting in terms of mission and British class distinctions between 1860 and
1895. The Universities' Mission to Central Africa, founded in response to
Livingstone's plea in 1859, was a crucial first step. The Cambridge Mission to
Delhi and the Oxford Mission to Calcutta were established fairly soon
thereafter, which meant that Anglo-Catholics could participate in evangelical
missions, too, without sacrificing their high church sensibilities.
Coincidentally, the CMS was making its own inroads into the upper classes of
British society, primarily through the processes of Keswick revivalism, a
recruiting pathway they shared with the China Inland Mission, the largest of
the faith missions. The recruitment of a famous group of aristocrats into the
China Inland Mission, the so-called Cambridge Seven, put the missionary
vocation in an attractive new light for church publics on both sides of the
Atlantic. Their story of self-sacrifice, which required the abandonment of
great social privilege and athletic acclaim for the sake of the gospel and the
world's salvation, became for many friends of mission a powerful call
narrative worth repeating, especially for the benefit of the sophisticated and
the most highly educated. Alvyn Austin (2007, 206-9) assesses the impact of
the Cambridge Seven on recruiting for mission among students in North
America and Britain.
Finally, we have a growing number of studies related to the crisis in
vocations that has overtaken the Catholic Church. As William Burrows (2010,
131) has observed, too few priests and declining numbers of religious relative
to population growth since the 1960s make it exceedingly difficult to see how
the Roman Catholic Church could possibly carry out its announced aim of a
“new evangelization” in the West. Burrows looks to the religious orders to
become engines of missional renewal once again, but acknowledges that
profound differences of opinion within the church about the nature of
vocation have yet to be resolved, especially with respect to priestly celibacy
and the ordination of women. The Center for Applied Research on the
Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University has become an important
source of the demographic data on which Burrows and other missiologists are
basing their current analyses. CARA's recent assessment of global
Catholicism (published in Froehle and Gautier 2003), which includes
statistical information on baptisms, seminary enrollments, clergy numbers,
and religious memberships, is a benchmark study that not only considers the
worldwide circumstances of the church at the beginning of the twenty-first
century, but also tracks regional trends. In a follow-up publication from
CARA, Bendyna and Gautier (2009) have surveyed some four thousand new
members of religious institutes in the United States, in order to determine the
particular reasons why these post-Vatican II Catholics have been attracted to
the religious life and the various institutes to which they are now attached.
Equipped with these data, the authors go on to suggest what the “best
practices” of vocation promotion and formation might be, a subtopic that
relates directly to all the primary research areas explored in this section: the
recruitment, training, and selection of missionary candidates. James Kroeger
(1991) has critiqued the unhealthy practice of “vocation piracy” or “vocation
skimming,” by which some older religious institutes in the West with
unfavorable demographic trends at home have recruited in poorer countries
where employment and educational prospects for the young are especially
grim.
SPIRITUALITY
One of the major findings of the CARA study just cited on recent vocations to
religious life is that many new members were attracted to their particular
institutes by the ethos or spiritual character of the group they eventually
joined. According to the report (Bendyna and Gautier 2009, 9), new members
…were attracted to their particular religious institute by its spirituality,
community life, and prayer life. Although the ministries of the institute
are also important to most new members, they are less important than
spirituality, prayer, community, and lifestyle.
Many of the religious institutes surveyed by CARA are missionary orders. In
keeping with the history of missionary monasticism, each of these institutes
would be expected to have a particular gift or “charism” that defines the
group's distinctive purpose and signature style of evangelization. What this
recent study of vocation reminds us is that for many members of these orders
Christian mission cannot be reduced to a set of tasks or a strategy. Leavening
the effort in some way is a quality of life in ministry that the group as a whole
claims for its own. This insight would appear not only to apply to American
Catholics but also to hold true more generally.
In his comprehensive description of missiology, Jan Jongeneel (1997, 1-47)
underscores the importance of spirituality to missionary vocation when he
locates “missionary ascetics” at the center of missionary theology (or
theology of mission). According to Jongeneel (1997, 17), “every form of
mission, and also every form of (missionary) theology, including systematic
and practical (missionary) theology, which lacks spirituality, is Spirit-less and
is, therefore, doomed to die.” Jongeneel is not only laying down a criterion
here by which to judge the adequacy of different theologies of mission when
he makes such a declaration. In the context of his project, which is the
academic study of mission, he is also saying something about spirituality as a
particular subject within the broad area of scholarship he labels
Missionstheologie, understood to be conceptually separate from
Missionsphilosophie and Missionswissenschaft. Within this understanding of
the field, “missionary ascetics” is considered to be “foundational” for
Missionstheologie, in that “all other missionary theological disciplines are
grounded upon this one” (Jongeneel 1997, 47; cf. also 373).
Celtic, Franciscan, and Ignatian Spiritualities
The rest of this section is meant to give a sense of what might be included
under the topic of mission spirituality. I begin with a selection of historically
oriented research, in which various aspects of spirituality have been
highlighted, often with the intention of promoting in the present some
missionary virtue a scholar sees exemplified in the past. Such a linkage is
plainly evident in much that has been written over the past twenty years about
the missionary activities of Irish monks. Thomas Cahill's bestselling account
of the Irish and how they “saved” Western civilization is a case in point. In
this rendering of Irish Christianity, two movements of evangelization are
described within a larger story of cultural heroism. The first concerns the
conversion of Ireland to a non-Latin form of Christianity in the time of
Patrick. On Patrick the missionary and the possibility of Celtic theology, one
should consult Thomas O'Loughlin (2000). A second movement has to do
with the diffusion of this peculiar amalgam across Western Europe, as Irish
monks wandered and reseeded the continent with a new set of Christian
monastic institutions. Cahill recognizes in Irish Christianity a world-affirming
theological stance that was prepared to live with and learn from the nature
religions of a pre-Christian age. He praises the monasteries for the frontier
hospitality they so generously shared with near neighbors and travelers in
need. In outposts of light scattered across a darkening continent, industrious
copyists are credited with having “reconnected barbarized Europe to the
traditions of Christian literacy” (Cahill 1995, 171), thereby preserving the
cultural legacy of Christian Europe when Rome itself could not.
George Hunter (2000) covers much the same ground as Cahill but in a
more self-consciously missiological manner. Building on the work of John
Finney (1996), Hunter urges churches in the postmodern West to lay aside
more familiar “Roman” and “traditional evangelical” models of conversion in
which abrupt either/or decisions are expected to be made for Christ, in order
to employ a gradual, interpersonal “Celtic way of evangelism.” According to
Hunter, Patrick and his successors ought to be admired especially for their
openness to local customs (a sign of commitment to the principle of
indigenization), their deep dedication to contemplative prayer, and a
teamwork approach. An extensive set of primary texts connected to Celtic
spirituality is now available in Davies (1999). O'Loughlin (2008) discusses
with great insight the chief explanatory uses to which Celtic and other forms
of ancient spirituality have been put in recent times.
A second historical tradition of mission spirituality that continues to attract
considerable research attention today is connected to the memory of Francis
of Assisi. Like the Dominicans, Francis and his followers aspired to an
authentic form of the vita apostolica. According to Bevans and Schroeder
(2004, 158-59), the Franciscans constructed their distinctive expression of
mission spirituality by emphasizing the vita in vita apostolica, which meant
“witnessing to and imitating the passion of Christ through austere poverty,
with the apostolate or work of mission growing out of the whole way of life.”
Over time, a strict mendicant lifestyle would not hold for all who called
themselves Franciscans, but a special concern for the poor persisted and more
often than not this emphasis has defined the mission focus of the order. The
Franciscan mission impulse to identify with the poor at the margins of society
is explored in Dries (1998a). An influential study that works hard to connect
St. Francis to liberation theology is Boff (1982). The Franciscans also
maintained contact with the notion of itinerancy by means of the ministries
they provided to pilgrims in the Holy Land.
To be sure, the Friars Minor have had their critics in the modern era.
Especially suspect is the role they played in the establishment of Spanish
America, where their evangelization activities were carried out in the context
of a brutal colonial order that just a few Franciscans actively opposed
(Franciscan enthusiasm for the Inquisition process applied by the Spanish in
early-sixteenth-century Mexico is carefully examined in Don 2010). Yet
several aspects of their distinctive spirituality have won wide appreciation
within and beyond missiological circles. The desire of the Franciscans to
promote peace and to avoid religious disputation has been consistently
praised. Hoeberichts (2008), for example, argues that the “model of the holy
gospel” Francis hoped to follow continues to be relevant today, precisely
because it has less to do with antagonistic preaching than with works
(operatio) demonstrating God's deep desire for peaceful relations in societies
rent by violence and division. The Franciscans are also often commended for
having created new ways for nonordained believers to participate in mission,
whether through tertiary orders or the Poor Ladies (on the role of women in
the early Franciscan missionary movement, see Schroeder 2000). A strong
surge of interest in ecotheology has likewise found a powerful source of
inspiration in the spiritual legacy of St. Francis and his remarkable concern
for God's creation. While sorting through the various contemporary agendas
into which this perennially attractive historical figure has been made to fit,
Roger Sorrell (1988) explores how Francis innovated by expanding his
mission to include the world of nature.
The Jesuits were a third group in mission history whose ideas about
spirituality decisively shaped their missionary program. Several qualities
stand out among those most vigorously promoted within the organizational
culture of the Society of Jesus. An unequivocal commitment to active
ministry in the world, for example, propelled the Jesuits full force into the
secular realm. Thus oriented, it soon became clear to the founders that their
vocational aspirations could not be accommodated within the cloister.
Disciplined learning was another habit that defined the ethos of the group and
so led to a famously successful, worldwide ministry of education. The Jesuits
also emphasized the need to be flexible in the practice of their piety, even as
they agreed to submit together to established ecclesiastical authority. The
virtue of obedience multiplied the institutional strength of the order. The
cultivation of personal initiative and a capacity for discernment prepared its
members to adapt successfully to a variety of contexts and ministry demands.
And then there was the willingness to be sent anywhere on mission, a global
venture that became the primary means by which this group sought to honor
God and to seek their own salvation. As Ignatius (Loyola 1970, 170)
succinctly put it in the Constitutions: “Our vocation is to travel through the
world and to live in any part of it whatsoever where there is hope of the
greater service to God and of help of souls.”
Quite deliberately, Ignatius and his closest collaborators defined a “way of
proceeding” that resisted summing up in a list of tasks, a rigid lifestyle
mandate, or a distinctive theological position. Their vision for mission was
complex and exceedingly durable, in part because it was never reduced to an
inflexible set of requirements or a simple formula. Only a small portion of the
scholarly literature pertaining to the Jesuits takes up the question of their
mission spirituality, but several important studies should be mentioned. An
indispensible resource for missiologists with an interest in this topic is John
O'Malley's research on the first generation of Jesuits (1993). Also to be highly
recommended is Luke Clossey's imaginative treatment of “salvation and
globalization” in Jesuit missions through the seventeenth century. While
Clossey (2008, 10) deliberately concentrates on a defined set of secular
considerations (“geography, history and logistics of trade, movement,
transportation, and communication networks”), he nevertheless pays close
attention to several crucial aspects of vocation that are not so easily explained
in material terms, including early Jesuit motivations for mission. On a smaller
scale, Mooney (2009) has written about “Ignatian spirituality” as a wellspring
of still-vibrant principles for apostolic mission today.
Pilgrimage
A few other frames of reference for the practice and theology of mission
issuing out of spirituality but not so closely identified with a single religious
order or ecclesiastical group may also be described. In the examples that
follow, I will briefly mention in each case how a basic idea may be rooted in
ancient traditions, but the emphasis in my treatment will fall more on recent
reflections. In this part of missiology, researchers and the mission theologians
or practitioners they study are focused on enduring aspects of spirituality that
have been or might be applied to contemporary circumstances. The nature of
Christian mission, its ultimate purposes, and the proper basis of a missionary
call are all at stake in these discussions.
One way to look at mission is to see it as a form of pilgrimage. Within this
frame of reference, travel can become a spiritual discipline by encouraging
self-examination in the midst of alien environments. If physical deprivations
are also included, even greater personal growth may be experienced. To the
extent that one's strengthened faith is then shared with others, a wider
significance yet can be realized. Something like this understanding of
pilgrimage undergirded the piety of many Irish monks who itinerated across
Europe in the early Middle Ages. To be a peregrinatio pro Christo in the
manner of a Columbanus meant to forsake one's patria voluntarily, to leave
family behind without any expectation of ever seeing them again, and to
endure hardship along the way. Or, as Michael Richter (1999, 44) has put it:
“self-imposed, lifelong exile in obedience to commands by God…is the
essence of the early medieval Irish concept of peregrinatio.”
Over the centuries, other evangelizers followed the Irish down the
pilgrimage path of mission spirituality, albeit with their own emphases and in
response to completely different historical circumstances. Medieval
mendicants, for example, found not only penitential value in apostolic poverty
but also a lifestyle that freed them up for service and preaching wherever the
Spirit seemed to be leading. Likewise, the Jesuits embraced a way of being in
mission that assumed nearly unlimited mobility and a willingness to reside
abroad for the whole of one's life. Generations of Protestant missionaries
began their work with similar expectations. These, too, were committed to
lifelong service in faraway and sometimes dangerous settings in response to
God's call. Advocates of mission were eager to highlight the sacrifices these
workers were making for the sake of the gospel on behalf of those who stayed
at home (see, for example, the 1812 ordination sermon of Leonard Woods
[1966, esp. 266–68], given just before the first group of ABCFM missionaries
departed from Boston). Such appeals for support, often quite impassioned,
gave rise to a widespread impression within the church that foreign mission
workers were ideal disciples of Christ, who embodied within themselves the
missionary calling of the whole Christian community.
From the mid-twentieth century, the idea that travel could somehow
sanctify Christian service came under fire. Keith Bridston (1965) was among
those who sought to demythologize the vocation of mission by questioning
the belief that salt-water voyages miraculously transformed ordinary believers
into living saints. Bridston suggested that missionary frontiers might still
exist, but geography was not the only factor to consider: “The Christian
mission, as an expression of God's mission, means not only going out to but
also into the world” (113). In the wake of what proved to be an effective
postcolonial critique of foreign missions, some creative attempts have been
made to reappropriate the concept of pilgrimage as a basis for mission
spirituality. An example is David Bosch (1979) and his “spirituality of the
road.” More recently, Peter Phan (2003) has written from an Asian
perspective on “crossing borders” as an approach to mission spirituality
grounded in the incarnation. A kind of “going” is evident, too, in the notion of
Orlando Costas (1982) that mission is a movement toward Christ, who has
already positioned himself among those who suffer “outside the gate.”
Similarly, Anthony Gittins interprets the “journey” of mission as an
opportunity to experience God's grace, as well as to share God's love. Gittins
(1993, 150) urges all Christians, wherever they might find themselves, to
move out from behind their “barriers and bulwarks” of “selfishness,
ethnocentrism, prejudice, or fear,” in order to follow Jesus into mission. In
this understanding of spirituality, social margins become the “epicenter” of
mission and pilgrimage a means of personal transformation (163). The work
of E. Stanley Jones largely anticipated the kind of postcolonial mission
spirituality we now find expressed in the writings of Bosch, Costas, Gittins,
and many others. In his Christ of the Indian Road, Jones (1925, 57–58)
depicted Jesus already standing in the East: “He is there, deeply there, before
us. We not only take him; we go to him…. We take them Christ—we go to
him. He is the motive and the end.” Here, too, the missionary journey remains
but the route has had to be reconceptualized, because a Western identity for
Jesus can no longer be assumed.
Spiritual Warfare
Premodern Christians took it for granted that the church and its ministers had
to battle demonic forces on behalf of the one true God. Human responsibility
for evil actions and immorality necessarily remained, but the interference of
other actors was commonly presupposed. In those places where the church
did not yet exist or was weak, some observers imagined landscapes almost
entirely given over to malevolent impulses at work just beyond the reach of
human control. Within this worldview, mission is easily recast as a form of
spiritual warfare. In this case, the call to mission may be heard as an
invitation to oppose God's nonhuman rivals, to expose the false basis of their
power, and so to liberate the unhappy victims of their debilitating influence.
Apostolic exorcists and Jesus himself provide a biblical template for such an
understanding of mission. The history of ancient and medieval Christianity is
rife with examples of missionaries who appear to have operated conceptually
from within a spiritual warfare frame of reference. If anything, hagiographic
storytelling tends to accentuate this dimension of the missionary vocation. In
retrospect, of course, we may be able to identify many other motives and
interests (political, social, and economic, among others) that were no doubt
shaping premodern missionary programs, but these analyses cannot wipe
away the fact that for many of the evangelizers involved their acknowledged,
overriding concerns were spiritual in nature.
The possibility that mission could be an arena for spiritual warfare has not
disappeared, despite the spread of modernity around the world since the
eighteenth century. Parts of the church in the West and a (probable) majority
of believers elsewhere still expect and claim to perceive satanic resistance to
Christian missionary activity. Especially in those places where traditional
religions are still viable, missionaries may well find themselves confronting
demonic adversaries whose reality is unquestioned in context. As a result, this
topic continues to be studied within missiology and not only from a historical
perspective. An invaluable guide to a large portion of this literature is offered
in Kraft (2002). The occasion for Kraft's paper was a Lausanne consultation
on spiritual warfare (“Deliver Us from Evil”), held at Nairobi in 2000 (other
contributions to the same meeting are posted on the Lausanne.org website).
Kraft writes as a self-described “third-wave” evangelical, but he is also
attentive to scholarship focused on the experience of Pentecostal missionaries.
Within this literature several specialized subtopics have emerged, including
“power evangelism” (advocated in Wimber 1986), “strategic level” or
“cosmic-level” spiritual warfare (critiqued in Lowe 1998), and “spiritual
mapping” (discussed in Van der Meer 2001). Allan Anderson's introduction to
Pentecostalism (2004, esp. 206–42) provides a way into a large collection of
global research on a century of mission undertaken within that set of
traditions. Pentecostal approaches to mission have typically included some
form of deliverance ministry, carried out in opposition to Satan's dark designs.
Special mention must also be made of Paul Hiebert's classic essay on the
“excluded middle,” which is widely cited across this literature, regardless of
denominational affiliation. Writing from an anthropological perspective,
Hiebert (1982) critiques the mechanistic world-view of most modern
Westerners, arguing for an organic, holistic understanding of God's creation in
which dynamic encounters are seen taking place involving humans, spirits,
and forces of nature. In the three-tiered universe he describes, a middle zone
is postulated between the supernatural realm of the divine and the natural
order modern people understand through science. According to Hiebert,
theologies of mission that do not recognize this “excluded middle” of
principalities and powers will lack appeal for most people living outside the
secularized West, because such theologies cannot respond adequately to the
deepest questions of life, whether related to divine guidance, providence,
healing, suffering, misfortune, or death. The broad impact of Hiebert's essay
within missiology is discussed in Anane-Asane et al. (2009).
Hospitality
The militaristic language of spiritual warfare does not resonate equally well in
every quarter of the church. While most Protestant fundamentalists and many
Pentecostals, plus some traditional Catholics, Orthodox believers, and
evangelical Protestants, may find this way of imagining mission attractive and
even inspiring, liberal Protestants and progressive Catholics as a rule do not.
A nearly opposite pattern of reception may be observed across the church in
connection with hospitality, an ancient theme in mission spirituality that has
reemerged over the past few decades.
Like pilgrimage and the idea of spiritual warfare, the theme of hospitality
may also lay claim to biblical roots, portrayed vividly in the story of the Good
Samaritan and Jesus' directive to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, and
visit the sick and those who are in prison (Matt. 25:31–46). Relevant, too, are
those Old Testament texts that teach Israel how to treat the aliens and
sojourners living in their midst (for example, Exod. 22:21; Deut. 10:19; Deut.
24:17–18). Hospitality survived as a dimension of mission in the monastic
traditions of the church and not only among the Irish in their frontier
redoubts. The Rule of Benedict, for example, includes a chapter (53) on the
reception of guests, in which this responsibility is interpreted in terms drawn
from Matthew 25. Pilgrims and the poor are to be received graciously, with
humility and kindness. The community is instructed to pray with those who
visit, to edify their guests with a reading from the divine law, to wash their
feet, and to provide them with food. In this embodiment of mission service,
we find not only a ready response to physical need but also a desire to show
respect for others, including and especially those of little social account:
“Great care and concern are to be shown in receiving poor people and
pilgrims, because in them more particularly Christ is received; our very awe
of the rich guarantees them special respect (Benedict 1981, 259).”
Two factors in particular seem to be influencing current discussions of
hospitality within missiology. The first of these is migrancy. As streams of
refugees and other displaced persons leave their home regions behind for a
variety of reasons, many of these people find themselves strangers in strange
lands. How should the church relate to these new neighbors? Among those
who have written about hospitality as a missionary virtue to be practiced
especially with respect to refugees and migrants of different kinds are Pohl
(2003), Hanciles (2003), and Escobar (2003). Some additional examples of
current research in this area are presented in Spencer (2008).
New perceptions of religious pluralism are also affecting the way many
missiologists relate the concept of hospitality to the vocation of mission. K
suke Koyama (1993), for example, has put forward the idea of a “stranger-
centered” mission theology, which he considers especially well suited to
interfaith relations. Gittins (1994), however, has suggested that Koyama's call
to “extend hospitality to the stranger” lacks a proper sense of interpersonal
mutuality. According to Gittins, it is better for evangelizers to regard
themselves as strangers and aliens rather than relating to outsiders in this way.
By ceding control and sometimes relying on others to take the initiative,
missionaries are enabled to receive hospitality as well as extend it in Christ's
name (this argument is developed more fully in Gittins 1989, 84–138). From
a Pentecostal perspective, Amos Yong has argued further that a theology of
hospitality could become the basis of an inclusive, dialogical, and fully
pneumatological performance of the gospel that responds appropriately to our
postmodern context of religious pluralism. For Yong (2008, 131), “the
Christian mission is nothing more or less than our participation in the
hospitality of God.”
Vulnerability
Mission may also be entered into as a circumstance of vulnerability. In this
kind of mission spirituality, uncertainty is the order of the day. One has to be
ready to live simply, sometimes alone, and without recourse to many of the
social support structures most people would consider necessary for a normal
life. Mission as vulnerability overlaps to a degree with the concept of
pilgrimage. To be sure, itinerant monks embraced their own experiences of
liminality, often defined by extraordinary austerities and commitments to self-
abnegation. But the emphasis here is not on the journey or one's growth in
faith so much as it is trained on the character of Christian witness given along
the way. Suffering on behalf of the gospel is accepted as a possibility.
Weakness and insecurity are not only endured as means of discipline, but are
woven into the fabric of the message one hopes to communicate. The divine
Word that puts aside its heavenly privileges in order to be made incarnate and
then to suffer death on behalf of others is the ultimate model for this
understanding of mission spirituality. In the idea of mission as vulnerability,
the invitation Jesus gave his first disciples—to take up his cross and come
after him—echoes down through the ages as a particular call to mission as
costly discipleship.
The subject of vulnerability has already been broached in these pages,
albeit indirectly. When radical commitments are made to contextualization,
for example, missionaries acknowledge their lack of control over the
evangelization process and accelerate the moment when they will become
completely redundant. Some have seen in the first-evangelization work of
Vincent Donovan among the nomadic pastoralist Masai in Tanzania an
example of what a total surrender to local cultural norms in the light of the
gospel might look like (Donovan 1982). On those occasions when
missionaries have had the courage to oppose the colonizers or to stand against
the rich and powerful, intense social pressure to cease and desist from such
protests or some other form of coercion against those so engaged has often
followed. That missionaries who defend the poor can become modern-day
martyrs of the church is argued through Jon Sobrino's reflections (2003) on
faithful witness given in the midst of political and economic oppression in El
Salvador. A number of other violent contexts for mission, both historical and
contemporary, are discussed in Eitel (2008).
David Bosch (1992) warns against any attempt to glamorize martyrdom or
idealize missionary victims. Caution is also warranted due to persistent
entanglements with Christendom, violence, and colonialism over the
centuries, which call into question the church's capacity after Constantine to
suffer with Christ. Bosch concludes, nevertheless, that mission in weakness is
the only genuine spiritual norm on offer to would-be Christian evangelists. It
requires that the cross of Christ be placed at the very center of the church's
missionary self-understanding (362):
Only if we turn our backs on false power and false security can there be
authentic Christian mission. Of course, this will lead to opposition,
perhaps even suffering, persecution and martyrdom. But martyrdom and
persecution have always been among the lesser threats to the life and
survival of the church.
Jonathan Bonk (2007) reaches a similar conclusion in his study of mission
and ministry in contexts of power and violence, arguing that followers of
Jesus risk losing their primary identities as citizens of God's kingdom when
they participate in worldly pathologies of power.
 DEPICTING THE MISSIONARY
The discussion in this chapter has shown so far that the missionary vocation
can be studied as a profession, in which case the methods of social science are
likely to loom large. Other researchers, more theologically oriented, have
focused on mission as an expression of spirituality. I propose now to describe
a third set of research that attends to perceptions of the missionary vocation,
both inside and outside the church, as these have been shaped by different
kinds of literary and visual works. For the sake of efficiency, the scholarship
that pertains to these various creative projects will be considered according to
the genre used, with particular attention given to historical writing, biography,
literature, and films.
In History Writing
In an earlier chapter, we looked at several forms of narrative used to write the
history of mission. One objective of that analysis was to show how historians
have employed a variety of styles by which to portray mission and
missionaries. Thus, it was noted, for example, that ecclesiastical historians
tended to focus on metropolitan centers and not on the peripheries, where
episcopal power held less sway. In these accounts, the theological orthodoxy
of the evangelizers was often a primary concern and close cooperation
between missionary bishops and royal figures appears to be normative. A
somewhat less regularized picture of mission has been observed in some of
the hagiographical materials surveyed earlier, with more room allowed in
these narratives for charismatic actors and wonderworkers to operate without
direct reference to the usual channels of ecclesiastical and political authority.
Additionally, in some forms of critical ethnography, we found missionaries
portrayed as (un)witting agents of modernity and colonial dispossession.
To the literature previously cited in the history of mission chapter we may
now add the extended discussion of Andrea Sterk (2010b) on the
“representation” of mission in late classical and early medieval historical
sources. Following Ian Wood (2001) but concentrating more on the expansion
of Christianity within Asia and the roles played by women captives in the
evangelization of Armenia, Georgia, and Yemen, Sterk explores how a select
group of Christian historians “crafted or reshaped accounts of mission with
their own particular details and emphases to pass on their own particular
perspectives on mission and conversion” (Sterk 2010b, 304). For Sterk, this
meant asking about how mission and missionaries are represented within
larger schemes of Christianization (275) and “the role of historians as self-
conscious agents as well as interpreters of Christianization” (276). Thus, we
find the churchman Agathangelos, writing in antiquity about the conversion
of Armenia to Christianity, taking care to show his missionary heroes
resisting Zoroastrian religion while not rejecting Iranian culture or language
altogether because that was the primary cultural world to which many of his
own audience still related (280). Or, using an unusual metaphor,
Agathangelos depicts the foreign captive Rhipsime and her virgin martyr
companions as “cupbearers,” who added their own blood to the two vessels of
joy and retribution they carried to Armenia as witnesses to the gospel. In this
portrayal of the missionary task, according to Sterk (2010b, 286), “serving as
a ‘cupbearer' to the world was…the vocation of all those who had drunk from
the cup of life and joy.” Such an understanding is far removed from the idea
of mission as “a political ploy for unifying the populace, exalting the ruler, or
sanctioning the ecclesiastical hierarchy” (286). In this way, as she carefully
examines the stories of Rhipsime and other captive women evangelists, Sterk
not only adds to our knowledge of mission history in the East but also
expands what we know about non-elite forms of evangelization or “mission
from below.” In this article and an equally substantive companion piece
(2010a), Sterk pulls together a wealth of scholarly material pertaining to the
depiction of mission in a wide range of ancient historical sources.
Biography
Biography is another way to write about mission history that focuses even
more precisely on the figure of the missionary. The attraction of the genre
within the modern missionary movement is not difficult to grasp. Close
associates of individual missionaries have used biographies to honor their
colleagues, friends, and family members. Sending organizations have also
been eager to tell exciting stories of outstanding missionaries they have
sponsored, since such publicity can further institutional aims, whether in the
realm of fundraising or by communicating in personal terms how the church
or mission group intends to go about its work. Likewise, for critics of
mission, biography can be an effective way to make their objections vivid and
compelling. For all these reasons and more, whether arguing for or against
Christian mission, biographical studies have had enduring appeal.
Mission biography has long been considered an integral part of missiology.
This is evident, for example, in the “International Missionary Bibliography”
section of the IRM, devised in 1912. In this first English-language “scientific”
review of missionary literature, biography was one of the initial categories
used to classify the materials surveyed and proved to be an active research
area within the bibliography (Skreslet 2006a, 174–87). When the IRM
bibliography was revised a half-century later, the category of biography was
dropped from the structure. The change reflected a new set of priorities within
that part of the ecumenical movement that had begun to shy away from the
idea of individual missionaries or mission societies taking the initiative in
mission in favor of the concept of missio Dei. Outside the WCC, proponents
of mission continued to produce missionary biographies at a robust pace, with
many of the traditional purposes of this literature still in operation: to laud and
memorialize missionary heroes, to teach about mission through individual
stories, and/or to advance denominational, institutional, or theological
agendas. From about the 1970s, we can see another function of biography
emerging more distinctly within missiology. This is the capacity of
biographical literature to expand the archive of mission studies, especially by
giving more direct attention to women and non-Western missionary actors.
An ongoing, long-term project that exemplifies this service to the study of
mission is the Dictionary of African Christian Biography, published online in
multiple languages (the project is described in Bonk 2004). Another angle of
approach is suggested by the work of Booth (2002) on Arabic-language
biographies of foreign women missionary teachers. The materials Booth
describes were originally published as magazine articles and were written
from an indigenous perspective.
Scholarly biographical treatments of individual missionary figures are
plentiful, and many of these have already been cited in connection with other
topics. Not yet mentioned is the outstanding “mission legacies” series that
continues to run in the IBMR (an initial collection of these biographical essays
was published in Anderson et al. 1994). Critical studies of missionary
biography as a genre are still not numerous but some of what has been
attempted in this part of the field may be described. Several scholars have
argued for missionary biography to be recognized as a particular form of
missiology. Tucker (1999, 430), for example, contends that biographies add
the study of “character” to missiology. Neely (1999) agrees that mission
biographies, even when presented as hagiographies, have something special to
contribute to the study of mission but cautions that questions of fact and
fiction must not be ignored. In his article, Neely discusses how to distinguish
hagiography from more objective forms of biography. He also examines side-
by-side several accounts of the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Baptist
missionary Lottie Moon as a way to show how the biographer's perspective
can affect the telling of a missionary life. Rohrer (2006) has reflected on the
complex three-way relationships that can emerge when biographers speak to
contemporary audiences about the subjects of their research. Rohrer's case
study is the life of George Leslie Mackay (1844-1901), a Canadian
Presbyterian missionary to Taiwan. In a very pertinent and stimulating line of
investigation, Rohrer asks: to whom does the story of Mackay now
“belong”—the divine intention of the missio Dei, the organization that sent
him, the Canadian nation, the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan, or the secular
academy? In other words, whose interpretive frame of reference, if any,
should be considered primary with respect to this biographical subject?
Another scholarly approach to the study of mission biographies has focused
on the effect this literature has had on a variety of audiences. Thus, Sittser
(2007) has written about Protestant missionary biographies and how some of
these have functioned as “written icons of faith” that edify individual readers
by showing how real-life persons were “transfigured” in the course of their
mission experience. Other scholars have studied the social impact of
particular mission biographies, which in some cases extended across cultures
and generations alike. Conforti (1985), for example, considers the enormous
appeal exercised through the nineteenth century by the Life of David Brainerd
(1718–47). According to Conforti, Brainerd's paradigmatic story not only
inspired and guided countless missionaries who came after him and strongly
influenced the practice of piety more generally in (Protestant) antebellum
America, but it also served to mediate the theology of Jonathan Edwards to an
evangelical public spread out on both sides of the Atlantic. Edwards, working
from the missionary's private diary, was responsible for putting the Life of
Brainerd into its final form before publication. Walls (2003, 253) sees
Brainerd becoming in death “the Protestant icon of the missionary, its ideal
type, as a result of the published journal. Every new missionary—typically, a
man in his twenties, was taught thereby to see this young man as the pattern
for what his own life ought to be.”
Later in the nineteenth century, David Livingstone may well have replaced
Brainerd as the quintessential missionary of the age, judging by the torrent of
popular lives written about him (on Livingstone's mythic status, which clearly
transcended his identity as a religious activist, see MacKenzie 1990). Without
disputing these judgments, it is necessary to point out that for many
nineteenth-century Protestant women their model missionary would not have
been either Brainerd or Livingstone but more likely Ann Hasseltine Judson.
Brumberg (1982) has written about the wide influence of Ann Judson's
biography on popular American culture.
A few scholars have attempted to relate biographical works on missionaries
to larger fields of literary endeavor. So, for example, Terrence Craig (1997)
explores how the writing of missionary lives contributed to the formation of
Canadian culture and identity. Craig is equally interested in missionaries who
came to Canada or left from there to labor abroad, since he considers both
directional movements part of the same evangelistic impulse. Craig (132–37)
concludes that this set of national missionary biographies, taken as a whole,
reflects and possibly shaped the development of Canadian literature more
generally, with narrower views of Canadian (and Christian) identity
eventually giving way to a more multicultural social vision. Anna Johnston
opens up another path of inquiry when she discusses the biographical
materials produced by LMS missionaries in the first half of the nineteenth
century as one kind of colonial literature. Johnston (2003, 32–37) is
particularly keen to show how most missionary writings of the period were
governed by informal editing processes that affected both secular and
ecclesiastical literature. According to Johnston, whether writing about foreign
missionaries or early converts to Christianity, missionary biographers of the
time tended to rely on an “endless recirculation of tropes” on mission and
native societies within a broad colonial discourse that did not bother to seek
or incorporate non-European perspectives (81). The overall effect was to
produce a thick web of stories that relentlessly pushed for religious and other
interventions in foreign societies by vividly asserting the cruel depths of
indigenous depravity. Although Johnston also looks at missionary texts
originating in Polynesia and Australia, she has the most to say about
biographical literature written in India.
Fiction
Sometimes only a very small step is needed to move from missionary
biography to fiction. But not always, and it bears repeating that a measure of
imagination on the part of every depicter of mission is required no matter
what form of storytelling might be involved. In any case, missionaries have
been featured in many works of fiction. Alan Neely (1996) has surveyed a
number of these publications, in addition to a selection of feature films.
Besides describing these materials in terms of plot and themes, Neely also
considers how missionary characters have been portrayed in them with
respect to “their fitness, preparation, calling, conflicts, encounters with other
cultures, and their individual strengths and weaknesses” (464). Jamie Scott
(2008b) expands considerably the list of print resources discussed in Neely
and sorts the whole into several useful categories, including narrative works
featuring either Catholic or Protestant evangelical missionaries, modern
popular novels about mission, and mission fiction published in languages
other than English. In addition, Craig (1997, 110–31) has catalogued a large
collection of Canadian mission fiction, but he does not find much to admire in
these works, many of which appear to him to embody a crude sort of wish
fulfillment on the part of their authors and not much else (120).
Some classic works by Western authors in which missionary characters or
settings are used in more than an incidental way have been carefully studied
with an eye for missiological issues. William Hutchison (1987, 74–77), for
example, brings into his description of the early ABCFM mission to Hawaii
an analysis of the rather critical perspective on foreign missions put forward
by Herman Melville through his South Sea novels Typee and Omoo. As
Hutchison observes, Melville's depiction of mission was contending in the
court of public opinion back home with an official picture that put the results
of the work in a far more appreciative light.
Other scholars have been drawn to the study of mission in classic Western
novels because of the women characters involved. An example is Valentine
Cunningham (1993) on Jane Eyre, a nineteenth-century novel in which the
title character has to decide if she will marry St. John Rivers, a suitor who
intends to go to India as a missionary. The key issue behind Jane's decision,
according to Cunningham, is whether or not she will accept the subordinate
status of missionary wife that will come with the marriage. Cunningham
provides context for his discussion of the novel and its portrayal of women in
mission by including a sketch of an actual missionary to India (Mrs. Mary
Hill) who would have been a contemporary of the fictional Jane Eyre. Scholar
Patricia Hill (1985, 8–22) extends the range of the literature under discussion
within this subtopic when she considers several popular works of fiction
written between 1860 and 1930 that include missionary characters or themes.
Hill shows how the novels she examines became discursive spaces in which
competing ideas about missionary vocation, feminism, and secular values
could interact with each other. Gill (1998) has added a study of missionary
heroines he finds depicted in Victorian-era popular fiction and biography.
In contrast to literary critics, missiologists have been somewhat slow to
examine the burgeoning trove of fictional works produced outside the West
that put missionary encounters at the heart of their storylines. An exception to
this general rule is provided by the Japanese novel Silence, which is widely
cited within the field and often taught in courses on missiology. The
seventeenth-century Portuguese priests brought to life by Shusaku Endo in
Silence represent a profound literary study of the missionary vocation.
Welcome attention has also been paid to a number of African novels that
touch on mission, with Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) probably
receiving the most emphasis. A critical study of Achebe's work that recently
appeared in a volume dedicated to “mother tongue theologies” is Merritt and
Sterling (2009). In their treatment of what has come to be regarded as a
classic postcolonial novel, Merritt and Sterling focus on the contest taking
place at mid-century in Nigeria between Christianity and traditional Igbo
religion. An alternative view of the struggle over Christianity in Africa at the
end of the colonial era is presented in Obi, another Nigerian novel with strong
religious themes written by Achebe's contemporary, John Munonye.
According to Purcell (2004), the most significant religious conflict portrayed
in this book was not the one that pitted the religions of West Africa against
each other. The question for Munonye was rather about the future of
Christianity on the continent, as foreign missionaries and indigenous
Christian leaders clashed over who would direct the development of the
tradition following the end of colonial rule. With some similar concerns in
mind, Kamau-Goro (2010) has analyzed two novels written in the 1960s by
Ngûgî wa Thiong'o (The River Between and Weep Not, Child). In these and
other writings that reflect on aspects of East African mission history from a
postcolonial perspective, Thiong'o renders a complex judgment on missionary
Christianity that is not easily pigeonholed. Kamau-Goro suggests that
Thiong'o's point of view is best explained when interpreted as a vernacular
appropriation or reconfiguration of Christianity's sacred texts “through the
idiom of traditional gnosis” (2010, 9). Working in a comparative
fashion, Okyerefo (2010) considers the idea of African agency and
Christianization as these are portrayed in two Ghanaian novels. In Two
Thousand Seasons, initially published in 1973, author Ayi Kwei Armah
roundly condemns the part played by foreign missionaries in Africa's colonial
subjugation, in keeping with the critical perspective established earlier by
Achebe, Thiong'o, and many others. More surprising, perhaps, is what
Okyerefo finds in Benjamin Kwakye's The Sun by Night, published in 2006.
In this fictional rendering of West African religious history as that unfolded
one generation after independence, the missionary vocation has been wrested
away from evangelizing Westerners by independent indigenous preachers of
the gospel who understand and are eager to respond to the spiritual and
material needs most acutely felt by their fellow citizens (Okyerefo 2010, 66).
Film
Some novels are eventually made into films, which may or may not hew
closely to the original artistic visions of their authors. Other screenplays are
written without reference to an underlying print version. In either case, the
figure of the missionary has appeared with some frequency over the past
century in a number of motion pictures, some quite well known and others
more obscure. A generation ago, Norman Horner produced a “checklist” of
fifty motion pictures he considered “useful” for mission studies (1982, 172).
Most of the items listed were documentary or educational in nature, and
denominational mission boards produced many of them for Christian
education purposes. In the article by Neely (1996) cited above, fourteen
feature films are described with respect to their basic storylines and the
perspectives offered on mission. Neely shows particular concern for the
image of mission likely to be communicated in each of these creative projects.
By far the most complete listing of motion pictures with missionary themes
and characters now available to students of mission is the compilation Jamie
Scott (2008a) published in the IBMR. Scott's emphasis is on feature films
rather than educational materials, although he does mention several Christian
organizations that have sponsored or produced films for commercial
distribution, plus a group of biographical pictures, documentaries, and videos
that likewise reflect an insider's view of Christian mission (118-20). Included
in this article is a remarkably detailed discussion of silent movies that feature
missionary characters doing their work in domestic or foreign circumstances
(115–16). Scott also makes mention of a few films not in English that relate in
some way to missions (120). Not mentioned in any of these compendia are
two sets of documentary films produced in the 1930s and early 1940s by the
American-based Harmon Foundation, parts of which portray missionary
activities in Africa. Weber (2001) describes the aims and results of this
ambitious project, which the Foundation carried out in cooperation with a
number of American mission boards through the Missionary Education
Movement of the Federal Council of Churches. In these films, according to
Weber, missionaries and other Western experts are seen striving for the social
development of Africa and her peoples.
Apart from movie reviews, which I do not intend to survey here, critical
studies of the visual resources catalogued in Horner, Neely, and Scott are still
relatively few. Missiologists have given serious attention to one film in
particular, however: Robert Bolt's story of eighteenth-century Jesuits in the
Amazon attempting to evangelize the Guaraní (The Mission). Daniel Berrigan
(1986), who served as an on-set advisor to members of the cast and director
Roland Joffé with regard to Jesuit history and ethos, published his own
reading of the film in the form of a personal journal the same year that the
movie was released. Subsequently, Hale (1995) has evaluated the film as an
expression of liberation theology, while assessing the role of Berrigan in its
production. Hale's comments (85-87) on the film's missionary characters are
directly relevant to the concerns of those who write more generally about the
depiction of mission in film and fiction. Blossom (2003) has analyzed The
Mission alongside three other films that also consider the fate of various
Amerindian groups affected by missionary activity: Black Robe, At Play in
the Fields of the Lord, and The Mosquito Coast. Reaching across all four
films, according to Blossom (248–49), is a shared conviction that the
Christianization of the New World inexorably led to the destruction of stable
and harmonious pretechnological societies. Individual missionaries might
exhibit some admirable qualities in these movies, he observes, but they are
nevertheless judged harshly for having participated in historical processes the
filmmakers largely deplore.
 Missiology Reconfigured
The deceptively simple definition of missiology adopted at the outset of this
project (“the systematic study of all aspects of mission”) has decisively
shaped the manner in which I have approached my subject. As noted already,
such a definition tends to push the limits of the field outward in a number of
ways and to encourage one to consider scholarly work on the subject of
mission undertaken from multiple starting points. Theological investigations,
proposals for norms in the practice of mission, and specialized studies of the
church and its sacred vocation continue to form a huge part of the subject
matter that makes up missiology. Alongside these materials commonly found
in seminary curricula are many other kinds of research on mission, which
come from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, each with its own set of
preferred methodologies. Among the academic works outside of theology I
have attempted to recognize here are contributions made to the study of
mission by historians, area specialists, religious studies scholars,
anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, linguists, communication
theorists, experts in the study of human organizations, and feminist scholars,
among others. My intention has been to present a representative sample of
such research, in order to indicate the broad scholarly landscape I believe the
field of missiology now encompasses.
My approach has allowed for the inclusion of various, even contradictory
viewpoints with respect to the nature and purposes of Christian mission. I
have chosen not to provide a normative definition of mission, in view of the
fact that many different understandings of mission have informed the work of
missionaries over the centuries and also the scholars who study them. If this
introduction to the field of missiology had been conceived instead as an
introduction to mission theology or a course of preparation for personal
involvement in Christian mission, I may well have made another decision on
this crucial methodological issue.
As portrayed in this book, missiology is organized around a series of six
primary topics that highlight one or another aspect of this inherently
interesting field of study. Even within these defined subject areas, scholars
may apply more than one disciplinary approach to the study of mission. We
saw this, for example, in the chapter on the Bible and mission, where
exegetical, theological, and literary critical methodologies were each featured
in turn. The element of culture has been ever-present throughout this book but
has not always figured in just the same way. Thus, in chapter 4, one of my
aims was to show how the work of missiologists draws from and has
implications for those who focus more specifically on systematic theology or
social scientific studies of culture. Considered from this perspective,
missiology is a field in which such investigations may be observed interacting
with each other. In the following chapter, I attempted to give serious
consideration to research on the history of religion and on religious systems
as these are embedded in particular cultural matrices, in order to show how
these studies can deepen our understanding of cross-cultural, interreligious
encounters that involve missionaries. In chapter 6, where the means of
mission stood front and center, special attention was given to aspects of
culture impacted by missionary methods aimed especially at social
transformation, healing, the communication of religious messages, or the
promotion of interfaith dialogue. I hope to have shown also how cultural
analysis has become indispensable to the study of mission history.
Does missiology have a central concern? As we have proceeded through
these six broad subject areas, I have mentioned several arguments made
recently in favor of particular themes or scholarly interests that might be
construed to stand at the “heart” of missiology. Usually, these proposals rest
on particular definitions of mission or a sense of what the scholar believes to
be the most urgent task facing contemporary missionaries in the field. Phan
(2003, 8), for example, makes the case that “crossing borders” is the one
aspect of the missionary job description that has remained constant over time,
even if our ideas about the nature of the boundaries to be traversed have
changed dramatically. Pachuau (2000, 549-52) also recognizes the importance
of boundary crossing, especially in the context of a religiously plural world,
which leads him to suggest that the theology of religions has become the
“essential integrating principle” or “hub” of missiology. Langmead (2008) has
argued that reconciliation ought to be considered the “central model” or
“integrating metaphor” for mission, in light of his perception that increasing
levels of conflict and violence are tearing our world apart. Others have
promoted verbal proclamation or demonstrations of healing as actions without
which authentic Christian mission cannot take place.
My own position is that missiology does not have a center but effective
theologies of mission most certainly do. So long as missiology is understood
to encompass more than the theology of mission, it seems to me that it does
not need to have a central concern apart from the desire to understand mission
in all its aspects as completely as possible. Therefore, I do not consider any
one of the six areas of mission study described above to be more central to the
field than any other. I am not now inclined either to arrange these topics in
some kind of hierarchical scheme. Without a doubt, each of these subject
areas is related to the rest in a variety of ways that may not always be
apparent. Studies of culture, for example, may illuminate problems of
interpersonal (mis)understanding that arise when missionary encounters take
place across the boundaries of religious difference. Students of missionary
methods and the theology of mission likewise have much to learn from each
other. In addition, I am convinced that historians of mission risk
incompetence if they are not ready to take into account research that ranges
across the entire topical framework sketched out in this book.
An intention from the beginning has been to describe the field of
missiology as I believe it is practiced today, rather than to advocate an ideal
that does not yet exist. As explained in the introduction to this study, my
perceptions of the field are based on three primary sources of data. The first is
a general sense of what is being published right now in a diverse set of
scholarly journals focused on the study of mission. A second collection of
information comes out of my own work on a decade of dissertation research
on mission published in English between 1992 and 2001 (Skreslet 2003). I
have also written previously about several major bibliographic projects that
attempt to represent the field (Skreslet 2006a). More than anything else, these
classification structures and the huge variety of studies on mission reported
through them have suggested to me that only an expansive definition of
missiology could do justice to this wide-ranging branch of learning. Readers
do need to keep in mind that missiology has developed over the generations
and will continue to change, as new knowledge is discovered and additional
points of view are brought into conversations already under way about the
record of Christian mission, whether focused on its aims, methods, or effects.
Consequently, the layout and understanding of academic missiology presented
here should not be taken as a representation of something that is entirely fixed
or timeless.
Those calling themselves missiologists today belong to a community of
practice that has its own scholarly periodicals, professional societies,
specialized conferences, and research networks. For this core group, several
habits of professional conduct have been established that appear to me to
shape this field of study in distinctive ways, including an intense interest in
religious change, respect for the vocation of Christian mission, and a desire to
integrate knowledge about mission gathered from many sources and
viewpoints. With some justification, readers may understand this project to be
an expression of the integrative impulse I have attempted to describe. Beside
those who self-identify as missiologists are many other contemporary
researchers who likewise are contributing to this dynamic field of study. In
some sense, these scholars, too, are functioning as missiologists, as were a
host of ancient, medieval, and early modern observers of mission who wrote
about some dimension of Christian outreach well before the time when
Alexander Duff, Gustav Warneck, and others began to put this scholarly field
on a proper academic foundation toward the end of the nineteenth century.
 Bright prospects lie ahead for those who might want to study Christian
mission in all its aspects. Huge gaps in our knowledge still remain.
Increasingly sophisticated research techniques are uncovering layers of
complexity and hidden social processes not at all evident to earlier
generations of scholars. New kinds of data are becoming available, as
heretofore unconventional methodologies are applied to existing archival
resources and contemporary mission experience. Fuller narratives of
evangelization are also emerging, in part due to the fact that we are beginning
to understand better the roles played in cross-cultural mission by indigenous
actors. Non-Western perspectives on the study of mission are becoming
increasingly prominent within the field and will, I believe, become more
influential in the decades to come. In many ways, the integrative potential of
missiology is yet to be achieved.
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 PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED IN
THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MISSIOLOGY SERIES
The American Society of Missiology Series, published in collaboration with
Orbis Books, seeks to publish scholarly works of high merit and wide interest
on numerous aspects of missiology—the study of Christian mission in its
historical, social, and theological dimensions. Able presentations on new and
creative approaches to the practice and understanding of mission will receive
close attention from the ASM Series Committee.

1. Protestant Pioneers in Korea, Everett Nichols Hunt Jr.

2. Catholic Politics in China and Korea, Eric O. Hanson
3. From the Rising of the Sun, James M. Phillips
4. Meaning Across Cultures, Eugene A. Nida and William D. Reyburn
5. The Island Churches of the Pacific, Charles W. Forman
6. Henry Venn, Wilbert Shenk
7. No Other Name? Paul F. Knitter
8. Toward a New Age in Christian Theology, Richard Henry Drummond
9. The Expectation of the Poor, Guillermo Cook
10. Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today, James J. Stamoolis
11. Confucius, the Buddha, and the Christ, Ralph Covell
12. The Church and Cultures, Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD
13. Translating the Message, Lamin Sanneh
14. An African Tree of Life, Thomas G. Christensen
15. Missions and Money (second edition), Jonathan J. Bonk
16. Transforming Mission, David J. Bosch
17. Bread for the Journey, Anthony J. Gittins, CSSp
18. New Face of the Church in Latin America, Guillermo Cook
19. Mission Legacies, edited by Gerald H. Anderson, Robert T. Coote,
Norman A. Horner, and James M. Phillips
20. Classic Texts in Mission and World Christianity, edited by Norman E.
Thomas
21. Christian Mission: A Case Study Approach, Alan Neely
22. Understanding Spiritual Power, Marguerite G. Kraft
23. Missiological Education for the 21st Century: The Book, the Circle, and
the Sandals, edited by J. Dudley Woodberry, Charles Van Engen, and
Edgar J. Elliston
24. Dictionary of Mission: Theology, History, Perspectives, edited by Karl
Müller, SVD, Theo Sundermeier, Stephen B. Bevans, SVD, and Richard
H. Bliese
25. Earthen Vessels and Transcendent Power: American Presbyterians in
China, 1837-1952, G. Thompson Brown
26. The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History, 1820-1980,
Angelyn Dries, OSF
27. Mission in the New Testament: An Evangelical Approach, edited by
William J. Larkin Jr. and Joel W. Williams
28. Changing Frontiers of Mission, Wilbert Shenk
29. In the Light of the Word: Divine Word Missionaries of North America,
Ernest Brandewie
30. Constants in Context: Theology of Mission for Today, Stephen B.
Bevans, SVD, and Roger Schroeder, SVD
31. Changing Tides: Latin America and Mission Today, Samuel Escobar
32. Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth
Century, edited by Dana L. Robert
33. Church: Community for the Kingdom, John Fuellenbach, SVD
34. Mission in Acts: Ancient Narratives for a Postmodern Context, edited by
Robert L. Gallagher and Paul Hertig
35. A History of Christianity in Asia: Volume I, Beginnings to 1500, Samuel
Hugh Moffett
36. A History of Christianity in Asia: Volume II, 1500-1900, Samuel Hugh
Moffett
37. A Reader's Guide to Transforming Mission, Stan Nussbaum
38. The Evangelization of Slaves and Catholic Origins in Eastern Africa,
Paul Vincent Kollman, CSC
39. Israel and the Nations: A Mission Theology of the Old Testament, James
Chukwuma Okoye, CSSp
40. Women in Mission: From the New Testament to Today, Susan Smith
41. Reconstructing Christianity in China: K. H. Ting and the Chinese
Church, Philip L. Wickeri
42. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (second
edition), Lamin Sanneh
43. Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity, Robert J. Gallagher
44. The World Mission in the Wesleyan Spirit, Darryll L. Whiteman and
Gerald H. Anderson
45. Miracles, Missions & American Pentecostalism, Gary B. McGee
46. The Gospel among the Nations: Christian Mission in a Pluralistic World,
Robert A. Hunt
47. Mission and Unity: Lessons from History, 1792-2010, Norman E.
Thomas
48. Mission and Culture: The Louis J. Luzbetak Lectures, Stephen B. Bevans