Missiology continues to be a male-dominated field, despite the fact that the majority of mission practitioners are women. Christian female scholar-practitioners have unique insights into issues facing women in contexts around the world that can be best met through holistic ministry; however, the voices of women scholar-practitioners are often overlooked due to muted group theory and unconscious gender bias. The honor–shame worldview that permeates many societies creates conditions that are especially challenging for women. This article presents the findings of field research and interviews conducted by female scholar-practitioners in MENA, Thailand, and Indonesia, highlighting women’s concerns in those specific contexts. We discuss three issues common across these regions, including gendered expectations, educational opportunities, and geographical challenges. Implications for mission practitioners as well as for future research are discussed.
Missioners and missiologists called home from the wider world, literally or figuratively, to do mission in the United States return to confront a historically liberal society in disarray. To what troubles shall we address our public witness in word and deed? How shall we make our witness intelligible to a traditionally liberal society in the midst of its unraveling? Liberalism’s legitimacy crisis and the decline of the force of its social imaginary since the 1960s define the specific public conditions for a contemporary, contextually sensitive Christian mission in America. Liberalism is taken here not as a political orientation, but as a central theme in the public sensibilities shared by most Americans on the left and right. Liberalism’s often overlooked conceptual foundations and its many manifestations along a spectrum of ideologies and practices are presented as a background to this discussion. As well, the discussion features the pervasive and also overlooked Christian influences that emerged in the 18th century—the American Reformation—and elaborated into the middle of the 20th century to shape a distinctively (mostly) Protestant liberal society. A well-contextualized Christian public witness—and a public missiology—will draw from its own historical resources born in the American Reformation as well as address both post-political despair and metamodern hope if it is to make sense to a liberal society in trouble.
Stanley Hauerwas has been noted for his theology of missionary "witness." However, his theology is not uncontroversial. Of late, it is argued that his theology of witness does not often, or sufficiently, attend to the nature and complexity of belief for those people who live in contemporary, Western society. Part of this complexity, as highlighted by various sociologists and theologians, is that religion has become individualized and privatized. These are serious challenges to the church’s engagement with contemporary society, which Hauerwas does not always seem to adequately address. It will be the purpose of this article, however, to attempt to overcome this lacuna in Hauerwas’s theology, and explore if, and how, his theology might serve as a response to some of the specific challenges arising out of the growing trend towards "privatized religion" in the United States. This will be accomplished by bringing into dialogue Hauerwas’s later work on witness, with some of the sociological insights provided by Charles Taylor and Robert Wuthnow. It will be argued that Hauerwas’s theology of witness, though incomplete, does provide insights that might be helpful to the church in her missionary efforts in the United States.
The author, Titus Presler, regrets that three sentences in the article go beyond a strict reading of the evidence.
Presler R (2016) Education, religion, and risk in Peshawar: A missional self-examination. Missiology 44(2): 207–221 doi:
The opening paragraph at the start of p212 has been corrected as follows: Nevertheless, complications ensued. In October 2011 my two-year work visa was revoked without explanation, my wife and I had to leave the country within 24 hours, and it took the church four months to secure cancellation of the revocation so that I could return. A three-month delay in visa renewal occurred in 2013. No reasons were given, but it was clear that the nation’s security agencies had misgivings. While beating me in February 2014, the ISI agents asked me, "Why are you here in Pakistan?" "For education," I replied while shielding my head. "No, you are here with the CIA!," they retorted while giving their blows extra force.
This correction will be included in all online versions of this article.
The growth of the gospel amongst the Iranian diaspora remains markedly unexamined in missiological circles. The few existing analyses draw attention to disillusionment with Islam as a result of the current political regime in Iran, sustaining an extractionist approach which tends to marginalize interest in spiritual resources Iranians find attractive and useful in their diasporic experience. This article explores the potential of classical Persian poetry, and its depictions of Jesus in particular, to inform and expand missiological engagement with the Iranian diaspora. Following a discussion of three poetic representations of Jesus, consideration is given as to how these representations might serve as sites for both creative evangelistic endeavour and as a potential source of reflection for Iranian Christians.
Missions activities often include efforts aimed at improving the physical well-being of others. These efforts have gained additional emphasis in recent years as North American Protestants have focused on missions activities that have tangible impacts on people’s well-being in contrast to activities with more spiritual impacts. This article uses the idea of "quality of life" to review the relationship of Christian mission to improving the physical well-being of others. Offering a brief sketch of missional activities undertaken in the New Testament, during the Roman Empire, through monasticism, by Anglo-American Reformers, and by 19th- and 20th-century North American missionaries, it concludes that the improvement of people’s quality of life shifted dramatically in reference to the church’s understanding of mission. Specifically, Christians changed from seeing the improvement of others’ quality of life as a means of people sharing in the salvation of Christ to that improvement as one of the chief ends of Christ’s salvific work.
Much missionary work is focused on helping churches become healthy and mature. In doing so, missionaries face the challenge of contextualization. The local people’s ideals and images of church usually reflect different emphases than those of the missionary’s home culture. Indicators that have been used to assess whether a church is doing well in the missionary’s home country may not be the best measures of maturity or health in the host culture. This article describes the application of an approach to contextualization—Paul Hiebert’s "missional theology"—to the diagnosis of church health and maturity in Turkish-speaking Roma (Millet) churches in Bulgaria. In the process, the limitations of using indicators of church health developed in another cultural context without adaptation are discussed, Millet ideals of healthy churches are analyzed, and biblical and Millet ideals are brought into dialogue with each other to produce a contextualized portrayal of a healthy Millet church.
The enormous demographic change of Christianity worldwide is forcing a reexamination of basic questions about Christian identity and the relation of local Christian communities to other Christian groups and traditions. Christianity has been both an agent and a product of the flattening and shrinking of the world. What are the implications of globalization for contextualized worship arts? Through an ethnographic study of 12 urban churches, conducted from 2012 to 2014 in Beira, Mozambique, this article explores the challenges of globalization for developing contextualized worship arts.
The discussion on missions in the Old Testament has led to an unsatisfying diversity of results. In order to let the Old Testament speak for itself as an independent voice of the Christian Bible, foreign concepts like "missions" have to be replaced by theological concepts inherent to the Hebrew Bible itself. The Torah and Former Prophets develop four theological lines within the theme-field of a positive (blessing) mandate to the nation of Israel concerning others: (1) the mandate as mediator of blessing to all the families of the earth; (2) the mandate as mediator of knowledge of God to non-Israelites; (3) the mandate as royal priesthood mediating between Yhwh and the Gentiles; (4) the mandate as host people for strangers. These mandates cannot be subsumed under one single organizing concept like (passive or centripetal) "missions," "witness," or "messenger." Instead they have to be understood as situational specifications of the original blessing mandate to Abraham. The theological intention of these Old Testament texts is to actualize a vision of worldwide knowledge of God in the hearts of their readers.
The choice of music, an essential element of worship and church life, must be addressed in cross-cultural church planting contexts. As cultures evolve, church planters are faced with choices about musical styles that may lead to interpersonal conflicts within the church. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine factors that may enable cross-cultural church planters to constructively manage music-related conflicts when they arise. Members of church plants, like all people, have various goals when entering into such conflicts. They are concerned about the content of the conflict (i.e., the musical style) and thus have content goals. They are also concerned about social elements of the conflict (e.g., their relationships, their identity and values, and the process used to resolve the conflict) and thus have social goals. The results of this study of 276 evangelical Christians indicate that achieving both content goals and social goals contributes to overall satisfaction across various conflict outcomes. Moreover, the evidence indicates that achieving only a social goal leads to greater satisfaction with the conflict outcome than achieving only the content goal in music-related conflict. This implies that church planters, when faced with music-related conflict, should strive to meet the gospel-congruent social goals of people with whom they are in conflict in order to maximize satisfaction with the conflict outcome.
This article proposes a critical reevaluation of church planting utilizing the philosophical area of virtue ethics. The article begins first with a critique of modern church planting based primarily upon Alasdair MacIntyre’s assessment of the social sciences in After Virtue. MacIntyre’s critique of the social sciences as having the potential to be both manipulative and overconfident bears striking parallels to the current moral issues surrounding church planting. Such a critique paves the way for a rehabilitation of the practice of church planting. The second part of this article begins a process of rebuilding an understanding of church planting from the ground up. Utilizing a Thomistic understanding of virtue, I will demonstrate how the individual missional actions that compromise church planting are in accordance with our natural and supernatural ends, and thus promote human flourishing. Following this, I will begin to build a definition of church planting coherent with Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of a practice (activities with goods internal to them). Such a definition necessitates the need for the practice of church planting to be authorized by Scripture, church, and tradition. Last, I will show how the practice of church planting must be embedded within the broader narrative of the church and the individual Christian life.
Women leaders are scarce in evangelical mission organizations. Part of the reason may be gender-role stereotypes, which function very strongly in much of evangelicalism. This article presents the stories of two women who worked at executive-level leadership positions in evangelical mission organizations. Using narrative analysis and a critical feminist lens, I examine their stories to understand how these women describe their leadership and how they portray their use of power. The strength of gender-role stereotypes and evangelical gender roles appeared to define and limit the power they were able to use. As long as they stayed within prescribed norms, they experienced some success. Deviations from the gender-role stereotypes led to sanctions from their organizations. Conclusions and implications are that the stereotypes may limit women’s leadership and that both women and organizations need to become aware of how these unspoken assumptions may be functioning. Recommendations for women leaders and for organizations seeking to incorporate women into leadership are offered.
This article explores the miscommunication of the concept of sin and consequently of the gospel due to mismatches between missionaries’ and host people’s understandings of sin. Examples of the miscommunication of sin in several cultural contexts due to gospel communicators’ limited and fixed understanding of sin are given. The Bible’s portrayals of both the multifaceted nature of sin and the corresponding multifaceted nature of the gospel are examined. Based on these, an approach to more effective communication of the concept of sin is outlined, which includes appreciating its multifaceted nature, analysing how the local people view it, and examining how the Bible speaks to the local people’s particular understanding of sin.
Missionaries experience multiple evaluation processes, both formal and informal, involving various stakeholders in their ministry (e.g., sending organizations, churches, and national partners). While a great deal of literature exists on performance assessment and performance management in general, the particular issues related to missionary evaluation have scarcely been addressed. A small study consisting of interviews with eight missionaries revealed a number of issues that deserve further attention. This article summarizes the results of the study, which consisted of questions relating to the evaluators and the purposes, content, and means of evaluation. Some tentative conclusions indicating possible directions for further study are also outlined.
Missiology has been based on the notion of an objective description of another culture and the notion that culture is homogeneous, coherent, and integrated. Such notions have faced serious challenges from globalization and postmodern anthropology, which is a product of poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism. The post-postmodern missiology proposed here is built on the epistemological foundation of critical realism and recent social theory. In this missiology the concept of culture is reoriented to the diversity of intra-cultural variations, conceived in spatial terms as mobility, and embedded in power. The diversity in culture leads us to question the validity of much theological contextualization. In its place a polythetic and progressive contextualization is proposed.
The contemporary case of high-profile evangelical groups promoting intercountry adoption in books, conferences, and church ministries in the United States is a situation that requires missiological examination. This article makes an argument for the need for a broadened theological base from which to understand intercountry adoption and orphan care, as well as the need for critical engagement with related knowledge bases in the social sciences. It includes discussion of the difficulties associated with adoption of children as a missionary strategy and making parallel the adoption of children with a believer’s adoption by God. Integration of the biblical theme of power reversal to attain social justice for the oppressed with current adoption literature is used to problematize the theological and practical emphases of the evangelical adoption and orphan care movement, and to inform Christian thought and practices related to child removal and welfare.
The concept of already-mission is developed as a corrective to current missional literature on congregational development. Remnants of the extractional approach to congregational development are critiqued. These problematic assumptions include viewing congregational leaders as mission brokers and parishioners as missional blank slates. The already-mission approach is presented as an alternative to colonial habits in congregational mission strategy. Already-mission is described using categories of values, vision, mission, and covenant. Interview questions, tested with parishioners and seminary students, are developed. Partnership practices and examples are explored, and congregational readiness factors in relation to the already-mission model are discussed.
Recent discussion concerning the relationship between the god of Islam and the god of Christianity prompted this article, which explores that relationship by looking at the nature of revelation in each religion and how that revelation reflects the nature of each god. This exploration indicates that these gods are not one and the same, because while the revelation found in the Qur’an is transcendent and static, revealing a god who is the same, the revelation found in Jesus Christ is both immanent and living, as is Jesus himself. The effect this has on preaching and missions is discussed in the conclusion.
In 1971, John Gatu, General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, issued a famous moratorium on foreign missionaries and funds. The immediate reaction was strong and provoked a debate about mission that continues to this day. This article investigates Gatu’s motivation for such abrupt and controversial action and makes a case for considering the moratorium to be a milestone in mission history, marking the symbolic end of the colonial mission paradigm and the start of the postcolonial mission era.
The article is an exposition and critique of Lesslie Newbigin’s view of the church and its mission, according to which the church’s mission is compared with and taken up into the sending of the Spirit and the Son by the Father. The conclusion is that Newbigin’s ecclesiology has great merit in that it challenges the Christian community to realize that it is not even truly a church unless it is active in missions. But, at the same time, the essay argues that there are aspects of God’s missional work that Newbigin’s view does not fully integrate.
With pluralism increasingly becoming the dominant explanatory paradigm for religious diversity in Europe and North America, Christians must contend with the reality that their fundamental conviction of salvation being mediated uniquely and exclusively through Jesus Christ is widely perceived as being parochial, intolerant, or even unconscionable. This article explores and challenges what appears to be a common and significant, but not often examined, assumption underlying protests against claims of Christian particularity—an unfairness intuition. Considerations include recent research on culture and notions of fairness/justice and biblical-theological reflections on fairness/justice.
An obscure field called scientometrics—the study of how rapidly academic research is produced and how quickly it becomes outdated—has recently been popularized by Stephen Arbesman’s (2012) book, The Half-life of Facts. This article employs the methods of scientometrics to measure the rate at which new missiological information is being published, and the rate at which this research is going out of date. Mission leaders can use this data to obtain a clearer picture of how the discipline of missiology is reacting to a changing world. This will allow us to concentrate on trends that matter, and on theories and strategies that will have maximum staying power.
Over the last 100 years we have seen dramatic changes in the ways that Christian churches have approached mission. In the United States, mission is now dominated by activities such as short-term immersion trips, church-to-church global partnerships, young adult volunteer programs, or lay mission programs that send individuals or families for temporary assignments. In this context of rapid change, Steve Bevans and Roger Schroeder published their groundbreaking work, Constants in Context, which provides guidelines for mission—summarized by the term prophetic dialogue—that acknowledge that Christianity is by its nature mission-oriented, and that the nature of our mission must take into account centuries of wisdom and at the same time modify itself with changing times. Based on a case study in Colombia, this article proposes that the practice of international accompaniment in zones of violent conflict is an example of prophetic dialogue in practice, and thus can serve as a model for other twenty-first-century mission activities.
This article explores how the use of biblical metaphors for salvation can be a significant aid in communication of the gospel. Metaphor is a powerful communicative tool that not only illustrates truth, but can touch emotions and can shape cognitive functions. Four New Testament images of salvation are described with examples of how they may resonate with the plausibility structures found in various cultural settings.
Chronic economic disparities are painfully evident throughout the world, and in this context challenging questions of missional hermeneutics, formation, and practice arise. This article seeks to tease out some noteworthy economic implications of Gen 1–3, implications that are both theologically and missionally evocative and often at odds with widespread anthropological assumptions, market-centric values, and conceptions of socio-economic justice. Drawing together insights from Gen 1–3, the Babylonian Enuma Elish Creation Myth, neoclassical and contemporary economic perspectives, and Catholic Social Teaching, the article highlights key anthropological and socio-economic values that can contribute to a biblically authentic missional hermeneutic.
This article aims to briefly provide a missional hermeneutic of the other by undertaking a dialogue between Levinas and Confucianism. Regarding the other as heathen, uncivilized, and lost, the church has tended not to treat the other as its interlocutor. Levinas’s hermeneutic of the other might help the church correct this tendency toward the other. However, Levinas’s emphasis on the radical otherness of the other might lead to further distancing between the church and the world as the other. In this regard, Confucianism’s relational and inclusive understanding of the other might be helpful for reducing the gap between the church and the other.
Should missiology seek the status of a theological discipline? After a brief account of the history of academic missiology it is argued here that a trinitarian missiology is at the heart of all of theology. Missiology should both permeate theology and exist as a subject area to accompany missionary praxis, making theological education at least missiological to the core, if not itself missional. Missiology is part of practical theology, praxis-based and oriented to specific contexts. It draws on both theological and other disciplines (particularly the social sciences) as an interdisciplinary enterprise rather than as a discipline in its own right.
In the past two centuries, the Algerian church has witnessed a number of Christians who have demonstrated that gospel living requires promoting peace and respect for all people. The stories of the Trappists of Staouéli, Charles de Foucauld, Leon Duval, Christian de Chergé, and the Trappists of Tibhirine indicate in various ways that mission and dialogue entail loving encounter of one’s neighbor in concrete ways in the daily interactions of life. Their legacy finds expression in some contemporary views on missiology.
This article explores the relationship between different construals of the Trinity and missio Dei and their resultant understandings of political formation necessary for the church in mission. We evaluate the Spirit-centered view of mission which frontloads the Trinity into the Spirit’s work in the world as well as the Jesus-centered view of mission which backloads the work of the Trinity onto the historical work of Jesus. In each view we expose an inherent problem in forming the communal presence necessary for gospel witness coupled with resistance to empire. Instead, we propose the Incarnation-centered view of mission as a trinitarianism sufficient for mission amid empire.
An increasing number of theologians assert that the Western world has moved from a Christendom era to a post-Christendom era. In relation to this, this article discusses the charge of sectarianism. The article argues that the task that lies before the church in the Western world in not to bypass its distinctiveness with accusations of sectarianism, but to recapitulate an understanding of its own distinctiveness that should be seen as a precondition for its engagement in society. Such an ecclesiological position holds, it is asserted, important potential for an understanding of the role of a missional church in a post-Christendom society.
United Methodist scholars have contributed significantly to the emerging critical study of evangelism. In doing so, they have also contributed to the study of mission. This is because the Methodist approach to the study of evangelism allows for a broad set of definitions for evangelism, multiple methodologies for considering evangelism, and a wide array of activities that can fall under the rubric of evangelism. This essay demonstrates the breadth of this contribution by reviewing texts authored by United Methodist scholars of evangelism from the 1970s to the present.