Abstract
General works
In this volume, Dale Irvin draws together a variety of international Christian perspectives that open up new understandings of the Reformation. In six chapters, contributors offer general discussions and case studies of the effects of the Protestant Reformation on global communities from the sixteenth century to the present.
This book explores questions and challenges around creating and maintaining intercultural ministries today. It addresses issues of power, privilege, assimilation, and segregation, including chapters from a racially and denominationally diverse group of pastors, theologians, and teachers who reflect on their experiences and experiments in intercultural ministry.
Contributors articulate various evangelical views regarding the church’s mission, providing a healthy and vigorous debate on this topic. In a helpful counterpoints format, this volume demonstrates the unique theological frameworks, doctrinal convictions, and missiological conclusions that inform and distinguish stereological, participatory, contextual, and ecumenical-political missions.
Biographies
This is the story of how one Muslim man was drawn to the Christian faith, and how he later became an ambassador for Christ with a ministry in the Muslim world. This narrative sheds light on Islamic cultural dynamics and what Westerners should know about Muslim contexts.
Church renewal
In this text, the authors bring clarity to the multisite movement and assembles the lessons learned over the past fifteen years. They explore the opportunities presented by the various forms of multi-site church, identify areas of concern, and conclude that multisite is not only a biblically sound ecclesiological model, but also a model that provides a compelling solution to contemporary reductionism in the church.
In this follow-up to Church for Every Context, Moynagh develops a model of emergent innovation that combines insights from both complexity and entrepreneurship theories, and takes into account the significant developments in practice and thinking around the emerging church.
Education
This text examines how the Black Church has changed throughout a modern/postmodern context. Everett explores how social gospel dimensions and prophetic radicalism have diminished in a way that it might reestablish itself as a pillar in the community through a retrieval of its prophetic voice and social gospel roots so that it to might be missional-minded and civically engaged. Everett anticipates that this perspective will assist the Black Church in the reclamation of its heritage by confirming its purpose and affirming its position within the missional context that God has placed it.
The Basel Missionary Training Institute (BMTI) was the first school designed solely for preparing European missionaries for ministry in non-European lands. Pitfalls of Trained Incapacity explores the various sociological and historical factors that influenced the BMTI “community of practice” and how the outcomes affected the work of the Basel Mission in Ghana in its initial phase.
History
Andrew E. Barnes chronicles African Christians’ turn to American-style industrial education, particularly the model developed by Booker T. Washington at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, as a vehicle for Christian regeneration in Africa. Over the period 1880–1920, African Christians, motivated by Ethiopianism and its conviction that Africans should be saved by other Africans, proposed and founded schools based upon the Tuskegee model.
This addition to the Encountering Mission Series portrays the sweep of missions history, revealing how God has fulfilled his promise to bless all the nations. Two leading missionary scholars and experienced professors help readers understand how missions began, how missions developed, and where missions is going. The authors provide practical application of history’s lessons. Maps, tables, box inserts, sidebars, and discussion questions add to the book’s usefulness in the classroom.
Ruth Tucker offers candid profiles of women of Christian history who changed the world in their own way. From the famous to the infamous to the obscure, women like Perpetua, Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, Anne Hutchinson, Susanna Wesley, Ann Judson, Harriet Tubman, Fanny Crosby, Hannah Whitehall Smith, Corrie ten Boom, and Mother Teresa, along with dozens of others.
Walls examines the role of mission and cross-cultural transmission of the gospel in the formation of world Christianity, covering themes ranging from the transmission of Christian faith, to Africa in Christian thought and history, along with reflections on a broad range of mission figures, and a personal reflection on “missiology as a vocation.”
Religions
This selection of essays by Jesuit theologian Michael Amaladoss brings together insights on religious diversity in an increasingly globalized world, where religion and religious differences influence individuals and societies in profound ways. Drawing on a particular context in India, the writings here are structured around the contention that interreligious dialogue or religious pluralism are not abstracts, but can only be discerned in the context of a lived reality of a world of many faiths.
Do Muslims and Christians truly share Abraham? Is Abraham a starting point for dialogue among monotheistic faith communities? Bristow rigorously analyzes biblical and Qur’an Abraham narratives and builds on the tight connection between narrative and worldview to lay the foundation for a careful theological comparison between two portraits of Abraham and the two faith traditions in which they are embedded.
Peter Kreeft invites us to encounter dialogues on the world’s great faiths. His characters Thomas Keptic and Bea Lever are students in Professor Fesser’s course on world religions, and the three explore the content and distinctive claims of each. Together they probe the plausibility of major religions, from Hinduism and Buddhism to Christianity and Islam. Along the way they explore how religions might relate to each other and to what extent exclusivism or inclusivism might make sense.
In a world of deep religious strife and increasing pluralism, it can seem safer to remain inside the “bubble” of our faith community. Christian college campuses in particular provide a strong social bubble that reinforces one’s faith identity in distinction from the wider society. Drawing on the parables of Jesus, research on interreligious dialogue, and their own classroom experience, Larson and Shady provide readers with the tools they need to move beyond the bubble.
Examining key Buddhist doctrines such as non-self, karma, and dharma, Mackenzie shows the reader ways of sensitively engaging with Buddhists. Informed by Karl Reichelt’s contextualized approach, the book advocates friendship with Buddhists but at the same time maintaining missionary encounter. The book offers analogies, illustrations, and conversation starters for those who wish to share their faith with Buddhist friends.
By drawing on the witness of the Catholic Church in Algeria and Morocco, McGee sensitively illuminates the way in which Christians can connect sincerely in everyday life with their Muslim neighbors. The account of the martyred Trappist monks of Tibhirine, recounted in the award-winning 2010 film Of Gods and Men, forms the backbone of this affecting and thoughtful celebration of interreligious friendship.
Before his death, Jacques Dupuis, a prominent Catholic theologian who faced a long persecution by his own church for his teachings on religious pluralism, sat down for a book-length interview with Gerard O’Connell, a noted Catholic journalist. Dupuis insisted that the frank and honest transcript not be published until after he died, and certain other curial figures were out of office. This book presents not only Dupuis’s life story (including his tragic final years) but also his views on religious pluralism, interreligious dialogue, and ecclesiology.
This volume explores the changing dynamics of Islam today, including how current religious and social climates shape Christian engagement with Muslims. This book brings together leading missiologists, theologians, and historians from the 2016 Missiology Lectures at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Intercultural Studies to present a nuanced account of contemporary Muslim societies.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims often treat each other as strangers. Their holy books are not the cause of their conflicts and enmity but rather show the way to solve them. They tell a common story of the lifelong journey of the human being to the promised city, the promised land, and the promised world where justice and righteousness reign.
Social aspects
This resource orients readers to the history of globalization and to a Christian theological perspective on it, explores concrete realities by focusing on global poverty, and helps readers reimagine Christian mission in ways that announce the truly good news of Christ and God’s kingdom. This is the second book in a new series that reframes missiological themes and studies for students using/featuring the common theme of mission as partnership with Christians.
Social sciences
This text covers the essential concepts that drive cultural anthropology today in a newly streamlined format with a “toolkit” approach that emphasizes the discipline’s big questions and reinforces key concepts to show that these tools are useful beyond the classroom in relationships, campus life, workplaces, religious communities, and our globalizing world.
Spirituality
In order to deal with the stressful nature of displacement experienced by people who work internationally, there must be resilience. This volume presents a specific type of resilience, namely “resilience nourished by inner sources.” Cultivating inner resilience draws on all the facets of a person’s interior life: thoughts and memories, hopes and desires, beliefs, convictions, concerns, and emotions. The notion of inner strength and resilience from within is developed using many examples from missionaries and development workers as well as case studies from all over the world.
Theology
This resource specifically addresses the missiological issues of the twenty-first century. This collection of essays in honor of Charles E. Van Engen features contributions from Stephen Bevans, Roger Schroeder, van Thanh Nguyen, Mary Motte, Gerald Anderson, Scott Sunquist, and many others who offer their insights and reflections, focusing on the impact of cultural and demographic changes on the nature and purpose of Christian mission.
This text gathers well-regarded Christian thinkers from around the world to discuss the significance of Christian teaching in their respective contexts. Nine scholars from the global church, incorporating African, Asian, Latin American, and First Nations cultural contexts, reflect deeply on soteriology in the majority world.
East Asian theological perspectives, as an antidote to Western modes of thinking, can present an alternative hermeneutic to the dualism inherited from Greek philosophy that still prevails in Western theologies. Contemporary theologies (including Asian theologies), heavily influenced by this dualism, are often divided by two macro-paradigms; namely, theo-logos (classical theology) and theo-praxis (liberationist theology). Heup Young Kim argues for a third way, the Dao paradigm of theology that can encompass these disparate traditions but also move beyond them into more fruitful theological, scientific, and philosophical areas of reflection.
An increasing number of theologians believe that the Western world has moved from an era of Christendom to an era of post-Christendom. This book goes to the heart of the debate related to this shift, asking, How are we to understand the distinctive identity of the church with special reference to its role in a post-Christendom society? It then presents an analysis of the work of the English Reformed theologian Lesslie Newbigin and the American Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder, both of whom reflect on how we should understand this important question.
Asia
This text is a collection of experiences and perspectives from some of the most influential leaders in Asia. The subjects cover life stories to theological explorations. This book covers how culture has affected the sharing of the gospel in the Asia context and how gospel values can transcend cultural limitations.
Ian Johnson tells the story of one of the world’s great spiritual revivals. Following a century of violent anti-religious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches, and mosques, as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty over what it means to be Chinese and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is searching for new guideposts.
Through an examination of Methodist missions to Southeast Asia at the turn of the twentieth century, this book unites the history of globalization with the history of Christian mission and the history of Southeast Asia. The book explores the international connections forged by the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Malaysia Mission between 1885 and 1915, putting them in the context of a wave of globalization that was sweeping the world at that time, including significant developments in Southeast Asia.
This is the first scholarly volume on Chinese Christian Pentecostal and Charismatic movements around the globe. The authors include the most active and renowned scholars of global Pentecostalism and Chinese Christianity, including Allan Anderson, Daniel Bays, Kim-twang Chan, Gordon Melton, Donald Miller, and Fenggang Yang. It covers historical linkages between Pentecostal missions and indigenous movements in greater China, contemporary charismatic congregations in China, Singapore, Malaysia, and the United States, and the Catholic charismatic renewal movement in China.