Remembering the American Society of Missiology 1973–2023: Remarks at the 50th anniversary banquet celebration

Introduction

I remember my very first American Society of Missiology (ASM) annual meeting. It was in June 1975, and I was a young anthropology graduate student, eager and anxious to discover how I could apply my anthropological training to God’s mission in the world. It was a small gathering of perhaps 25–30 men, and we met at Divine Word College in Epworth, Iowa, at the invitation of the president of that school, Fr. Louis Luzbetak who was also the ASM president that year. I remember the presidential address given with real gusto by a young, energetic, former missionary who had served a decade in the Philippines—45-year-old Gerald Anderson. I also met Charles Kraft at that meeting and on the spot, he invited me to come out to the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, as a visiting scholar and discover how anthropology and cross-cultural mission were related. Kraft, Luzbetak, and Anderson would all become very important in my formation as a missiological anthropologist, and they each contributed to my 38 years of active membership in the ASM.

At that 1975 meeting, the ASM was only 12 years old, and despite the fact that there was very little gender, and even less ethnic diversity in the group, I was impressed with how these Independent Evangelicals, Mainline Protestants, and Roman Catholics seemed to get along so well together, recognizing and respecting each other’s different ecclesial traditions of mission. I would later learn that this tripartite ecumenical community would become a trademark of the ASM. And thank the Lord, we have not strayed from that commitment. We have kept it alive to this day. Look around this banquet hall tonight, and I’m sure you’ll agree, we’ve made some progress in terms of ethnic diversity and gender equality, united around our common commitment to God’s mission in the world.

The annual meeting, for as long as I can remember, has always occurred on Father’s Day weekend, and from 1973 to 1987, each year the meetings were held in a different venue. The planning committee not only had to organize the program, they also had to secure a different venue each year. And that was a lot of time-consuming work. After a dismal experience at the University of Pittsburgh in 1987, in 1988 we met for the first time at Techny Towers, the headquarters of the Society of the Divine Word, a Catholic missionary order, and it was such a wonderful venue that we returned there every year for the next 25 years until we grew to 150 participants, and Techny could no longer contain us. Many of us old timers have fond memories of Techny and still miss that place.

And why did we outgrow Techny? For many years a typical ASM annual meeting included a few plenary speakers, a Saturday night banquet, a couple board meetings, a business meeting, and worship on Sunday. We came to realize, however that we had a bleak future as a missiological society if we did not open the doors and make room for more presentations than just a few plenary sessions. We needed to do something. The conclusion of an internal study process, following the suggestion of Robert Priest, professor of anthropology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School at the time, led us to transform the structure of the annual meeting by developing parallel sessions and multiple opportunities for presentations, much like American Academy of Religion (AAR), Society of Biblical Literature (SBL), and the American Anthropological Association annual meetings. And that is when as a Society we were transformed into what we have become today. Instead of an old men’s club we provided multiple opportunities for established scholars and young graduate students to intermingle, present their papers, and participate on an equal footing in the activities of the Society. From an average of 150 participants in our last days at Techny we grew to over 300 registrants on a few occasions. And then COVID struck.

ASM Publishing

In my role as the Publisher for ASM, I want to speak for a few minutes on the history of the publishing arm of the American Society of Missiology. Our quarterly journal Missiology: An International Review was first published in January 1973. As a missiological journal, Missiology was established on the solid foundation of the journal Practical Anthropology that had been founded in 1953 and primarily served the needs of Bible translators. It was a small pamphlet size of about 40 pages, published six times a year, with a worldwide distribution of more than 3000 subscribers. Our first editor for Missiology was Australian missiological anthropologist, Alan Tippett, who was the ideal person to pick up the reins from Practical Anthropology. Tippett was one of the founding members of the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary. He incorporated into the Masthead of Missiology the phrase “Continuing Practical Anthropology,” which continues to this day.

In the history of Missiology, we have had eight editors:

In the same period, we have had four Publishers of the American Society of Missiology, whose role it is to oversee the growing number of publications emanating from the ASM . They include:

From 1983 to 2013 our journal was published at the Mennonite Herald Press in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, but in 2013 we were approached by Sage Publications offering to produce our journal. We were hesitant at first, for fear we might lose some editorial control, but the decision has turned out to be a good one, providing us with a steady stream of revenue and a much wider circulation of our journal, with presently 10,683 subscriptions worldwide.

When the American Society of Missiology was founded, its first priority was to establish an academic journal to help launch the field of missiology as a legitimate academic discipline, but our approach was different from that of the Europeans. The European approach to the study of mission, beginning with the great German missiologist Gustav Warneck (1834–1910), as Wilbert Shenk (1987: 29) has written, “Conformed to the cannons of scientific investigation and scholarship . . . [and] European missiologists continue to be an elite group with membership limited to those with full academic training and engaged in university related teaching, research and writing.” In contrast, the American approach to missiology has been pragmatic and more of an applied science. Therefore, we have welcomed scholars, practitioners, and mission executives into our community.

Realizing the need for more than just a scholarly journal, the ASM began exploring the possibilities of publishing a monograph series, and in 1979 the American Society of Missiology entered into an agreement with Orbis Books to publish the ASM Series. In 1980, the first two books in the ASM Series were published—Everett Hunt’s Protestant Pioneers in Korea and Eric Hanson’s Catholic Politics in China and Korea. To date we have published 64 books in the ASM Series with the 2023 publication of Al Tizon’s Christ among Classes: The Rich, the Poor, and the Mission of the Church.

Every doctoral student who finally defends her or his dissertation naturally wonders if it will ever be published and read by more than the three to five members on their dissertation committee. We have always had University Microfilms that make dissertations available, but this is still a very limited distribution. So, in 2007, the ASM decided to launch the Scholarly Monograph Series. We negotiated a publishing arrangement with Wipf & Stock Publishers, and to date, 63 doctoral dissertations have been published under the Pickwick Publications imprint.

In 2012, the Board of Publications launched the Book Award for Excellence in Missiology and this year Daniel D. Lee’s book, Doing Asian American Theology: A Contextual Framework for Faith and Practice is the 11th recipient of this coveted award.

Our newest venture in missiological publishing is the Samuel Escobar Award launched in 2022. The purpose of the ASM Samuel Escobar Book Award is to encourage ASM members who are from the Global South or who are North American persons of color, to publish their first book. We will provide an award of $500 to the author and a publishing subvention of up to $4000 to be given directly to the publishing house for the book that receives the award.

In conclusion

Did our founders back in 1972 and 1973 ever imagine that our journal Missiology would have over 10,000 subscribers in 50 years, or that we would have published 64 books in the American Society of Missiology Series, and 63 doctoral dissertations now have a wider reach by being published in the ASM Scholarly Monograph Series? These are impressive statistics, but in my mind the most important element in our publishing is that our missiological scholarship must continue to contribute in practical ways to furthering God’s mission in the world.