The future of mission studies

Introduction

I confess that I get a little nervous when people start discussing the future of something. I have been in situations where this is a way of asking ‘Does it have a future?’ I am taking it that, on its fortieth anniversary, at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, the future of mission studies is not in question. But even if it is, I am convinced that someone somewhere will always be doing mission studies in the future – if not in the West, then in another region of the world. I say this because Christians read a Bible in which each of the four gospels culminates with Jesus Christ telling his disciples about their mission in the world. Christians in every place and age will grapple with the meaning of these commissioning verses – Matthew 28:16–20; Mark 16:15–20; Luke 24:46–49/Acts 1:8; John 20:19–23. They will wonder about how to make disciples, tell the good news, how to bear witness and how to fulfil Jesus’ words in practice. All thoughtful Christians are challenged to reflect on what they have and have not done to respond to Jesus’ expectations for his gospel-bearers. Mission may go by these various names – discipling, evangelism, witness, service and possible others, ¹ but all are attempts to describe our part in the outworking of the purposes of God in Jesus Christ in the in-between times before he comes again.

If mission is understood as missio Dei, then there are many possible starting points for a biblical understanding of mission studies or missiology, ² from creation to revelation and various points in between. However, arguably, each of these becomes significant for Christian mission only as the church asks what the commission means for our practice. ³ If our starting point is what Jesus calls his disciples to do in the world – not just the Matthean version but also Mark, Luke and John's renderings, then mission is primarily the activity of the church towards the coming kingdom or the life of the age to come. Likewise, the church does mission studies because action and reflection go together for growth in faith and faithfulness. Whether mission studies becomes established as a field of study or discipline in the academy is a secondary question (Stanley, 2022). In any local context, that depends on the relationship of the church with its society and of faith with the academy. Nevertheless, if Christians around the world are acting on Jesus' commission, it is important that what we do, why we do it and how we do it are studied in the most rigorous way possible. This is so that mission practice can be known, critiqued, developed and reformed in ways suggested by the best of human knowledge and research. Furthermore, it is necessary that we appraise our mission activities not just in the eyes of its promoters, or its participants, but also from the perspective of those who have been on the receiving end of it in order to reform and develop them. This criticality is to ensure that the mission is not done at the whim of a mission leader, or based on a conspiracy theory, or because of mere enthusiasm for a cause, but that it is done responsibly, in Christlike ways and for the glory of God.

In this article, ⁴ I will attempt to answer the question of the future of the academic study of mission in three different dimensions: (a) the nature of mission studies as a field; (b) its relation to other disciplines and (c) its potential development.

Mission Studies or Missiology as a Field

In order to illustrate the need for clarity about mission studies or missiology as a field, which is necessary for curriculum development and research purposes, let me first turn to the example of Fuller Theological Seminary, where I currently work and then to recent The Oxford Handbook of Mission Studies, for which I was the lead editor (Kim et al., 2022).

The PhD degree in Intercultural Studies at Fuller has as its core course ‘Missiology as a Discipline’. Missiology was the original name of the degree in the School of World Mission that was founded by Donald McGavran in 1965. The change of the name of the degree, and eventually the school, to Intercultural Studies was pragmatic in recognition of the difficulties that some graduates experienced when working in contexts inhospitable to Christianity or religion in general if ‘mission’ appeared on their CV (Glanville, 2015). In addition to the church growth theory of McGavran, Fuller's products included practical anthropology, unreached people groups, power evangelism and spiritual warfare. Being a separate School of World Mission, Fuller's most well-known missiologists tended to focus on strategy and action and left matters of theological reflection to Fuller's School of Theology. However, such missiology was challenged by the 2000s through the introduction of biblical theology of mission, mission history and by mission as development and as social action. Nevertheless, although most faculty could appreciate David Bosch's historical-theological approach, there were some for whom missiology was merely the application of the social sciences to fulfil the mission task or a means of justifying a spiritual battle against anti-Christian forces. ⁵ Without a clear delineation of the nature of missiology, successive PhD students – many of whom arrived without backgrounds in the field – were left to work it out for themselves from a bewildering variety of books. Decisions about who could be appointed to the missiology faculty were also difficult without a clear description of the field.

It seems that Fuller was not the only institution with this problem. As the editor of Mission Studies, the journal of the International Association for Mission Studies (IAMS), I noticed that the brief definition of the interests of the association varied significantly from one executive committee to the next. Then, a few years ago, I was asked to suggest how to describe what constituted research in mission studies, especially in connection with the AMRI initiative – the Alliance of Mission Researchers and Institutions. ⁶ Several suggestions had already been made based on what activities were considered to be part of the mission but without clear disciplinary, theoretical or conceptual considerations.

These experiences heightened for me the need to clarify the meaning of mission studies or missiology, which I see as my major field or discipline. What should be included in mission studies and where do the boundaries lie? As I looked for wisdom, I found that the existing dictionaries were more than a decade old and that there was no handbook or companion volume with an academic publisher that represented the state of the field of missiology. At the fourteenth IAMS Congress in Seoul in 2016, I called a meeting to discuss this need, and a loose outline of such a work began to take shape. There was a consensus that to describe a field of study, we needed to think in terms of disciplines, methods and theories. And there was broad agreement that, from a disciplinary point of view, mission studies is an interdisciplinary field that brings many different approaches to bear on the subject of Christian mission. It was also agreed that those multiple disciplines fall into three main categories: biblical/theological, historical and social sciences of various sorts. As I started planning The Oxford Handbook of Mission Studies, working at first with the late Knud Jørgensen, ⁷ the social sciences that emerged as most prominent are cultural, religious and societal studies.

In putting the Handbook together, to these five disciplinary approaches, we also added a section on mission practice and one on the history and development of mission studies or missiology. Each section is attentive to method and theory, in part by including chapters on the relation of mission studies to each of the other fields. ⁸ The Handbook was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Although missiology is probably best described as a field of inquiry, such attention to method and theory is a further step on the way to its development as an academic discipline. There may soon be other such initiatives. ⁹

Mission Studies and Neighbouring Fields

Because missiology is outward-facing and chronicles Christian engagement with all sorts of current issues, over the last few centuries, it has spawned other fields as well. For example, many early ethnographers and anthropologists were missionaries who closely observed the people among whom they worked (Lauterbach, 2022). The same can be said for early scholars of religions (Longkumer, 2022). The study of translation and intercultural communication has been encouraged by reflection on Bible translation and the transmission of the gospel (Sanneh, 2009). The World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 famously catalysed inter-church relations and the study of ecumenism (Thomas, 2010: 48–73). The study of international development from the mid-twentieth century is indebted to the aims and methods of missionaries who ran health, education and other services in Western colonies, as well as to the theology of the diakonia or service wings of some northern European state churches (Drønen, 2022). Practical theology is closely related to mission studies since both apply doctrine to practice. ¹⁰ For many parts of the majority world, mission has catalysed studies of social transformation and effective forms of advocacy for justice (Burity, 2022).

In the last few decades, two other fields that are closely related to mission studies have emerged: ‘world Christianity’ and ‘intercultural theology’. In various Western academies, there are attempts to replace mission studies with one or other of them. Like the emergence of ‘intercultural studies’, both fields responded to the toxicity of the word mission in the Western academy in the postcolonial period both because of its perceived complicity with the atrocities and arrogance of European colonialism and also because it was interpreted by university administrators to express a hostile intent towards others. However, unlike the use of ‘intercultural studies’, these disciplines have been significantly theorised. Let us look at each in turn.

The development of the study of world Christianity has been led mainly by historians such as Andrew Walls, Lamin Sanneh, Dana Robert and Brian Stanley, and it is growing especially in the English-speaking West (Robert, 2021). ¹¹ Although it started in the 1990s as a forum for collected studies of Christianity in varied communities and regions, it now pays greater attention to the interrelations of these varied expressions of the faith (Wild-Wood et al., 2021). Furthermore, the study of world Christianity has a clear religious studies agenda to challenge the prevailing treatment of Christianity as a European religion by showing that it too is a world religion in the fullest sense of the term (Kim and Kim, 2016). Therefore, it can be said that it exists in the West to solve a particularly Western problem of Euro-centrism and to decentre the West in the study of Christianity (Wild-Wood et al., 2021). While this is a necessary task, ironically, less attention has been given to how the majority world church will reshape world Christianity.

The term ‘intercultural theology’ was coined by Walter Hollenweger, Hans Margull and Richard Friedli in the 1970s as they reflected within the ecumenical movement on the global diversity of Christianity (Hollenweger, 2003). ¹² They saw that ecumenical relations demanded ‘theological giving and receiving’ in this ‘post-colonial and polycentric period’ (Schreiter, 1997: 127; Ustorf, 2011: 14). Intercultural theology has gained traction, especially in Europe, among those concerned to bring diverse religious communities in the continent together (Cartledge and Cheetham, 2011). In 2007, leading German bodies for mission studies proposed to give mission studies the alternative name of ‘Intercultural Theology’ (WGTh and DGMW, 2008). Although many continental European missiologists have found this to be a helpful way of avoiding missiology, Henning Wrogemann (2016–2019) has shown that it is still possible for debates in mission studies to be included within the field of intercultural theology. However, the challenges that majority-world theology poses for Western theology are still far from being addressed. ¹³

It may seem that the future of mission studies in the Western academy is stretched between world Christianity on the one hand and intercultural theology on the other. However, while both can be substitutes for mission studies, neither has the practice of mission as its integrating theme, so these fields may increasingly diverge from it. As they develop in the academy, each may neglect topics that have traditionally been covered by mission studies. Both may become preoccupied with various forms of Christianity and their interrelations and fail to treat, for example, intentional evangelistic movements, mission as service/diakonia, reaching the unreached, mission as integral to Christian life, churches in relations to other faiths, apologetics and so on. Although the awkwardness around mission in the academy may incline scholars to avoid it, if missions and mission are not studied, the abuses associated with missions cannot be corrected, postcolonial critique and decolonisation of missions cannot happen and the renewed forms of mission necessary for today's world cannot be developed.

In 2008, the journal Mission Studies invited responses to the German proposal for intercultural theology from majority-world missiologists. Francis Oborji (2008) regarded it as a retrograde step towards parochial and ethnic theologies that was self-defeating in an era of globalisation. Ken Miyamoto (2008) pointed out that, in Asia, mission is different from Western colonial missions because it is primarily to people of the same culture not a different one and that mission is about social and political questions and not only religious ones. These responses show that intercultural theology, much like the study of world Christianity, exists to solve a European problem couched in European terms (Ustorf, 2011), whereas mission is a concern of churches the world over. The responses above from the majority of world scholars, together with the participation in the Oxford Handbook of missiologists from beyond the West, support my contention that, even if the West no longer studies mission practice, scholars in other parts of the world will continue to study what it means to respond to Jesus’ expectations for his disciples in the world.

The Potential Development of Mission Studies

In this final section, I will describe some recent developments at Fuller and argue that the relationship of mission studies to the social sciences is crucial for the discipline's development.

By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the separation of the School of Intercultural Studies and the School of Theology at Fuller became increasingly unsustainable as the decline in missionary sending by many churches in the West, whether for financial reasons or reasons of postcolonial sensibility, had its impact. Moreover, the structural separation of the two schools was seen as undesirable for several reasons.

First, the ‘missional church’ discourse among US Evangelicals that was stimulated by Lesslie Newbigin in the 1990s and applied to North America especially by Darrell Guder successfully penetrated US church and theology (Guder, 1998). The School of Theology now claimed to be ‘missional’ in its orientation and also to be doing missional hermeneutics. In the School of Theology, mission was no longer associated with specialists in faraway places but it was expected of pastors and congregations in the increasingly de-churched and plural United States. Theories and theologies of mission developed on foreign mission fields – like contextualisation, dialogue and liberation – were now applied to Western society in the interests of witnessing to Christ in the neighbourhood and nation. Second, the development of missio Dei theology inclined some theologians to see themselves as doing theology for the sake of mission. Meanwhile, whereas in the earlier School of World Mission, missiology was done for pragmatic reasons to support a global missionary movement, as the missiology in the School of Intercultural Studies became more reflective, increasingly history and theology courses were included to critique missions and to ensure that they were also ethically sensitive. For both reasons, the interest in mission no longer separated one school from another, rather it united them. We could all see ourselves as participating in the mission of God.

A third reason for the increasing integration of missiology and theology at Fuller is that the constituencies and faculties of the two schools also grew more similar. Students involved in mission and development agencies gravitated towards the School of Intercultural Studies and this is an important constituency to continue to serve. However, both schools admitted students who worked in non-profits more generally. Moreover, globalisation had increased the global reach of the theological faculty, so it was not only the former missionaries who had international experience. Whereas, the School of Intercultural Studies traditionally had most of the international students, global migration and the formation of migrant churches in the United States, increased the numbers of black, indigenous and students of colour in the School of Theology. Fourth, the designation of the former School of World Mission as the School of Intercultural Studies also eroded the distinction between the latter and the School of Theology. Because US diversity is described primarily in terms of diverse cultures, School of Theology faculty increasingly saw themselves as developing interculturality within the United States. The School of Intercultural Studies might point out that the discussion around cultures and religions is different if it includes cultures outside the United States, but while our colleagues in the School of Theology were increasingly embracing mission and interculturality and gaining a more diverse constituency, it was hard for the School of Intercultural Studies to justify its inclination to remain separate.

Eventually, in 2020, the decision was made to merge the two schools of theology and intercultural studies as one School of Mission and Theology. The missiology faculty were surprised and delighted that it was theologians who made the suggestion that mission should come first in the new name. Then the question became, what distinctive attributes of mission studies should be preserved in the new school. As I see it, there are three: concern for the world outside the church, a global and decentred perspective and the use of the social sciences. I will mention the first two briefly and then expand on the social sciences.

Since Fuller Seminary's faculty and staff are all employed within the United States and its campuses are also there, it is a national not an international organisation. However, largely because of its teaching of world mission, its aspirations and impact have been global and, due to migration, transnationalism and communication technology, between a quarter and a third of Fuller's students are now international. Mission to all nations and to the ends of the earth is what will prevent Fuller from becoming preoccupied only with the concerns of the United States. Furthermore, its educational partnerships in other continents will enable Fuller to see itself and its mission as others see us, and to understand itself as merely part of world Christianity, not the centre of it.

A crucial aspect of what the School of Intercultural Studies represented vis-à-vis the School of Theology was the use of the social sciences. While it is true that social sciences may be used in biblical studies and theology as well, for theologians, current issues may be accommodated under theology. However, for missionaries and missiologists, the main issues are not in the church but in the world, so the direct interface with social scientific studies of the real world is imperative. The School of Intercultural Studies employed people whose PhD degrees were in non-theological subjects ¹⁴ and this is an important part of its legacy. For the earlier School of World Mission, the social sciences were used to support a global sending movement from the United States. ¹⁵ Today, the social sciences are used more to address the social issues that concern majority-world Christians, and many in the minority world too.

As we compiled the Handbook, it became clear that the interface of mission studies with social sciences, such as the studies of society, global affairs, economics, politics and so on is the cutting edge of the field at the present time. This is why the social science section is situated at the end of the volume as a pointer to the future of mission studies. The chapters include a discussion of the relationship of mission and the social sciences, followed by chapters on race, women, migration, money, ecology and demography. Our PhD students concur that these chapters are the highlight of the volume for them and that are looking for missiologists to address societal concerns. The actual issues will vary from region to region, but missiology has the capacity to specialise in topics that are transnational and to be increasingly driven by the concerns of the majority world. Mission studies or missiology can be studied as theology and history – as Timothy Yates, for example, defined it at the end of the last century (Yates, 1994). However, this additional interface with the social sciences, its global perspective and its attention to Christian responses to Jesus’ commissions offer a particular and valuable contribution to the church and academy.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, I quote from the introductory chapter in the Handbook (Kim and Fitchett-Climenhaga, 2022: 15–16) that brings us back to where we began – to the commissioning of the disciples by Jesus:

This Handbook shows how what started as a means to plan Western Christian mission(s), prepare missionaries, and increase missionary effectiveness has grown into an interdisciplinary field of enquiry that includes the critical study of the theology, practice, and history of mission, as well as its impact – cultural, religious, and social. Mission Studies deals with all eras, peoples, and regions, including contemporary missionary movements arising from the Majority World. It studies the agents, motives, methods, and goals of mission, and assesses its results. ‘Mission’ has also been developed as a theological term deriving from the trinitarian nature of God and the sending of the Son and Spirit. (missio Dei)