Missiology: An International Review

As Luke traces the progress of the Gospel from Jerusalem to Rome, and the displacement of Israel by the Church as the true people of God in the Messianic Era, his penchant for detail focuses more on the inclusiveness of the multiplying congregations than on accurate growth statistics. Uncharacteristically, Luke's overall pattern is to record numerical expansion in approximations and general terms, although he deliberately gives specific figures to underscore the rapid initial growth of the church in Jerusalem. Professor Copeland's study maintains that growth was Luke's dominant theme. He shows that this growth was numerical, geographic, cultural, heterogeneous and qualitative.

Every culture has some standard of right and wrong. This is not fully discovered in a people's behavior, our author reminds us, but in their ideals. These ideals may, in essence, closely parallel the Decalogue; but this essence may be applied with widely varying emphases in the real life situations of different cultures. If the missionary, jealous for the essence of God's righteous demands, relies too heavily on the applications and emphases of his own culture, he may experience little conviction of sin in his hearers — and confused standards in the emerging church. Fully recognizing the dilemma this imposes on the cross-cultural witness, linguist-translator Dye finds hope and help in an ethnotheological approach to the problem.

As missionary priest and anthropological researcher, Stephen Fuchs presents this case study in comparative religion from the missiological viewpoint. Ritual observances are seen in their wider sociological context. The resultant view of sin emerges not only as inadequate from a Christian perspective, but as a source of the continuing misery, spiritually and socially, of the subject people. Father Fuchs' colleagues can draw direct benefit, both motivational and strategic, from this study — a practical goal of all missiological research. At the same time, the value of such models for wider application puts all of us in the author's debt.

Small ethnically-related adjacent groups view themselves as quite distinct from their neighbors — and tend to accentuate these perceived differences. This greatly influences their diverse responses to similar changes in social environment, such as the coming of Christian missionaries. Citing his study of two such adjacent groups in northern Nigeria, Professor Salamone suggests that the chosen approach to a specific people can be facilitated by recognizing that culture change, including conversion, involves a learning process.

Coming as he or she does, from a culture heavily dependent on print media, the western missionary finds the rejection of a literacy program a devastating experience. Missionary McKinney reminds us that by studying the cultural structure (particularly the religious structure), and by applying the established principles of culture change, we can often predict and forestall such potential rejection. Her article also includes suggestive lists of practical factors that may lead to acceptance or rejection of literacy programs.

Like other movements throughout history, the Protestant missionary enterprise arose out of zealous activism, and only later turned to reflective analysis. Even then, missiology as a discipline developed very slowly within the halls of academia. Furthermore, as senior missiologist, R. Pierce Beaver points out in this paper originally presented to the Association of Professors of Missions (at St. Louis, June, 1973), some belatedly-established chairs of missions saw only a decade or two of occupancy before the Great Depression reversed these gains; and the changes brought about by World War II accentuated this downward trend. With the renewal of interest now appearing in some Protestant circles, this historical analysis should encourage every missiologist as to the cruciality of his task.

Rhetoric, as a discipline involving the effective use of words to influence or persuade, shares important common ground with both evangelism and Christian apologetics. Just as Augustine found gold in the secular art of the classical rhetoricians and used it to popularize the sermonic form of Christian communication, Professor Hesselgrave shows how today's missionary can harness the “new rhetoric” to the task of communicating the Christian faith cross-culturally. Missiology indeed!

Some churchmen view missionary societies as a historical contingency of the nineteenth century. Others see them as Protestant counterparts of the Catholic missionary orders — and both as successors of the missionary bands so prominently chronicled in the book of Acts. Mission executive Murphy and his colleagues, in their struggle for organizational self-understanding, have probed beyond the mere fact of those first century bands; they have also sought to identify their apostolic function and their relationship to the early congregations. Such an analysis of the apostolic team as a structural prototype can bring a theological dimension to the needed reevaluation that mission agencies face today.