Missiology: An International Review

Some popular missional church literature portrays the institutional church as a stale and mostly unattractive entity focused on maintaining its programs and buildings and increasingly unable to reach a secular society. Rather than reform or reboot church in its present structure, new missional communities need to be established in places where unchurched people are comfortable gathering. This article examines some of these assumptions in conversation with some of the critics of the missional church literature. It calls for a robust ecclesiology that takes into account the rich historical heritage of the church and the role aesthetics and rituals play in the formation of authentic missional communities.

After many years of fruitless attempts by Western missionaries to establish a foothold in Beijing, Matteo Ricci and his companions were finally given permission to enter the Forbidden City to build a house and a church in accordance with Chinese laws. This breakthrough of Ricci and his Jesuit brethren represents a significant period in the history of cultural dialogue between East and West. He had come a long way, motivated by a fervent desire to spread the Catholic faith, to save souls for the greater glory of God—ad majorem Dei gloriam. To succeed in China, Ricci would need more than just a rugged faith to convert the Chinese who, by and large, believed themselves to be superior to everyone else in the world. He would need science and technology and a willingness to accommodate and learn from that mystifying oriental culture. Ricci was gifted with these traits to an extraordinary degree that made his life in China fascinating from a religious, historical, and cultural point of view. In Ricci’s life, we are introduced to the first significant encounter between European and Chinese civilizations. A bridge between East and West, Ricci’s life and work in China is one of the most fascinating episodes in mission history. This essay attempts to appraise Matteo Ricci’s effort to accommodate Confucianism in propagating Christianity in China and his polemics against Buddhism. It attempts a critical study of Ricci’s work, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, emphasizing its strengths and weaknesses.

The Lisu, one of China’s 55 ethnic groups, converted to Christianity nearly 100 years ago through the evangelistic efforts of the China Inland Mission (CIM). The CIM missionaries constructed an orthography, translated the Bible, and stressed the importance of Scripture for individual religious devotion. However, in the course of five months of fieldwork in the Nujiang Valley, I rarely encountered a Lisu engaged in personal Bible study. I contend that this situation has less to do with the level of faith or commitment, and more to do with the interplay of literacy and orality, of individual and community, and the overall Lisu linguistic situation. While the Lisu Bible provides the overall frame for Lisu Christian society, it does not sustain Lisu Christianity in the everyday arena: the practical living out of what it means to be a Lisu Christian. While Scriptures provide the necessary framework, something needs to fill in the frame, to provide sustenance to nurture faith in an oral context. For societies and ethnic groups existing in the linguistic borderlands between the oral and the written, this is the missiological task that will remain once Bible translation is complete.

How loud is unintentional noise in Western metanarrative evangelism models used in crosscultural contexts? This article seeks an answer to this question by exploring five metanarrative evangelism models in relation to innocence/guilt, honor/shame, and power/fear.

As in all disciplines, missiology employs models to describe various complex phenomena such as Winter’s E-Scale and P-Scale of cultural distance, Engel’s model of the “spiritual-decision processes,” the C1 to C6 spectrum of contextualization among Muslims, and Bevans’s models of contextualization laid out on a spectrum. Each of the models has value in facilitating discussion and understanding of a highly complex process and system. Similarly, worldview heuristic models can be used to discern and compare broad areas of reality between diverse peoples. One method of using these pedagogical models to discern worldviews is by investigating three primary components of a worldview, the spiritual realm, the physical realm and the interaction between the spiritual and physical realms. These models also identify five core perceptions of reality to compare between differing worldviews. Utilizing models assists in discussing and discerning differences in core perceptions of reality and provides a means to develop a scale of worldview distance between a Christian worldview and another worldview. Such models are what Paul Hiebert refers to as the “synchronic model of worldviews,” which helps a person to understand how people view the structure of the world or what Clifford Geertz refers to as a “model of reality” to make complex structures comprehensible. The models in this article are pedagogically helpful in assisting cross-cultural workers in discussing and exploring the significance of worldview distances in various cultures with similar or dissimilar core perceptions of reality. The differences in these perceptions have an impact on the contextualization process missionaries face and the worldview distances they need to bridge.

In the past decade, there has been an explosion of research that uses insights from migration studies as a way of understanding various shifts in global Christianity. As a result, missiology has both benefited from and increasingly gravitated toward migration studies for assessing specific global processes. Diaspora missiology, framed as a discipline, movement, and strategy, has emerged as a contemporary missiological reflection on globalization and migration. While some aspects of diaspora missiology contribute helpful insights to the future of missiology, ongoing missiological reflection that uses diaspora as its key framework raises questions that invite critique. In this article, we describe the emergence of diaspora missiology and the various ways it is currently being used in the broader discourse as represented by major proponents Enoch Wan, Sadiri Joy Tira, and J. D. Payne. We then raise four points, critically and constructively unpacking key questions under the following headings: (1) assessing the need for a distinct discipline as an alternative to “traditional missiology”; (2) objectifying migrants: counting and (dis)counting the world’s Christians; (3) the “unnoticed” missionary potential of Christian migrants; and (4) immigrant congregations and transnational ties: multidirectional mission.

As an American, and a missionary of various shades among my own Native American peoples for 30 years, I have observed as much about Western (White) culture in North American missions as I have among the many Indigenous tribal cultures. This article is meant to provide an opportunity for a self-critique of Western missionary culture, particularly concerning some of the roots of colonial and neo-colonial practices of mission in the United States. In other words, I want to provide an opportunity for us to learn how those who have been the recipients of North American mission the longest may understand Western missionary culture. The most blatant contrast of Western missionary culture compared to Indigenous cultures is hierarchy as the structural norm. Hierarchical structures do not intuitively generate equality. Such structures require power to be used over the other in order to retain power and maintain homeostasis. By diminishing notions of dignity in the (subaltern) other, whether the other is such by ethnicity, gender, class, or simply by being considered a less important part of creation, we dehumanize them or desacralize them, robbing them of their dignity. Once a person, group, or another part of creation is identified as having less dignity or sacredness than ourselves we can, within a hierarchical norm, find rationalizations to use power over them. These rationalizations are then codified in societies and systemic structures to create the norm. Throughout the centuries, Christians have settled for hierarchical governance as the norm. In a very real sense, a significant root of slavery, patriarchy, racism, and classism involves accepting this hierarchical norm. Christian mission has not been immune to the same hegemonic tendencies and must be re-examined in order to resurface in a form worthy of the message of the pre-colonial Jesus.

Apart from studies focused on short-term mission, there has been little empirical research into the broader range of factors that have been influential in current missionaries’ decisions to serve God long-term. This study aims to address this gap by exploring these factors in the narratives of 42 relatively new Australian missionaries. A qualitative approach was adopted and used semi-structured interviews with 42 missionaries to explore their journey into long-term mission, the factors involved in that decision, and how they chose the agency they are serving with. Three main factors were found to be most influential: interaction with missionaries, participating in short-term mission trips, and being exposed to the world and its needs. Reasons for choosing a mission agency highlighted having a relational connection with agency personnel and perceiving a good fit between their own interests and gifts, and the work of the agency. The article concludes by outlining implications of this research for mission agencies, churches, and Bible colleges.