Missiology: An International Review

Much missionary work is focused on helping churches become healthy and mature. In doing so, missionaries face the challenge of contextualization. The local people’s ideals and images of church usually reflect different emphases than those of the missionary’s home culture. Indicators that have been used to assess whether a church is doing well in the missionary’s home country may not be the best measures of maturity or health in the host culture. This article describes the application of an approach to contextualization—Paul Hiebert’s “missional theology”—to the diagnosis of church health and maturity in Turkish-speaking Roma (Millet) churches in Bulgaria. In the process, the limitations of using indicators of church health developed in another cultural context without adaptation are discussed, Millet ideals of healthy churches are analyzed, and biblical and Millet ideals are brought into dialogue with each other to produce a contextualized portrayal of a healthy Millet church.

The enormous demographic change of Christianity worldwide is forcing a reexamination of basic questions about Christian identity and the relation of local Christian communities to other Christian groups and traditions. Christianity has been both an agent and a product of the flattening and shrinking of the world. What are the implications of globalization for contextualized worship arts? Through an ethnographic study of 12 urban churches, conducted from 2012 to 2014 in Beira, Mozambique, this article explores the challenges of globalization for developing contextualized worship arts.

Missions activities often include efforts aimed at improving the physical well-being of others. These efforts have gained additional emphasis in recent years as North American Protestants have focused on missions activities that have tangible impacts on people’s well-being in contrast to activities with more spiritual impacts. This article uses the idea of “quality of life” to review the relationship of Christian mission to improving the physical well-being of others. Offering a brief sketch of missional activities undertaken in the New Testament, during the Roman Empire, through monasticism, by Anglo-American Reformers, and by 19th- and 20th-century North American missionaries, it concludes that the improvement of people’s quality of life shifted dramatically in reference to the church’s understanding of mission. Specifically, Christians changed from seeing the improvement of others’ quality of life as a means of people sharing in the salvation of Christ to that improvement as one of the chief ends of Christ’s salvific work.

Women leaders are scarce in evangelical mission organizations. Part of the reason may be gender-role stereotypes, which function very strongly in much of evangelicalism. This article presents the stories of two women who worked at executive-level leadership positions in evangelical mission organizations. Using narrative analysis and a critical feminist lens, I examine their stories to understand how these women describe their leadership and how they portray their use of power. The strength of gender-role stereotypes and evangelical gender roles appeared to define and limit the power they were able to use. As long as they stayed within prescribed norms, they experienced some success. Deviations from the gender-role stereotypes led to sanctions from their organizations. Conclusions and implications are that the stereotypes may limit women’s leadership and that both women and organizations need to become aware of how these unspoken assumptions may be functioning. Recommendations for women leaders and for organizations seeking to incorporate women into leadership are offered.

The choice of music, an essential element of worship and church life, must be addressed in cross-cultural church planting contexts. As cultures evolve, church planters are faced with choices about musical styles that may lead to interpersonal conflicts within the church. The purpose of this study is to empirically examine factors that may enable cross-cultural church planters to constructively manage music-related conflicts when they arise. Members of church plants, like all people, have various goals when entering into such conflicts. They are concerned about the content of the conflict (i.e., the musical style) and thus have content goals. They are also concerned about social elements of the conflict (e.g., their relationships, their identity and values, and the process used to resolve the conflict) and thus have social goals. The results of this study of 276 evangelical Christians indicate that achieving both content goals and social goals contributes to overall satisfaction across various conflict outcomes. Moreover, the evidence indicates that achieving only a social goal leads to greater satisfaction with the conflict outcome than achieving only the content goal in music-related conflict. This implies that church planters, when faced with music-related conflict, should strive to meet the gospel-congruent social goals of people with whom they are in conflict in order to maximize satisfaction with the conflict outcome.

This article proposes a critical reevaluation of church planting utilizing the philosophical area of virtue ethics. The article begins first with a critique of modern church planting based primarily upon Alasdair MacIntyre’s assessment of the social sciences in After Virtue. MacIntyre’s critique of the social sciences as having the potential to be both manipulative and overconfident bears striking parallels to the current moral issues surrounding church planting. Such a critique paves the way for a rehabilitation of the practice of church planting. The second part of this article begins a process of rebuilding an understanding of church planting from the ground up. Utilizing a Thomistic understanding of virtue, I will demonstrate how the individual missional actions that compromise church planting are in accordance with our natural and supernatural ends, and thus promote human flourishing. Following this, I will begin to build a definition of church planting coherent with Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of a practice (activities with goods internal to them). Such a definition necessitates the need for the practice of church planting to be authorized by Scripture, church, and tradition. Last, I will show how the practice of church planting must be embedded within the broader narrative of the church and the individual Christian life.

The discussion on missions in the Old Testament has led to an unsatisfying diversity of results. In order to let the Old Testament speak for itself as an independent voice of the Christian Bible, foreign concepts like “missions” have to be replaced by theological concepts inherent to the Hebrew Bible itself. The Torah and Former Prophets develop four theological lines within the theme-field of a positive (blessing) mandate to the nation of Israel concerning others: (1) the mandate as mediator of blessing to all the families of the earth; (2) the mandate as mediator of knowledge of God to non-Israelites; (3) the mandate as royal priesthood mediating between Yhwh and the Gentiles; (4) the mandate as host people for strangers. These mandates cannot be subsumed under one single organizing concept like (passive or centripetal) “missions,” “witness,” or “messenger.” Instead they have to be understood as situational specifications of the original blessing mandate to Abraham. The theological intention of these Old Testament texts is to actualize a vision of worldwide knowledge of God in the hearts of their readers.