Missiology: An International Review

This article attempts to add to missiological discussions by rereading some selected passages from the life of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph using a missional hermeneutic. I have chosen Genesis 12:6–7 and 13:18, which record Abraham’s forms of worship and dwelling among important groves of trees, as a potential example of worshipping God in a plural society in the public sphere and as a potentially helpful example for worshipping God today in the public sphere. I then turn to the struggle of Jacob and his family’s connection to deities other than Yahweh in their journey away from Laban toward God found in Genesis 31:19, 32, and 35:2–4. The final part of this article will discuss Joseph in Egypt, more specifically his full acceptance as an Egyptian as found in Genesis 41:45, 50; 42:8; 43:32 and his use and practice of Egyptian rituals as a part of his daily life as demonstrated in Genesis 44:5, 15, and 44:31–34. I hope this article will on the missiological issues presented as well as on the potential of Genesis to inform the ongoing discussions of missiology, especially in the construction of robust biblically faithful theology of mission work. Reading the Bible from a missional hermeneutic is a relatively new hermeneutical phenomenon that is still in the process of development. This article is one version of how this hermeneutic can aid biblical studies and how missiological studies can reread the text in meaningful ways.

John Oxenbridge was a 17th-century Puritan minister who lived in England, Bermuda, Suriname, Barbados, and New England. During his residence in Suriname, a short-lived English colony, he wrote a missionary treatise he entitled “A plea for the dumb Indian.” The work was never published and survives partially in non-digitalized manuscript form at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. One of the intact portions of the manuscript is a discussion of the settlement of pre-Columbian America. Oxenbridge held that the Native Americans were descended from ancient Scythians, the semi-nomadic and “uncivilized” peoples of the vast Eurasian Steppe, who had entered America through “Anian,” an early modern designation for the region around the Bering Strait. He also thought that two other peoples later settled in pre-Columbian America: Welsh adventurers sailed across the Atlantic but soon intermarried with the Native Americans and disappeared as a distinct people, and some of the lost tribes of Israel entered the New World through Anian. These lost Israelites still survived and continued to observe the Mosaic Law. They never intermarried with the Native Americans; however, they passed on a “tincture of Israels customs” to their Indian neighbors. Oxenbridge’s discussion of the peopling of pre-Columbian America may seem like an antiquarian curiosity of little interest to historians of Christian missions. But for him it remained relevant to the present day. The Welsh migration, which he thought predated Spanish and French colonization, legitimated the English imperial claim in America. More importantly, the presence of lost Israelites in Scythian America would facilitate the conversion of the Native Americans.

Luke 10:1–16 records Jesus sending a group of 70 (in some texts 72) disciples to proclaim the kingdom. If an open-hearted “child of peace” welcomed them, the messengers were to stay with them, blessing and evangelizing them and their household. Since the 1960s, proponents of the “person of peace strategy” have derived from this text a methodology for contemporary disciple-making. Matthews, writing in this journal, critiques the strategy as a hermeneutically weak misreading of the text, which hijacks instructions intended only for the original hearers, and uncritically applies them today. Matthews does accept that Luke 10 contains principles relevant to contemporary mission, but for reasons of space he declines to say what these principles may be. I attempt to identify these principles through a missional reading approach and ask how Luke 10 forms communities for mission then and now. I conclude that its prime purpose is to form Christians to be interdependent messengers of profound peace, who seek out interdependent children of hospitable peace. I then apply these insights to our current missiological moment. Finally, in light of this discussion I assess the specific “person of peace strategy” itself. While I offer some criticisms, I find more to appreciate about the strategy than Matthews does.

While the dramatic growth of church-planting movements (CPMs) in non-Christian contexts around the world provides ample opportunity to explain their emergence and significance, a missiology of these movements is struggling to keep pace. This article argues that CPM is a unique feature in the field of mission studies that emerged in the later 20th century. Although it shares some of the same characteristics as the early Church Growth Movement discourse, CPMs today are a specific type of movement occurring mostly in least-reached Muslim and Hindu contexts. CPM missiology contains a number of features and unknowns which demonstrate that the discourse is both evolving and invaluable for how the global church understands mission.

The central research question of this qualitative study was: What are expatriate perceptions of North Korean (Juche) ideology? Other studies on Juche have examined Juche from religious, political, or missiological lenses. However, few qualitative studies have been done on this subject. While it is nearly impossible to conduct research with North Koreans living in North Korea, this study collected data from nine expatriates who had lived in North Korea around the time of the interviews. From the data, two major categories emerged: the foundational influences and function of Juche. The results indicate that the participants perceive Juche to be influenced by Korean culture, nationalism, and humanism, while the participants understand the function of Juche as a system of control, a religion, and an ideology.

For 1400 years, Muslims and Christians in interfaith dialogue have encountered a perennial impasse surrounding the historical account of Jesus’ death. For most Muslims who hold a traditional interpretation of the Qur’an, Jesus did not die on the cross, but was assumed to heaven and another was crucified in his place. For Christians, however, the cross and subsequent resurrection are the center of gospel faith. This article recognizes the impasse over the crucifixion, but proposes that the conceptual distance surrounding the concept of atonement is a prior concern that needs to be addressed before one overcomes the historical question. In order to consider the barriers to communication and mutual understanding surrounding Jesus’ cross, we must first recognize that the qur’anic understanding of atonement presents linguistic, ritual, narrative, and worldview barriers to a biblical understanding of atonement. As such, before one answers the question, “Did Jesus die on the cross?” it is imperative to ask, “Why would Jesus’ death on the cross matter?” This article seeks to explain the distinct understanding of atonement represented in the Qur’an and to propose that the Book of Hebrews is uniquely suited to present a biblical understanding of atonement to one who is influenced by the Qur’an.

The question asked of this grounded theory study was what are the perceived reasons Asian American Buddhist background believers in Hawaii converted to evangelical Christianity? The following factors were perceived as reasons for participants converting to Christianity: an exposure to Christianity, a crisis, a quest or search, and a divine connection—either emotional or miraculous. Studies on transformation or conversion have found a similar pattern (Mezirow, 1991; Rambo, 1993; Tippett, 1992; Ullman, 1989). However, more recent studies have identified an emotional or even supernatural component to conversion that needs to be explored further (Hilderbrand, 2016, 2020, 2021; Iyadurai, 2015; Snook et al., 2018). The outcome of conversion was expressed as a feeling of peace, joy and happiness.

Global workers must work toward an appropriate ethic of communication both corporately and personally to effectively engage all recipients of the gospel. Further, an ethic of communication for missional engagement must be biblically faithful and culturally appropriate in order to create ‘bridging encounters’ with potential recipients of the gospel (Kraft and Gilliland, 2005: 53). ‘Bridging encounters’ consist of communicative pathways that build common ground for engagement regardless of the level of agreement; they demonstrate cultural consideration, engagement, and respect of participants’ ideas, which works well in a postmodern age that values conversation. Since the 1920s, missiological characterization has provided a rhetoric of the ‘unsaved’, ‘unincorporated’, and ‘unreached’¹ when describing people groups. This rhetoric of ‘un-’ may unintentionally cause breaking encounters instead of bridging encounters. Designating people groups as ‘in’ or ‘out’ can create a sense of ‘othering’ between global workers and recipients of the gospel. The consequent psychological friction proves detrimental to creating personal bridging encounters where individuals communicate the gospel in a more fluid manner (Bhargava and Manoli, 2015).

“Business as mission” (BAM) was introduced to the Christian missions community during the 2004 Lausanne conference in Pattaya, Thailand. Since then, interest in BAM has grown exponentially, and with it, demand for support services, training, and financing. For all the attention, however, scholarly research in this area has not kept pace, and there remain many unknowns about the personal and contextual factors that contribute to the impact and sustainability of a BAM enterprise. Seeking to address that gap, this paper builds on insights from the social entrepreneurship literature that enables us to construct a typology that distinguishes between four basic types of BAM practitioner. While all four seek to advance the cause of Christ using business, and thus fit the basic definition of BAM, each brings a different combination of motivations, backgrounds, and practices. The relevance of those differences is then explored using survey data collected from 119 self-defined BAM practitioners around the world. We also identify several essential business practices that are correlated with strong economic and social impact. Implications for further research are discussed.