Mission Field Research Articles

Introduction

During most of the modern history of the expansion of Western Christendom, China, as the world’s most populous country, was the great prize. Although the results were disappointing, as the numbers of converts both Protestant and Catholic remained relatively small throughout the height of China missions in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the promise of China missions never diminished. Despite the pre-eminence of China in overall mission history, very little attention has been given to the role and influence of China missions beyond the borders of China proper either to the Chinese diaspora or to the wider mission community. This special issue is a first attempt to explore the impact of “China” in missions beyond China’s borders. For our purposes, China becomes both a place where tactics and vocabulary could be invented and tried, a sort of laboratory for mission methodology, and a place of the imagination where “muscular” Christianity could be displayed and tested, or where medical practices were adapted with global implications. In more recent times, China missions, not allowed on the mainland after 1950, have once again as they did in the nineteenth century, addressed the needs of the Chinese diaspora in Europe and America. The essays in this collection challenge scholars to reflect more broadly on the variety of intercultural encounters enabled by missionary work, and ask us to think of this history trans-nationally by going beyond the borders of single nations or mission fields to embrace a global perspective.

The Cambridge Seven, Late Victorian Culture, and the Chinese Frontier

While some gender studies have examined dimensions of British masculinity with regard to the empire, they often have neglected the constitutive role that Christian faith played in the formation of British masculinity and the ways that British Christians constructed ideal masculine character. This essay reassesses the Cambridge Seven’s significance in the construction of a British evangelical masculinity in the late Victorian period. It argues that British evangelicals utilized the ideals the Seven collectively represented to construct a Christian masculinity in relation to the foreign frontier. This analysis suggests that both faith and the foreign mission field were integral dimensions of British evangelical masculinity. Ultimately, the Seven’s experiences in China challenged and subverted many of these ideal constructions.

성경의 리더십을 통한 선교적 리더십에 관한 고찰

Mission is the task of the Great Commission. For the purpose, the role of Christian leaders is not to drive but to lead the people of God. Missionary leadership must be derived from biblical leadership. It is necessary to discuss about what kind of leadership is needed for mission field as well as church ministry through the leadership in the Bible. Leadership should be attained through the Scripture and be learned to discern the will of God instead of trying to receive it through human thinking. Even if there are many role models as a leader in the Bible, the author wants to focus on Moses, Nehemiah and Jesus. That is why they have shown us a radical paradigm shift on leadership. Missionary role as a leader must be on human relationships as the heart of the missionary task. In order to persuade people, they must win people, and to that end leaders must build relationships based on love and trust: “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”(Matt. 20:28). In conclusion, good leaders are not loners, but mix well with people. Leaders must be friendly and likable. They need to relate well with many different types of people, being inclusive in thought and action. Good leaders are not celebrities, but celebrators. Good leaders are not subversive, but submissive. Good leaders so notdo it all themselves, but involve others. Good leaders do not seek rewards, for they are satisfied with a job well done. They are customized by the Creator for ministry to their generation. They are fashioned through the faithful servant-leader``s emulation of the Son.

Ground Contact Analysis for Korea's Fictitious Lunar Orbiter Mission

In this research, the ground contact opportunity for the fictitious low lunar orbiter is analyzed to prepare for a future Korean lunar orbiter mission. The ground contact opportunity is basically derived from geometrical relations between the typical ground stations at the Earth, the relative positions of the Earth and Moon, and finally, the lunar orbiter itself. Both the cut-off angle and the orbiter's Line of Sight (LOS) conditions (weather orbiter is located at near or far side of the Moon seen from the Earth) are considered to determine the ground contact opportunities. Four KOMPSAT Ground Stations (KGSs) are assumed to be Korea's future Near Earth Networks (NENs) to support lunar missions, and world-wide separated Deep Space Networks (DSNs) are also included during the contact availability analysis. As a result, it is concluded that about 138 times of contact will be made between the orbiter and the Daejeon station during 27.3 days of prediction time span. If these contact times are converted into contact duration, the duration is found to be about 8.55 days, about 31.31% of 27.3 days. It is discovered that selected four KGSs cannot provide continuous tracking of the lunar orbiter, meaning that international collaboration is necessary to track Korea's future lunar orbiter effectively. Possible combinations of world-wide separated DSNs are also suggested to compensate for the lack of contact availability with only four KGSs, as with primary and backup station concepts. The provided algorithm can be easily modified to support any type of orbit around the Moon, and therefore, the presented results could aid further progress in the design field of Korea's lunar orbiter missions.

존 웨슬리와 성령의 열매의 선교적 함의

The major goal of this article is to find missiological implications of the fruit of the Spirit(love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control) in Galatians 5:22 by investigating John Wesley’s and others’ writings. Because the author believes that attitude is strongly contagious in mission fields, he especially aims to suggest that the fruit of the Spirit would supply some valuable hints for proper missionary attitude.The first half of this article deals with John Wesley(1703-1791) and the fruit of the Spirit. Unlike some theologians who divide the fruit of the Spirit into three or four portions, Wesley regards the fruit of the Spirit as an indivisible whole. Wesley does draw a distinction between extraordinary gifts of the Spirit and ordinary gifts of the Spirit. However, to Wesley, the fruit of the Spirit is more than merely the gifts of the Spirit. It is synonymous with Christian perfection. Wesley’s view of the fruit of the Spirit is congruent with the verse “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus”(Phil. 2:5).The second half of this article handles missiological implications of the fruit of the Spirit. In order to do so the author applies insights from Thomas Keating, Elisa Morgan, Evelyn Underhill, Philip D. Kenneson, James Merritt, Viv Grigg, and the Bible. Among these, the subtitles of Merritt’s nine chapters are worth mentioning: If you’re not loving, you’re not living; Joy to the world; How to keep your head while others are losing theirs; Winners never quit and quitters never win; Try a little kindness; How to live the good life; The world’s greatest ability; The lower you get, the higher you go; Never let them see you sweat.The author concludes this article by emphasizing that intercultural missionaries should be deeply purged good soil and stay close (not to the sender or to the host people but) to Jesus in order to be fruitful. The perfecting or maturing of the Christian character is what the fruit of the Spirit is all about.

존 로스 선교사의 선교신학 입장으로서 성취신학 연구

There had been many influential protestant missionaries in the last 130 years in the history of the Korean Protestant missionaries but there had not been one who was more influential then John Ross from Scotland. John Ross was not only a missionary in China, but he made the Korean translation of the New Testament. A publication which already existed in Korea years before the American Protestant missionaries came to Korea. It is very rare for any country to have such a missional history of this manner. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is very minimal data about John Ross in the Korean Church history. In this paper, the Fulfillment Theology from the position of the Missiological Theology is dealt with as we try to better understand John Ross. As he witnessed the emphasize of the Confucianism’s ancestral worship in China, he began to better understood the Fulfillment Theology from the position of the Missiological Theology.In this paper, the life and ministry of John Ross along with his missiological attitude towards other religion and the relationship of Confucianism and Christianity are dealt with. In particular, this paper deals with the efforts of John Ross as he searched for the contact point of Christianity in Confucianism and his desire to lead the contact point to Jesus Christ in his work. His method was to increase the efficiency of the witness of the Gospel.John Ross, in his 39 years of missionary work in China baptized over 4000. And through his faithful efforts his work is still evident in China today as DongGuan Church and DongBook Seminary in Shenyang, China are actively operating. Thus, there is a great significance in studying the Fulfillment Theology from the position of Ross's Missiological Theology. If we obtain a better understanding of Ross's Missiological Theology, it will not only be beneficial to Christianity but essential in witnessing to other religions. The literature review method was used for this paper, as major writings of Ross and primary data founded was used. In addition, to gain a better understanding of John Ross and his work, Ross's home and his grave site in Scotland was visited 10 times and his main mission field, Shenyang, China 15 times.

What Is a Nurse? “A Missioner of Health”

What Is a Nurse? “A Missioner of Health”

’African Churches Willing to Pay Their Own Bills’: The Role of Money in the Formation of Ethiopian-type Churches with Particular Reference to the Mzimba Secession

ABSTRACTMatters related to money were fundamental to the causes of the formation of Ethiopian-type churches. These included inter alia the raising of funds abroad and the subsequent need to control such funds by white ministers, delay or refusal of ordination due to cost factors and differentials in stipends, lack of or poor allowances, lack of trust in the use of funds, poor emoluments and accommodation. This was in contradiction to emerging mission policy as propounded by Henry Venn in his Three-Self formula, particularly with regard to the principle of self-support following Pauline methods. At the heart of such issues was the need for missionaries to control what they had created, and maintain and perpetuate a sense of dependency. The Mzimba Secession offers substantial evidence to support the suggestion that finance was a central concern in fostering inferiority and subjection in the mission field leading to the formation of a new church movement.

Forming and restoring community in a nomadic world: A next generation perspective on the future of the discipline of missiology

The emergence of a 21st-century participatory culture in a globalized world invites us to reimagine missiology in light of a participatory triune God who forms and restores community amidst difference and otherness. It pushes us toward the local, where we reclaim the centrality of local Christian communities and their ordinary disciples as primary missionary organizations and personnel. The American context must be recognized as a major 21st-century mission field requiring intentional engagement with a diversity of cultures. These realities call for new patterns of giving, receiving, learning, and innovation as missiology accompanies local churches witnessing to and seeking to form community with their neighbors.

The Meaning of the missio Dei: Reflections on Lesslie Newbigin’s Proposal That Mission Is of the Essence of the Church

The article is an exposition and critique of Lesslie Newbigin’s view of the church and its mission, according to which the church’s mission is compared with and taken up into the sending of the Spirit and the Son by the Father. The conclusion is that Newbigin’s ecclesiology has great merit in that it challenges the Christian community to realize that it is not even truly a church unless it is active in missions. But, at the same time, the essay argues that there are aspects of God’s missional work that Newbigin’s view does not fully integrate.

‘Je suis d’aucune Nation’: the recruitment and identity of Irish women religious in the international mission field, c. 1840–1940

This article examines the lives of Irish-born women religious around the world in the period 1840–1940. Ireland sent thousands of nuns overseas as teachers and missionaries, to work in schools, orphanages and hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa, South East Asia, the Americas, Australia and Europe. Looking at contemporaneous views of missionary work, recruitment to religious life and the social conditions for Irish women during and after the years of the Great Famine, the article determines some of the attractions of religious life for Irish women, and the expression of their Irish identity to be found in convents internationally. The article concludes with comments on the bifurcated identity of Irish women religious who, though first and foremost members of particular religious orders, were often identified by others as “Irish Nuns”.

Theorising missionary education: the Bolivian Indian Mission 1908‐1920

PurposeEducation was an enduring feature of the modern Protestant missionary movement. Historiographically, however, scholarship on the subject is often fragmented geographically and focused on the micro contexts in which missionary education occurred. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nuances of the missions‐education relationship, using a particular case study, in order to indicate alternative ways of conceptualising that relationship. It focuses on a small New Zealand evangelical mission working in Bolivia from 1908 and utilises the concept of “sites” to indicate the complexities that need to be considered in any particular study of missions and education.Design/methodology/approachEducational activities and explanatory factors pertaining to the Bolivian site of missionary education are re‐constructed from missionary archives. Different voices, agendas and readings are acknowledged in this re‐construction. In this way the article moves from a plain narrative about the mission and its educational activities to a more conceptual attempt to explain the application of education in the Bolivian context. The archives are read in the light of both historiography and theory.FindingsThe article indicates that a simple or monochrome reading of the missions‐education relationship is deficient. It grapples with the reasons why an explicitly evangelistic mission invested considerable energy and resources in education. Using the concept of “sites” it argues that this emphasis on education can be explained by a set of complex and overlapping factors reflecting historical timing, evangelical culture ormentalité, missionary geographical origins and local socio‐political context. While this will not explain all “sites” of missionary education, the approach is a model of how to construct a complex reading that enables us to discern multiple voices and motivations.Originality/valueThis article addresses a lacuna of conceptual scholarship on missionary education. Furthermore it attempts to shift the focus onto four relatively neglected aspects in missions‐education scholarship: missionary projects from colonial contexts, the South American context, the early twentieth century, and conservative evangelicalism.

Edinburgh 1910 and Christian Identity Today: An African Perspective

Informed by notions of Christendom, the Edinburgh 1910 missionary outlook conceived of Christian faith in territorial terms and fostered an understanding of Christian mission and identity in which the world is “territorially or geographically” divided into the “Christian land” and “mission field.” This missionary vision engendered a unidirectional flow of resources and ideas in which the West was the sender and the non-West the receiver. However, with the recent southward shift of the Christian landscape, each nation sends as well as receives missionaries. Never before has the course of missionary movement been this multidirectional, disparate, and global. But in spite of this new development, the Edinburgh missionary outlook still represents an important lens through which people conceive mission and respond to it. Therefore, this article examines the reflection of African missiologists on the missionary outlook of Edinburgh 1910, and emphasizes the importance of true theological reciprocity and mutuality as a major step towards overcoming the dichotomy between the older and younger churches, between Western Christianity and the Christianity of the southern continents.

C.T. Studd

Among the contributors to The Fundamentals there was hardly a more colourful figure than C(harles) T(homas) Studd (1860–1931). One of the greatest cricketers of his day; converted to Christ through the impact of Dwight Moody; a ‘rich young ruler’ who, rather than ‘going away sorrowful’, gave up his vast wealth to serve his Lord; a leading member of the ‘Cambridge Seven’ university graduates who made China their mission field; and the founder of what would become one of the most influential independent missionary organisations in the world – Studd has provided the evangelical world with a worthy counterpart to Roman Catholicism’s Mother Teresa.

Masculinity in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Mission Field: Contact and Negotiation

ABSTRACT Building on earlier work on the history of Moravian masculinity in the more urban centers of Euro-American activity and moving the focus of scrutiny to the mission field of Pennsylvania, this essay asks how the change of place and environment, both natural and cultural, might affect the notions and practices of Moravian masculinity. Through an examination of passages from the Shamokin mission diary, written between 1745 and 1755, the essay suggests that the place and ethos of Moravian life, even as it was conducted in a small mission deep in the backcountry, also revealed gender norms and behaviors that adhered not only to those of colonial Euro-Americans but also resonated with the practices and norms of masculinity found within the Native American cultures with which the Moravians interacted. The combination of Sifting Period language, bridal mysticism, and a stress on the visual provides Moravians and Native American people in the mid-century with more commonalities in the practices of masculinity than were later assumed in the New Republic.

Discrete event command and control for network teams with multiple military missions

During mission execution in military applications, the US Army Training and Doctrine Command Pamphlet 525-66 Battle Command and Battle Space Awareness capabilities prescribe expectations that networked teams will perform in a reliable manner under changing mission requirements, varying resource availability and reliability, resource faults, etc. In this paper, a command and control structure is presented that allows for computer-aided execution of the networked team decision-making process, control of force resources, shared-resource dispatching, and adaptability to change based on battlefield conditions. A mathematically justified networked computing environment is provided called the Discrete Event Control (DEC) framework. DEC has the ability to provide the logical connectivity among all team participants, including mission planners, field commanders, warfighters, and robotic platforms. The proposed data management tools are developed and demonstrated with a simulation study on a realistic military ambush attack. The results show that the tasks of multiple missions are correctly sequenced in real time, and that shared resources are suitably assigned to competing tasks under dynamically changing conditions without conflicts and bottlenecks.

Child Abuse and the Church: A Call for Prevention, Treatment, and Training

Child abuse is both a sin and a crime. In this article, we present a call to the global Christian church to prevent and treat child abuse, and to train professionals across disciplines to do so. Vieth discusses effective child protection policies in churches. Among other recommendations, he encourages consultation with child protection experts, thorough screening of child workers, and accountable supervision of children in church. Tchvidjian examines cultural aspects of missions organizations that contribute to the abuse of children in the mission field. He suggests that missions organizations who have failed to protect abused children in the past placed their reputation above child protection, failed to treasure children, and believed in God-sanctioned power and control of missions workers. Knodel reviews the efforts of Christian organizations to prevent the trafficking of children worldwide. She finds effective advocacy occurring across the globe but among Christian organizations that are rarely tied to any specific denominational support. Next, Walker reviews evidence-based treatment recommendations for children and adolescents. Trauma-focused CBT is a leading empirically supported treatment for child abuse. Recently, efforts have been made to sensitively integrate faith into TF-CBT. Vieth then discusses effective church responses to allegations of abuse. He suggests suspending the activities of a church worker when allegations are made against him or her in addition to informing the police. Tchivdjian concludes by discussing the mission and vision of the GRACE foundation—a multidisciplinary Christian nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting children from child abuse and treating children who have been abused.

Protestant Revivals in China with Particular Reference to Shandong Province

Revivals have been a regular feature of the missionary enterprise. The modern Catholic and Protestant missionary movements themselves emerged from major religious revivals in the Western world. On the nineteenth-century China mission fields, Protestant missionaries from the mainline denominations frequently lamented the fact that their often nominal convert communities were lacking in Christian spirit and called for reinvigoration campaigns. It was, however, in the twentieth century that several large-scale revival movements occurred, starting with the ‘Manchurian revival’ of 1907–8 and culminating in the great ‘Shandong revival’ of the 1930s. The years after 1908 saw the rise of Chinese ― as well as some foreign ― full-time revivalists engaging in evangelistic efforts to reach the native Christian as well as non-Christian populations. The Canadian Presbyterian Jonathan Goforth (1859–1936) and the Shandong evangelist Ding Limei (1871–1936) are the most prominent representatives of the early campaigns of Christian renewal. In the 1920s, in spite of the fundamentalist/modernist controversy and anti-Christian agitation by nationalist and revolutionary forces in China, revivalism actually intensified. The principal focus of this paper will be on the new currents of spiritual regeneration that came with the proliferation of mostly small and sectarian missions of Holiness or Pentecostal provenance. Pentecostal ideas, in particular, contributed to the growth of Chinese independent churches and the wave of revivalism that swept across parts of China in the early 1930s. Such ‘gifts of the spirit’ as prophecy, divine healing and speaking in tongues, as well as a strong pre-millenarian belief, energised many of the more radical indigenous revivalists at this time. Other well-known Chinese evangelists had been influenced by the Holiness movement or Plymouth Brethren ideas. The Chinese dimension, especially in the context of Shandong province, is receiving particular attention in this paper.

Belonging to a Spirit of Life

If you read in the ninth chapter of Luke, the account of Jesus' encounter with a Samaritan village on his way to Jerusalem, you find a story that is a microcosm of the challenge and critique of mission pneumatology, the Spirit in mission and the spirit which we bring to mission. The Samaritan village rejects Jesus' appeal for hospitality when its residents hear that his reason is not that he wants to see them, but that he wants to use them as a resting place on his way to Jerusalem. If we are unaware of the unresolved and ancient hostilities between Jews and Samaritans, they are made immediately apparent to us in the belligerent reaction of the disciples. Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them? It is not so much a question but a devout desire, a prayer even. These disciples have lived with Jesus for months now, they have seen him cure a Roman centurion's servant, feed the hungry, they have heard him preach liberation, call women to be his followers and challenge the disciples to live mercifully and gently, loving their enemies; at what point did he ever mention calling fire down from heaven? An opportunity for grace and peace, companionship and celebration is missed as sectarian attitudes desire to exclude, hurt and harm both enemies and the earth. Jesus' instant rebuke in such a missed opportunity is clear, and some translations adopt this minority version of Luke's text, when Jesus turns to them and says: do not know to what Spirit you (Luke 9:55) (1) You do not know to what Spirit you belong. The indictment is clear. So, how is it that these disciples who live daily with Jesus don't know to what Spirit they belong? How can they want to scorch the earth and be the cause of death and damnation? How could they think that the Holy fire we associate with the Spirit should be in any way biddable to their dark desires? It seems ridiculous, but they do. Of course we are different. We are much better disciples than them. We don't feel the person of Jesus needs to be forcibly imposed, we don't scorch the earth or call down death on our rivals, we don't co-opt the divine to our dark desires ... Well, the Spirituality and Mission working group has constantly had to face up to this as something we have done. We have groaned over the hurt caused to Indigenous people and to women by the domineering attitudes prevalent in the imposition of Christianity. We have grieved for the many ways we have scorched the earth and her communities of life and cruelly rejoiced for the unequal and disproportionate harvest it has afforded some of us. And we have realized that many of these things have been the deep determined mission of the church over generations. You do not know to what Spirit you belong. This is such a painful allegation when the Spirit is the essence, soul and heart of ecumenism in its freest and fullest sense. None of us as individuals or traditions have any claim on the Spirit, or embody the Spirit's life fully. The Spirit is always within and beyond us and will always go where it wills rather than where we will. Thus the working group has felt challenged to discern the Spirit in creation's favour rather than our favour. We have sought also to articulate the Spirit as the agent of the life and mission of the Trinity, not of the church, and to refuse to co-opt her to any of our sectarian urges. Let us know to what Spirit we belong. She comes not as conqueror but as companion. The biblical witness opens with the Spirit as brooding companion to chaos, out of which God calls rather than imposes creation. (Gen.1:1ff) This chaos-charming Spirit is the companion of salvation history: the Israelites are led through the wilderness by holy fire, the prophets are called by the Spirit, the presence and absence of God conveyed by her life all move creation's life back in step with what God is doing, till we meet Christ the embodiment of the Spirit as companion. …

A Study on the Forced Conversion of Japanese Unificationists Caused by the Violent Abductions since Mission Works in Japan were Began Pyun-Seoung

A Study on the Forced Conversion of Japanese Unificationists Caused by the Violent Abductions since Mission Works in Japan were Began Pyun-Seoung