World Missions Research Articles

Book review: Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models, written by A. Scott Moreau

Book review: Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models, written by A. Scott Moreau

Yohannan's "Revolution in World Missions: One Man's Mission to Change a Generation" (Book Review)

Yohannan's "Revolution in World Missions: One Man's Mission to Change a Generation" (Book Review)

The Third Wave and the Third World

While a great deal of social science literature has examined the explosion of pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in the Global South as well as conservative and anti-modern forms of resurgent Christianity in the United States, little work has been done to investigate the causal effects of the former on the latter. Drawing from existing literature, interviews, and archives, this article contributes to filling that gap by arguing that in the mid-twentieth century, evangelical missionary concerns about competition from global Pentecostalism led to an intellectual crisis at the Fuller School of World Missions; this crisis in turn influenced important Third Wave figures such as John Wimber and C. Peter Wagner and is linked to key moments and developments in their thought and pedagogy.

Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, by Edward E. Andrews

Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World, by Edward E. Andrews. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. ix, 326 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). In his first book, Edward Andrews combines meticulous historiography and compelling storytelling to produce a tour-de-force that should interest both specialists and non-specialists alike. In an important sense, Native Apostles does for the history of Christian missionaries throughout the Atlantic World what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker did for the transatlantic history of labour in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Revolutionary History of the Atlantic (Boston, 2000). Though there were hundreds of Amerindian, African, and African-American missionaries operating throughout the early modern British colonial world, we know very little about them until now. Yet by the nineteenth century, the majority of people working in various Protestant world missions were not British. Indeed, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proved pivotal for the colonial globalization of Christianity. Pursuing investigation of these sociohistorical developments and the question of how or indigenous converts and evangelists figured within complex and contested processes of sociocultural interpenetration and change requires a nuanced transatlantic approach. There were likely many more native apostles--including women--than evidenced by the document trail, yet Andrews uncovers a revealing and robust archive, including a plethora of self-authored materials by Christians themselves, which he treats as auto-ethnographic texts of considerable significance. Conversion processes and cumulative generational developments of non-European clergy meant that Black and Indian evangelists throughout the early modern world figured profoundly in evolving transatlantic debates about race and the future of Christendom. Chapter one examines missionary and conversion efforts among Amerindians in seventeenth-century North America, from the first (unsuccessful) English effort to employ evangelists in early seventeenth-century Virginia to the mid-seventeenth century praying towns of eastern Massachusetts and southern New England. The first Christian missionary to Indians in this area was a convert--not John Eliot, as is usually taken to be the case. Indigenous Christians emerged as strategic, thoughtful interpreters of Christianity, espousing variable conversion stories and shepherding a changing field of dynamic bricolage in religious praxis. Native evangelism was fraught with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions, including a view among some of Christianity as a vehicle for revitalizing ancestral religion. Disciplining and managing orthodoxy, resistance to indoctrination, the unpredictable affordances and effects of diseases, and King Philip's War in the mid-1670s all represented considerable challenges to the Christian project. Puritans had a near monopoly on Protestant evangelization in the British Atlantic world during the seventeenth century, but the ascent of Anglican missionary competition began with the turn of the eighteenth century, as discussed in Chapter two. The Anglican approach was more top-down, manifesting in an early attempt at sending a converted Yamasee Prince to the Carolinas for mission work, but this effort floundered, producing no converted Cherokee or Creek royalty. This experiment was also partly inspired by transcolonial evangelical work in India, yet the lack of real early success in the Atlantic world prompted Anglican regrouping and led to dispensing with their trickle-down model. George Berkeley hatched a plan to build a theological school for formally training Amerindian evangelists in the 1720s that never came to fruition, even after the idea resurfaced two decades later in the Barbados Codrington College effort designed to train slave preachers. These developments reflect new ways of thinking about and taking advantage of conversion, as well as the recursive influences of Christian evangelism vis-a-vis both Native Americans and Blacks. …

선교적 교회와 상황화 - 세계선교운동에서 상황화 패러다임으로의 전환과 전개를 중심으로

본고는 세계선교운동에서 상황화 패러다임으로의 전환과 전개를 인식론의 시대적 변천과 연계해 추적하면서 교회 본연의 선교적 삶을 확증하고 강화하는 상황화의 존재 의미와 가치를 다각도로 탐구한다. 교회의 선교적 생명성은 상황화를 통해 구체적으로 활성화된다. 문화적 진공상태 가운데 형성·전파·정착되는 복음은 결코 존재하지 않기 때문이다. 따라서 복음의 전수(傳授)적 측으로부터의 탈(脫)문화적이며 동시에 복음의 수용적 측으로의 재(再)문화적인 상황화는 선교적 교회에게 존재론적으로 부여된 해석학적 과제이다. 그러나 세계선교운동에서 상황화가 교회의 선교적 삶에 있어 필수불가결한 본질적 요소로 중시되어 적극 활용된 것은 탈기독교세계 시대의 출현 이후이며, 이것은 복음과 문화에 대한 인식론적 전이와 밀접히 관련된다. 다시 말해 상황화는 계시와 이성, 본체와 현상, 주관성과 객관성, 실증주의와 상대주의를 통전적으로 아우르는 비판적 사실주의 관점에서 복음의 경계 한정성 대신 중심 지향성이, 문화의 자족적 폐쇄성 대신 유기적 상관성이, 그리고 타종교의 문화적 우연성 대신 문화적 필연성이 강조되는 탈기독교세계적 사유의 산물이다. 이와 같은 인식론의 시대적 변천과 맞물려 1970년대 초 에큐메니칼계 신개념으로 등장한 상황화는 1980년대에 그 유형과 방법에 대한 심도 깊은 논의와 연구를 거치면서 세계선교운동의 주류 패러다임으로 부상하였다. 그 결과 오늘날 세계선교운동은 ‘상황화는 함의상 과정성이, 유형상 포용성이, 그리고 방법상 적합성이 요청되는 교회의 선교적 실존의 필연이다’라는 공동의 선교신학적 인식 속에 단일문화적인 기독교세계가 아닌 다문화적인 하나님 나라를 추구하며 하나님의 선교에 참여하고 있다.

Book Review: Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models

Book Review: Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models

Policies to Optimize Work Performance and Thermal Safety in Exercising Humans


 
 
 Emergency workers engaged in strenuous work in hot environments risk overheating and mission failure. We describe a real-time application that would reduce these risks in terms of a real-time thermal-work strain index (SI) estimator; and a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to compute optimal work rate policies. We examined the thermo-physiological responses of 14 experienced U.S. Army Ranger students (26±4 years 1.77±0.04 m; 78.3±7.3 kg) who participated in a strenuous 8 mile time-restricted pass/fail road march conducted under thermally stressful conditions. A thermoregulatory model was used to derive SI state transition probabilities and model the students’ observed and policy driven movement rates. We found that policy end-state SI was significantly lower than SI when modeled using the student’s own movement rates (3.94±0.88 vs. 5.62±1.20, P<0.001). We also found an inverse relationship between our policy impact and maximum SI (r=0.64 P<0.05). These results suggest that modeling real world missions as an MDP can provide optimal work rate policies that improve thermal safety and allow students to finish in a “fresher” state. Ultimately, SI state estimation and MDP models incorporated into wearable physiological monitoring systems could provide real-time work rate guidance, thus minimizing thermal work-strain while maximizing the likelihood of accomplishing mission tasks.
 
 

Book Review: Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models

Book Review: Contextualization in World Missions: Mapping and Assessing Evangelical Models

Review Symposium

Review Symposium Candy Gunther Brown (bio) When God Talks Back makes an ambitious claim, signaled by its subtitle. The argument is far-reaching, insightful, and largely persuasive. It uses thick description to represent sympathetically the experiences of informants. Its interpretive frame elucidates larger patterns. Luhrmann draws her data primarily from the ethno-graphic observation and interviews at two Vineyard churches and a psychological experiment she designed and then contextualized with psychological theory, select historical reading, and bestselling evangelical literature. A twofold question arises: Does the data support the book’s claim to explain evangelical experiences of relationship with God? Does the overall portrait—even if accurate in observation and interpretation—have the right proportions? The Vineyard began as a loose association of churches with a common “spiritual DNA,” to borrow founder John Wimber’s language. Leaders of Vineyard USA accept classification as a “denomination,” though they are organizationally separate and distinctive in emphasis from much of the global movement, which comprises two-thirds of Vineyard churches. Even so, the Vineyard is a very de-centralized denomination. Individual congregations differ markedly from one another. Luhrmann describes the Chicago Vineyard selected as located within an “intellectual island within the inner city” (9). Congregants took notes during sermons and wrote for hours in prayer journals. Not all Vineyards—let alone all charismatic churches—have such an intellectual bent toward cultivating prayer “skills.” There are certainly popular prayer manuals that encourage evangelicals to plan “date nights” with Jesus or pour an extra cup of coffee for God (80, 74). Luhrmann found informants who followed this advice, but it is hard to say just how many do so. Other important genres of charismatic literature and practice receive considerably less nuanced attention from Luhrmann, i.e. texts that encourage Christians to pursue a more starkly supernatural vision of divine-human interaction in miraculous healing, deliverance from demons, and highly specific prophecies used in evangelism. Such artifacts of a worldview influenced by the “never-secular societies” of the two-thirds world are relegated to the Bibliographic Notes at the end of the book (387). The few deliverance books mentioned might be supplemented by many other widely read books and films on deliverance, healing, and prophetic evangelism, i.e., the Argentinian Pablo Bottari’s Free in Christ (2000), Randy Clark’s Ministry Team Training Manual (2011), Bill Johnson’s When Heaven Invades Earth, Darren Wilson’s film Finger of God (2007) with its sequels, and many others. (2007) Chapter 1 explains the emergence of the Vineyard as an outgrowth of the 1960s counterculture, adding in the penultimate chapter that this period of social upheaval also ushered in a “psychotherapeutic” revolution. Only in the last chapter does the reader hear that California’s Fuller Theological Seminary and “power evangelism” played a role in Vineyard history. Indeed, Wimber, who was an adjunct instructor at Fuller’s School of World Missions, borrowed extensively from two-thirds-world students who emphasized the close connection between “signs and wonders” and church growth. Luhrmann picks up on Wimber’s lament that Western “reason” impedes recognition of the supernatural, but she has remarkably little to say about how Wimber sought to counter rationalism with supernatural power more than the “feel-good blurries” of “God the therapist” who functions like an imaginary friend (316, 121, 119). (Luhrmann does acknowledge that Wimber cared enough about deliverance, however, that he parted ways with Calvary [End Page 134] Chapel) for that reason, amongst others. Luhrmann hints at the gulf between the Vineyard of the 1980s and the 2000s. To be sure, during Wimber’s lifetime, the Vineyard’s characteristic teaching that the kingdom of God is both “already” and “not yet” spawned expectations of supernatural intrusions; over time, emphasis shifted from pressing in for more breakthroughs toward explaining why there are not more successes. By contrast, movements that grew out of the early Vineyard—such as Toronto Blessing and Revival Alliance (Randy Clark, John Arnott, Heidi Baker, Bill Johnson, Ché Ahn, Georgian Banov) continue to draw inspiration from two-thirds-world charismatics with whom they interact in global networks. The book says little about healing, deliverance from demons, or prophetic evangelism. When many charismatics say they hear from or...

New World Missions and the Spanish Context

New World Missions and the Spanish Context

Book Review: Roots and Remedies of the Dependency Syndrome in World Missions

Book Review: Roots and Remedies of the Dependency Syndrome in World Missions

Breaking the Silence on Suicide and Mental Illness: The Brethren in Christ, 1968-1989

In spring 1968 a tragic event catapulted the Brethren in Christ into a deep awareness of mental health issues. Lucille Lady, wife of a prominent church leader in the denomination, chose to end her life while her husband Jesse was out conducting a Bible Study. The couple lived in Upland, California, but with their public profile Lucille Lady’s suicide would impact not only their large kin network, but the denomination at large. Lucille came from a large family descended from a line of noted church leaders. Her grandfather Henry Davidson had begun the denomination’s periodical The Evangelical Visitor in 1870, nearly a century before Lucille’s death. 1 His daughter, Lucille’s aunt Frances Davidson, had been the first to respond to the Brethren in Christ call to world missions in that same era. 2

Invitation to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the 21st Century – By Timothy C. Tennent

Invitation to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the 21st Century – By Timothy C. Tennent

The Journey of the Finnish Pentecostal Mission: The Fire Burning in the Tensions between Modality and Sodality

The Finnish Pentecostals' impact to the world missions has traditionally not been very well known. However it is now touching 60 nations with 345 long tenn workers as well as annually with 400-500 short termers. The goal has been to have one missionary per one hundred believers (about 140 now).2 Arto Hämäläinen, How to Start Missionary Work in New Sending Countries (Helsinki, Fida International&Avainsanoma, 2003,22 This study paper reflects and analyses the development of the Finnish Pentecostal mission from the Azusa type of spontaneous mission movement almost one hundred years ago to the well structured mission body today. The paradigm shifts have led from sodality to modality, and finally to sodality in modality, from traditional mission society to local church centred mission, and eventually to the well defined cooperation unit of the mission organization and local churches.

Book Review: Introduction to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-First Century

Book Review: Introduction to World Missions: A Trinitarian Missiology for the Twenty-First Century

Book Review: The Great Commission: Evangelicals and the History of World Missions

Book Review: The Great Commission: Evangelicals and the History of World Missions

Apostolic Function and Mission

This is the address given by Alan R Johnson, an alumnus of OCMS, to inaugurate the J. Philip Hogan Chair of World Mission. The Hogan chair represents a connection between Assemblies of God World Missions and the Assemblies of God Theological Seminary where in a proactive and catalytic fashion the process of engaging with subjects of missiological importance can be undertaken. The author argues that thinking about missions is a communal activity that requires continual reflection.

Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New. By Daniel T. Reff. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 290. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00 cloth; $21.99 paper.

Reviewed by: Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New Cynthia Radding Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New. By Daniel T. Reff. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 290. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00 cloth; $21.99 paper. This book offers the reader an engaging synthesis of "the rise of Christianity" in the comparative framework of two widely varying time periods and geographical regions. Daniel Reff provides a thematic point of entry into ancient and early medieval European history in combination with colonial Latin American history on one important theme: the development of Catholic missions directed to indigenous peoples in northern New Spain (Mexico). His central arguments establish the conditions of epidemic disease in the Mediterranean world and European mainland in the first millennium of the Common Era, paralleled by the demographic crises of early conquest Ibero-America that created the scenario for Christian evangelization. Secondly, Reff compares the narratives of early Christian writings and Jesuit missionary accounts to show that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century clerics deliberately emulated ancient Christian texts in order to bolster the legitimacy of their New World missions. This dual approach offers a novel text for discussion, and the varied secondary sources provide students and scholars alike with an informative and challenging bibliography. The brevity of the synthesis, however, does not allow the author to develop as fully as he might have either the narrative exegesis or the historical complexities of his subject. Furthermore, the paucity of citations from recent Mexican scholarship in archaeology and ethno-history for northwestern New Spain reflects missed opportunities to rethink some of the assumptions repeated in this study concerning transculturation, cultural responses to disease, and the power struggles inherent in the religious conquests of early Roman Catholicism and the Spanish-American colonies. Several points stand out for further discussion: Daniel Reff's suggestion that mortality rates among Christians was significantly lower than among pagans during the epidemics of late antiquity; his comparison of the Aztec and Roman empires, and the scant attention paid to the economic life and internal governance of the Jesuit missions of New Spain, in which the Indian cabildo played a major role. Similarly, Reff's history minimizes the violence of early conquest encounters through the prolonged Mixton and Chichimec wars of sixteenth-century northern Mexico as well as the destructive impact of forced labor drafts and the economic imbalances between subsistence and surplus production in the mission communities. The structure of his study, combining substantive historical events with the literary analysis of sacred narratives, raises intriguing questions concerning the methodology for interpreting different belief systems over time and space: how do we combine archaeological, historical and ethnographic evidences in ways that are not anachronistic or simplified? [End Page 494] Reff makes ample use of illustrative passages from the principal texts that inform his study, particularly Andrés Pérez de Ribas, Triunfos de Nuestra Santa Fé, and Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, supplemented by scholarly translations of early Christian writings and archival citations to the Jesuits' annual reports—the latter deposited in the Mexico City, Archivo General de la Nación. He argues, interestingly, that seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in New Spain had more in common intellectually and theologically with early Catholic teachings, concerning Satan and the origins of sin, than with the comparatively harsher doctrines of the late Middle Ages and Counter-Reformation. Nevertheless, Jesuits repeatedly condemned native shamans as sorcerers and partners with the devil. Reff's conclusions underscore a basic paradox, namely that if, indeed, disease played a major role in the rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New, it was not explicitly acknowledged in the narratives of either period. This book opens a window to promising pathways in comparative history, leading us back to the sources that informed this study and provoking new questions for research and discussion concerning the intersections of intellectual and social history, agency, and the disjunctions of colonial conquests. Cynthia Radding University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico Copyright © 2007 Academy of American Franciscan History ...

Book Review: The Changing Face of World Missions: Engaging Contemporary Issues and Trends

Book Review: The Changing Face of World Missions: Engaging Contemporary Issues and Trends

Relationship between Role Perception and Well-Being in Married Female Missionaries

Although women play a significant role in world missions, few studies have been done to ascertain what factors enhance their effectiveness and sense of well-being. This study surveyed 153 married female missionaries to explore how they perceive their overall well-being and missionary role, and whether their perception of their role is related to their sense of well-being. Unexpectedly, responses indicated a need to modify Bowers (1984) Classification of Married Women Missionaries' Roles from four categories into two: “direct worker” or “support worker.” In an analysis of the data using this new classification Direct Workers were found to have a lower level of emotional distress than Support Workers. Additionally, participants' answers to open-ended questions indicated a moderate level of relevance of role issues in their lives as missionaries. Implications of these findings for enhancing married female missionary's well-being and for future research using this new classification are discussed.