REL 253-4 : Foundations of Mission

There has been a rapid growth in studies of ''World Christianity,'' which have dismantled the notion that Christianity is a Western religion. In this book, Jay Case examines the efforts of American evangelical missionaries in light of this new scholarship. He argues that if they were agents of imperialism, they were poor ones. Western missionaries had a dismal record of converting non-Westerners to Christianity. The ministriesthat were most successful were those that empowered the local population and adapted to local cultures.

This collection of essays explores the ways in which late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionaries to Africa contributed to various academic disciplines, such as linguistics, ethnography, social anthropology, zoology, medicine, and many more. This volume includes an introductory chapter by the editors and eleven chapters that analyze missionary research and its impact on knowledge about African contexts. Several themes emerge, including many missionaries' positive views of indigenous discourses and the complicated relationship between missionaries and professional anthropologists.

In The Cross-Cultural Process in christian History, Andrew F. Walls shows he has not lost the capacity to surprise readers with new insights into things they thought long settled. In essays that sparkle with wit and insight Walls reaches back to Eusebius of Edessa in the fourth century and down to the contemporary world. His seer's eyes reach from "Old Athens" and "New Jerusalem", to the vast continents of South America and Asia, to his beloved Africa.

In this provocative book, Guder argues that the incarnation of God in Jesus provides the foundational model for the practice of Christian missions in the world today.

This book brings together lectures and articles by the renowned historian of world Christianity. Essays such as "The Gospel as the Prisoner and Liberator of Culture" reveal the paradoxes of the Christian movement in discussing how different primitive Mediterranean Christianity is from early Catholicism, from Celtic monasticism, from Reformation Protestantism, and from Nigerian Spirit Christianity. Andrew Walls shows how the central question for Christianity has always been one of identity, a phenomenon revealed at each stage of its history by the missionary movement. What this means for theology, however, has hardly been explored.

Working with new insights on the influence that Christian translations of Scriptures and catechisms into African languages had on cultural self-understanding, social awakening, religious renewal, reciprocity in mission, process, Sanneh shows that mission and translation were and continue to be integral parts of cultural renewal in the face of the relentless onslaught of imperialism in its classic and contemporary forms.