This survey of mission studies is long overdue. The publication of David Bosch’s Transforming Mission in 1991, a wide ranging and richly textured volume surveying Christian thinking about mission from the New Testament through to the twentieth century, helped to define and raise the profile of missiology in the academic community at large. Bosch showed how a discipline encompassing theological, historical and sociological approaches, which had originated in research for missionary work to the non-Christian world, had now broadened its remit in all kinds of ways. Since then the range and quantity of contributions to this discipline from across the world has mushroomed, especially in the USA, also incorporating theological methods pioneered in the Majority World, such as inculturation, contextualization, liberation, interfaith and church growth studies. In a world in which mission is now recognized as being ‘from everywhere to everywhere’, not least from Brazil, South Korea, Nigeria and other Christian centres in the Majority World, the discipline has responded to this in a diverse and fascinating set of ways, drawing on the related rise of study of Christianity as a world religion and of its impact on public life, with more attention now paid to cultural diversity than to denominational diversity.
Kirsteen Kim of Fuller Theological Seminary in California, Knud Jørgensen lately of the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, and Alison Fitchett-Climenhaga of the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne have commissioned a wide and impressive range of scholars to provide an overview and analysis of all this, with a sprinkling of Anglicans among them. The publication of this volume with its 41 essays is a major achievement and we are in debt to the editors for their labours. It provides a much-needed window onto a vast range of studies and will be a key reference point for the discipline in years to come. The design, editing and printing of the volume are also of a high order, with a price tag to match.
After a helpful overview from the editors, Part I outlines the origins and development of mission studies and its main methods. Brian Stanley begins the story in the nineteenth century with the emergence of the science of missions especially in Germany. The role of Protestant ecumenism and the major conference in Edinburgh in 1910 receives proper attention. The growing importance of Catholic mission studies, not least through Orbis Books in the US (the publisher of Bosch’s Transforming Mission) is also highlighted. Paul Kollman then looks forward to what mission studies might offer in the third millennium and Dorottya Nagy raises necessary questions about the theory and methodology of missiology.
The relationship of mission studies with other fields of theology comes into view in Part II. Biblical studies, doctrine, ecclesiology (from an Orthodox perspective) and intercultural studies all receive attention. Steven Bevans provides an especially helpful overview of theologies of mission in the twentieth century, looking at the Trinitarian theology of missio Dei, the more christological theology of liberation, and the anthropologically based theology of inculturation or contextual theology. He also discerns fresh and promising trajectories of research from these in the current century.
Part III presents studies of a broad swathe of practical work in the field, including the overlap of mission studies with practical theology. Topics include mission agency structures and the work of missionaries, spirituality and liturgy, proselytism, communications, involvement in international development and social action, and in healing ministries.
In Part IV the relationship between mission and colonialism comes under scrutiny, with special attention to colonial mission’s underside, bringing to the fore the experience of the colonized. The nature of postcolonial mission is also considered, including the relationship of mission with Communism in the former Czechoslovakia. Dana L. Robert presents an informative overview of the relationship of mission studies with study of world Christianity over the centuries. She looks forward to developments within and beyond the postcolonial reconfiguration of mission studies.
The second half of the Handbook deals with three further academic fields that have been brought into dialogue with mission studies: cultural anthropology and cultural studies, religious studies, and studies of society of various sorts. The editors point out that although each of these fields has its own disciplinary distinctiveness, nevertheless culture, religion and society are not easy to tease apart in any particular case of missionary engagement, making the organizing of a handbook like this quite challenging. Nevertheless the remaining chapters flow forward in a clear and logical fashion.
In Part V the relationship between mission studies and the anthropology of Christianity is surveyed. For example, in an innovative chapter Gina Colvin and Rosemary Dewerse give voice to Christian Māori and Aboriginal women whose Indigenous communities were dispossessed and whose cultures suffered attempted eradication. The editors tellingly comment that these Indigenous women challenge mission practices and mission studies with a perspective from the margins. There are also surveys of Christianity in China, the relationship of Christian mission and African traditions and with secularism.
The chapters in Part VI look in greater depth at Christian mission in relationship to people of particular faiths, beginning with indigenous religions and including Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. Muthuraj Swamy ponders how the colonial encounter with the peoples of India was at least partially responsible for the construction of the religion of Hinduism, which now, ironically, challenges the existence of religious minorities in India including Christianity. What can Christian mission learn from this? Annemarie C. Mayer charts the struggle to understand theologically the persistence of other religions and also the rise of the dialogical approach to mission.
Finally, Part VII considers how mission studies addresses particular social issues. From the Latin American context Joanildo Burity shows how engagement with social sciences has connected theory and practice and encouraged a more self-critical attitude in mission while also generating interest within social sciences in religion. The impact of widespread discourse on race on mission studies is also surveyed. In her chapter on gender, Gemma Cruz uses feminist theology to make sense of women’s experiences in mission, a line of study which challenges how mission is defined. This section also considers the relationship with migration over the centuries, another burgeoning field of study, though Jehu Hanciles’ work is not reviewed. Climate change is the last social issue to be considered, with Kapya Kaoma arguing that it has brought about a paradigm shift in theology – this shift has, of course, reached into the Anglican Communion through creation care now being widely recognized as part and parcel of mission. The increasingly popular Five Marks of Mission definition is evidence of this. To wrap things up, Gina Zurlo and Todd Johnson survey the use of statistics to measure the spread of Christianity, its demography and impact. Their overview of current quantitative data on Christian mission and the growth of world Christianity makes fascinating and salutary reading. It might have benefitted from being placed in an introductory section to the Handbook.
