Abstract
When one picks up a 200-page volume on the history of Christian mission, it is necessarily concise. Edward Smither’s slim volume runs at a quick pace which hits the peaks of mission history that covers 2000 years. He bathes a good number of those peaks in brilliant light and some valleys in shadowy gloom. Throughout, he is careful to highlight that God is in control of his-story. His years as a historiographer of Church and mission history and as Dean of Intercultural Studies at Columbia International University qualify him to write a work that received Christianity Today’s Book Award of Merit for 2020.
Despite the size, Smither adequately documents for any reader who desires to follow up on a specific person, era, or issue. As Smither says in his epilogue: “this book is introductory in nature but invites a deeper study on each person, region, and approach in it.”
An interesting caveat would be that anonymous Christians, sent and supported by the local church, were mostly responsible for the Church’s spread. But, from the Middle Ages to the Protestant Reformation, monks and the mendicant orders mainly carried out mission efforts. One area Smither could have further explained was why sodalities needed to form and spearhead mission efforts that were not taken seriously by Church modalities. Another missed opportunity was exploring Hudson Taylor’s use of single women missionaries to plant churches in China’s interior. In the latter chapters, women did merit at least a paragraph in each chapter’s summary.
Smither does an excellent job of mapping out the shifts in methodologies and mission thinking, and the significant paradigm shifts, in all eras of mission history as he reviews the “when and where,” the “who and what,” and “the key trends, themes, and paradigm shifts in missions practice”. Christian Mission is an excellent source for use as a quick perusal of world missions’ leading players while recognizing the pivotal role many unknown and non-missionaries played in establishing the Church. The final chapter, “Missions from the majority world,” itself worth the book’s price, reflects reality in the present decade’s mission efforts and the impact that majority-world missions are having on Protestant missions.