Welcome to the July issue of Missiology: An International Review. This issue contains seven articles and fourteen book reviews. The editors hope these offerings will provide interesting and thought-provoking reading, prompting further discussion and writing on topics of importance to the discipline.
This issue starts with a number of articles discussing practical issues of missiology. In the first article, a qualitative study, Diane Marshall uses data collected from a large mission organization to challenge the pipeline theory of women’s leadership, proposing instead the need for intentional strategies to support women leading in a mission agency. Next, David Hirome and Hansung Kim discuss the work of African missionaries to the United States, examining their perspectives and considering two specific case studies as examples of such mission work. Third is Leela Priya Santhakumar’s paper—which won the 2025 ASM student paper competition—in which she focuses on the strength of an ecumenical approach to Christian development work in India, with its various religious restrictions. Closing this section is Philip Sampson’s article on contextualization, specifically language regarding the atonement, which he then applies to the Melanesian context.
The fifth article is an examination of the work of Eunice Victoria Pike, an early Bible translator among the Mazatec people. J. Kaleb Graves uses her correspondence to challenge theological assumptions and explore the impact of early mission work on local people. Next, Seth Porch engages the reader in a discussion on the foundation of mission, arguing that the basis for mission is the Trinity rather than particular commission texts found in the New Testament. Wrapping up the articles in this issue is an essay by Wei Jie Nicholas Ho in which he reflects on the developments in biblical scholarship over the past seventy years and how they impact a missiological understanding of Luke-Acts.
The fourteen book reviews reflect the breadth of contemporary missiological scholarship, engaging questions of history, justice, ecclesiology, and Christian practice across diverse cultural and global contexts. Several works revisit key episodes in the history of mission and global Christianity, offering fresh interpretations of Methodist, Jesuit, and Pentecostal movements, as well as missionary encounters in places such as Japan, Alaska, Africa, and China. Others turn toward questions of race, marginality, and social justice, examining topics such as whiteness in American Christianity, the long struggle of Black Catholic religious women, and transnational solidarities among marginalized communities. Several volumes also explore evolving forms of Christian witness and ministry in a changing world, addressing themes such as collaborative ecclesial leadership, missional priesthood, institutional chaplaincy, and the church’s engagement with pluralistic and digital societies. Still others engage foundational questions of evangelism, worldview formation, gendered experience in evangelical communities, and the documentary record of missionary scholarship, expanding the interpretive tools available to students of mission history and practice. Taken together, these reviews highlight the ways contemporary missiology continues to wrestle with historical legacies, emerging forms of ministry, and the diverse voices shaping the global church.
Among this collection, Naveen Seelamsetti “highly recommends” Thomas Coomans’s edited volume Missionary Spaces: Imagining, Building, Contesting Christianities in Africa and China, 1830s–1960s (Leuven University Press) to “mission historians, scholars of global Christianity, and researchers,” particularly noting that its “materially focused perspective enhances missiological discussions of contextualization by demonstrating its manifestation in physical structures, spatial organization, and discipline, rather than solely in doctrine or preaching.” In his review of Philip Wingeier-Rayo’s John Wesley and the Origins of Methodist Missions (Abingdon), Peter J. Bellini writes that the book “significantly adds to the genre of Methodist missions,” ranking it alongside recent volumes by Thomas Kemper and David Scott, and even classic works on Wesleyan global mission such as that edited by Charles Yrigoyen Jr. Misael Cornelio-Arias commends Rakel Ystebø Alegre, Torbjörn Aronson, and David M. Gustafson’s edited volume Revising Pentecostal History: Scandinavian-American Contributions to the Development of Pentecostalism (Pickwick Publications), describing it as “a landmark study that will compel a significant recalibration of the historiography of World Christianity” and noting that “missiologists will be rewarded with a narrative illustrating the inherently transnational and missional impulse animating Pentecostalism from its inception.”
Leanne M. DzubinskiEditor in Chief
William R. GreenAssociate Editor
