Abstract
This article summarizes and reflects on Pope Francis’s 2023 Apostolic Letter Ad Theologiam Promovendam, a document that emphasizes the missionary and contextual nature of theology. After a short introduction to the document, the article summarizes and reflects on it in five points: Theology is (1) missionary and synodal; (2) contextual; (3) interdisciplinary; (4) communal; (5) wisdom oriented. Francis’ perspective on theology is an important one for understanding the importance of the discipline of missiology today.
Introduction
On June 19, 2025, the American Society of Missiology hosted a special panel on the theme “Missiology: A Contested Discipline.” The panel consisted of John Franke, who offered a paper entitled “Sent into the Neighborhood: Missiology and the Local Church;” Stephen Bevans, who spoke on Pope Francis’s 2023 document entitled Ad Theologiam Promovendam; Peter Lee, whose topic was “Missiologists as a Contested Profession,” and Kirsteen Kim, whose paper summarized the development of the Lausanne Movement with the title “Missiological Contestations of the Lausanne Movement 1974-2025.”
The panel was a first effort at attempting to re-evaluate and more deeply to understand the discipline of missiology the context of the academic world today, a context that challenges understandings of mission and mission studies that were influenced by colonialism and cultural imperialism, and one that has moved mission studies to the margins of the disciplines of history, theology, and the social sciences. Despite these moves, missiologists believe that their discipline is actually a central one for the various theological disciplines, and that a missiological perspective is a crucial one in today’s fragmented and wounded world.
This issue of Missiology publishes these papers together in the hope that they will generate further discussion and creative thinking about the discipline of missiology today.
Our panel this afternoon has been convened to reflect on various aspects of missiology as a contested discipline—what is missiology about? Why is it important? What might its future be? Should we stop speaking of “missiology,” even “mission,” at all, accepting new ways of approaching the discipline in terms of intercultural theology, world Christianity, or intercultural studies?
I certainly do not know the answer to all of these questions. I am convinced, however, that theology, particularly systematic theology, needs to be informed by what I have called a “missiological imagination”—a way of thinking theologically that places theology at the service of the mission of the church in the world, helping the church better embody, demonstrate, and proclaim the vision of Jesus of the reign or kingdom of God (see Bevans, 2001).
I have tried in my career as a mission theologian to do theology out of this conviction. This is why I was delighted to read the short but important document of Pope Francis, published on November 1, 2023, entitled Ad Theologiam Promovendam (Francis, 2023), or—in my translation—Moving Theology Forward. I believe that in this document Pope Francis saw the need for missiology as a vital part of the theological enterprise. This is why knowing about it and paying attention to it is crucial in the discussion that we are having this afternoon, and which this Panel is calling on the ASM to engage in more intentionally in the future. As far as I know, although Francis wrote about theology in a similar vein (Francis, 2013, 2015b, 2022), and since his election Pope Leo XIV has echoed Francis’s teaching (Leo, 2025, 2026), there would be nothing comparable in the official documents of other Christian churches or faith communities. David Bosch writes about the missionary nature of theology, of course, in his magisterial Transforming Mission (Bosh, 1991), and Michael Barram and John Franke have initiated an important series in Missional Hermeneutics, Theology, and Praxis (e.g. Barram and Franke, 2024). Such Protestant and Evangelical writings, while authoritative in their own right, are not formal church statements.
In this short presentation I can only outline what the document says, and make a few reflections on it, but I hope such a summary will encourage you to read it, written by such a remarkable pope.
Introducing the document
Ad Theologiam Promovendam’s immediate context was the approval of new statutes for the Pontifical Academy of Theology, a learned society of forty theologians appointed by the Vatican. The task of the Academy is to promote dialogue between faith and reason under the guidance of the pope.
I’ve always had trouble translating that Latin word promovere. Literally it means to “promote”—for example the Vatican office for ecumenism is called the “Dicastery for the Promotion of Christian Unity.” Somehow though, I don’t think this literal translation really expresses in English what the Latin means. In English, “promote” has the connotation of advertising or making something better known—businesses promote their products; scholars try to promote their latest book. In the translation of the Apostolic Letter that I made, since it has not been translated into English, I rendered it as “to move forward.” So, the first sentence in my translation reads: “In order to move theology forward into the future, one cannot limit it to abstractly repeat formulae and structures of the past.”
I think the idea of “moving theology forward” is the basic idea of the document. Francis writes that the times demand a new way of thinking about theology. As he puts it: “What we are living through is not simply an epoch of change, but a change of epoch” (Francis, 2019).
The content of Ad Theologiam Promovendam
There are, as I see it, five major points to Ad Theologiam Promovendam (ATP). The document is quite short by Vatican standards—only ten short paragraphs. Packed into them, however, is a radical and powerful vision of how theology needs to be done in today’s world. It is a vision with missiology at its heart!
A theology in sync with a synodal and missionary church
The first point is that theology today needs to be in sync with a synodal, missionary church, rooted especially in the real issues with which the world deals today. In the last several years, Francis had proposed a renewal of the church, reinstating the vision of Vatican II. He has called for the development of a “synodal church,” based on the conviction that baptism confers upon all Christians the wisdom of the Spirit, a wisdom that needs to be shared with the entire church (see Francis, 2023). He speaks of Synodality as a “constitutive element of the church,” and is convinced that “the path of synodality is what God expects of the church in the third millennium” (Francis, 2015a: par. 33, 30).
Synodality is a missional concept. It begins with understanding the equality of all Christians through baptism (Communion). It then calls forth the participation of all—from every sector of the church (participation). Having listened to all, discernment is then made as to how the church should work with God in God’s mission in the world (mission).
A theology that recognizes the synodal and missionary nature of the church is a church that, as Francis puts it, “goes forth” (Francis, 2013: par. 24), and so is concerned with the real issues of the world. As Francis wrote:
The openness to the world, to human beings in the concreteness of their real situations, with their problems, their wounds, their challenges, their possibilities, cannot . . . be reduced to a tactical attitude, superficially adapting contents from the past expressed in new situations, but should develop as an epistemological and methodological rethinking . . . (Francis, 2023: par. 3)
Theological reflection as contextual theology
The second point of ATP is that theological reflection is called:
to a change of paradigm, to a “bold cultural revolution,” . . . that lets it be, in the first place, a fundamentally contextual theology, capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel according to the conditions in which women and men live their daily lives, in diverse geographical, social, and cultural situations, and taking as an archetype the incarnation of the eternal Logos, his entrance into culture, within a particular worldview, with a religious tradition of a people. (Francis, 2013: par. 4, emphasis in original)
As far as I know, this is the first time that the term “contextual theology” is used in an official Roman document (at least in Italian. The Latin has the phrase “proprii temporis” or “in its own time”). As I have argued in my book Models of Contextual Theology, the term “contextual theology” is a stronger one than the term that Catholic teaching has used rather regularly—that of “inculturation” (Bevans, 2002: 26–27). As the Asian Catholic bishops have suggested, in tune with thinking out of the World Council of Churches, “contextual theology” or “contextualization” moves beyond inculturation to include the realities of contemporary secularity, technology, and the struggle for human social and ecological justice (FABC, 1979; TEF, 1972). This is an important move for Catholic teaching on theology, and is strongly influenced by missiology.
Theology as interdisciplinary
Third, and as a consequence of the need of contextual theologizing, theology needs to be inter-disciplinary. Pope Francis spoke of this interdisciplinarity “in the strong sense” (Francis, 2023: par. 5). This means that theology cannot not just be multi-disciplinary, but cross-disciplinary. In other words, theologians need to engage in dialogue with the disciplines of philosophy, anthropology, psychology, the arts, social sciences, the hard sciences and so forth, in a way that deeply affects theological thinking and content.
In this way is found the difficult task for theology of being able to avail itself of new categories elaborated from other forms of knowledge, in order to penetrate and communicate the truths of the faith and transmit the teaching of Jesus in contemporary language, with originality and critical consciousness. (Francis, 2023: par. 5)
This, of course, is what missiology is called to do as well.
Theology as communal
Fourth, theology needs to be done in community. Quoting his address to the International Theological Commission in 2022, Francis wrote that “ecclesial synodality therefore needs theologians to do theology in a synodal way, developing their capacity to listen to each other, to dialogue, to discern, and to harmonize their many and varied contributions” (Francis, 2022). “Theological institutions should therefore be places where theologians have the experience of collegiality and theological brotherhood/sisterhood” (Francis, 2023: par. 6).
Contextual theologians have long said that real contextualization comes from the people, who, in the words of the late pioneer of Filipino theology Leonardo Mercado (1980), are “the best theologians” (p. 13). Theology, wrote American theologian Peter Schineller, is too important and complex to be left to professional theologians (Schineller, 1988). This means that theology that is truly contextual must be rooted in the voices and insights of ordinary people, in dialogue with theologians who can interpret their experience in the light of theology’s rich tradition and their study of culture and context. Moreover, contextual theology needs to be done in serious dialogue of theologians with one another. Theologians in individual schools of theology need to be constantly sharing and reflecting together. The age of the lone theologian at her or his desk has long passed. This is probably true as well of the lone missiologist.
Theology as wisdom
Fifth, theology needs to have a “wisdom dimension.” While continuing to be rigorously critical and honest, it needs to recognize the pastoral and spiritual dimension of all theological work. I often call this the need for theology to have “cash value”—we have always to ask the question “so what?” This depends, says Francis, on “rethinking the nature of thinking” (Francis, 2023: par. 7), recognizing that Christian faith can be presented in a thoughtful, responsible way, but geared to touching people’s hearts as well as their minds. To accomplish this the inductive method must be used, with theology rooted in the faith, wisdom, and questions of real people (Francis, par. 7). It has to be missiological.
Theology is always at the service of the people, helping them to understand more deeply the liberating and life-giving reality of our Christian faith. The more we can use their language, the images of their culture, the richness of their experience, the better theology is. Even though theology is rigorous, it can be marvelously pastoral. I believe that the best theology is always pastoral, and the best pastoral practice is always grounded is good theology. I think Francis understood this very well and called theologians to such an understanding. Theology is
a true critical way of knowing in that it is sapiential knowing, not abstract and ideological, but spiritual, worked out on one’s knees, grounded in adoration and prayer; it is a transcendent knowledge and, at the same time, attentive to the voice of the people, therefore ‘popular’ theology, focused mercifully on the open wounds of humanity and all creation and within the twists and turns of human history, to which it prophetically proclaims the hope of a final fulfillment. (Francis, 2023: par. 7, emphasis in original)
Conclusion
I hope this quick overview of ATP has been helpful and encouraging. It certainly has been encouraging to me. Much of my theological career has been spent in arguing for the contextual and missionary nature of all theology, and, with Francis’s inspiration it bore fruit in my book Community of Missionary Disciples: The Continuing Creation of the Church (Bevans, 2024). I believe strongly that one of the tasks of missiology is to help theologians be at the service of the church and its mission. In some ways, if theology cannot do this, it should itself be considered a contested discipline.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.