Missiology: An International Review

Is missiology, with such an eclectic background, a legitimate discipline that deserves equal status with other disciplines? To answer this question, this article surveys definitions, briefly investigates its development in the Protestant context, and suggests ways to maximize its potential while protecting it. The conclusion is that missiology should take a backseat to no discipline, but must remain surrendered to Scripture to maintain its distinctive contribution.

Missionaries constantly struggle with misperceptions caused by ideas and understandings that they brought from home, some of which lie deep within their worldview. One foundational assumption posits the existence of persons according to substance, not according to relationship. It seldom occurs to the missionary that there might be other ways of understanding persons. It turns out that every culture has a folk sociology to account for things like, but not exactly like, individual, self, and society. How people perceive themselves and their world provides the context for ministry, if we can only discover how person and sociality are constructed.

Research suggests that many adult children of missionaries have ongoing life-struggles. Explanations for the etiology of AMK struggles provide underpinnings for interventions by a growing professional community of those ministering to missionary kids (MKs). A survey questionnaire was administered to 101 Wycliffe AMKs, testing hypotheses associated with two models: (1) a psychological model hypothesizing that high levels of AMK life-problems result from high levels of childhood trauma, and (2) an anthropological model hypothesizing that high levels of AMK life-problems result from a lack of relevant cultural competencies as MKs enter their parents' home country. It was found that while childhood trauma was predictive of life-struggle, trauma items distinctive of MK experience (such as frequent separations) were not predictive of adult-problems, while other forms of trauma (abuse) which are predictive of life-struggle apparently do not occur at higher rates for MKs than for others. Research results did provide support for the hypothesis that a lack of relevant cultural competencies in U.S. culture at the time of entry to the U.S. was predictive of life-problems. Practical and research implications of these findings are discussed.

It is often stated in the historiography of the faith mission enterprise that early faith missions focused almost exclusively on evangelism, whereas denominational missions invested heavily in schools, hospitals, and the like. This article explores the experience of Cameron Townsend in the Central American Mission during the 1920s, and argues that conservative evangelicals in faith missions were every bit as concerned as the more liberal denominational missionaries with schools and hospitals. That historians have paid such attention to the “evangelism only” focus of faith missions indicates that they have attended closer to the rhetoric of home councils and conservative home constituencies than to the missionaries themselves.

The story of Christian missions among Native North American tribes continues to be fiercely debated both in the church and in the academy. I offer the following study of missionary-theologian Carl F. Starkloff, who has devoted the past 40 years of his life to these issues, as a particularly effective contemporary example of someone engaged in this encounter. I consider three distinct periods in Starkloff's pursuit of successful inculturation, periods that mirror larger missio-logical movements within the Catholic Church since Vatican II. According to Starkloff, we should be prepared to endure some “theological messiness” in our experiments toward genuine inculturation.

This essay explores the cultural phenomenon of globalization ushered in through worldwide economic market expansions, international travel, technological advances, and rapid Internet communications. These transformations are influencing and changing not only cultures and individual nation-states; they are also impacting religious meaning and faith everywhere. By examining the case study of the Sakalava people of Madagascar, who practice an indigenous religion known as tromba spirit possession, we can learn how this specific cultural and religious context copes with external economic, political, cultural, and religious forces. The research also explains how Christianity needs to interact with the Sakalava religion in reconstructing the Sakalava culture and discovering gospel values already present and active. This has worldwide implications for a Christian mission of evangelization. The article concludes by outlining some consequences for Christian evangelization that attend to the local and the universal impact of the gospel vision.