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April 2008

Asian Light, Asian Fruit

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 The articles show that, although for several centuries Christian missions were sometimes deeply compromised advocates, or at least beneficiaries, of Western military and economic intrusion in that part of the world—which left behind a legacy that will take many more generations to purge—nevertheless the church in Asia not only survived but thrives.

January 2008

Mission and the Peaceable Kingdom

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What went wrong? Why would intelligent, well educated young men in their prime willingly obliterate themselves by crashing passenger jets into New York 's famous Twin Towers-arch symbols of this nation's commercial virility? How could they have been convinced that the incineration of ordinary Americans both compelled and justified their carefully executed mass murder by suicide? What religious or ideological wellsprings animated them and thousands like them? A plausible and much repeated response to these perplexing questions was soon offered by Bernard Lewis. . .

October 2007

July 2007

Europe: Christendom Graveyard or Christian Laboratory?

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Shortly before his election as Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger published a pithy little volume in Italian, Europa: I suoi fondamenti oggi e domani (Edizioni San Paolo, 2004). Recently translated into English under the title Europe Today and Tomorrow (Ignatius Press, 2007), the book wistfully recalls the continent’s Christendom heritage and argues that, without a return to its spiritual foundations, Europe’s moral and political disintegration is inevitable.

April 2007

Human Stories and the Mission of God

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Without stories—stories about ourselves, about our families and ancestors, about our social groups, tribes, nations, and religions—there can be no self-consciously distinctive human existence. Stories are integral to human identity, providing one with a sense of location vis-à-vis everything and everyone else. it is our participation in these stories that makes us “we” and the rest “they.” Personal and communal identity means participating in the selective common memory of a uniquely delimited group.  

January 2007

Movements, Missiometrics, and World Christianity

Each January since 1985, the IBMR has featured an annual statistical table on global mission and world Christianity. Since this table is possibly the most anticipated and without doubt the most frequently cited of our regular offerings, we felt it would be appropriate this year to provide readers with some background on who and what lie behind these statistics. David B. Barrett has arguably done more than any other single person to help us see world Christianity in all of its complex permutations as a global movement.  

October 2006  

Edinburgh 1910: Friendship and the Boundaries of Christendom

At the time of the extraordinary World Missionary Conference convened in Edinburgh from June 14 to 23, 1910, Europe ’s global hegemony was unrivaled, and old Christendom’s self assurance had reached its peak. That the nations whose professed religion was Christianity should have come to dominate the world seemed not at all surprising, since Western civilization’s inner élan was thought to be Christianity itself. Missionaries were unable to offer any credible rejoinder to the charge that the West neither believed nor practiced what the Bible actually taught.  

July 2006  

Mission and the Go-Between God

Anglicans are not the only Christian communion suffering from what former CMS general secretary Max Warren once described as a peculiar “ecclesiastical squint which gets virtually every important issue out of focus.” Such humble self-awareness is prerequisite to an ability to hear what the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches, regardless of the religious condition or cultural setting. . . . Aware that they understand only the dim contours of God’s self-revelation, thoughtful Christians readily attest that when it comes to being transformed into the glory of our Lord, the Spirit still has plenty of work to do, even in the most saintly among us.  

April 2006  

Beyond Babel: Pentecost and Mission

Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting, the Tower of Babel, evokes the account of how human accord was divinely mutated into linguistic pandemonium and cultural fragmentation. Its New Testament counterpart is the story of Pentecost. In her lead essay Edith Blumhofer tells how—in the wake of Azusa Street and similar, concurrent revivals one hundred years ago—early American Pentecostals were convinced that the gift tongues was God’s way of enabling them to preach the Gospel in the mother tongues of peoples all over the world, without the time-consuming labor of actually learning another language.  

January 2006

Just What Is the Gospel?

Just what is the Gospel? The Nicene Creed encapsulates the essence of the Gospel for Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, and most other Protestants. Most other Christian groups are similarly committed to the doctrines it teaches. The irreducible essence of the Gospel—whatever the time, place, culture, or church communion—is that Jesus the Christ, God’s only begotten Son, is the key to unlocking our human potential, both now and in the life to come.  

October 2005

Can There Be Christianity Without Church?

It is worth pondering that Christ is more likely to be found outside than inside the wealthy, smugly self-sufficient Laodicean church (Rev.3:14–22) and its contemporary analogues. Will we one day discover that, for “churchless Christians” in India, Hindu temples were simply places of incubation, just as synagogues incubated our Lord’s earliest followers before finally ejecting them as “Christians”? And so we return to the question: can there be Christianity without church? Perhaps the question should be reframed: Is the true church—the kingdom—always visible, always recognizable, to those who operate within the Christian religious establishment?  

July 2005  

Finding Our Own Voice: The Quest for Authentic Conversion

Charles Forman is to be thanked for his masterful overview of theological developments in the Pacific Islands, a part of the world too seldom mentioned in this journal. His title, “Finding Our Own Voice,” aptly reflects a ubiquitous and quintessentially human quest that manifests itself at all levels of life—individual, community, ethnic group, and nation—and across the spectrum of languages, societies, and religions.  

April 2005  

Christian Mission: Lengthened  Shadow of a Great Man

One of the most sought-after issues of Time magazine featured the editors’ pick of the twentieth century’s 100 most influential persons, good and bad. Grouped into five categories—the selections included several men and women whose faith-driven activism turned them into household names and exemplars. No missiologists—not even David J. Bosch—made the list.  

January 2005 

Tracking World Christianity

To mark this journal’s fiftieth anniversary, Robert T. Coote told the story of the IBMR in his article “Finger on the Pulse: Fifty Years of Missionary Research.” Evolving from R. Pierce Beaver’s “Occasional Bulletin from the Missionary Research Library“, launched in 1950, the IBMR is among today’s most trusted and widely circulated sources of mission-related information and analysis.

Noteworthy