International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Issue 29:1, January 2005
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (56 pp., 2.3 MB PDF)

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Tracking World Christianity

To mark this journal’s fiftieth anniversary, Robert T. Coote—then assistant editor—told the story of the INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH in his article “Finger on the Pulse: Fifty Years of Missionary Research” (IBMR 24 [2000]: 98–105). Evolving from R. Pierce Beaver’s mimeographed 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.

In January 1985 David Barrett’s inaugural “Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission” appeared in the IBMR. Coauthored with Todd M. Johnson since 1998—joined this year by Peter F. Crossing—this feature has now appeared in twenty-one consecutive January issues.

With some frequency over the past two years, journalists from major newspapers have requested information on the number of Christian missionaries engaged in mission to Muslims. Thanks to the article by Todd M. Johnson and David R. Scoggins, we are now able to venture a response: an estimated 57,300 Christian missionaries work in countries that are predominantly Muslim or that have significant numbers of Muslims. Conversely, some 141,630 Muslim missionaries work in countries that are predominantly Christian. Both groups of missionaries, surprisingly, seem to focus most of their efforts and resources on fellow believers.

Tallies do not tell the whole tale of world Christianity, of course. Ideas, scholarship, books, and archives are also an integral part of the Christian story, making absolutely essential the kind of institutions and activities described in the articles by Jean-Paul Wiest and Kylie Chan.

Everyday human life must be lived in contexts over which we have little or no control. Swept along like flotsam on geopolitical, economic, and social tidal waves, not even the most powerful human being can control the nature, direction, speed, or impact of these overwhelming and often destructive forces. In such a world, Christian missionaries—insofar as they resist being drawn into the maelstrom of competing, aggressively self-serving nationalisms, choosing rather to live Christianly in contexts of hatred and turmoil—will be radical in Norman E. Thomas’s instructive sense of that word. The IBMR deems it high honor indeed to play its part in tracking the radical movement that continues to turn the world upside down.

—Jonathan J. Bonk
bonk@omsc.org

 

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Issue 29:1, January 2005
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FULL ISSUE (56 pp., 2.3 MB PDF)