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— Leaders and Revolutionaries, Artists and Entertainers, Builders and Titans, Scientists and Thinkers, Heroes and Icons— the selections included several men and women whose faith-driven activism turned them into household names and exemplars: Helen Keller, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

No missiologists—not even David J. Bosch—made the list. Yet those of us who walk in his intellectual shadow know that in the world of mission studies, he is surely one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century. In their essay “Missiology After Bosch,” Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder go so far as to make the startling assertion that “after the twentieth century, any missiology can be done only as a footnote to the work of David Bosch.” Their “footnote” is a book, Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today, reviewed in this issue. 

David J. Bosch is only the latest in a galaxy of stars from which the rest of us have, over time, taken our missiological bearings. A South African who served as a missionary to the Transkei for nine years following completion of his doctoral studies in New Testament at Basel, he was professor of missiology at the University of South Africa (UNISA) from 1971 until his fatal car accident in 1992. Soon recognized, thanks to his prolific pen, as a towering intellectual presence in the field of mission studies, it was the publication of his Transforming Mission— referred to by Lesslie Newbigin as a summa missiologica—that, thirteen years after his death, has secured Bosch’s position as perhaps the most significant figure in contemporary missiological discourse. His masterful elucidation of mission theory within the matrix of six historical paradigms has provided scholars with a sense of time, place, and direction that gives coherence to missiological discourse, profoundly influencing the way we understand and teach mission history and theory. 

Though he has been gone for well over a decade, we are only now beginning to appreciate the depth and the breadth of this great man. But with the clarity that can come only with hindsight, we are also better able to discern the limitations of Bosch’s contribution, staggering though it is, to the field. In a perceptive essay marked by intellectual integrity and scholarly erudition worthy of his subject, Alan Kreider probes Bosch’s contribution by examining the profound impact of the advent of Christendom on the self-understanding and practice of all subsequent Christian mission, including the contemporary. Reacting to what he regards as an inadequacy in Bosch’s schema, Kreider argues persuasively that a more academically sound and ultimately more useful way of understanding ourselves across the 2,000-year continuum of Christian missionary endeavor is to think of not six but three historical paradigms of mission: pre-Christendom, Christendom, and post-Christendom. He suggests that we take another look at pre-Christendom mission and notice how fitting it is for the post-Christendom realities of today’s post-Euro- American world church. This thesis is echoed and reinforced by one of today’s leading interpreters of the global Christian movement, IBMR contributing editor Wilbert Shenk, in his essay “New Wineskins for New Wine: Toward a Post-Christendom Ecclesiology.” “

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance”—as monasticism is “of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson . . . and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.” Our sorry history bears testimony to the ease with which we allow our commissioning Lord’s shadow to be eclipsed by the grotesque deformities of human convention, whereby greed is overlooked, domination of all kinds is ignored, oppression is disregarded, and violence is downplayed—sometimes explicitly in the name of Christ. Thus even so venerable a mission society as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, whose board of governors included the archbishop of Canterbury, had no scruples about deriving part of its revenues from the labors of Africans enslaved on its Codrington sugar plantation in Barbados. Branded across the chest of each of the estate’s slaves was the word SOCIETY. 

As important as those are who, like Bosch, have shaped our approach to the study and the practice of Christian mission, truly Christian mission—as this issue of the IBMR reminds us in various ways—can never be the lengthened shadow of any mere mortal. At its redemptive best, it is always the lengthened shadow of the Son of Man, the Word made flesh, whose life, death, and resurrection are at once the source, the model, and the power for all who respond to his call. And his shadow does not reach to the highly politicized concerns of self-preserving Christendom. His, rather, is the shadow of the cross, lengthened and extended through the self-giving community of God’s kingdom citizens, wherever they are found.

Contents 

59 Beyond Bosch: The Early Church and 
the Christendom Shift
Alan Kreider

69 Missiology After Bosch: Reverencing a Classic by Moving Beyond
Stephen B. Bevans, S.V.D., and 
Roger P. Schroeder, S.V.D.

73 New Wineskins for New Wine: Toward a Post-Christendom Ecclesiology
Wilbert R. Shenk

76 Noteworthy

80 Describing the Worldwide Christian
Phenomenon
Todd M. Johnson and Sandra S. Kim

85 My Pilgrimage in Mission
Walter J. Hollenweger

89 My Pilgrimage in Mission
Charles R. Taber

93 The Legacy of François Elbertus Daubanton
Jan A. B. Jongeneel

98 Book Reviews

110 Dissertation Notices

112 Book Notes