Christian Conversion and Mission

Given the scores of editorial themes featured in the IBMR since 1977, readers may be surprised to learn that “conversion” has never been included among them. Of course it has been an implicit motif many times, since the subject is seldom far from the center of most mission-related discourse. Christian scriptures have a lot to say about conversion. Given humanity’s pervasive awareness that things, including us, are not as they ought to be, disappointingly deficient early believers must have been heartened by Paul’s assurance that they were being transformed into the likeness of Jesus the Christ, and that God’s comprehensive transformation project involved all of creation, including humankind.

While missionaries across the ecclesiastical gamut generally agree on both the need for and the fact of Christian conversion, sharp disagreement often exists regarding its description, its exact means, and its results. Contemporary Christian dissonance over conversion, Andrew Walls’s lead article points out, is nothing new. Our earliest faith forebears struggled, sometimes not very successfully, to distinguish between proselytism and conversion.

That first-century followers of the Way should have come to be regarded not simply as proselytes to the venerable religion from which their faith had sprung, but as converts to a Lord who invited them to turn their cultural, social, intellectual, and spiritual selves toward him, profoundly impacted the faith’s core DNA, ensuring both its universality and its particularity. Richard Peace’s helpful survey of conflicting understandings of Christian conversion and the official statement issued by the Seventh International Conference of the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism together show, however, that despite the remarkable clarity of understanding achieved by the early church, we still have a long way to go.

Assent to, and recitation of, formulaic propositions about God are no proof of conversion, Christopher Wright’s essay reminds us. Whether in horticulture or in piety, so Jesus taught his followers, common sense goes far in discerning fraud from fact: “You will know them by their fruits.” And it is for their good fruits that both Kenneth B. Mulholland, who completed his earthly journey shortly after submitting his Pilgrimage, and Dorothy Davis Cook, this issue’s Legacy subject, are known.

Choo Lak Yeow’s survey of nearly half a century of theological education in South East Asia offers the sort of masterful overview possible only for someone intimately involved with that heartening story. And, finally, readers are once again indebted to David Barrett and Todd Johnson for their twentieth consecutive annual statistical table on global mission, this year drawing special attention to conciliarism, not as an end in itself, but as a means toward God’s mission of “reconciling the world unto himself.”

BACK

Converts or Proselytes? The Crisis over Conversion in the Early Church
Andrew F. Walls

Conflicting Understandings of Christian Conversion: A Missiological Challenge
Richard V. Peace

Implications of Conversion in the Old Testament and the New
Christopher J. H. Wright

After The Next Christendom
Philip Jenkins

Helsinki 2003: Jesus and His People
Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism

Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 2004
David B. Barrett and

Todd M. Johnson

Theological Education in South East Asia, 1957–2002
Choo Lak Yeow

My Pilgrimage in Mission
Kenneth B. Mulholland

The Legacy of Dorothy Davis Cook
Susan E. Elliott

Christian Publications in China

Wing N. Pang

Noteworthy