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Front cover (above):

The Nestorian Monument in China and a rubbing of its top that shows the cross rising out of the lotus flower. Shown is frequent IBMR contributor Dr. Jean-Paul Wiest, director of the Jesuit Beijing Center, Beijing, China, who provided both photographs.

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International Bulletin of
Missionary Research

Noteworthy
2008 / 2007 / 2006 / 2005 / 2004 / 2003

April 2008

Announcing

A three-year project commenced in May 2006 by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and the World Council of Churches’ program on interreligious dialogue and cooperation now includes evangelical and Pentecostal representatives. The dialogue, called An Interreligious Reflection on Conversion: From Controversy to a Shared Code of Conduct, was advanced August 8–12, 2007, when some thirty Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Pentecostal, and evangelical theologians and church leaders from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States gathered at the Institute of Science and Theology of Religions, Toulouse, France, to outline the content of the code of conduct, which is expected to be finalized by 2010.

A global conference on Christian mission has been proposed for late 2011 by the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches. The commission includes delegates from member churches of the council as well as from the Roman Catholic Church and several other Christian bodies not in full membership of the WCC. The conference will continue a series of representative gatherings that began with the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910. The WCC’s most recent world mission conference met near Athens in 2005. Many historians of Christianity consider the decision at Edinburgh to form a Continuation Committee, which eventually led to the formation of the International Missionary Council, as the starting-point of the modern ecumenical movement. Samuel Kobia, a Methodist pastor from Kenya, is WCC general secretary. For details, visit www.oikoumene.org/en/news/news-management/eng/a/browse/10/article/1722/world-mission-and-evangel.html.

Some 240 leaders of a broad range of churches, confessions, and interchurch organizations from more than seventy countries agreed to advance what they called the Global Christian Forum. The agreement for encounter and dialogue has a goal to “foster mutual respect, explore and address common challenges.” Participants endorsed the final draft of a “Message from the Global Christian Forum to Brothers and Sisters in Christ Throughout the World” at a meeting November 6–9, 2007, in Limuru, near Nairobi, Kenya. Visit
www.globalchristianforum.org to read the statement.

The Endangered Archives Program at the British Library has funded nearly seventy projects in thirty-seven countries since its establishment three years ago. The program, with support from Arcadia, formerly the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund, focuses on the preservation and copying of important but vulnerable archives throughout the world, according to a British Library report. For details, visit www.bl.uk/
endangeredarchives.

Personalia

On January 1, 2008, John R. Watters, who has done linguistic fieldwork and consultation in Cameroon, Nigeria, and Chad and has taught linguistics at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Yaoundé (Cameroon), completed his maximum term of service as executive director of SIL International and Wycliffe International and the position was divided in two. Watters will continue to serve the SIL-Wycliffe Bible translation cause. Fredrick A. Boswell, SIL vice president for academic affairs, was named executive director of SIL International. Boswell worked as a field linguist and translation advisor to the Cheke Holo language group in the Solomon Islands on Central Santa Isabel Island. In addition to that field assignment in the Solomon Islands, he has lived and worked in Peru and Papua New Guinea. Kirk Franklin, a citizen of Australia and the United States who has spent most of his life in the Pacific region, was selected as the next executive director of Wycliffe International. He has served with Wycliffe since 1980, most recently as executive director of Wycliffe Australia. He previously served in various media, communications, and leadership roles. Franklin, fluent in the Tok Pisin language of Papua New Guinea, spent twenty-five years in that country.

T. Jack Thompson, who spent thirteen years working in education in Malawi, will retire in September 2008 as director of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World and senior lecturer in the history of world Christianity at the University of Edinburgh. He specializes in the history of Christianity in central and southern Africa and on the impact of missionary photography in creating stereotypes of Africa in Europe and particularly in Scotland. The university’s school of divinity is seeking a new director.

Died. Ralph Wiltgen, S.V.D., author of two volumes on Catholic missionary beginnings in the Pacific, December 6, 2007, in Techny, Illinois. Born in Chicago in 1921 and ordained a priest in 1950, Wiltgen received a doctorate in missiology at the Gregorian University in 1953. In 1959 he was assigned the task of writing the history of the Society of Divine Word (S.V.D.) missions in Papua New Guinea, which began in 1896. To lay the groundwork for the S.V.D. history, however, he decided to go back to the origins of missions in the Pacific in 1825. His first volume is The Founding of the Roman Catholic Church in Oceania, 1825–1850 (1979), and the second volume is The Founding of the Roman Catholic Church in Melanesia and Micronesia, 1850–1875 (2008).

Died. Heribert Bettscheider, S.V.D., director of the Divine Word Missionaries Missiological Institute at Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, December 11, 2007, in Germany. Born in 1938, Bettscheider entered the Society of the Divine Word in 1959 and was ordained in 1964. He held numerous academic and administrative posts in the S.V.D. and was named director of the Missiological Institute in 1995. In recent years he had dedicated much energy to the missiological implications of migration and to questions of considering Europe as a continent in need of missionary efforts.

January 2008

Announcing

The American Society of Missiology has chosen “Envisioning Apostolic Theology: As the Father Sends
. . .” for its 2008 annual meeting theme. The meeting will be held June 20–22 at Techny Towers, Techny, Illinois. For details, visit www.asmweb.org or contact Arun W. Jones at ajones@austinseminary.edu. The Association of Professors of Mission, meeting June 19–20 at the same location, will focus on the topic “The Gospel Beyond Mere Words: Issues in Contextualizing Liturgy, Music, and the Arts.” Visit www.asmweb.org/apm for details, or contact Bonnie Sue Lewis at bslewis@dbq.edu.

The 2008 Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and Non-Western Christianity, July 3–5 at the University of Edinburgh, will have “Perceptions and Portrayals: Heroes and Villains in Mission Historiography” as its theme. The conveners are Lamin Sanneh and Andrew F. Walls. The seminar is cosponsored each year by the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Edinburgh, Yale Divinity School, and the Overseas Ministries Study Center. For details, visit www.library.yale.edu/div/yaleedin.htm.

The fourth International Interdisciplinary Munich-Freising Conference on the History of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Freising IV) will be held February 15–17, 2008, in Freising (near Munich), Germany. Its theme will be “The Year 1989/1990 as a Turning Point in the European and Non-European History of Christianity.” Those present will discuss how the collapse of socialism, the end of the cold war, and the start of a “bipolar world order” in 1989–90 affected the churches and Christians not only in Eastern Europe but also in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. A new attempt will also be made to develop a global perspective on the history of Christianity in different parts of the world and its interdependencies. The speakers are leading experts from various regions and backgrounds. For details, visit www.kg1.evtheol.uni-muenchen.de/veranstaltungen/freisingiv/index.html.

“Exploring Religious Spaces in the African State: Development and Politics from Below” is the theme for a conference being planned by the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. The gathering will be held April 9–10, 2008, in Edinburgh. For details, contact Barbara Bompani, School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh, b.bompani@ed.ac.uk.

The Henry Martyn Centre and the African Studies Centre of the University of Cambridge will cohost a conference titled “East African Revival: History and Legacies” in Cambridge, April 25–26, 2008. The conference is being held to mark the opening to researchers of the private papers of Joe Church (1899–1989), the Anglican medical missionary “who was deeply involved in this movement which has so profoundly shaped the character of Protestant Christianity in much of East Africa,” says Brian Stanley, director of the Henry Martyn Centre at Westminster College, Cambridge. For details, visit www.martynmission.cam.ac.uk/cafrican%20conf.html, or e-mail Polly Keen, pk262@cam.ac.uk.

The summer 2008 issue of the Journal of American–East Asian Relations will feature a special issue entitled “Christianity in China as an Issue in the History of the United States–China Relations.” Associate editor Dong Wang is associate professor of history at Gordon College, Wenham, Massachusetts.

An international conference will be held September 26–28, 2008, on the theme “Empire, Slave Trade, and Slavery: Rebuilding Civil Society in Sierra Leone, Past and Present.” The conference, which will mark the bicentenary of the establishment of Sierra Leone as a British Crown colony in 1808, will be held at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation, University of Hull, Hull, U.K. Liverpool Hope University and the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University, are cosponsors. For details: www.hull.ac.uk/WISE/Conferences/Callforpapers/sierra_leone_2008_call_for_papers/index.html.

On June 19, 2007, one of the oldest mission agencies, the Church Mission Society, led by general secretary Tim Dakin, opened new offices in Oxford, marking the first time the CMS office has moved outside of London since its founding on April 12, 1799. Initially the society had no designated offices, but by the end of the nineteenth century a row of houses had become a large headquarters with a complex administration and numerous staff. The CMS office now hosts the new Crowther Centre for Mission Education, where Cathy Ross is manager. Visit www.cms-uk.org for details.

Some important documents on the history of Christianity in Asia that are not otherwise available may be accessed online at www.aecg.evtheol.lmu.de/cms/index.php?id=10, a Web site of the church history department at the University of Munich, Germany. One of the first such documents is the “Minutes of the Consistory of the Dutch Reformed Church in Colombo Held at the Wolvendaal Church, Colombo, 1735–1796.”

Personalia

Appointed. Kirsteen Kim, honorary lecturer in theology, University of Birmingham, U.K., as an International Bulletin of Missionary Research contributing editor. Her latest book, The Holy Spirit in the World: A Global Conversation, was published by Orbis Books in October 2007. A former chair of the British and Irish Association for Mission Studies, she is vice-moderator of the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism of the World Council of Churches.

Died. Charles R. Taber, 78, a contributing editor and a past president of the American Society of Missiology and of the Association of Professors of Mission, Johnson City, Tennessee, October 26, 2007. Born in Neuilly, France, to Brethren United States missionaries, he spent his youth in France and French Equatorial Africa. Taber met his wife of fifty-six years, Betty, at Bryan College, Dayton, Tennessee. After a year at Grace Theological Seminary, Winona Lake, Indiana, he taught school in Oubangui-Chari, 1953–61, when a medical emergency forced the family’s return to the United States. He was invited to do studies on the Sango language at Hartford Seminary Foundation, in Connecticut, where he completed his doctorate in anthropology and linguistics. Taber was hired by the American Bible Society, and one of his projects became The Theory and Practice of Translation (1969), coauthored with Eugene Nida. In 1969 the family returned to Africa, where Taber served as translations consultant for the United Bible Societies for nearly three dozen projects in twelve countries and edited Practical Anthropology. In Johnson City since 1973, he taught missions at Milligan College and then at Emmanuel School of Religion. He published The World Is Too Much with Us: “Culture” in Modern Protestant Missions (1991) and To Understand the World, to Save the World: The Interface Between Missiology and the Social Sciences (2000).

Died. James H. Kraakevik, 79, director of the Billy Graham Center (1984–96) and former chair of the science division, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois, September 26, 2007. Previously he was education secretary for West Africa for SIM and was involved in rehabilitation work during and after the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s. From 1981 to 1984 Kraakevik was SIM director of research and ministries.