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خطوة إلى عالم لا حدود له من القصص

الاستماع والقراءة

Henning Wrogemann

John G. Flett

The gospel is for every tribe, tongue, and nation (Revelation 7:9), but there is no single biblical or theological model for the relationship between the gospel and these diverse cultures. Indeed, every suggested approach carries its own range of philosophical and theological commitments that all too often remain unexamined. Contextualization is fraught with challenges—yet wrestling with questions of context is essential for how we understand mission, theology, and the embodiment of the Christian faith.
German missiology has engaged these questions in a variety of ways that can both inform and critique Anglo-American traditions. In this compilation and analysis, John Flett and Henning Wrogemann translate and comment on a core thread of German missiological works, explaining both their historical and current significance. Drawn from journals and books across a century of academic discourse, these classic writings trace developments from Gustav Warneck, the father of contemporary missiology, through key thinkers such as Karl Hartenstein, who coined the term missio Dei, down to twenty-first century discussions of intercultural hermeneutics. Along the way they reveal advances, mistakes, and changing definitions as German missiologists interacted with the cultural and political realities of their time.
This longitudinal study, showcasing many texts available in English for the first time, tackles the history and dynamics of contextualization head-on and sheds new light on the state of missiology today. We are reminded, Flett and Wrogemann argue, that we must keep working to honor difference within the worldwide Christian community as necessary to the fullness of our being in Christ.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

IVP Academic

Missiological Engagements

Questions of Context: Reading a Century of German Mission Theology

Vince L. Bantu

Christianity Today Award of Merit
Christianity is not becoming a global religion. It has always been a global religion. The early Christian movement spread from Jerusalem in every direction, taking on local cultural expression all around the ancient world. So why do so many people see Christianity as a primarily Western, white religion?
In A Multitude of All Peoples, Vince Bantu surveys the geographic range of the early church's history, revealing an alternate, more accurate narrative to that of Christianity as a product of the Western world. He begins by investigating the historical roots of the Western cultural captivity of the church, from the conversion of Constantine to the rise of European Christian empires. He then shifts focus to the too-often-forgotten concurrent development of diverse expressions of Christianity across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
In the process, Bantu removes obstacles to contemporary missiological efforts. Focusing on the necessity for contextualization and indigenous leadership in effective Christian mission, he draws out practical lessons for intercultural communication of the gospel. Healing the wounds of racism, imperialism, and colonialism will be possible only with renewed attention to the marginalized voices of the historic global church. The full story of early Christianity makes clear that, as the apostle Peter said, "God does not show favoritism, but accepts those from every people who fear him and do what is right."
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

A Multitude of All Peoples: Engaging Ancient Christianity's Global Identity

In search of holistic Christian witness, missionaries have increasingly sought to take into account all the dimensions of people's cultural and religious lives—including their songs, dances, dramatic performances, storytelling, and visual arts. Missiologists, educators, and practitioners are cultivating new approaches for integrating the arts into mission praxis and celebrating creativity within local communities. And in an increasingly globalized and divided world, peacemaking must incorporate the use of artistic expressions to create understanding among peoples of diverse faiths. As Christians in all nations encounter members of other religions, how do they witness among these neighbors while respecting their distinct traditions?
Building on sessions at the 2018 Missiology Lectures at Fuller Seminary, this book explores the crucial role of the arts in helping people from different cultures and faiths get caught up in the gospel story. Scholars and practitioners from throughout the world present historical and contemporary case studies and analyses. Their subjects include the use of Christian songs during the Liberian civil war and Ebola crisis, social critiques in contemporary Chinese art, interreligious dialogue through choir music in Germany, aesthetic practices of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and how hip-hop music empowers urban young people in globalizing Mozambique.
These essays foster a conversation about the work that missiologists, art critics, ethnodoxologists, and theologians can do together to help guide church leaders in promoting interfaith and intercultural relationships. While honestly identifying weaknesses in the church's practice, the contributors call all Christians to understand the power of art for expressing cultural and religious identity, opening spaces for transformative encounters, bridging divides, and resisting injustice.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

The Arts as Witness in Multifaith Contexts

William Dyrness

Darren T. Duerksen

New expressions of church that are proliferating among Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other non-Christian religious communities, including so-called insider movements, have raised intense discussion in missiological circles. In Seeking Church, Darren Duerksen and William Dyrness address these issues by exploring how all Christian movements have been and are engaged in a "reverse hermeneutic," where the gospel is read and interpreted through existing cultural and religious norms.
Duerksen and Dyrness draw on the growing social-scientific work on emergent theory—the concept that social communities arise over time in ways that reflect specific historical and cultural dynamics. This is a missiological process, they argue, in which God has always worked through people and their culture to shape his witness in the world. They illustrate emergent theory through historical and contemporary case studies and consider the church's contextualized nature by exploring biblical models of the church, worship practices as emergent, and ecclesial markers that identify emerging churches and their distinctive witness.
For missiologists, theologians, practitioners, and all who ponder the challenge and opportunities of mission among other religious communities, Seeking Church offers a multidisciplinary conceptual framework with which to understand the global diversity of the body of Christ. The Spirit is constantly drawing people toward God's community, causing new expressions of church to emerge and thus displaying new facets of his work and character.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

Seeking Church: Emerging Witnesses to the Kingdom

Oscar Garcia-Johnson

Throughout the history of the Christian church, two narratives have constantly clashed: the imperial logic of Babel that builds towers and borders to seize control, versus the logic of Pentecost that empowers "glocal" missionaries of the kingdom life. To what extent are Westernized Christians today ready for the church of the Pentecost narrative? Are they equipped to do ministry in different cultural modes and to handle disruption and perplexity? What are Christians to make of the Holy Spirit's occasional encounters with cultures and religions of the Americas before the European conquest?
Oscar García-Johnson explores a new grammar for the study of theology and mission in global Christianity, especially in Latin America and the Latinx "third spaces" in North America. With an interdisciplinary, "transoccidental," and narrative approach, Spirit Outside the Gate offers a constructive theology of mission for the church in global contexts.
Building on the familiar missiological metaphor of "outside the gate" established by Orlando Costas, García-Johnson moves to recover important elements in ancestral traditions of the Americas, with an eye to discerning pneumatological continuity between the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian communities. He calls for a "rerouting of theology"—a realization that theology cannot make its home in Christendom but is a global creation that must come home to a church without borders.
In this volume García-Johnson

- considers pneumatological insights into de/postcolonial studies
- traces independent epistemic contributions of the American Global South
- shows how American indigenous, Afro-Latinx, and immigrant communities provide resources for a decolonial pneumatology
- describes four transformations the American church must undergo to break free from colonial, modernist, and monocultural structuresSpirit Outside the Gate opens a path for a pneumatological missiology that can help the church act as a witness to the gospel message in a postmodern, postcolonial, and post-Christendom world.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

Spirit Outside the Gate: Decolonial Pneumatologies of the American Global South

Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, World Christianity and Intercultural Theology for 2019 — International Bulletin of Mission Research (IBMR)
Christianity is not only a global but also an intercultural phenomenon.
In this third volume of his three-volume Intercultural Theology, Henning Wrogemann proposes that we need to go beyond currently trending theologies of mission to formulate both a theory of interreligious relations and a related but methodologically independent theology of interreligious relations.
Migratory movements are contributing to an ongoing process of religious pluralization in societies that tended to be more religiously homogenous in the past. Interreligious platforms, movements, and organizations are growing in number. Meanwhile, everyday life continues to be characterized by very different modes of interreligious cooperation. Coming to a better understanding of such modes is a major concern for societies with high levels of religious and cultural plurality.
Wrogemann's conviction is that much would be achieved if we posed new and different questions. When it comes to interreligious relations, what is significant, and what is meaningful? What exactly is a dialogue? Which factors are at play when people from different cultural and religious traditions come into contact with each other as physical beings in real-life situations? What about the different images of the self and of the other? Which interests and hidden motives underlie which claims to validity? Exploring these questions and more in masterful scope and detail, Wrogemann's work will richly inform the study of interreligious relations.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

Intercultural Theology, Volume Three: A Theology of Interreligious Relations

Yes, White people can be saved. In God's redemptive plan, that goes without saying. But what about the reality of white normativity? This idea and way of being in the world has been parasitically joined to Christianity, and this is the ground of many of our problems today. It is time to redouble the efforts of the church and its institutions to muster well-informed, gospel-based initiatives to fight racialized injustice and overcome the heresy of whiteness.
Written by a world-class roster of scholars, Can "White" People Be Saved? develops language to describe the current realities of race and racism. It challenges evangelical Christianity in particular to think more critically and constructively about race, ethnicity, migration, and mission in relation to white supremacy.
Historical and contemporary perspectives from Africa and the African diaspora prompt fresh theological and missiological questions about place and identity. Native American and Latinx experiences of colonialism, migration, and hybridity inspire theologies and practices of shalom. And Asian and Asian American experiences of ethnicity and class generate transnational resources for responding to the challenge of systemic injustice. With their call for practical resistance to the Western whiteness project, the perspectives in this volume can revitalize a vision of racial justice and peace in the body of Christ.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

Can "White" People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission

Wanjiru M. Gitau

Christianity Today 2019 Book of the Year Award, Missions/Global Church
Building from a behind-the-scenes case study of Kenya's Nairobi Chapel and its "daughter" Mavuno Church, Wanjiru M. Gitau expands their story into a narrative that offers analysis of the rise, growth, and place of megachurches worldwide in the new millennium. In contexts experienced as deeply volatile, and on a continent reeling from the structural incoherence imposed in colonial times, megachurches provide a map of reality to navigate by, with the gospel as their primary compass. Gitau shows that recognizing the psychological, spiritual, and social destabilization of modernizing societies is the first step to valuing the place of megachurches in contemporary Christianity.
Through analysis of social demography, theology, philosophy of ministry, leadership development, and strategy, Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered makes integral sense of the historical and social forces that give megachurches their growth opportunity, and reclaims them as a subject of serious theological conversation.
This engaging account centers on the role of millennials in responding to the need for "a home for new generations" amid the dislocating transitions of globalization and postmodernity in postcolonial Africa and around the world. Gitau gleans practical wisdom for postdenominational churches everywhere (mega- and otherwise) from the lessons learned in Kenya's remarkable urban, evangelical renewal movement.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

Megachurch Christianity Reconsidered: Millennials and Social Change in African Perspective

Scott W. Sunquist

Asia is the birthplace of Christianity. If Christianity is not usually seen as an Asian religion, that is because the history of Christianity in Asia has long been a difficult one. Whereas Christianity in the West received royal support, Asian Christianity has led a more nomadic and exilic existence. Today it is the least Christianized region of the world.
Scott W. Sunquist is a recognized expert on the history of the Christian faith in Asia. Over the years he has published and spoken frequently on this theme. Explorations in Asian Christianity gathers his key writings on the topic and organizes them into four main categories: surveys that look at Asian Christianity in broad perspective, historical investigations that look at how Christianity shapes our understanding of history and historiography, missiological studies that look closely at issues of place, and finally essays on theological education.
Topics explored in this volume include

- Ecumenism in Asia
- The cruciform nature of Christianity
- A missiology of place
- The Christian view of time
- Global migrationExplorations in Asian Christianity sheds light on one of the most important but least well-known areas in Christian history.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

Explorations in Asian Christianity: History, Theology, and Mission

Christianity is not only a global but also an intercultural phenomenon.
In this second volume of his three-volume Intercultural Theology, Henning Wrogemann turns to theologies of mission. Mission theologies, he argues, are found in a wide range of implicit as well as explicit forms, from the practice of Christian presence by a Pakistani Christian among a marginalized people to the published deliberations of mission scholars in the West. The task of intercultural theology is to investigate and promote awareness of the variety of culture- and context-specific theologies of mission.
From Warneck to Bosch, from Edinburgh to Lausanne to Busan, Wrogemann provides an overview of the theological underpinnings, rationalizations, and visions for mission and its practice. Tracing developments across a range of Christian traditions, movements, themes, and regions of the globe, from Europe and North America to sub-Saharan Africa, Wrogemann presents us with an array of mission theologies across the scope of the modern missionary movement. This rich conspectus is rounded out with the doxological dimension of mission and the varied facets of oikoumenism.
Masterful in its scope and detail, this volume will richly inform the study of missiology and global Christianity. And it is essential reading for doing theology in a multicultural key. In a day when the church in the West struggles to understand and appreciate its missionary legacy and calling, Wrogemann's work sparkles with its deeply informed insights and inspiring vision.
Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.