Missiology is the academic study of the Christian mission history and methodology. It began to be developed as an academic discipline in the 19th century.
A Christian mission is an organized effort to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as educational or hospital work, in the name of the Christian faith. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries. Sometimes individuals are sent and are called missionaries, and historically may have been based in mission stations. When groups are sent, they are often called mission teams and they undertake mission trips. There are a few different kinds of mission trips: short-term, long-term, relational and those that simply help people in need. Some people choose to dedicate their whole lives to mission.
Indigenous churches are churches suited to local culture and led by local Christians. There have been two main Protestant strategies proposed for the creation of indigenous churches:
- Indigenization: Foreign missionaries create well-organized churches and then hand them over to local converts. The foreign mission is generally seen as a scaffolding which must be removed once the fellowship of believers is functioning properly. Missionaries provide teaching, pastoral care, sacraments, buildings, finance and authority, and train local converts to take over these responsibilities. Thus the church becomes indigenous. It becomes self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing.
- Indigeneity: Foreign missionaries do not create churches, but simply help local converts develop their own spiritual gifts and leadership abilities and gradually develop their own churches. Missionaries provide teaching and pastoral care alone. The church is thus indigenous from the start. It has always been self-supporting, self-propagating and self-governing.
Rufus Anderson was an American minister who spent several decades organizing overseas missions.
Christianity has been present in China since the early medieval period, and became a significant presence in the country during the early modern era. The Assyrian Church of the East appeared in China in the 7th century, during the Tang dynasty. Catholicism was one of the religions patronized by the emperors of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty, but it did not take root in China until its reintroduction by the Jesuits during the 16th century. Beginning in the early 19th century, Protestant missions in China attracted small but influential followings, and independent Chinese churches were also established.
Kenneth Scott Latourette was an American Baptist minister and historian, specialized in Chinese studies, Japanese studies, and the history of Christianity. His formative experiences as a Christian missionary and educator in early 20th-century Imperial China shaped his life's work. Although he did not learn the Chinese language, he became known for his study of the history of China, the history of Japan, his magisterial scholarly surveys on world Christianity, and of American relations with East Asia.
Christianity in Africa first arrived in Egypt in approximately 50 AD. By the end of the 2nd century it had reached the region around Carthage. In the 4th century, the Aksumite empire in modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea became one of the first regions in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion. The Nubian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria and Alodia followed two centuries later. From the late fifth and early sixth century, the region included several Christian Berber kingdoms. Important Africans who influenced the early development of Christianity and shaped the doctrines of Christianity include Tertullian, Perpetua, Felicity, Clement of Alexandria, Origen of Alexandria, Cyprian, Athanasius and Augustine of Hippo.
Timothy C. Tennent is an American Methodist theologian. He is the current president of Asbury Theological Seminary.
Lamin Sanneh was the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity at Yale Divinity School and Professor of History at Yale University.
Thomas Torrance (1871–1959) was a Scottish Presbyterian minister and Protestant missionary to Sichuan, western China. He was first sent there by the China Inland Mission (CIM), and later by The American Bible Society. He married Annie Elizabeth Sharp (1883–1980) of the CIM in 1911. He was the father of the 20th century theologian, Thomas F. Torrance.
Allan Anderson is a British theologian and the Professor of Mission and Pentecostal Studies at the University of Birmingham. He is frequently cited as one of the foremost scholars on Global Pentecostalism.
The International Association for Mission Studies (IAMS) is an international, inter-confessional, and interdisciplinary professional society for the scholarly study of the Christian mission and its impact in the world and the related field of intercultural theology. It is based in England and South Korea.
Shoki Coe was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, erstwhile principal of Tainan Theological Seminary (1949-1965) and director of the Theological Education Fund of the World Council of Churches. Through the Theological Education Fund, he is widely known for his coinage of the notion of "contextualizing theology," later better known as "contextual theology," which argues for theology's need to respond to the sociopolitical concerns of a local context. He was named by Kosuke Koyama as the latter's spiritual father.
Dana Lee Robert is a historian of Christianity and a missiologist. She is a professor at Boston University, where she has worked since 1984. She was the co-founder of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission in 2001, one of the first university-based Centers on World Christianity in North America. For years, Robert held the School of Theology's Truman Collins Professorship in World Christianity and History of Mission, but in 2022 she was installed in the William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professorship, the highest distinction bestowed upon senior faculty members who remain actively involved in research, scholarship, teaching, and the University’s civic life.
Christian Gonçalves Kwami Baëta was a Ghanaian academic and a Presbyterian minister who served as the Synod Clerk of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of the Gold Coast from 1945 to 1949. He was among a number of prominent individuals, corporate organisations and civil society groups that were instrumental in the establishment of the University of Ghana, Legon in 1948.
The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity (BDCC) is a biographical dictionary which focuses on the lives of Chinese Christians and foreign Christian missionaries to China. It is published in both Chinese and English.
The Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide (CCCW) is a study, teaching and research centre in Cambridge, England and a member of the Cambridge Theological Federation which is affiliated with the University of Cambridge.
Journal of the Henry Martyn Institute is a biannual scholarly journal published by Henry Martyn Institute, Hyderabad, India on disciplines encompassing religion, culture and interfaith relations and could be found in nearly 100 libraries worldwide. It promotes inter-religious understanding with a special focus on the study of Islam.
Carl K. Becker (1894–1990) was an American doctor and missionary. He left a profitable medical practice in Boyertown, Pennsylvania to join the Africa Inland Mission in 1929. By 1934 he had set up his own mission station in the Ituri Rainforest in the Belgian Congo. Becker was medical resident of the mission's hospital, carried out more than 3,000 operations and delivered hundreds of babies each year. He was the first in Equatorial Africa to use electric shock therapy for the treatment of psychiatric disorders and his leprosy village attracted specialists from across the world. He was briefly evacuated during the 1964 Simba rebellion and returned to the United States upon his retirement in 1976.
Kathleen Mary Amelia Bliss was an English theologian, missionary and official of the World Council of Churches (WCC).
