Dana Robert’s new book has finally arrived. Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 192 pages) recounts the history of Christian missions but not from a strict partisan perspective or as a mono-toned description of western institution and theology. Rather, Robert presents missions as “a central process in the formation of Christianity as a world religion” (p. 2). Missions gives strength and vitality to the faith through its multi-lingual and multi-cultural expressions right from the beginning (p. 17) and expands as it provides “catalyst for identity-formation” (p. 2) for the various peoples, locales, and cultures it encounters. “Cultural fluidity” and translatability, Robert maintains, are the engines for the expansion of the Christianity into a worldwide religion.
Alternative histories, especially those written from a western and/or denominational orientation, give the impression that the success of Christianity is due to one type of Christianity triumphing over errant forms. In this attempt to frame the success of Christianity as the rise of orthodox faith, other ‘Christianities’ are characterized as heresy and dismissed from the main storyline, or they are not mentioned at all. Such a one-sided interpretation of missions and Christianity is being revised by African, Latin American, and Asian historians, as well as westerners, such as Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, and Dana Roberts. The story is truly much broader and more diverse than we’ve been taught.
Christian Mission belongs on your list of books to read. When read along with Philip Jenkin’s The Lost History of Christianity, one cannot help but see the expansion of Christianity as greater than western colonialism or a religion exported from Britain, Germany, and America. Until you get your copy of Robert’s book, here is an enticing excerpt.
But the story of Christianity around the world is not that of a simple, linear progression. To become a world religion, Christianity first had to succeed on the local level. Specific groups of people had to understand and shape its meaning for themselves. What in totality is called a “world” religion is, on closer observation, a mosaic of local beliefs and practices in creative tension with a universal framework shaped by belief in the God of the Bible, as handed down through Jesus and his followers. … growth takes place at the edges or borderlands of Christian areas, even as Christian heartlands experience decline.
Robert’s history reminds me that I as go forth in mission I must do more than replicate my particular denomination and its theological formulations. I am to proclaim Jesus Christ and then trust the Spirit to bring understand and hope from within every language, culture, and locale. Robert and others give me hope that as I witness the demise of Christianity at what has been its center, it is exploding at the edges of the world.
Having lived at the “edges” for almost three decades, I am encourged by the Christainity I see there, even with its non-Baptistic, non-western, non-traditional, non-theological nature. This Christianity provides hope for hopeless people, a voice of spiritual expression for voiceless people, and a community for communityless people. Can the western church learn from this new Christianity, or are we doomed to spiritual decline until we become the “edge” at which a new Christianity will be born?
Mike, thanks for constant challenge.
Thanks for the post. I can’t wait to read the book.