This study of W.C.Willoughby of Bechuanaland, which is approximately 135,000 words in length, is a critical appraisal of his work as a missionary practitioner and scholar. It begins in 1882 with an account of the year he spent as a "pioneer missionary" in Central Africa and includes a "flash-back" to his earlier life. This venture, in which he nearly lost his life, was a failure and he returned home to pastoral work in Scotland and England. Ten years later he was appointed by the London Missionary Society to Phalapye, seat of the Bamangwato t in Bechuanaland. Two chapters are devoted to his life and work there, his reactions to the British invasion of Matabeleland and Mashonaland, and his visit to London with the Bechuanaland Chiefs in 1895. Pastoral, educational and political work during these years are inextricably mixed. Willoughby spent a further decade founding and building up the life of the Tiger Kloof Native Institution at Vryburg in South Africa's Northern Cape. The first of two chapters deals with his struggles to set up the school and is followed by an attempt to evaluate his educational ideas and achievements. At the point of breakdown Willoughby handed over to a newly appointed successor and, for a short while, became missionary at Molepolole where the tribal problems of the Eakwena had reached an unpleasant crisis. He was glad when the Society invited him to undertake an extended deputation to Australasia and the Islands of the South Pacific. During this tour Willoughby was invited to become Professor of African Missions at the Kennedy School of Missions at Hartford, Connecticut, in the United States. It was there that, at last, he was able, along with his teaching, to give himself to the task of writing up his researches into the history, social life, politics, anthropology and religion of the Bantu people. Following a chapter covering his twelve years in America, four chapters examine his three major publications. Two are an analysis of his ideas expressed in Race Problems in the New Africa, and two, dealing with Bantu religious beliefs and practices, concentrate on The Soul of the Bantu and Nature Worship and Taboo. Chapter twelve concludes the study with a brief account of Willoughby's return to Birmingham, where he had been trained fifty years earlier, his death, and an overall assessment of his life's work. An attempt is made to delineate several areas of African life which Willoughby was interested in and which, in terms of Christian practice, might be further developed today. They relate to rain-making, liturgical experiments and co-operation between those engaged in European and traditional methods of healing.

The main focus of this thesis is an historical analysis of the methods of mission used by the Church during approximately the first six centuries of the Common Era. The New Testament describes the effectiveness of sermons preached to large crowds of people as well as providing evidence of evangelists and Church planters who travelled around the Roman Empire calling people to conversion and gathering converts into congregations. However, the extant evidence suggests that such high profile evangelism all but died out during the second and third centuries. It appears that the main means by which the Church grew during these centuries was the attractiveness of the Church community and the lifestyle of ordinary Christians. In the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries the Church moved from being a small, marginalised and sometimes persecuted group of people to becoming one of the central institutions of Roman society. In this context the Church began to grow simply because it became aligned with the mainstream of society, as well as by coercion. During these same centuries there were also Christians who lived outside the Roman Empire where they were a minority who shared their message by showing their neighbours a positive alternative way of living. In a concluding section the variation in methods of mission across the first six centuries CE are summarised before a short discussion raising some possible implications for mission today. It is suggested that the contemporary Church in the Western world has lessons to learn from the Church of the first three centuries regarding the importance of ordinary Christians demonstrating a distinctive Christian lifestyle to their neighbours.

The Edinburgh World Missionary Conference, 1910 has long been regarded as a central event in the history of world missions. A great deal of christological debate had been taking place in the decades prior to Edinburgh 1910. Theologians in Britain, North America and on the continent of Europe had been subjecting the Bible and the person of Christ to unprecedented historical and philosophical scrutiny. Developments within science, particularly the influence of evolution, were used by theologians to explain the action and influence of God in the world and this had profound implications for mission theology since it impacted directly on the issues surrounding the revelation of God in non-Christian faiths and the uniqueness and finality of Christ himself. Many missionaries were falling under the influence of immanentist thought which was changing their own understanding of the value and validity of non-Christian faiths. Fulfilment theology drew on Hegelian influences and evolutionary concepts to construct a theory of religions which viewed Christianity as the fulfilment of other world faiths.

This study investigates how the evangelical message was communicated over 40 years of mission to Mongolia, taking into account that when it started in 1971, Mongolia had no churches, believers or Bibles available in contemporary language, and most people had never heard of Jesus Christ. The study aims to investigate mutual misunderstandings on the part of both missionaries and the recipients of the Gospel. It will show how missionaries have difficulty in understanding the society and its worldviews into which they entered. On the other hand, nationals had great difficulty in understanding the message and its relevance. They also distrusted the aims of the missionaries and their apparent wealth in a poor, isolated country. Mongolian society is verbal, heavily relying on information passing between people orally. It is also characterised by voluntary social isolation and wariness about whom to confide in. This means that the main source for the thesis could not be documents, questionnaires or formal interviews. However I took part in everyday conversations and discussions, continually listening to what people were saying, often casually. The results reveal that mission succeeded in establishing an extensive Christian movement, evangelical in name, but in character heavily influenced by syncretistic Mongolian worldviews. It is largely dependent on money from abroad, and concentrates on the teaching of material advantage as God's blessing for this life, rather than the tenets of classical evangelicalism. Although the State came to allow freedom of religion and the populace at first was interested in Christianity, later it largely rejected the evangelical movement. The principal conclusion is that whilst at first missionaries were idealistic and enthusiastic about the rise of the movement, later many Christian nationals and missionaries had cause to be less sanguine, posing questions on the viability of it.

No description available.

The thesis portrays Scottish missions to Palestine carried out by Presbyterian churches, largely the Free Church of Scodand, between the years 1839 and 1917. These missions had as their stated arm the conversion of Jews to Protestantism, but also attempted to convert Christians and Muslims. The missions to Damascus, Aleppo, Tiberias, Safad, Hebron and Jaffa are examined, with the missionaries being portrayed in their religious, theological, social, economic, national and imperial contexts. The theological devotion to the land of Palestine and the missionaries' assumptions about the place of Jews in the divine economy form a basis for the link between the theological aims and the imperial ambition of the protagonists. The three main methods of the missionaries' work - confrontation, education and medicine - are described, with attendant results analysed, along with the ways in which these were communicated to the supporting constituency in Scotland. The relationship of the missionaries to their Scottish constituency and their employers is shown to be a complex one characterised predominantly by limited control from Scotland, and misconceptions, misinterpretations and misunderstandings from the missionary field. The racism, denial of distinct local agency, and suppositions regarding theological imperatives in relations to people in the Levant are shown to represent an imperial model of practice on the part of the Scots. In this context, the successes and failures of the missionaries' methods - initially aimed at securing conversions, but when that failed to produce adequate quantifiable results, became about communicating their imperial cultural norms - are shown to result primarily from the agency of indigenous actors in response to the actions of the Scots. Local actors utilised the services offered, but did not pursue religious conversion. Using models of identification and reculturation, the missionaries' failure to adequately address the dialectic of identity and difference that they faced is shown to symbolise the failure of the imperial ambition as expressed in their desire to produce religious converts.

The thesis provides a case-study model of the ideal of an indigenous selfcontextualising church initiative. At the same time it also presents a post imperialist approach to mission in rural China. These both come about through an innovative tool used for missionary education in rural China. This tool is a particular training method which is not merely culturally adapted but more importantly, combines the two non-related fields of dental health care training and theological education. The thesis describes the development of the training method as it engages with the teaching and learning cultural norms and simultaneously avails of contemporary adult education theory. The training method is evaluated in light of the results using tools for self, peer, and/or third-party assessment. The findings show that training participants were enabled to acquire the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes appropriate to the dental profession and/or responsibilities of Christian ministry. The thesis makes its claim for presenting a post imperialist mission method in that the training participants also took responsibility for both the dental work and development of the Christian ministry on their own terms.

This thesis attempts to reassess health and healing in mission, afresh and relevantly, in view of the growing changes and complexities of globalization. The writer attempts to find out what is meant by health in the Bible, in the perspective of God’s mission and the mission of God’s people and, from there, to infer what should be done with regards to health and the quest for wholeness as part of missionary efforts today. Hence, this thesis is based on a biblical, historical and contemporary approach to analysing the mission experience that includes health interventions in order to derive a better understanding of health and wholeness in the mission of God’s people at the start of the third millennium.

With a few exceptions, earlier studies of religious change in Southern Africa have generally focused on Christianity in select areas, ethnic groups and polities within one state, confined by the colonial boundary. This approach made light of the existence of expansive African traditional religious networks across ethnicities and boundaries. Traditional religion was often relegated to the periphery, with predictions of its imminent demise under the impact of colonial rule, global forces and proselytising world religions. The constantly mutating perceptions of group belonging across established borders were often overlooked. By focusing on the trans-frontier Mid-Zambezi region from c.1890 to c.1970, and reviewing oral histories, documents, primary and secondary literature, as well as carrying out oral interviews, the present study uncovers the survival, continuity and disjuncture in traditional religion in a changing religious landscape across borders. The Mid- Zambezi region was populated by a mixture of Shona groups and pockets of a multi ethnic Nyungwe-speaking group. British and Portuguese imperialists divided the area into what became the colonies of Southern Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa. Thus a region which was once the centre of the indigenous Mwene Mutapa State and a key site of earlier Portuguese mercantile and Catholic missionary activity was now rendered marginal by colonial boundary making. State and missionary penetration was slow, and the region became an important source of migrant labour for Southern Rhodesia. Yet this marginality was a key factor in explaining the continued dominance of the royal ancestral mphondolo or mhondoro traditional religious systems which began to co-exist with the growing but often instrumental adherence to the Christian churches. The change in the religious landscape consisted of adaptations to wider socio-economic changes generated by Christian missionary activities, formal education, wage migrant labour and monetisation. In this flux of socio-economic changes, the religious landscape of the Mid Zambezi was reconfigured.

This study demonstrates the extensive contribution of successive mission policies from 1901 to 1980 to the regional character of the Episcopal Church in the Philippines (ECP). The policy of concentration from 1901 to 1919, which focused church’s work in certain areas of Luzon and Mindanao, continued to impact the development of its mission in spite of the adoption of new policies in the succeeding years. This is because it was primarily developed in relation to the issue of marginality in Philippine society, a factor that remained vital to new policies although it was not always explicitly acknowledged. Although the policy of consolidation from 1920 to 1940 aimed at strengthening the initial mission work, it also allowed expansion for the sake of marginalized people like the Tiruray in Upi, Maguindanao. After World War II to 1962, the church adopted policies of centralization - gathering key institutions in one centre - and expansion of influence - bringing church’s influence to the mainstream of Philippine society. However, when the church pursued its expansion to the lowland Filipinos in partnership with the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI), the concentration of its work amongst the marginalized people in the Cordillera and Mindanao was further enhanced. From 1962 to 1980, the church adopted parallel policies of devolution – Filipinization of leadership - and decentralization – division of the district into dioceses. However, since the policy of decentralization was developed not only for efficient administration of the church but also for its regional expansion, it further contributed to concentration of work in places where the church has been previously working. The framework of ‘mission history after the “world-Christian turn” ’ employed in this study made it possible to arrive at the above conclusions in spite of relying on sources that are predominantly colonial, because it demands reconceiving mission history in the light of World Christianity. In particular, this mission history articulates Filipino voices that have been muted and yet can be detected in the way missionaries dealt with issues like marginality. The capacity to highlight local context and local voices in this framework is partly due to the identification of the double role of mission policies - mediating and synthesizing - in the dialogical relationship between theory (theology, theories, ideals) and practice (expediencies or what is happening on the ground) in the work of Christian mission. This study contributes to the broadening of mission history as well as demonstrating the importance of mission history in the continuous growth and evolution of World Christianity as an area of study.