This fictional novella takes place during the narrator Smoot's two-year mission to Melbourne, Australia. It chronicles the intertwining of the lives and destinies of three main characters: Smoot, a Utah native who struggles with carnality and lack of conversion and spirituality; Babakian, an Australian convert who used to be a punk rocker and has become frustrated with Mormonism's blandness and conformity; and Samantha, a nonmember part-Tongan Utahn with whom Smoot was involved before his mission. Speaking generally, the novella is about how Babakian misuses his creative powers of art and sexuality, how Samantha explores the gospel and changes her life, and how Smoot matures spiritually and learns to sacrifice.

Over the past 150 years, Evangelicals have established a social infrastructure of organizations in Russia. Through an exploration of Evangelical engagement in Russia, this thesis asserts that evangelical salience will increase as other players in society -- namely, the federal government and Russian Orthodox Church -- continue to fail to address issues in society. This thesis traces evangelical presence in the region, first in the Russian Empire, then during the Soviet Union, and finally in today's Russian Federation. The concluding chapters dwell on a critical growth period for Evangelicals at the fall of the Soviet Union, during which the totalitarian communist regime was replaced with western political and economic systems, while few formal networks in the new Russian social sector emerged. In this social vacuum, Evangelicals filled and continue to fill a unique role with their well-developed organizational model that simultaneously addresses social and spiritual issues on an intimate level with the Russian people. Indeed, while the general population of Russia decreases, and the number of Russian Orthodox believers remains steady, Evangelical Russians are increasing annually. What is behind Evangelicals’ continued growth? With a focus on their non-religious functions in Russia, this thesis sets to find out.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-146).

Francis Xavier is of historical importance in two respects: (1) he was one of the small band of men who, led by Ignatius of Loyola, founded the Society of Jesus, and (2) he was the first Christian missionary to Japan. In addition to these major points of importance, he life and work are in close relation to the historical events, both ecclesiastical and secular, of the first half of the sixteenth century. A more complete biographical study of Xavier must bring in the names and offices of numerous leaders of church and state in many countries. It must also, at least to some extent, sketh the outlines of the condition of religion, of international rivalries, and of colonial expansion in his time. Our goal in the present study is a more modest one than such a biography. It concerns especially the mind of Francis Xavier in relation to his mission. Nevertheless, some attention to these broader aspects of the state of the world in Xavier's times have been found necessary as we have proceeded with our subject...

Thesis (D. Min.)--Reformed Theological Seminary, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-216).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-146).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-146).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Reformed Theological Seminary, 2006. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 203-216).

This dissertation analyzes the role of quantification in the history of Christian mission by placing David B. Barrett’s World Christian Encyclopedia (1982) in its historical context. It argues that Barrett’s unique mixture of education, professional background, and geographical location in Africa helped him develop an understanding of world Christianity based on its newly-discovered diversity and fragmentation at the end of the British Empire. The Encyclopedia presented a comprehensive quantitative assessment of membership in all branches of the Church and helped shape contemporary understandings of world Christianity. In making explicit connections among world Christianity, mission history, and the social scientific study of religion, this dissertation sheds lights on the history of religious data in relationship to world Christianity. This study shows that Barrett was part of a long history of missionaries who produced church-based, scientific scholarship. It illustrates the ubiquity of such scholarship throughout the history of mission, demonstrated through an analysis of missionary quantification from the Jesuits to Barrett, including the Christian roots of American sociology. This analysis contends that American sociology in the 1960s—when Barrett received his Ph.D. in religion from Columbia University—was fundamentally shaped by the history of missionaries who produced social scientific research. The Encyclopedia was conceived, developed, and produced in Africa. Barrett’s location in Nairobi, Kenya, with the Church Missionary Society during the rise of African nationalism and decolonization informed his perspective on world Christianity. Much like the African Independent Churches he studied, Barrett broke off from the missionary establishment and threw his support behind “heretical” African groups. This analysis of Barrett’s experience in Kenya suggests that the growth of African Christianity was fundamental to reshaping definitions of world Christianity. This dissertation contributes to existing scholarship by historically placing the World Christian Encyclopedia in its theological, geographic, political, and social contexts. This study shows that Barrett was the first person to quantify religious adherence of all kinds and to equally represent all of world Christianity in one book. Further, the Encyclopedia indicated that a new era of world Christianity had come, and its center of gravity had moved from white Europe to black Africa.

This dissertation examines the first three decades of a missionary encounter that began under the auspices of the Congo Inland Mission (CIM – later renamed as Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission [AIMM]) in Belgian Congo. As Africans, North Americans, and Europeans entered into relationship with each other through mission, they developed an identity as global Mennonites. They began to embrace a catholic ecclesial imagination – that is, a commitment to shared membership within the church as a political body capable of transcending competing claims of race, ethnicity, gender, or nation-state. Using both an ecclesiological lens of analysis and a global history framework, this dissertation traces the ways in which ecclesial institutions, practices, discourses, and performances functioned to support or undermine a social imagination that embraced expatriate missionaries and local believers within a single church, in both its local/congregational and trans-local manifestations. During the period covered by the dissertation, expatriate and Congolese Mennonites struggled to define what the church was, and to determine who could participate in it and how. Factors that helped to promote a shared ecclesial imagination among Congolese and expatriate believers included an inter-denominational vision, faith mission principles and practices, Pentecostal revivalism, a Mennonite congregational polity, shared experiences of work and worship, and friendships that crossed boundaries of race and gender. However, CIM missionaries’ assertions of ethnic Mennonite control over mission strategy and structure, and their complicity with colonial labor exploitation, promoted a two-tiered understanding of the church that entrenched racial segregation and squelched the aspirations of white missionary women and Congolese evangelists. An ecclesiological lens of analysis thus offers new insights into the relationship between missions and colonial regimes, into the role of mission in American Mennonite denominational formation, and into the interactions among gender, race, and ethnicity in mission. The dissertation traces the contested memories of early CIM “pioneers,” such as Alma Doering, Aaron and Ernestina Janzen, and L.B. and Rose Haigh, and retrieves the missional agency of the many Congolese Mennonites who worked alongside them. In this way, it both uncovers the struggles for catholicity that shaped the missionary encounter at its inception, and calls attention to the ways in which such struggles continue to play out on the terrain of memory and knowledge production, coming to light through the competing efforts and uneven ability of Congolese and North American Mennonites to tell stories about their shared past. The historical narrative at the core of the dissertation thus serves as a case study for a broader exploration of theological and historiographical themes of memory and catholicity in relation to mission. The dissertation develops an ecclesiological framework for the study of the missionary encounter in which an explicit commitment to catholicity guides the task of writing world Christian history. It identifies ways in which such an ecclesiological mode of remembering can contribute to greater unity and catholicity within the global church.