Highly recommended: 30-minute video of Brian Stanley outlining the birth and growth of mission studies as a recognized academic discipline (“The Changing Face of Mission Studies since the Nineteenth Century”). The lecture is from March 2019, presented in Scotland to the Edinburgh Theological Society. Twenty minutes of Q&A follow the lecture.
“No longer is the study of Christian mission a question of assembling, analyzing and ordering the empirical facts arising from the encounters of Western professional missionaries with the challenges posed by non-European faiths and cultures. What is it instead? I think it’s more of a corporate narrative exercise in which Christians are hearing, exchanging, pondering the life stories of those who have sought to live the life of the gospel, often together, and to witness to its truths in a whole variety of contexts. Mission studies today is less pragmatic, less empirical, more theologically reflective, more diverse theologically, more diverse in terms of disciplinarity and cultural perspective. Although I think we would have to say the attempt to ground this area of Christian studies as a science that the university world would take note of must be judged to have been misconceived and largely a failure, the fact that the center of gravity of Christianity has shifted so much southwards has meant that serious reflection on the task of communicating the gospel has actually moved back closer to the life of churches, the life of ordinary Christians in the non-Western world especially, and I think that is probably a good thing.”
