International Review of Mission最新文献

This article explores the concept and practice of discipleship in contemporary missions. Discipleship in mission reflection has emerged in recent years within the scope of the World Council of Churches and the Asian Christian Conference. The practice of intentional discipleship is carried out not only by churches or parachurches but also by communities of Jesus followers who adhere to non-Christian religions. They remained in their religion but professed to believe in and accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour. They study individually or together in a community to grow in the proper knowledge of Christ and know what God wants them to do in their daily lives. This article presents several case examples, mainly from Indonesia, resulting from the author's research.

In this article I analyze the concept and contextuality of ecumenical missiology and its contemporary paradigms. Furthermore, I argue that the mission from the margins paradigm may construct a new method for undoing constantly increasing marginalization when understood from both its theological and philosophical points of view. This article celebrates togetherness in missio Dei as life-giving mission of God and argues that transformation is the only hope for humankind and the churches. It was written to honour Finnish missiologist Dr Risto Ahonen on his 80th birthday.

This article explores the historical roots and unfolding legacies of reparations denial as a continuation of the spiritual and socioeconomic planetary war perpetuated through the transatlantic slave trade. An examination of the social production of an anti-reparations norm against Afro-Americans in the United States seeks to uncover underlying fears of national destabilization and their relations to underexamined opportunities for functional solidarities across ethnicities, potentially offering a unique contribution to the pursuit of lasting global peace. The article proposes a twofold re-examination. First, it insists on the rejection and reconception of religious concepts upholding and extending the socioeconomic relations of slavery and white supremacy through evasive political theological notions of human nature and historical time. Second, it advocates the formation of local, national, and international alliances dedicated to articulating, supporting, defending, and achieving reparations for distinct historical events as a means of repairing unique legacies of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism for the common good, using an international ecumenical alliance for repair and reparations (AIRRE) developed by the Presbyterian Church's (USA) Center for the Repair of Historical Harms as an active example.

Contextualization has featured prominently in missiological research for decades, often alongside concepts such as syncretism and hybridity. Being typically conceived as attempts to transpose and communicate the gospel in words and ways that make sense to people in their local cultural settings, contextualization has been theorized extensively in missiological scholarship. Notwithstanding this longstanding scholarly interest, a dearth of research recognizes in-service training as a valid expression of contextualization praxis. This article addresses this knowledge gap. Set in the contemporary church context in Thailand, the article explores questions, issues, and trends of current theological training practice, considering future opportunities for indigenous leadership formation. The analysis converges around the central proposition that in-service training is an under-recognized strategy for leadership development in Thailand and beyond. Conceptualizing opportunities for future research, the review charts pertinent perspectives and prospects for in-service training. This article embodies a timely research agenda aimed at sidestepping undue reliance on Western-dominated hermeneutics while at the same time advocating for indigenous theological training approaches in countries of the majority world.

The term syncretism has had a metamorphic history in terms of its meaning, starting as positive with Plutarch, to being positive and negative during the Reformation, and then becoming neutral and negative after the Reformation to becoming decidedly negative from the 1920s onward. Despite advances in interpreting syncretism in more neutral or positive ways, the word's meaning and function remain imprecise. Central to the fog surrounding the word is its implicit meaning of some type of mixture, whether negative, neutral, or positive. The question then becomes, “Is mixture a valid central meaning of the word?” More importantly, can the suspicious lens of decolonialism offer insight into redefining it and also give direction as to how it could function? This article studies the development of the term, examines current scholarship within the World Council of Churches, and situates syncretism within the larger context of the decolonial discussion in trying to redefine it in light of its original meaning.

The purpose of this article is to trace the evolution of the concept of missio Dei and examine the implications of each shift for the practice of mission. First, I explore the origin of missio Dei and its development from 1932 under Hitler's regime, and then I suggest Willingen's understanding of missio Dei in 1952 as an ecclesiocentric basis for mission. I then explore two more shifts in the understanding of missio Dei. Through the report on evangelism, The Church for Others and the Church for the World (1967), I assert that the report made a paradigm shift in the understanding of missio Dei as a theocentric mission with its implications for interfaith dialogue. Then, I present missio Dei as a Spirit-centred mission based on the World Council of Churches' (WCC's) recent policy statement, Together towards Life (2013), and how to practise the concept of missio Dei as it is presented in the document by the WCC and ACT Alliance, Called to Transformation: Ecumenical Diakonia (2022).

Using an ecofeminist reading of Isaiah 5:1-7, this article offers the Song of the Vineyard as a poem spoken from the perspective of the woman experiencing the social crisis in 8th-century Judah. Using a powerful rhetoric to convey her message, the woman dared to speak out against the unjust circumstances that threatened the well-being of her people and land. This paper also explores the role of the vineyard as an agent that raises its voice against injustice. Lastly, this paper creates a dialogue between an ancient voice and the voice of Asian women today. It shows the struggles of Asian women such as the Kendeng women farmers to achieve social justice and justice for the natural environment. This paper calls for churches and the Christian community to hear the voices of the land and women and to take significant actions to end the violence against women and the land.

According to the postcolonial approach, to understand today's world one must take into account modern colonialism (late 15th to mid-20th centuries) as well as all other forms of colonialism. Orthodox theologians have only recently and on a small scale begun to use postcolonial analysis. However, Orthodox theology can contribute to the discussion and shed more light on both the historical experience and the future course of the debate. In particular, the postcolonial perspective can intersect with missionary praxis and missiology, as the Orthodox Church began to be seriously active in the missionary field (of sub-Saharan Africa and the Far East) in the 1960s, that is, at the end of the classical colonial period. Its experience confirms that colonialism entails not only direct imposition on the colonized but also the colonized people's internalizing of the colonizers’ logic. The postcolonial approach thus invites self-criticism. The obligation to be self-critical is at the heart of the Orthodox tradition, despite the fact that it is often forgotten, resulting in nightmarish distortions and neo-colonial attitudes. At the same time, the postcolonial perspective reinforces the liberating mission of the gospel and patristic theology in all human contexts. In this way, postcolonialism is called to come to a fruitful completion with anti-colonialism and to contribute to the key demand of Orthodox ecclesiology, which is the formation of authentically local churches and not branches of other, national churches.

This article sets out the colonial legacies and realities which continue to dominate indigenous peoples’ lives, experience, communities, and capacities in Australia. It roots this colonial violence in the particular efforts of missionaries to convert and dominate indigenous peoples with a white colonial God. The Bible was a key weapon for this work, but it is also central to the decolonial work of reconstruction and reparation. While Aboriginal Christians are rereading the biblical texts in ways that push back against the colonial occupation that is at the heart of the church's biblical exegesis, the article is pointing to this as a task laid on all churches and Christians, who can and should decolonize the dominant biblical and theological narratives. Further, there is a deep need to see theological education as a key location for reparation by the colonial inheritors, so that indigenous Christians can continue to deepen and deliver the tools that will help liberate mission and theological education from their colonial legacies.