International Review of Mission最新文献

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.

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.

This article outlines some key steps and motifs for developing a decolonial relational ethics that will be vital not just to the work of decolonization but also to the practice of the ecumenical movement if it is to both add its weight to the calls for decolonization and itself be decolonized. The author interrogates key dimensions of her own field of study in Christian ethics and engagement in the ecumenical movement. She highlights some of the key spaces and often marginalized communities and persons who can shape the ecumenical movement's further engagement in decolonization. It offers a critique and a vision rooted in the author's lived experience and the scholarship of decolonization while seeking application in methodologies for colonial systems, relationships and mindsets to be challenged and reset.

Martyr is the title given to someone who has died for the sake of their faith. However, the dead cannot speak about their own death. Judgments on behalf of the dead are inevitably done by the living, posthumously. In this sense, martyr-making is the politics of the death operated by the living. Taking this perspective of martyr-making, this paper seeks to reassess the martyr-making process in the Protestant Church in Korea (PCK), focusing on the case of Rev. R. J. Thomas's death in Korea in 1866. Some argue that Thomas, with his original desire to be a missionary and his contribution in providing the Bible to native Koreans, is the first Protestant martyr in Korea. However, others contend, with the viewpoint of decolonization, that his approach, which appeared invasive, cannot be justified, even though he himself identified as a missionary. Even the ambiguity of his death prevents him from being called a martyr. Given that the process of martyr-making or unmaking inevitably involves potential politicization by specific living authorities who interpret and designate individuals as martyrs, this paper explores the trends of martyr-making in the PCK, where political and religious ideologies are deeply intertwined.

The article explores how pivotal the kingdom of God has been and still is to the identity of the ecumenical movement. The discussion of the biblical vision of the kingdom, which is coming and yet is also present, offers a motif which not only forms the life of the church and gives it hope but also forms the life of the oikoumene, giving hope to all of life. The ensuing discussion shows how, historically, the ecumenical movement has practised its calling of unity and mission as one which offers salvation to all life and to all aspects of life and goes on to outline how the kingdom continues to inspire ecumenical engagement today. Fundamental to this is the realization that the kingdom lays claim not on the church but on the whole world. This turns the ecumenical movement away from self-service so that the life of the world is shifted, challenged, and transformed through the work and witness of the ecumenical movement. This is especially and urgently needed where the powers, systems, and structures of our world cause injustice, inequity, and catastrophe. In this mission ecumenism reaches its fullest unity, in which all are saved.