The Routledge Encyclopedia Of Missions And Missionaries

The Encyclopedia of Missions and Missionaries examines the nature and effects of missionary work around the world and throughout history, analyzing how secular and clerical people from major religions (especially Christianity, Buddhism and Islam) have brought social changes along with words of a new faith.

The Encyclopedia of Missions and Missionaries examines the nature and effects of missionary work around the world and throughout history, analyzing how secular and clerical people from major religions (especially Christianity, Buddhism and Islam) have brought social changes along with words of a new faith.

"A model reference work that can be used with profit and delight by general readers as well as by more advanced students of Twain. Highly recommended." - Library Journal The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain includes more than 700 alphabetically arranged entries that cover a full variety of topics on this major American writer's life, intellectual milieu, literary career, and achievements. Because so much of Twain's travel narratives, essays, letters, sketches, autobiography, journalism and fiction reflect his personal experience, particular attention is given to the delicate relationship between art and life, between artistic interpretations and their factual source. This comprehensive resource includes information on: Twain’s life and times: the author's childhood in Missouri and apprenticeship as a riverboat pilot, early career as a journalist in the West, world travels, friendships with well-known figures, reading and education, family life and career Complete Works: including novels, travel narratives, short stories, sketches, burlesques, and essays Significant characters, places, and landmarks Recurring concerns, themes or concepts: such as humor, language; race, war, religion, politics, imperialism, art and science Twain’s sources and influences. Useful for students, researchers, librarians and teachers, this volume features a chronology, a special appendix section tracking the poet's genealogy, and a thorough index. Each entry also includes a bibliography for further study.

Written by leading scholars in the field, this comprehensive and readable resource gives anthropology students a unique guide to the ideas, arguments and history of the discipline. Combining anthropological theory and ethnography, it includes 275 substantial entries, over 300 short biographies of important figures in anthropology, and nearly 600 glossary items. The fully revised and expanded second edition reflects major changes in anthropology in the past decade.

Best Texts of Missiology, Hearts and Minds Bookstore Mission--a driving force in the long Christian story--today is often cast as the embarrassing relative of tall-steeple religiosity. In our wider culture it's now tucked in the endnotes of book-club histories or forms the ghostlike ellipses in the six o'clock news. But in Introducing Christian Mission Today, Michael Goheen brings the vibrant history, motivation and challenges of Christian mission to the fore. Through the centuries Christian mission has always been recalibrating, retooling and reevangelizing. It has repeatedly taken surprising turns as it is carried along by the Spirit of God. Goheen's introduction to mission's biblical, theological and historical dimensions engages the present and anticipates the future. As he unfolds the major issues of the global and urban, the pluralistic and wholistic contexts of mission today, he lays the ground for engaging in God's great kingdom enterprise. This full-scale text incorporates the keen missional insights of Lesslie Newbigin, David Bosch and other formative thinkers. It will be a valued resource not only for those in crosscultural contexts but also for those engaged in reevangelizing the West.

The Oxford Handbook of Mission Studies represents more than a century of scholarship related to the theology, history, and methodology of the propagation of Christian faith and the engagement of Christians with cultures, religions, and societies worldwide. It contains more than 40 articles by experts from different disciplinary and ecclesial perspectives, who are from all continents. It not only offers a broad overview of key approaches and issues in mission studies but it also highlights current trends and suggests future developments. The Handbook builds on renewed interest in mission studies this century generated by recent key statements on mission from ecumenical, evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox sources, and by a spate of academic works on the topic. Western church leaders now apply insights from foreign missions (such as, inculturation, liberation, interfaith work, and power encounter) to today's multicultural societies. Meanwhile, there are new initiatives in mission from the Majority World, where most Christians live, so that sending is not only 'from the west to the rest' but 'from everywhere to everywhere'. Therefore, this volume aims to reflect the voices of the receivers of mission as well as its protagonists and to raise awareness of new movements. In a time of growing recognition of 'religions' more generally, this work examines and theorizes the missional dimensions of the world's largest religion: its agendas, growth, outreach, role in public life, effect on cultures, relevance for development, and its approaches to other communities.

The mission church literature seems to be dominated by idealized conceptions of the benefits of equipping congregations to participate in local mission work. This investigation challenges this idealism, by paying critical attention to congregants’ ordinary theologies that develop in reaction to the communication of Missio Dei theology to them. Their voices are absent from the formal literature. The study employs rescripting methodology to modify key assumptions made in the formal ecclesiological literature by drawing on insights that come from Christians’ ordinary theological voices. The study traces how the introduction of a Missio Dei theology to a British Reformed congregation had a significant impact on them. A small team of Christian leaders communicated Missio Dei theology to this church over a period of six years. It found that mission changes came at substantial personal cost to the church’s members: 1) a schism occurred when congregants attempted to remove the leader responsible for these changes from his office as church pastor, and a third of congregants left the church because they did not want to embrace the church’s new mission identity; 2) three divergent groups then emerged—two of them wanted different kinds of churches that seemed incompatible; 3) two thirds of members supported and participated in the church’s mission activities, which put strains on some of their families; 4) unresolved tensions continued to impact the congregation throughout the whole change process; 5) unexpectedly, for a Reformed church, a third group made up of women developed prophetic practices that arose due to the mediation of Missio Dei theology. Vitally, this thesis challenges the notion that helping churches to become mission-focused will make them thrive.

With the extraordinary growth of Christianity in the global south has come the rise of "reverse missions," in which countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America send missionaries to re-evangelize the West. In The Spirit Moves West, Rebecca Kim uses South Korea as a case study of how non-Western missionaries target Americans, particularly white Americans. She draws on four years of interviews, participant observation, and surveys of South Korea's largest non-denominational missionary-sending agency, University Bible Fellowship, in order to provide an inside look at this growing phenomenon. Known as the "Asian Protestant Superpower," South Korea is second only to the United States in the number of missionaries it sends abroad: approximately 22,000 in over 160 countries. Conducting her research both in the US and in South Korea, Kim studies the motivations and methods of these Korean evangelicals who have, since the 1970s, sought to "bring the gospel back" to America. By offering the first empirically-grounded examination of this much-discussed phenomenon, Kim explores what non-Western missions will mean to the future of Christianity in America and around the world.