In November 2010, three hundred faculty, students, and others interested in Christian mission gathered in Boston to consider how the world, the global church, and Christian missions have changed since the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh in 1910 and to reflect on the three previous centennial conferences (Tokyo 2010 in May, Edinburgh 2010 in June, and Cape Town 2010 in October). Participants at "2010Boston" were not delegates from churches and mission agencies, but were students and scholars of various aspects of world Christianity representing the Anglican/Episcopal, Evangelical, mainline Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic traditions. This conference volume consists of nine keynote messages, five student presentations, three reports from the other conferences, and additional materials from or about 2010Boston. The keynote messages address the history of mission (especially in and from Boston) and the current global context for mission, and suggest modes for future Christian engagement with the world and one another. Student papers address such conference themes as unity in mission, mission and postcolonialism, and discipleship in context. The closing chapter surveys the conference's eight themes and summarizes the outcomes of the 2010Boston process.

"Provides a critical reassessment of the study of world Christianity that connects historical developments to current debates and new trajectories"--

"While the intent of the editors is to honor Steve Bevans, SVD, a towering figure in the field of missiology and a longtime author of Orbis books on missiology, this book will be designed less as a festschrift than as a textbook for classroom use. Designed around the three main foci of Bevans' theology (mission, contextual theologies, and dialogical theory), it will appeal to teachers of courses in Christian mission, theological method, contextual theologies, and contemporary Third World theologies. The contributors are a who's who of contemporary mission studies in a global context, including representatives from various Christian traditions and from throughout the global church"--

The Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference was the most famous missions conference in modern church history. A century later, five conferences on five continents displayed the landscape of global mission at the dawn of the third millennium: Tokyo 2010, Edinburgh 2010, Cape Town 2010, 2010Boston, and CLADE V (San José, 2012). These five events provide a window into the state of world Christianity and contemporary missiology. Missiologist Allen Yeh, the only person to attend all five conferences, chronicles the recent history of world mission through the lenses of these landmark events. He assesses the legacy of Edinburgh 1910 and the development of world Christianity in the following century. Whereas Edinburgh 1910 symbolized Christendom's mission "from the West to the rest," the conferences of 2010-12 demonstrate the new realities of polycentric and polydirectional mission—from everyone to everywhere. Yeh's accounts of the conferences highlight the crucial missiological issues of our era: evangelism, frontier missions, ecumenism, unengaged and post-Christian populations, reconciliation, postmodernities, contextualization, postcolonialism, migration, and more. What emerges is a portrait of a contemporary global Christian mission that encompasses every continent, embodying good news for all nations.

Explores the role played by missionaries in the twentieth-century transnational adoption movement Between 1953 and 2018, approximately 170,000 Korean children were adopted by families in dozens of different countries, with Americans providing homes to more than two-thirds of them. In an iconic photo taken in 1955, Harry and Bertha Holt can be seen descending from a Pan American World Airways airplane with twelve Asian babies—eight for their family and four for other families. As adoptive parents and evangelical Christians who identified themselves as missionaries, the Holts unwittingly became both the metaphorical and literal parental figures in the growing movement to adopt transnationally. Missionaries pioneered the transnational adoption movement in America. Though their role is known, there has not yet been a full historical look at their theological motivations—which varied depending on whether they were evangelically or ecumenically focused—and what the effects were for American society, relations with Asia, and thinking about race more broadly. Adopting for God shows that, somewhat surprisingly, both evangelical and ecumenical Christians challenged Americans to redefine traditional familial values and rethink race matters. By questioning the perspective that equates missionary humanitarianism with unmitigated cultural imperialism, this book offers a more nuanced picture of the rise of an important twentieth-century movement: the evangelization of adoption and the awakening of a new type of Christian mission.

One of the important contemporary but unexplored themes for Christianity in Africa today is its ongoing connections to a broader Christian and non-Christian world. This is quite apart from the idea of mission connections or reverse mission from Africa to elsewhere, or any mission-themed global connection. In much existing scholarship, Africa seems to only have recently been drawn into the orbit of global relations, but there is a long-standing relationship with the wider world, people linking from different regions at different times for varied reasons. This volume explores the theme of two thousand years of connections—and how the global sensibility has shaped Christianity on the continent for two thousand years.

Can something as simple as friendship have a transformative impact in a divided world? Through a series of richly textured historical portraits and reflections on personal experience, this book shows that boundary-crossing friendships in Christian mission have shaped theologies, built organizations and partnerships, facilitated mission work, and changed attitudes and ways of thinking. This is true in settings as varied as eighteenth-century French women’s work, twentieth-century urban Boston, colonial India, the Jim Crow South, and twentieth-century rural Congo. In all these settings and more, friendship has mattered. Boundary-crossing friendships are, however, not easy. Despite their power, such friendships are complicated by race, gender, ability, class, nationality, and other elements of identity, as this book also demonstrates. Friendships are not immune from the divisions in the world, nor a simple cure-all for them. Still, friendship stands as a powerful testimony to the gospel. Therefore, the book calls for more attention to friendship in the study of mission history and more living out of friendship as a practice of mission. In this way, this book pays honor to Dr. Dana L. Robert as a pre-eminent mission scholar and exemplary friend and mentor to others in the fields of missiology and world Christianity.