Is the language of mission clearly evident across the broad reaches of time? Or has the modern missionary enterprise distorted our view of the past? Michael Stroope investigates how the modern church has come to understand, speak of, and engage in the global expansion of Christianity, offering a hopeful way forward in this pressing conversation.

The urgent task of our day is to reimagine the church's witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet, a mere attempt to rehabilitate or revise the modern mission tradition will not do. Mission as a rhetorical and conceptual framework is the problem. The ethos and spirit of modernity with its ideas of progress, individualism, commodification, and conquest are hardwired into mission, and thus, this modern mental model undermines faithful witness and service. Now is the time to transcend the modern mission tradition - to become pilgrim witnesses.

The urgent task of our day is to reimagine the church's witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet, a mere attempt to rehabilitate or revise the modern mission tradition will not do. Mission as a rhetorical and conceptual framework is the problem. The ethos and spirit of modernity, with its ideas of progress, individualism, commodification, and conquest, are hardwired into mission. Thus, this modern mental model undermines faithful witness and service. Now is the time to transcend the modern mission tradition--to become pilgrim witnesses.

James F. Engel and William A. Dyrness offer a sympathetic yet courageous analysis of the challenges that North American and other Western Christian missions face.

Even as the global economy of the twenty-first century continues its dramatic and unpredictable transformations, the landscapes it leaves in its wake bear the indelible marks of their industrial past. Whether in the form of abandoned physical structures, displaced populations, or ecological impacts, they persist in memory and lived experience across the developed world. This collection explores the affective and “more-than-representational” dimensions of post-industrial landscapes, including narratives, practices, social formations, and other phenomena. Focusing on case studies from across Europe, it examines both the objective and the subjective aspects of societies that, increasingly, produce fewer things and employ fewer workers.

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.