For three years I have waited impatiently for a representative of the “global Christianity paradigm” articulated by scholars such as Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, Lamin Sanneh, Jehu Hanciles, and others to respond to Robert Wuthnow’s 2009 critique of their paradigm in his Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (University of Calif Press). So…

In a recent survey of 437 missionaries from the USA serving in eighty countries,[1] I asked “In your current country of ministry, how many people have you known that were accused by others of harming someone else through witchcraft?” A slight majority of the 68 missionaries in African countries (52%) reported knowing such a person,…

A few nights ago a visiting pastor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (let’s call him Rev. Basua) came to my room in Bangui, CAR where I’ve been visiting, to tell me a story about witchcraft and to show me his accompanying home-made video. The story concerned his brother-in-law (let’s call him Nzuzi), a…

Christians encounter ideas about supernatural realities not only from the Bible, but from the cultures in which we live. In many cultures one finds the belief that misfortunes are caused by human third parties acting malevolently through evil occult means. The misfortunes these people are believed to cause range from infertility or economic ruin to…

I was 16 years old, and had just arrived in the USA. John asked me my favorite sport. I replied, “football.” When I learned that he also loved “football,” we launched into an animated conversation that became quite confusing. Only when I remembered that the word “football” in the USA was used for a sport…

A Guest Post by Dr. Tim Stabell Hi Bob, I’ve done a couple of small-scale replication studies based on the information you sent me a couple of months ago, looking at how students in the two universities where I teach here in Congo respond to questions about their experience with accusations of witchcraft. I haven’t…

When economic ruin mysteriously threatens, when sons and daughters inexplicably die, and when illness threatens life itself, people around the world struggle with the question, “Why?” Different answers to this question are provided in different cultures. The wise men of Job’s culture “knew” that everyone “reaps what they sow” and therefore that Job must have…

In response to my recent post “What in the World is Missiology?” Steve Bevans suggested that missiology has a distinctive contribution to make to other seminary disciplines like systematic theology, church history, or biblical studies. In this post I build on Bevans’ thought, but in relation to the discipline of homiletics.

Academic conferences are core to the life-blood of any discipline. By conference participation younger scholars are inducted into the discipline, and all scholars overcome isolation, receive encouragement, develop scholarly networks, interact in ways that sharpens their own scholarship, and find opportunities for collaboration and publication.

In a recent survey of 610 missiologists, a fair number of respondents wrote comments indicating they perceived missiology meetings as comprised of old, white, and male participants. The following are a few of these comments: I attended a society meeting that was largely composed of older men, who did not interact with us younger participants….

Every academic discipline has its own journals.  Scholars read the journals of their discipline, assign articles from them to students, and contribute to them through research and writing.  Part of socialization to any discipline is developing a familiarity with the journals of one’s discipline, acquiring a commitment to their success, and learning to recognize which…

A few nights ago a visiting pastor from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (let’s call him Rev. Basua) came to my room in Bangui, CAR where I’ve been visiting, to tell me a story about witchcraft and to show me his accompanying home-made video. The story concerned his brother-in-law (let’s call him Nzuzi), a…