Transcending Mission

Mission, missions, missional, and all its linguistic variations are part of the expanding vocabulary and rhetoric of the contemporary Christian missionary enterprise. Its language and assumptions are deeply ingrained in the thought and speech of the church today. Christianity is a missionary religion and faithful churches are mission-minded. What's more, in telling the story of apostles and bishops and monks as missionaries, we think we have grasped the true thread of Christian history. But what about those odd shapes, those unsettling gaps and creases in the historical record? Is the language of mission so clearly evident across the broad reaches of time? Is the trajectory of mission really so explicit from the early church to the present? Or has the modern missionary enterprise distorted our view of the past? As with every reigning paradigm, there comes a point when enough questions surface to beg for a close and critical look, even when it may seem transgressive to do so. In this study of the language of mission--its origin, development, and application--Michael Stroope investigates how the modern church has come to understand, speak of, and engage in the global expansion of Christianity. There is both surprise and hope in this tale. And perhaps the beginnings of a new conversation.
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.
Michael W. Stroope (PhD, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate professor of Christian missions and the M.C. Shook Chair of Missions at Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University. Stroope worked with the International Mission Board, SBC, for twenty years and has served in Sri Lanka, England, Germany, and Hong Kong. He also taught as an adjunct professor at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
"All the main churches of the UK have 'mission' high on their list of priorities at the moment--mostly in the sense of 'missional church' or 'evangelization.' So Michael W. Stroope's findings that 'mission' is a late usage--unsupported by the Bible and premodern Christian literature--will certainly provoke. Nevertheless, when so much is invested in mission, this in-depth and insightful interrogation of the discourse and rhetoric is essential reading for scholars and practitioners alike."--Kirsteen Kim, professor of theology and world Christianity, Leeds Trinity University, UK
"Stroope challenges our understandings of missions. He uncovers how the vocabulary of the modern missionary movement was an imagined and invented tradition, with categories of rhetoric and symbolism that, while implicated both in the scientific revolution and the worldwide expansion of the West, was not only profoundly Protestant but was also dominated by the English speaking world. As such, it was not only a vehicle of modernity but of modernism itself. This vocabulary found its ultimate expression in the World Missionary Conference of 1910 in Edinburgh. That event, at the pinnacle of mission influence and optimism, envisioned the entire world coming under the sway of the kingdom of God on earth."--Robert Eric Frykenberg, University of Wisconsin, Madison