Constructing Mission History: Missionary Initiative and Indigenous Agency in the Making of World Christianity

Three master narratives currently dominate the analysis of modern mission history.?One puts foreign missionaries at the heart of the story.?A second emphasizes the colonial aspect of modern missions.?Here, missionaries are not heroes but villains, who are implicated in hegemonic schemes of imperial domination.?Thirdly, mission history is subordinated to one of its outcomes, the advent of World Christianity.?In this master narrative, the concept of contextualization looms large, bolstered by Sanneh's notion of translatability and emphasis on the agency of non-Westerners, who participate in and subtly shape the complex social processes of evangelization.?While all three of these master narratives are insightful, none of them adequately balances concern for missionary initiative and indigenous agency.??

Borrowing from speech-act theory, Skreslet offers a new analytical approach to the modern roots of World Christianity that differentiates between what a speaker might intend to communicate and the effects of what has been said or actions taken both in the moment and over time.?Corresponding to the concepts of illocution and perlocution as these technical terms are used in speech-act theory, the book is structured in two main sections.?Initially, the focus is on expressed missionary motives. Part two engages a representative set of modern-era mission performances involving many more actors than just the foreign evangelizers whose stated or implied intentions are emphasized in part one.

Stanley H. Skreslet is the R. H. Royster Professor of Christian Missions at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Dr. Skreslet returned to Union Presbyterian Seminary in 1997 after ten years of service on the faculty of the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo through the mission program of the Presbyterian Church (USA). Previously, he taught at the College of Idaho, after having been Chaplain and Director of Church Relations for the College. His scholarly interests are focused primarily on the field of missiology, but also include the history of Christianity, Islam, and Orthodox Christianity, especially as these latter topics relate to the Middle East. Dr. Skreslet is an ordained Presbyterian minister and member of the Presbytery of the James. He is a past president of the American Society of Missiology, the Association of Professors of Mission, and the Eastern Fellowship of Professors of Mission, and a former academic dean on the Richmond campus of UPSem. His most recent book, Comprehending Mission, was the first publication to receive the American Society of Missiology's annual book award.