Thomas Kuhn, Missiology, and World Christianity, Part III

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

Over the past two weeks, I have described the emergence of the current dominant paradigm within the academic field of missiology, its relationship to the field of World Christianity, and some reasons why there may be a paradigm shift on the way in missiology, in part because of developments within World Christianity. In this post, I will reflect on what it would mean for missiology to undergo a paradigm shift.

First, a paradigm shift represents a time of crisis for an academic field, but not necessarily the end of that field. When the colonial mission paradigm collapsed, it threatened to discredit the field of missiology as a whole, and indeed the field lost a good deal of prestige, funding, and positions. But missiology adopted a new paradigm and reemerged into another very productive period of scholarship, helping give birth to World Christianity. Thus, it is important to make a distinction between a field and its reigning paradigm, though there are of course tight connections between the two.

If it is true that missiology is facing a paradigm shift, some might wonder what comes next? Honestly, I do not know. I have yet to see anything that is a clear contender for a new paradigm for missiology. I can think of some possibilities, but I have no confidence that any of these would achieve a level of dominance within the field.

The first such possibility is that a new paradigm of missiology would emerge not from the Western academy but from the Majority World. While the inculturation paradigm was developed and advanced in part by missiologists from the developing world (such as Lamin Sanneh), it had its roots in responding to crises in Western Christianity related to the collapse of the colonial paradigm. Perhaps a new way of thinking about mission that responds primarily to the needs and self-understanding of the church in the Global South will become dominant in the Global North as well.

Another possibility is that new technology or new research techniques will open up new possibilities for missiological research, leading to a new paradigm. If this comes to pass, the Boston University Center for Global Christianity and Mission China Historical Christian Database might be a representation of the sorts of big data computing approaches that would allow for new types of research addressing new questions and yielding new assumptions about missiology. It is important to distinguish between new tools and new assumptions about the field, but the former can influence the latter.

A third possibility is that the increasingly severe environmental crisis caused by global climate change will force a significant re-thinking of Christian mission and its study. In this possibility, a new paradigm of missiology would emerge that sought to distance itself from eco-recklessness and instead centered care for God’s creation (human and non-human). This would parallel the breakdown of the colonial mission paradigm, which was unable to reckon with the historic harm caused by colonialism, and the emergence of the inculturation paradigm, which crafted a vision for Christian mission that affirmed all cultures.

Moreover, there is also the possibility that no new paradigm will emerge, or at least no single dominant paradigm. While missiology is a relatively small discipline, large disciplines like anthropology and history have room within them for multiple intellectual paradigms.

There is also the possibility of the withering of the field of missiology in the face of challenges to its current paradigm. Areas of human knowledge and academic disciplines are not guaranteed to continue.

In the English-speaking world, the field of philology has largely (though not entirely) been supplanted by linguistics, which continues some of the insights of philology but goes beyond them as well and has become a much larger field within academia. It is possible that World Christianity could supplant missiology in the same way.

Another analogy might be the field of geography, which continues, but in a diminished state from the level of attention, prestige, funding, and positions it enjoyed in the early 20th century. Missiology could similarly continue, but with less general interest in its work.

Ultimately, questions about the future of missiology and its dominant paradigm come down to two:

First, does the field continue to generate interesting conversations?

Continuing a paradigm involves both fidelity to core assumptions and the ability to apply those assumptions in new, interesting, and innovative ways. At the ASM conference this year, a friend remarked of a presentation, “That’s the same old thing I’ve been hearing for 30 years.” Normal science is productive when it extends the insights of an intellectual paradigm and applies them to help make sense of more phenomena. A sense that a paradigm is “played out” would diminish it.

Boredom is one threat to a paradigm. Confusion is another. According to Thomas Kuhn, paradigms break down when they no longer effectively serve as framing devices to make sense of the data. In this way, missiology would no longer generate interesting conversations if the assumptions of its dominant paradigm could no longer make sufficient sense of what Christians experience of the church, the world, and the relation between the two. That is essentially what happened at the end of the colonial paradigm, and that collapse threatened the field of missiology as a whole. Such confusion makes interesting conversations difficult.

Second, are there the resources to sustain the people and places (physical and intellectual) committed to having conversations enabled by the paradigm?

That cast of people may change, the places they work may shift, and as the past two and a half years have shown us, even how they have conversations may take new forms. But conversations don’t happen without people and a way to connect them.

For an academic field to be vibrant, it needs a critical mass of people to carry it forward. Those people need employment in positions related to the field. Such positions might extend beyond the academy, as is especially true in missiology, but it is hard to have a vibrant academic field of hobbyists. The people engaged in that field also need conferences, publications, lecture series, and the like to exchange ideas and research funding, libraries, and other resources to generate new ideas.

Of course, it is easy to catastrophize and to see in every change tremors of an on-coming disaster. But changes do matter, and changes in the world, in the church, and in the academy do impact disciplines such as missiology and their reigning intellectual paradigms. Asking where the field is going and how to keep it healthy are a useful exercise for academic disciplines.

Thomas Kuhn, Missiology, and World Christianity, Part II

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

In my last post, I described the emergence of the current dominant paradigm within missiology, which I called the inculturation paradigm, and the ways in which it has been tied to the rise of World Christianity as a field of studies, with inculturation paradigm missiology serving as both midwife and beneficiary of the rise of World Christianity.

In this post, I would like to explore four reasons why change may be welling up within missiology and World Christianity. I will reflect on the significance of these four reasons in a future post.

Generational change
It has now been a half century since the emergence of the inculturation paradigm within missiology and a third of a century since the emergence of World Christianity as a field of study. Academics often have long work lives, but given the amount of time that has passed, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the founding figures in these movements have died or retired, several within just the last few years.

This year’s Yale-Edinburgh Conference made special note of the recent deaths of Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls, founders of that conference. It felt tragically significant that the president of ASM this past year, Sister Madge Karecki, passed away just a couple weeks after the annual conference.

Looking to publications, the volume Landmark Essays in Mission and World Christianity came out in 2009, and a quarter of the authors included had already died at that time. In the 13 years since, all but a couple of the authors included have retired and/or died, several of them hitting those milestones in just the past two years.

Generational change does not necessarily mean a paradigm shift. Normal science can continue with members of younger generations and often does. Still, each new generation poses new questions. New generations of scholars will not have had the same intellectual and life experiences that shaped the perspectives of previous scholars. And younger scholars have the luxury of taking for granted insights that had to be hard won by previous generations. All these factors can set the ground for a paradigm shift.

Change in global social context
If there have been changes in personnel, there have also been changes in the broader historical contexts in which missiological and World Christianity scholarship proceeds. The inculturation paradigm of missiology was deeply shaped by the rise of postcolonialism in the 1960s. World Christianity burst onto the scene at a time when secular interest in globalization and connections across difference was high. Both these scholarly paradigms bear the mark of the era in which they were born.

While the world is still shaped by the legacies of colonialism and still operates in many ways on the infrastructure of globalization, the global context has also changed. It is hard to say where exactly the world is heading, but the rise of nationalism and authoritarianism in many contexts over the past decade, the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ever-growing existential threat of climate disaster make this historical moment unique from that of 30 or 60 years ago.

I do not pretend to have insight into how exactly these developments will shape the future of World Christianity studies or missiology, but it would be surprising if they did not do so in significant ways.

Evolutions within World Christianity
When World Christianity first arose as a field, available information was limited on Christianity in non-Western contexts. This made it relatively easy for early scholars in the field to compile surveys of Christianity around the world or to work across contexts, since the amount of available information to do so could be digested by a single person.

As World Christianity has grown as a field, however, the amount of available information on Christianity in specific contexts has increased significantly to the point where it is quite difficult for a single scholar to be well-versed in even the major scholarly works on Christianity in multiple contexts. Robert Frykenberg has opined that the histories of Christianity just in India alone are too complex and varied to address comprehensively in one book.

In light of this profusion of scholarship, the tendency in recent years has been for World Christianity to function increasingly as a collection of Christian area studies. Chinese Christianity studies is one such significant example, as noted at the Yale-Edinburgh conference this year. The study of Chinese Christianity is both connected to World Christianity and also an increasingly distinct field in its own right.

This trend towards area studies creates a tension, though. World Christianity has always had a comparative element do it. The scholars originating the field were committed to the notion that there are commonalities of the Christian tradition across contexts worth investigating and speaking of, that there is still such a thing as Christianity and not just discrete Christianities.

As scholarship on individual contexts proliferates, what is the coherence of World Christianity as a discipline that operates across contexts? This question was raised more than once at the Yale-Edinburgh Conference this year.

While such questions get at fundamental commitments within the field of World Christianity, I think they represent the normal development and maturing of an academic field, though that process of maturation may give rise to new paradigms of thinking about the study of World Christianity.

Yet as the field seeks to understand itself anew, it raises the question: Does World Christianity need missiology anymore? World Christianity got its start through the commitments of missiologists to both Christian universality and cultural particularity. If those two commitments are balanced in new configurations in the field of World Christianity, what implications will that have for missiology? And what is missiology if it is no longer midwife to and beneficiary of World Christianity?

Challenges in the organizational ecology of missiology
Academic fields and paradigms within those fields flourish when they have the resources (including positions, funds, and publication opportunities) to produce a vibrant amount of scholarship. They decline in tandem with a decline in such resources.

In this regard, the general decline of Christianity in North American portends poorly for the future of North American missiology as an academic field rooted in the church. Fewer North American Christians means fewer resources for the study of missiology, whether that’s because there are fewer seminary positions decided to missiology, fewer persons working in mission and also conducting academic research, or a smaller audience for missiological work.

Academic publishing across the board has become more difficult in many ways, but that applies also to publishing within missiology. There are expanded publication opportunities with newer presses such as Wipf and Stock or William Carey, but some established presses such as Orbis are not doing nearly the number of books related to missiology they were 20 years ago. While the total number of books across publishers might be the same, there are implications for the prestige of the field and therefore the ability of scholars working within it to get tenure.

Examining the American Society of Missiology’s membership gives another perspective on this trend. While the total membership of ASM is up relative to what it was a decade ago, that masks shifts within its membership. The number of independent Protestant (e.g., evangelical) members is up, but the number of Catholic participants has dwindled significantly, and the number of conciliar (e.g., mainline) Protestants is flat at best. Catholic and mainline missiology did not collapse in the 1970s and 80s, but that collapse may only have been delayed.

Even within the world of evangelicalism, there are signs of a reduced organizational ecology to support missiology. There are declining enrollments, even in some evangelical seminaries, or at least in their programs related to missiology. Programs, even at flagship schools, have been renamed or reshuffled, some of which reflects the ever-changing nature of higher education administration, and some of which represents declining or at least shifting interest among students.

The question of student interest hearkens back to the first point about generational change: Are new generations continuing to find the current paradigm and discipline of missiology a fruitful approach to satisfy their questions about the world?

Thomas Kuhn, Missiology, and World Christianity, Part I

Today's post is by UM & Global blogmaster Dr. David W. Scott, Mission Theologian at the General Board of Global Ministries. The opinions and analysis expressed here are Dr. Scott's own and do not reflect in any way the official position of Global Ministries.

I had the pleasure to attend both the American Society of Missiology and (virtually) the Yale-Edinburgh Conference last month. Not only were both events good chances to reconnect with colleagues and learn more about topics in the field, they were also chances to reflect on the fields of missiology and World Christianity as a whole. Indeed, the theme for the Yale-Edinburgh Conference was “World Christianity: Legacy and State of the Field.”

Both conferences helped confirm for me the sense I have that these intertwined academic fields may be on the precipice of a paradigm shift.

The term paradigm shift comes from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In the book, Kuhn argues that scientific knowledge alternates between periods of paradigm shifts, where new insights significantly reconfigure how people think about an area of human knowledge, and periods of normal science, where researchers work to extend the insights that have been established in the most recent paradigm shift. Most of the time, scientific work occurs under conditions of normal science.

Kuhn’s work has been endlessly debated and discussed, and his application of these insights to the hard sciences has been critiqued, but Kuhn’s arguments have had staying power as a helpful description of how knowledge production in many fields occurs.

In order to think about whether the fields of missiology and/or World Christianity may be on the precipice of a paradigm shift, it will be helpful to briefly review the history of those fields and recent developments within them.

For the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian mission was firmly grounded in what might be called the colonial paradigm. The colonial paradigm had its roots in the patronato/padroado system for Catholics and in the system of voluntary missionary societies for Protestants, most notably as proclaimed by William Carey.

In this colonial paradigm, the spread of Christianity, the propagation of European civilization, and the extension of European political influence or control were seen as mutually supportive developments. While individual missionaries held a variety of attitudes towards colonialism and civilizing mission, and while there were certainly tensions among these three strands, in general, the three coincided more often than not.

There were also other, minority paradigms that existed alongside the colonial paradigm (one might talk of the Riccian paradigm of cultural accommodation, perhaps), but the colonial paradigm was the dominant one for Christian mission for centuries.

When missiology as the study of mission emerged, the mission it was studying was largely this colonial model of mission. Thus, while many missiologists were more critical of colonial and civilizing forces than missionaries were, because the mission they were studying was colonial mission, early missiology may fairly be thought of as colonial missiology.

By the middle of the twentieth century, though, the colonial paradigm of mission and missiology had run into the same problems as colonialism as a whole: increasing pushback from the Majority World and increasing critique from within North Atlantic societies. The colonial paradigm of mission also faced the additional challenge of declining support from increasingly less religious home bases, though this was more a challenge in Europe than in the United States.

These challenges were particularly acute for mainline Protestants and Catholics, among whom missiology as a whole faced the prospects of a full-on collapse. For a variety of reasons, these challenges were less a threat to evangelical Protestants. Evangelical Protestants were less vulnerable to critiques not only because they were less receptive but also because some evangelicals’ practices of mission differed from mainline Protestants and Catholics in ways that made postcolonial critiques of the paradigm less applicable.

By the early 1970s, though, there was an emerging alternative to the colonial paradigm of missiology: the inculturation model of missiology. This model of missiology rejects the notion that conversion to Christian necessarily entailed adopting European cultural habits and instead affirms the value of non-European cultures as homes for the gospel. This model of missiology is very interested in questions surrounding the relationship between the Christian message and various human cultures. Moreover, it acknowledges the contributions to the spread and development of Christianity by non-Western Christians. It also acknowledges that Western cultures are not fully Christian and is open to seeing the West as a mission field. This model values evangelism, especially cross-cultural evangelism, as a significant form of mission, but also largely understands mission in holistic terms as involving aspects beyond direct verbal proclamation.

For most of the 1970s and 80s, those putting forward this model were a small group that had to resist both those who were still committed to the colonial model of mission and those who thought that mission necessarily implied the colonial model and therefore should die completely. Yet groups like the American Society of Missiology and the International Association of Mission Studies and nodes like the Overseas Ministry Study Center fostered the growth of this new paradigm.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, this paradigm of missiology was the established model in academic missiology circles and among many mission practitioners. It was embraced ecumenically across mainline or conciliar Protestants, Catholics, and evangelical or independent Protestants. The American Society of Missiology was characterized by careful balancing of these three groups, all of whom bought into the model. Given other theological disagreements among these groups, the level of agreement around missiology is a significant testament to the power of this new paradigm.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars working within this inculturation paradigm of missiology helped give birth to the field of World Christianity. The affirmation of various cultures as proper homes of Christianity that was fundamental to this paradigm led to an increasing awareness of the significance of various forms of Christian expression around the world. World (or Global) Christianity emerged as a field of enquiry directed at studying Christianity in various contexts around the world, not just in terms of its spread to that context or other forms of mission, but in terms of the totality of the Christian life and experience in that context.

The birth of World Christianity as a field energized missiology, which served as midwife to the new field. Developing and extending the field of World Christianity because a major concern for those operating within missiology. There was significant overlap in terms of scholars and networks. While World Christianity has since encompassed scholars who do not consider themselves missiologists, almost all missiologists in the past generation would also say that they have an interest in World Christianity.

Not only were there obvious intellectual connections between the inculturation paradigm of mission and the field of World Christianity, the emergence of World Christianity re-injected legitimacy, funds, and academic positions into the field of missiology and allowed it to recover from the crash of the colonial paradigm. New opportunities for research, publication, and academic careers made World Christianity a growth field, and missiology rode World Christianity’s coattails towards renewed legitimacy and academic vibrancy.

Much of the last thirty years of scholarship within the fields of missiology and world Christianity have involved working out the fundamental questions and insights of this new inculturation paradigm about the relationships between human contexts and expressions of Christianity, including its spread across contexts, and the roles of Christians from all backgrounds in the development of the faith.

Having reviewed the development of the current paradigm of missiology and the field of World Christianity, in my next post, I’ll look at some of the reasons why there may be fault lines forming in the paradigmatic structures of these areas.