Despite the remarkable growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the twentieth century, there is a dearth of primary material produced by these Christians. This volume explores the problem of writing the history of indigenous Christian communities in the Global South. Many such indigenous Christian groups pass along knowledge orally, and colonial forces have often not deemed their ideas and activities worth preserving. In some instances, documentation from these communities has been destroyed by people or nature. Highlighting the creative solutions that historians have found to this problem, the essays in this volume detail the strategies employed in discerning the perspectives, ideas, activities, motives, and agency of indigenous Christians. The contributors approach the problem on a case-by-case basis, acknowledging the impact of diverse geographical, cultural, political, and ecclesiastical factors. This volume will inspire historians of World Christianity to critically interrogate—and imaginatively use—existing Western and indigenous documentary material in writing the history of Christianity in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. In addition to the editor, the contributors to this volume include J. J. Carney, Adrian Hermann, Paul Kollman, Kenneth Mills, Esther Mombo, Mrinalini Sebastian, Christopher Vecsey, Haruko Nawata Ward, and Yanna Yannakakis.

A collection of essays exploring how scholars can discern the voices, thoughts, activities, and motivations of indigenous Christians of Asia, Africa, and the Americas in texts produced in the context of European domination from 1500 to the present.

Studies in the Intercultural History of Christianity, published by Peter Lang since 1975, is nowadays the largest series in the wide field of missiology, intercultural theology, and comparative religion/theology. The present editors decided to celebrate the publication of no less than one hundred and fifty volumes by evaluating and rethinking «intercultural theology». This book is meant to encourage Christian theology to be done more thoroughly, adequately, and effectively in the contemporary global and local setting. On the one hand, the volume offers new insights into the nature of doing biblical studies, church history, and systematic and practical theology as well as comparative theology, in an intercultural way. On the other hand, it argues for accomplishing interdisciplinary studies in the fields of theology and religion.

With the development of instantaneous global communication, it is vital to communicate effectively across cultural boundaries. This addition to the acclaimed Encountering Mission series is designed to offer contemporary intercultural communication insights to mission students and practitioners. Authored by leading missionary scholars with significant intercultural experience, the book explores the cultural values that show up in intercultural communication and examines how we can communicate effectively in a new cultural setting. Features such as case studies, tables, figures, and sidebars are included, making the book useful for classrooms.

"Drawing on his vast scholarly and practical knowledge, Safwat Marzouk offers a biblical vision of an intercultural church, one that fosters justice and diversity, integrates different cultural articulations of faith and worship, and embodies an alternative to the politics of assimilation and segregation. In a time of political polarization around global migration, this biblical vision affirms cultural, linguistic, racial, and ethnic differences as gifts from God that can enrich the church's worship, deepen its sense of fellowship, and broaden its witness to God's reconciling mission in the world. Discussion questions are provided to encourage group conversation on this complex and important topic." --

Effectively communicate Christ across Cultures The gospel message transcends cultures, but human communication does not. In Transforming Communication missionary and professor Vee J. D-Davidson provides principles for the intercultural communication of Christ. Using her twenty-five-plus years of experience teaching as a Westerner in Asia as a starting point, Davidson provides transferable principles that encourage awareness of context-specific issues and that see opportunities for intercultural communication as wholly unique opportunities, regardless of any perceived communication barriers. Readers from multiple different cultures will be able to apply the principles presented by use of relevant examples, illustrations, and enlightening insights provided from a wide range of Global South and Global North multicultural and intercultural perspectives. Transforming Communication offers practical principles to encourage and challenge Christian readers to build relationships that might well require engaging with issues that bring them out of their comfort zone but, the book also offers insights and encouraging devotional nuggets that feed into a triad of knowledge-impartation, self-examination and challenge, along with spiritual enrichment for the task.

We live in a multicultural society, but many Christians hesitate to engage those of other faiths about Christianity. Exploring evangelism from the perspective of four major worldviews, Jay Moon and Bud Simon unpack the intercultural dynamics at hand when sharing the gospel across cultures, offering contextual evangelism approaches that are relevant, biblical, and practical.

Recent years have seen a paradigm shift in Christian self-understanding. In place of the eurocentric model of »Christendom«, a new understanding is emerging of Christianity as a world movement with considerable cultural variety. Concomitant with this changing self-perception, a new theological discipline begins to take shape which analyzes the inter- and transcultural character and performance of global Christianity: Intercultural Theology. Judith Gruber discusses this nascent theological approach in two parts. She first gives a critical analysis of its historical development – in the first part of the book, two theological sub-disciplines of particular relevance are analysed: (1) missiology and its reflection on the encounter of Western Christianity with other cultures in the context of colonialism; (2) contextual theologies which focus on the particularity and dignity of the diverse cultural contexts of theological practice, but fail to sufficiently integrate the universal dimension of Christianity into their theological reflections. Secondly, this study offers a constructive theological approach to intercultural theology. It does that by bringing systematic theology into conversation with cultural studies. This interdisciplinary approach adds significant complexity to existing reflections on Intercultural Theology: Re-reading the theological history of Christianity within the critical framework of cultural theories exposes a host of disparate and conflictive Christianities underneath its dominant master narrative, and, moreover, it no longer allows a recourse to essentialist concepts of Christian identity, with which previous approaches to Intercultural Theology have mitigated this unsettling cultural plurality of Christianity: After the »Cultural Turn«, which has made a metaphysical epistemology untenable, new ways for thinking the unity and universality of Christianity have to be paved. The book draws on Paul Ricoeur's and Michel Foucault's concept of the event and on Michel deCerteau's proposal of a »Weak Christianity« in order to develop such a post-metaphysical framework, which allows to conceive of the unity and universality of Christianity without concealing its cultural plurality and contingency.