History of Missions

Unsatisfying

     

I did not register for the course or read the assigned material.

About two-thirds of this course is church history on a geographic region by geographic framework. The last one-third of the course is a series of biographies of famous missionaries of the modern era.

“History of Missions” has a lot of history and surprisingly little missions. There is only one lecture that addresses the problem of contextualization and syncretism, and then only indirectly in one of the biography lessons. The course mentions short term missions, an increasing trend in the American church, only once and then only tangentially. When discussing church history and biographies, the course only rarely grapples with the issue of how a missionary should analyze the culture and develop a framework of how to proclaim the Gospel within that culture. (Different cultures have different communication styles and different values; these must be considered when developing a communication strategy.) The course does not mention communicating the Gospel to Jewish people at all.

The course does have some important strengths. The course clearly communicates weaknesses of imposing religion by the sword, whether Christians do the imposing (e.g., Crusade) or whether Christians are being imposed upon (e.g., closed countries). The course highlighted the history of missions in Nubia and among aboriginal Australians, each of which is very interesting.

Unfortunately, this course did not meet the hopes that I had for it.