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A significant number of Muslim communities throughout the world reflect varying degrees of involvement in Islamic mysticism. What bridges are present in this context that will facilitate not only evangelism, but also discipleship and community formation? Matthew Friedman guides the reader on a journey examining the response of the early Christian community to the challenges of ancient Jewish and Hellenic mysticism, focusing on the central idea of «union with God in Christ.» Far from finding this to be a leftover from the early Church, he discovers that this theme remained crucial into the Reformation, particularly in the writing and work of eighteenth-century figures John and Charles Wesley.Join Friedman as he explores resources for discipleship and community building that will be relevant to both scholars and practitioners alike, and will be effective for witness within modern contexts of Islamic mysticism worldwide.

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This book evaluates the common criticism that Christianity in Asia is westernized. Since the 1980s, Asian evangelical theologians and missiologists argue that the intrusion of Western theology is responsible for the Western and, hence, alien expressions of Christianity in Asia. Yet, in Singapore, the number of Christians has increased over the last few decades. Empirical evidence demonstrates that younger Chinese Singaporeans convert from Buddhism or Taoism to Christianity partly because they perceive it as a «rational» religion over Buddhism or Taoism, which are viewed as «irrational» or «superstitious.» Not only do many converts favor Christianity as a rational religion, but they do not regard Christianity as a Western religion at the point of their conversion. What accounts for those recent developments? This study explores the processes of modernization and globalization as important factors, impacting religious change in Singapore. Personal, contextual, and structural elements actually influence one's religion of choice. In facilitating effective mission, one must qualify the use of the categories, «Asian» and «Western,» because religious and cultural boundaries overlap. What matters most in missiology is discerning how the gospel of Jesus Christ engages the self-understanding and lived realities of ethnic and religious others in diverse cultural settings.

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In this book–part biography, part critical analysis–John Hubers introduces us to a man whose pioneering ministry in the Ottoman Empire has gone largely unnoticed since his memoir was penned in 1828, three years after his death in Beirut, by a seminary colleague. His name was Pliny Fisk, and he belonged to a cadre of New England seminary students whose evangelical Calvinism led them to believe that God was opening up a new chapter in the life of the Church that included an aggressive evangelism outside the borders of Christendom. Fisk and his friend Levi Parsons joined that effort in 1819 when they became the first American missionaries sent to the Ottoman Empire by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Hubers's intent is to show the complexity of Fisk's character while examining the impact his move to the Middle East made on his perceptions of the religious other. As such, this volume joins a growing body of literature aimed at providing critical, historical, and religious context to the often checkered history of relations between American Christians and Western Asian peoples.

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Given increasing global migration and the importance of positive cross-cultural relations across national borders, this book offers an interdisciplinary and intercultural exploration of identity formation. It uniquely draws from theology, psychology, and sociology–engaging narrative and identity theories, migration and identity studies, and the theologies of identity and migration–and builds on them in an unprecedented study of international migrants to construct an initial theology of Christian identity in migration. New sociological research describes the social construction of religious, ethnic, and national identities among non-North American evangelical graduates who entered the United States to pursue advanced academic studies from 1983 to 2013. It provides an intercultural account of Christian identity formation in the context of migration, transnationalism, and globalization. It ultimately argues that an integral component of Christian identity-making involves the concept of migration, of movement, toward a transformation.

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Ecumenism in postwar Asia, institutionalized in the Christian Conference of Asia, displayed a remarkable this-worldliness from its inception in the 1940s. This tendency was in contrast to the tension between the church-centric and world-centric approaches to Christian mission that marked conciliar mission thinking in the West. This work examines the development of such this-worldly holiness in Asian ecumenism, focusing on M. M. Thomas of India and C. S. Song from Taiwan.
Special attention is drawn to the idea of «God's this-worldly presence» that considers God as redemptively at work in world history apart from the church. The study first compares the development of this-worldly holiness in the West and Asia and then examines the thinking of Thomas and Song. The chapters on these two theologians discuss their backgrounds, the basic concerns motivating their intellectual searches, and responses to the questions arising from such concerns. These chapters also try to understand how these theologians view the relationship between God and the world. In so doing, the study highlights the significance of the idea of God's this-worldly presence shared by Thomas and Song in spite of differences in their backgrounds, approaches, and theological formulations.
Having compared Thomas and Song, the study concludes that the idea of God's this-worldly presence became central to Asian ecumenism because it offered a common unifying vision to Asian Christians who come from a region characterized by tremendous diversity. The idea helped them to see the diverse peoples, cultures, and religions in Asia under one God who transcends the diversity and still takes it seriously.

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"For Thais, face is a fact," writes Flanders. However, "whether in theology, evangelism, or issues involving sin, salvation, or atonement, Thai Christians and missionaries alike seem either uninterested in or possibly incapable of addressing issues related to face. This glaring incongruity between the value of face for Thais and the lack of intentional engagement within the Thai Christian community is deeply troubling. "Surely, such a lack of careful attention to face is a dangerous posture. Uncritical views of face, furtively attaching to the theology of the Thai church, are potentially detrimental for its life and mission. Such seems to be an unavoidable situation without proper attention to face. Additionally, to ignore face is to run the risk of missing valuable cultural resources, implicit in the Thai experience of face, for the critical task of authentic Thai theological reflection. "This lack of engagement with face raises critical issues with which we must wrestle. How is it that such a central sociocultural issue has not been a more significant part of the Thai Christian vocabulary or experience? How pervasive are these negative attitudes regarding face? What lies behind them? Might this lack of self-conscious engagement with face have any relationship to the persistent Thai perception of Christianity as a foreign, Western religion? How should Christians understand this notion of face and how it relates to the ways we understand and proclaim the gospel?"

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Children are the focus of marriage in African cultures. Marriage is considered full and functional only if the couple has children–in many cultures preferably a boy. Becoming a parent also contributes to one's full adulthood in the sense that childlessness blocks ascent towards full personal dignity as an adult person in the community. As a result, childlessness is often a major disaster for both of the spouses. It has social, economical, and personal consequences, quite often including divorce.
This book explores in depth how childlessness is perceived, dealt with, and coped with in two Christian communities in Machame on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Childlessness is approached through narratives of the spouses concerned and the members of their communities. Their stories reveal pain and courage, brokenness and strength, faithfulness and betrayal. Christianity presents itself in an ambiguous light, on one hand, pressuring spouses to keep up facades supporting oppressive structures. On the other hand, Christian faith provides childless couples with personal hope in the afterlife that the African traditional culture offers only to those with children.
This study proves that childlessness is not only a personal but also a communal problem. Childlessness and the fear of having no children contribute to family structures and sexual behavior. In this way, they have a considerable impact on the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. However, this study reveals that the attitudes and practices towards marriage and children need not be petrified, but rather that traditions can, and do, change.

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In many oral cultures local proverbs are highly regarded for their wisdom and prized for their aesthetic expression. In this study Jay Moon provides an in-depth look at the use of local proverbs among the Builsa culture of Ghana, West Africa. In particular, the author's research shows how local proverbs can facilitate contextualized expressions of Christianity that are both biblically authentic and culturally relevant. The process of initiating and sustaining this form of expression is explicated with the help of an engaging narrative, providing valuable insights for those striving for genuine and meaningful expression of Christ in culture.
This study will be especially beneficial to the missionary community, particularly for the purposes of appreciating oral literature in primary oral cultures, finding proper roles in the contextualization process, identifying cultural values via the window of local proverbs, training missionaries in cultural understanding, and tailoring discipleship training to incorporate significant aspects of orality

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The Hybrid Tsinoys is a study of hybridity and homogeneity as sociocultural constructs in the development of current ethnic identity/ies of Chinese Filipinos. This study employs a descriptive ethnographic research method to discover how they see or define themselves in terms of ethnicity (Chinese, Filipino, or both) and how their perspectives affect other aspects of their lives (language, marriage, and family). The research proposes that there are different kinds of Chinese Filipinos as evidenced in the six classifications in chapter 4. Further, most of them have constructed a hybrid culture exclusively and uniquely their own. On the one hand, they are still attached to their cultural roots; on the other hand, they cannot evade the fact that they are influenced by their host country and the present global and migratory age we live in. Second-, third-, and fourth-generation Chinese Filipinos demonstrate their hybridity in language and mindset. This dissertation also lays out some challenges in relation to doing mission among them.

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The need to train Christian missionaries was an afterthought of the Protestant missionary movement in the early nineteenth century. The Basel Missionary Training Institute (BMTI) was the first school designed solely for the purpose of preparing European missionaries for ministry in non-European lands. Pitfalls of Trained Incapacity explores the various sociological and historical factors that influenced the BMTI «community of practice» and how the outcomes affected the work of the Basel Mission in Ghana in its initial phase. It shows that the integral training of the BMTI resulted in missionary practices that lacked flexibility to adjust attitudes and behavior to the vastly different circumstances in Africa, impeded the realization of mission objectives, and hindered the emergence of an African appropriation of Christianity.
By exploring educational and sociological perspectives in a precolonial context, this study reaches beyond its historical significance to raise questions of unintended effects of integral ministry training in other times and places. The natural cultural bias of groups with shared theological assumptions and social ideals–like the Basel Mission–suggests a strong propensity for trained incapacity, that is, for training processes that establish inflexible mental frameworks that are potentially detrimental to intercultural engagement.

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