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Vol. 36, No. 2 April 2012 Korean Missions: Beyond the Obvious ny computer’s performance is tied to software programs Christians in sub-Saharan Africa have been conspicuous Athat run in the background, usually in ways mysteri- exemplars of this dynamic process. The late Kwame Bediako ous to the user. If we compare Christian mission to a booted-up and others have observed that African religious leaders and computer, one of today’s most active background programs Continued next page consists of precolonial heritages passed down to postcolonized Christians. Whether obvious or difficult to discern, these heri- tages are powerful and in need of careful upkeep and attention. On Page Starting about 500 years ago, peoples of the Americas, Africa, 59 Korean Protestant Christianity: A Missiological Asia, and the Pacific experienced the awkward installation of the Reflection alien operating systems of European, American, and Russian polit- Joon-Sik Park ical, economic, and military power. Various Christian traditions 65 Grace Korean Church, Fullerton, California: were import- Mission from the Margins ed with those Wonsuk Ma alien systems. 68 Noteworthy The collapse of 72 Toward a Broader Role in Mission: How Korean modern colo- Americans’ Struggle for Identity Can Lead to a nial empires Renewed Vision for Mission p r o v i d e d S. Steve Kang and Megan A. Hackman opportunity for 78 Lessons from Korean Mission in the Former fresh and pen- Soviet Region etratingly help- John McNeill ful analyses of 82 Upcoming Conferences the modern missions move- 84 Missions from Korea 2012: Slowdown and Photo by Cassandra M. Zampini; courtesy of GBGM Mission News Maturation ment, allowing Fresie and Rukang Chikomb of DR Congo Steve Sang-Cheol Moon for the dissec- join other new missionaries as servers of tion of complex 86 The Second Text: Missionary Publishing and Holy Communion at commissioning Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress interconnec- service in Flushing, New York. David N. Dixon tions between religious propagation and political-economic power. At the same 90 A “New Breed of Missionaries”: Assessing Attitudes Toward Western Missions at the time, Christian movements throughout postcolonized territories Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School have had to grapple with the still lingering effects of their politi- of Theology cal, economic, and cultural subjugation and its direct mutant, F. Lionel Young III globalization, on their identity as “Christians.” 96 My Pilgrimage in Mission Never uninstalled, however, and continuously running in Joseph G. Donders the background have been peoples’ precolonial heritages. For the sake of their religious, ethnic, and national identities, postcolonial 100 Book Reviews Christians have had to reprogram their undeleted precolonial 101 Fifteen Outstanding Books of 2011 for Mission heritages in relation to imported and often imposed foreign Studies Christian traditions. These integration efforts have given fresh 110 Dissertation Notices shape and impetus to local and regional Christianities. 112 Book Notes key social institutions now receive open and public indigenous Roman and Byzantine Empires, sixteenth-century Hispaniolan Christian analysis in a way that was anathema during colonial believers enslaved by Spaniards, or early twentieth-century times—postcolonial reflection that has been accompanied by Hawaiian Christians dominated by powerful U.S. political and unprecedented numerical growth. Correspondingly, Korean corporate interests. In the nineteenth century, First Nations Alas- Christians, after draconian Japanese imperial efforts to squelch kans were baptized into Russian Orthodoxy or transmuted into fledgling expressions of Christian life, experienced extraordinary English-speaking Presbyterians. Chinese Christians, across the numerical growth. Somewhat ironically, however, in Korea this centuries, have received the Christian Gospel in its Syriac, Latin, growth has too often been detached from robust sociopolitical Russian, French, English, German, Korean, and other linguistic engagement. and cultural forms. The ongoing challenge across the continents has been to Today as never before, Jesus’ followers are found across understand what it means to turn previously unconverted a bewildering range of settings: multicultural, alien, postcolo- spheres of life to Christ. What does conversion look like—socially, nial, politically oppressive, affluent, and destitute. Whatever institutionally, and politically—and how does it take place? And the setting, whether rooted or on the move, the church is the what does this mean for the Christian diaspora, for the hundreds deeply flawed but extraordinarily purposeful body of Christ of thousands of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans who are incarnate—the Word made flesh. It exists by mission, just as a finding new homes and fresh hope in North America, Europe, and fire exists by burning, as Emil Brunner so aptly observed. The Australia—missionary-sending continents whose Christianity is modern world order created by expanding empires is giving way either moribund or greatly diminished? Bugs and error messages to social, demographic, and ecclesiastical realities that are much associated with this latest background software acquire particular less tidy than those proposed by missiological cartographers of poignancy for second- and third-generation, fully enculturated a century ago. immigrants more comfortable with the languages and cultural Can operating systems and background software ever be forms of their host countries than with those of their parents separated? Not without debilitating the one and destroying the or grandparents. In what sense is the Christianity of a Korean other. There can be no church and mission without human beings, Russian or a Korean American unique? What particular roles, if and there can be no human beings who are not shaped, condi- any, do such bicultural and even multicultural Christians play tioned, self-defined, animated, and limited by their cultures. Nor in the worldwide mission of the Gospel? can there be any church and mission that will not instinctively Such challenges are as old as our faith itself. After all, Jesus influence and benefit their host culture. While the essays in this and his earliest followers lived out their days in a multicultural, issue of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research brutally colonized world. The same holds true for two successive are weighted toward the country of Korea, they illustrate well millennia of Christians, whether it be Judean Christians under what is taking place worldwide. persecution, tenth-century Slavs trapped between the Holy —J. Nelson Jennings Editor Jonathan J. Bonk InternatIonal BulletIn of MIssIonary research Senior Associate Editor Established 1950 by R. Pierce Beaver as Occasional Bulletin from the Missionary Research Library. Named Occasional Bulletin Dwight P. Baker of Missionary Research in 1977. Renamed International Bulletin of Missionary Research in 1981. Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October by the Overseas Ministries Study Center, 490 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511 Associate Editor (203) 624-6672 • Fax (203) 865-2857 • [email protected] • www.internationalbulletin.org J. Nelson Jennings Contributing Editors Assistant Editors Catalino G. Arévalo, S.J. Darrell L. Guder Anne-Marie Kool Brian Stanley Craig A. Noll Daniel H. Bays Philip Jenkins Mary Motte, F.M.M. Tite Tiénou Rona Johnston Gordon Stephen B. Bevans, S.V.D. Daniel Jeyaraj C. René Padilla Ruth A. Tucker William R. Burrows Jan A. B. Jongeneel James M. Phillips Desmond Tutu Managing Editor Angelyn Dries, O.S.F. Sebastian Karotemprel, S.D.B. Dana L. Robert Andrew F. Walls Daniel J. Nicholas Samuel Escobar Kirsteen Kim Lamin Sanneh Anastasios Yannoulatos Senior Contributing Editors John F. Gorski, M.M. Graham Kings Wilbert R. Shenk Gerald H. Anderson Books for review and correspondence regarding editorial matters should be addressed to the editors. Manuscripts Robert T. Coote unaccompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope (or international postal coupons) will not be returned. Opinions expressed in the IBMR are those of the authors and not necessarily of the Overseas Ministries Study Center. Circulation The articles in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Bibliografia Missionaria, Book Review Index, Christian Aiyana Ehrman Periodical Index, Guide to People in Periodical Literature, Guide to Social Science and Religion in Periodical Literature, [email protected] IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature), Missionalia, (203) 285-1559 Religious and Theological Abstracts, and Religion Index One: Periodicals. Advertising OnlinE E-JOURnAl: The IBMR is available in e-journal and print editions. To subscribe—at no charge—to the full Charles A. Roth, Jr. text IBMR e-journal (PDF and HTML), go to www.internationalbulletin.org/register. Index, abstracts, and full text of this Spire Advertising journal are also available on databases provided by ATLAS, EBSCO, H. W. Wilson Company, The Gale Group, and University P.O. Box 635 Microfilms. Back issues may be purchased or read online. Consult InfoTrac database at academic and public libraries. Yarmouth, Maine 04096-0635 PRinT SUbSCRiPTiOnS: Subscribe, renew, or change an address at www.internationalbulletin.org or write Telephone: (516) 729-3509 InternatIonal BulletIn of MIssIonary research, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-3000. Address correspondence [email protected] concerning print
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