Browsing by Subject "Missiology"

Christianity in South Korea has long been touted the one success story in Asia, dubbed the “Korean miracle,” whose traction and trajectory of explosive growth are unanimously traced back to the Protestant missionaries who arrived in numbers at the end of the nineteenth century. Among them, one monumental figure towers over all: the Presbyterian Reverend Horace G. Underwood (1859-1916), widely considered the single most important and influential western missionary ever to set foot on Korea, in large part due to his extraordinary sacrificial love for the nation and the people of Korea.

As such, his theology and practice of missions represent a work of love from the missionary par excellence of Korea, who missiologically operated out of best intentions and overwhelming love for the natives. However, as this dissertation critiques, it is a work of love compromised by his racial imagination, not incidental to his missiology but at its core. Specifically, this dissertation theologically examines how race manifests and functions in Underwood’s missiology as a multifaceted pseudo- or anti-Christology. Hence, the story of Underwood is one in which his theology of mission problematically operated out of a thick and dynamic racialized Christology, even as he imagined he was espousing and performing the very teachings of Jesus, making it all the more ironic and tragic. At the core of such a false and faulty “Christology,” whiteness, with Underwood himself as its white masculine exemplar, as racially constructed and stabilized, unrelentingly seeks to usurp the Person and the Work of Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity. In this way, race as an anti-Christology with the white masculine posing as Christ functions as the missiological basis for his formation of a de facto white Korean Christianity.

The dissertation deconstructs and critiques Underwood’s racialized Christology in two parts. In Part I, I argue that Underwood’s missiological approach in making Koreans known through a comprehensive and comparative racial characterization presupposes a racialized doctrine of creation, whereby the white body, in lieu of Jesus, is deemed the revelation of full humanity (Chapter 1). What is more, in this doctrine, the white body positions itself also as the definitive judge of all humanity, and through its “all-seeing, all-knowing” judgment, the white body creates humanity anew, which in Underwood’s case meant re-creating Koreans as racialized modern subjects with a subjectivity posed to perform whiteness. As such, whiteness arrogates for itself Christ’s divine roles as the Judge and the Creator (Chapter 2).

In Part II, I shift to the heart of Underwood’s missiology: his racialized soteriology. I show that his argument for the missionary investment in Koreans is predicated on a racialized doctrine of salvation, which designates the white body, as opposed to Jesus, as the very incarnation of the elect, the very image of the saved (Chapter 3), along with the nation, as opposed to the church, as the body politic of the elect, with the emerging American empire the very image of the elect nation (Chapter 4). Moreover, in his racialized soteriology it is the white body who is the savior or the one electing, in place of Jesus, the true Elected One and Savior. Here, his racialized doctrines of creation and salvation come together in his re-creation of Korean religious subjectivity for the sake of saving the nation and the people of Korea. In this way, Underwood helps to establish a vision of racial nationalism for Korea that continues to shape the interaction between Christian practice and nationalist goals of well-being and progress in whiteness within Korea and in other parts of the world.

This dissertation argues that, for Luke, universal witness belongs within a broader claim about the identity of Israel’s Messiah. Framed by Luke 24:46-48 (and Acts 26:22-23), the book of Acts narratively construes the unfolding universality of the Christian movement as the unfolding of the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. The “Lukan Commission,” rooted in a prophetic promise, prefigures the role of Acts in narratively unfolding the identity of Jesus as πάντων κύριος (Acts 10:36).

Universal proclamation of salvation in Acts—implicitly by Jesus and explicitly by his witnesses—narratively realizes the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. Luke’s second volume reconfigures the narrative sense of “presence” and “activity” on the basis of Jesus’ exaltation to heaven and Lordship by the Spirit (cf. 2:17-36). Especially as the “word” spreads beyond Jerusalem and the Jewish people, the Lord Jesus’ influence on the unfolding of universal witness becomes pronounced.

Though the apostles receive Jesus’ commission, their outreach is generally restricted to Jews in Jerusalem. Not until the Cornelius incident (Acts 10:1-11:18) does the universal vision of Jesus’ commission (Luke 24:47; Acts 1:8) intersect with apostolic witness, which is why Luke gives the episode almost unparalleled emphasis (cf. 11:5-17; 15:7-11). In this respect, the event proves paradigmatic for Luke’s coordination of christological identity and universal witness, establishing Jesus’ messianic identity as “Lord of all” (10:36). The full scope of Jesus’ identity is what participants in witness must discover in their encounter with the (ethnically) “other” (ἀλλόφυλος).

This theological breakthrough lies behind Paul’s outreach in the Diaspora and finds expression in the makeup of the Syrian Antioch community (11:19-26; 13:1-3), itself the basis for Paul’s outreach to Jews and Gentiles everywhere. In endorsing Antioch’s ministry, Peter, James, and the Jerusalem believers “model” for unbelieving Jews the proper interpretation of the salvation of the Gentiles in relation to Israel’s hopes (Acts 15). Jesus’ identity as universal Lord helps explain Paul’s “turn” to the Gentiles (13:46; 18:6; 28:28) less as a result of Jewish rejection than as a fulfillment of the Messiah’s work as outlined in scripture (1:8; 13:47; 26:23). The receptivity of Gentiles to Paul’s preaching provokes Paul’s Jewish audiences even as it models proper receptivity to the universality of Jesus’ Lordship. The present study confirms that for Luke mission is in part a means for expanding the witnesses’ comprehension of the scope of Jesus’ Lordship in light of God’s work among the Gentiles. Luke’s focus on the response of Jewish believers to this emerging reality in Acts reconfigures notions of χριστός in light of the (narrative) expansion of his identity as πάντων κύριος.

The Church in America is in sharp decline despite the nearly 4,000 new churches that are started each year. This thesis poses critical questions about the viability and effectiveness of church planting in America and inquires whether new “missional” churches are truly impacting their communities. Through research and field experience, this project will present a church-planting and church-renewal model that may lead to both missional community impact and growing communal influence through the principles of community organizing. The model presented here in this thesis will drive church planters and leaders to view church more as a social movement that empowers communal agency toward a telos of human flourishing rather than simply a footprint of a worshipping community that is focused on numeric growth. The key finding presented in this work is the framework of building institutional power through empowering participants toward three specific sets of practices that make a church “missional”: Kingdom Missiology, Incarnational Ecclesiology, and Political Theology. This thesis argues that precisely within the intersection of these three principles, paralleled in models of community organizing, is where all churches, but especially church plants, can create movements that shape identity and cultivate human flourishing.

In the United States of America more and more churches are including intentional organized missional outreach efforts as a part of their overall ministry. As this number continues to grow it becomes increasingly important to ensure that the leaders of these missional efforts are properly equipped to lead. This project examines some of the primary competencies (theological, missiological & practical) required to ensure that local church mission leaders are well-prepared for their work whether they are laity, clergy, volunteer or staff. The thesis begins by examining a theology of mission founded on the mission of the Trinitarian God (the missio Dei) who now sends humanity out in mission following the model of the incarnation empowered by God the Holy Spirit. This chapter draws from the work of theologians and missiologists while focusing primarily on the Bible. The next chapter considers several missiological principles that are vital for the work of local church mission leaders. The thesis concludes by suggesting a number of effective practices put into use by a number of current local church mission leaders. These were discovered by interviewing ten current United Methodist local church mission leaders regarding their approach to a number of practical missional leadership concerns (getting started, strategic approaches, leadership structure, funding model and short-term experiences). The thesis offers new and existing local church mission leaders a foundation to construct healthy local church mission ministries.

In the United States of America more and more churches are including intentional organized missional outreach efforts as a part of their overall ministry. As this number continues to grow it becomes increasingly important to ensure that the leaders of these missional efforts are properly equipped to lead. This project examines some of the primary competencies (theological, missiological & practical) required to ensure that local church mission leaders are well-prepared for their work whether they are laity, clergy, volunteer or staff. The thesis begins by examining a theology of mission founded on the mission of the Trinitarian God (the missio Dei) who now sends humanity out in mission following the model of the incarnation empowered by God the Holy Spirit. This chapter draws from the work of theologians and missiologists while focusing primarily on the Bible. The next chapter considers several missiological principles that are vital for the work of local church mission leaders. The thesis concludes by suggesting a number of effective practices put into use by a number of current local church mission leaders. These were discovered by interviewing ten current United Methodist local church mission leaders regarding their approach to a number of practical missional leadership concerns (getting started, strategic approaches, leadership structure, funding model and short-term experiences). The thesis offers new and existing local church mission leaders a foundation to construct healthy local church mission ministries.

U.S. faith-based organizations (FBOs) founded by Christians have gained wide recognition and influence both nationally and internationally and have become, to a large extent, the de facto bearers of contemporary Christian mission in an increasingly post-denominational landscape. Yet the focus of this thesis is how FBOs suffer from a separation between missiology, ecclesiology, and theological reflection in ways that inhibit their participation in the mission of God, or missio Dei.

The thesis draws on history, sociology, and missiology to provide a critical framework for an inter-disciplinary analysis of FBOs that illuminates the problems they face and describes what is required for a recovery of faithful witness. The thesis begins with the emergence of FBOs as a uniquely Protestant story, locating their origins within the history of Protestant missions, the emergence of the voluntary society, and their evolution into humanitarianism and the problems which emerge out of that history. A move to sociological analysis situates contemporary FBOs within a wider social ecology of powerful forces that cause non-profits to behave like for-profit corporations, often giving themselves over to bureaucratic models shaped by a technological understanding of practice. The final move to missiology and ecclesiology makes the claim that the critical reference point for evaluation of the FBO is the flourishing of the practice of Christian missions.

This constructive missiology provides the basis for proposing marks of a faithful mission-type organization in the contemporary context which can sustain the practice of missions not primarily as humanitarian activism, but as participation in the missio Dei. The thesis re-narrates FBOs and the marks we should look for in FBOs by proposing several organizational disciplines that provide a response to the challenges facing the contemporary FBO. These marks are displayed through brief case studies from three FBOs: L'Arche International, the U.S. national organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and New Song Urban Ministries in Baltimore.