How can mission research better serve local leaders’ agendas? | Stan Nussbaum

This is a repost of the CMIW (Community of Mission Information Workers) quarterly bulletin for January 2021, written by Stan Nussbaum. It is short and provides a concise typology of the various kinds of research with attention to movements.

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Recent discussion in the new Motus Dei forum on new Christian movements flagged the problem that so few members of the movements were participating in the research network. So far, it is mostly white male outsiders like me. One wrote:

I am in touch with a number of movements that may . . . want to understand and be better equipped to do research. I don't think any of them would be interested in the sort of movement research that helps the wider world know how many movements there are or what their characteristics may be, though two groups of leaders did agree to participate in a project or two like that in the past. My sense from reading the threads here is that the sort of research being proposed . . . is about the internal needs of movements for their own growth and health.

The discussion brought back memories of my 24 years at Global Mapping International (GMI) and our constant struggle to explain our ministry, because “mission research” meant such different things to different groups. I offer the following typology of “mission research” in the hope that it may help CMIW readers explain themselves as well as promote greater attention to a crucial but neglected type of mission research.

Let us classify mission research by the gaps that are driving it. For simplicity, I mention only four common types:

1. A gap in a local leader’s or organization’s discernment of what to do next;
2. A gap in a strategic database;
3. A gap in the academic literature;
4. A gap on a donor’s checklist.
   

Gap 1 is the neglected gap mentioned earlier. Gap 2 is UPGs (unreached people groups), language mapping, etc. that GMI was initially designed to serve. Gap 3 is the academic world. Gap 4 is evaluative research, increasingly common.

The critical problem in the mission research community today is that the four types of research are siloed. Western strategists and mobilizers see that Gap 2 gets addressed. Western academics take care of Gap 3. Western donors demand attention to Gap 4. But the “local leaders” are out of sync with the West on all three points:

• Their mobilization is based more on social networks than geography;
• They want short useful case studies instead of bulletproof dissertations on niche topics;
• They want evaluation that rings true to local realities, not evaluation in terms of a foreigner’s categories.
  

Why don’t local leaders promote research that addresses Gap 1 themselves? Because it is an unknown type of “mission research.” What they know of research that addresses Gaps 2, 3, and 4 does not serve them. Can those of us involved in mission information work help these local leaders imagine research for Gap 1??

I am starting a couple of attempts at that, one of which is for experimental research that local leaders help design themselves. The other is a possible micro-research project in four African countries, focusing on research topics updated monthly by a handful of leaders in each country.

There are also encouraging signs that Silo 3 is reaching out toward Silo 1. For example, the mission statement of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies includes, “responding to issues identified by the church [my italics] with timely, strategic and rigorous research.”
I am less optimistic about the other two siloes but would be happy to be proved wrong there. Let’s see how we can spur each other on toward more “Gap 1” research.

Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity (Swartz 2020)

“If Arab Muslims are the least-reached people in the world, then American Evangelicals are the least-transformed people in the world,” retorted my Arab colleague as I was making my case for the priority of ministry among unreached people groups.

As an American Evangelical with a passion for disciple-making among the unreached, this stunned me. But then again, given all the ugliness that has been unveiled about American evangelicalism in (at least) the past five years, I have to admit, it might be painfully true.

In Facing West: American Evangelicals in an Age of World Christianity, David Swartz, professor of history at Asbury University, takes the reader on tour de force understanding of what can also sometimes be understood as “Christian Americanism” abroad. In so doing, Swartz shows how global evangelicalism does not sit comfortably in American clothes, and that American “missions” often has the dual effect of affecting the church in the United States as well. As he deals with people like McGavran, Wagner, Winter, and even Hiebert, I was most impressed with his grasp of the missiological side of the conversation. The description of the book says it best:

In 1974 nearly 3,000 evangelicals from 150 nations met at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. Amidst this cosmopolitan setting and in front of the most important white evangelical leaders of the United States, members of the Latin American Theological Fraternity spoke out against the American Church. Fiery speeches by Ecuadorian René Padilla and Peruvian Samuel Escobar revealed a global weariness with what they described as an American style of coldly efficient mission wedded to a myopic, right-leaning politics. Their bold critiques electrified Christians from around the world.

The dramatic growth of Christianity around the world in the last century has shifted the balance of power within the faith away from traditional strongholds in Europe and the United States. To be sure, evangelical populists who voted for Donald Trump have resisted certain global pressures, and Western missionaries have carried Christian Americanism abroad. But the line of influence has also run the other way. David R. Swartz demonstrates that evangelicals in the Global South spoke back to American evangelicals on matters of race, imperialism, theology, sexuality, and social justice. From the left, they pushed for racial egalitarianism, ecumenism, and more substantial development efforts. From the right, they advocated for a conservative sexual ethic grounded in postcolonial logic. As Christian immigration to the United States burgeoned in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1965, global evangelicals forced many American Christians to think more critically about their own assumptions.

The United States is just one node of a sprawling global network that includes Korea, India, Switzerland, the Philippines, Guatemala, Uganda, and Thailand. Telling stories of resistance, accommodation, and cooperation, Swartz shows that evangelical networks not only go out to, but also come from, the ends of the earth.

This book will help missionaries from America see how they are viewed by evangelicals in the Majority World, but it also adds an important piece of postcolonial logic in the globalizing understanding of frontier missiology. Highly recommended.