Mission and the Ephesian Moment of World Christianity

The historic 1910 Edinburgh missionary conference was a watershed moment for world Christianity as it established a framework for international cooperation in the task of bringing the whole gospel to the whole world.’ That goal has more or less been realized. In fact, with the shift of Christianity’s center of gravity from its traditional heartlands in Europe and the US to the “Global South” of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the focus of mission must also shift from a preoccupation with ‘transmission’ so as to engage the wider issues of the teleology of missio Dei . Using Andrew Walls’ depiction of the Ephesian Moment, the author explores mission as God’s activity of bringing together diverse social fragments (as bricks of a single building or as parts of the same body) so as to realize what Paul describes as the ‘very height of Christ’s full stature.” In describing the Pilgrimage of Pain and Hope and a visit to an organic farm in Uganda, the author offers “pilgrimage” as an example of mission practice, which reflects and advances this telos. The act of eating together, which pilgrimage fosters, is not only the expression and the test of the Ephesian moment it is the context within which the most pressing theological, pastoral and ecclesiological issues of world Christianity are illumined and engaged

Archaeology · Art · Body of Christ · Christianity · Context (archaeology · Depiction · Gospel · Literature · Pilgrimage · Political science · Sociology · Teleology · Theology · Christian Theology and Mission · History · Law · Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development

• Mission as Integral Ecology

  Emmanuel Katongole•Mission Studies•2022

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• The Missionary Movement in Christian History

  Richard Gray, Andrew F Wall et al.•Journal of Religion in Africa•1997

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