Andrew F. Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the
Transmission of Faith (Maryknoll ,
N.Y.
Andrew F. Walls has been a lay Methodist preacher for over
fifty years and served as missionary to Sierra
Leone and Nigeria .
He is the founder of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the
Non-Western World. He is also a Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh Ghana . He received a BA and MA from
Oxford University
Andrew Walls’ two books are both complementary as well as
continuous. The Missionary Movement in
Christian History was his first contribution of nineteen essays laying the
groundwork for a supposition that the world’s center of missiological influence
has shifted from the West to the South. He divided his book into three
sections. Each section has its own flavor and uniqueness, but the thought does
flow logically with the one building upon the argument of the former.
Entitled “The Transmission of
Christian Faith,” his first section deals with a historical overview of
missions. In six essays he posits that missiological expansion was really only
an episode in Christian history, a blip on the screen. But instead of
downplaying its importance, Walls conversely highlights both the diversity and
universality of Christianity as expressed in this movement. In one of the
essays, the process is displayed in six phases moving from the apostle Paul to
Europe and then on to Africa . He deals largely
with the interaction between the spread of the gospel and how it transforms
culture, so he hints at Africa ’s importance in
this section.
In the second section he makes a
transition to a clear emphasis on Africa . He
interacts with the primal religions of Africa
as well as with African Christianity in this section. He identifies exponential
growth patterns and charismatic cultural tendencies that now characterize the
African Christian Church. However, most interesting is his insistence in making
a distinction between the history of the African Church Africa was historically led by Europeans, Walls argues
that the evangelical revival in the African church was truly indigenous.
Part three sets the stage for
missiology. Walls believes there is a new era in Christian theology that is
largely due to the demographic shift in global Christianity. He sees theology
being shaped more by southern Christians than western ones. Issues like
non-western art, scholarship, medicine and organizational methodology highlight
the generational and gradual shift in values in southern countries. Walls
believes that “Christians outside Africa will have to make some responses to
the questions raised in the African arena” (146).
The Cross-Cultural
Process in Christian History, his second book contribution and continuation
of the first, is divided into three parts as well. The first section is four
chapters long and deals with a historical survey of how Christianity expanded
in the West over the last twenty centuries and then declined. Relying heavily
on Latourette’s History of the Expansion
of Christianity, the book culminates
with an emphasis on the declining influence of Christianity on the European
continent by the end of the last century. This section concludes with an essay
entitled “The Ephesian Moment” wherein Walls arguably makes his most
significant theological statement and identifies the current situation as yet
another blending of cultures to experience Christ.
The second
part is more non-Western focused with a special emphasis on Africa ,
Walls’ locale of missionary service. Describing a shift in the missions center
of gravity from the West to the South, this section is also somewhat of a
historical survey of the African continent. Walls’ main thrust in this section
is what he calls a shift of influence from the North and West to the southern
hemisphere. With this observation he also posits that mainstream Christian
theology will be greatly influenced by African theologians in the coming years.
He never identifies Africa as third world, but
he predicts a future missiological climate change that will place greater
emphasis on these southern continents that have typically grouped into that
category. He includes three noteworthy essays that detail how Christianity
engaged Islam in Africa during the nineteenth
century.
The final
portion of his book returns to the western scene to survey the history of
missions involvement in Europe and America . He highlights the
volunteer movement, the introduction of laity to missions, the emergence of
missions associations and the shift to protestant leadership in missions. Walls
then ends this section with an article by David J. Bosch that summarizes the
preceding emphases by bequeathing the title missiology to this study of
Christian history.
Walls’ books have great merit for
missiology and specifically for missiological historical studies. Although at
times his books seem to be a haphazard collection of his essays from various
time periods, Walls makes no apology. In fact, he readily admits at the outset
that his books may seem repetitive and unyielding. Collected and lectured over
a number of years, the essays cover a wide range of topics. Perhaps the three
greatest emphases from his essays are the ebb and flow of missions progression,
the distinction between foreign and indigenous conversion and how culture is
transformed by the gospel. The several other unique emphases that Walls makes
give the books academic value as well as practical worth, but it is these three
that arguably yield the greatest contribution to missiological dialogue.
Non-Western View of
Missions History
Walls views missions history in a
unique way. To Walls, Christian history is not a linear progression from Paul
to the present but waves of victorious expansion and unfortunate recession. At
times missions succeeds and Christianity does in fact progress, but at other
times there is a waning aspect to whatever progress was made. This
non-sequential aspect to Walls’ understanding of the missionary movement places
him in a category by himself. Whereas Latourette shows a progressive expansion
of Christianity from Pauline origins, Walls’ emphasis on the ebb and flow of
this progression identify clear shifts in geographic and political power. Therefore
his historical survey is not divorced from the social aspect of cultural
change, neither internally nor externally.
Walls expands his notion of this
non-linearity to describe new centers of Christian witness that in time also
influence the next stages of Christian development. He builds upon this theme
in defense of his ultimate thesis that the center of missions history is now in
Africa. Walls is brazenly supportive of Africa .
For him, Africa is representative of the
Copernican shift that has taken place in Christianity. The world’s Christian
population has relocated from a western center of influence up to the early
twentieth century and dramatically transferred to the southern hemisphere.
Given the nature of this global
shift in Christianity, the emphasis Walls places upon Africa
is understandable. However, his books seem slightly unbalanced as they place an
entire section of the emergent African theology without representing Latin America at all. He does nod slightly at the
theological development within India ,
but this appears to be more in conjunction with the necessary interaction
between Eastern Christianity and Islam throughout the Middle
East . Unfortunately this omission creates a noticeable vacancy in
the larger picture.
He tips his hand though in his last
chapter as he hails David Bosch at the “greatest theologian of the twentieth century”
without any apparent connection to the rest of his book. Granted Bosch was a
great thinker, but his only connection with Walls’ thesis is that he came out
of South Africa ,
a geographic location that could be argued is still more western in culture than
southern. Walls’ thesis that a Copernican revolution in Christianity has replaced
the influence of the West with that of the South, most notably African, is a
challenge. Perhaps that is why he relies so heavily on African theology as
almost a case study for the nonlinear argument.
Non-Western Conversion
Another significant observation is that Walls’ books are
both historical and theological in nature. He often brings the two spheres into
dialogue, but at times he seems to blur the two. Walls strongly asserts that
Christendom no longer exists, and he is critical of the western notion of
superiority with its idea of being chosen for missions expansion. Moreover,
this non-western historical bias is displayed specifically in the theological
understanding of conversion.
Whereas the
West has placed an emphasis on conversion as an intellectual decision to turn
from a former life to a new one in Christ, Walls challenges the western notion
that conversion is equivalent to proselytizing. For the West conversion implies
a change in culture and finding Christ outside the cultural experience. Walls
instead argues that a non-western understanding of conversion would be that of
finding Christ already within the culture itself.
This
difference in theological understanding is, for Walls, “of fundamental
importance” (68) and one of “the great issues of twenty-first-century
Christianity” (69). This theological stance entails a more ecumenical approach
to ecclesiology, but it also affects missiology. According to Walls, if there is
to be “cooperation between native and foreign workers” (70), the West must
allow for these non-western theologies to have equal footing on mission fields.
Walls’ books could truly be
considered a survey of Christian missions but with a twist. His goal is to make
the West aware of the coming non-western influence. He cites the Irish revival
for its influence upon evangelicalism much in the same way that Luther impacted
European Protestantism.
He challenges the reader to offer
that same influential seat to African theology today. In doing so he drafts the
missionary movement from its earliest post-Pauline endeavors to lay the
groundwork for his predictions that today is the day of the African missionary
movement. When Walls deals with the new emerging Ephesians moment, he attaches
considerable significance to some potential pluralistic elements. Comparing the
historical theological development as Greeks interacted with Jews to create new
categories for Christ, Walls states openly that theologies, including those
that detail how we understanding doctrines like atonement, will be drastically
altered by the emerging influence from the South.
Non-Western Translation
of Culture
Walls argues that Christianity evolves or morphs when
transferred from one culture to another. The idea of cultural transformation by
the gospel is not new. However, Walls capitalizes on this accepted fact to
capitulate that the culture also transforms what is defined as good news. In
doing so, he makes room for liberation theology among other ideas.
Specifically,
he creates a roundtable discussion for cultural nuances and their interplay
with evangelism. He identifies several African cultural elements that have
shaped evangelism, namely demons, ancestor veneration and objects of power. He
admits that the relationship between ancestor veneration and evangelism “has
been ill-defined and sometimes uneasy one, with theory and practice sometimes
in tension and different inferences drawn from similar premises” (127).
However, this is exactly what he considers to be the problem. These tensions
cannot be ignored. Instead, he suggests it requires “a degree of reorientation
from the missionary model of Christianity” (122), a clear judgment on the side
of culture.
Perhaps the
most startling statement about cultural transformation is his personal
observation that “the principal evidence of the ongoing life of traditional
African religion is within African Christianity” (120). This is case in point
that the gospel and the culture have already merged. When Africans deal with
questions like the fate of their unevangelized ancestors, for example, they
theologize in ways that westerners would have never imagined. Thefore, Walls
commits this insight into non-Western theology as a study of the way the gospel
translates the culture and thereby translates theology.
Missiological Implications
The aforementioned issues that Walls raises in his books
have some serious missiological implications for both historical studies and
theological dialogue. Although his essays deal with a wide range of topics, his
emphases on nonlinearity, conversion and cultural transformation are
specifically important in missiological settings where Christianity has to deal
with other world religions. The several other unique emphases that Walls makes give
the books academic value as well as practical worth, but it is these three that
arguably yield the greatest contribution to interfaith dialogue.
For example, Walls’ article on the
history of Christianity’s dialogue with Islam in Africa in the nineteenth
century is insightful and could rightly inform the current situation in Europe
where the demographics are swiftly shifting to a greater influx of Muslims. As
in the cases where Samuel Agayi Crowther of Yoruba and Harry Alphonso Ebun
Sawyerr of Sierra Leone wrestled with Islam, Walls asserts that it is the
indigenizing principle that “ensures that each community recognizes in
Scripture that God is speaking to its own situation” (12). If Christian
missionaries are ever to fully embrace a dialogue with Muslims, they must also
deal with the very issues that Walls raises.
It is helpful to understand the
historical gains and advances from a missiological perspective, but equally
helpful is the humility that is expressed in such an approach. This attitude
will only benefit a roundtable discussion. For too long, western missionaries
have approached missiological history as a conquest or crusade rather than an
organic move of God.
It is also helpful to understand
how Muslims can find conversion to Christ a matter of biblical transformation
of their own culture rather than a conversion to western culture. Although this
idea can be dangerous when taken to the extreme, a theology of conversion that
is both consistent with Scripture and benevolent to Middle Eastern culture
provides a more robust forum for intercultural dialogue. Viewed in this light,
Walls’ position on another Ephesian moment is warranted.
Complementary to indigenous
conversion, the idea of cultural transformation is still being discussed by
theologians and missiologists. What constitutes cultural transformation and
what indigenous elements of a culture are neutral or even positive are issues
that have been on the forefront of missiological dialogue for many years.
Walls’ theology of cultural transformation can indeed inform missiology as new
strategies are drafted for evangelism and as missions agencies attempt to
create exit strategies for their presence in Islamic locations.
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