Call for Papers for October 2026 Special Issue: "Christian Conversion and Mission"

Abstract

Andrew Walls’s posthumous Christian Conversion and Mission: A Brief Cultural History offers a nuanced and incisive overview of the history of Christianity’s encounters with Judaism, Roman Hellenism, Germanic custom, the modern West, and the cultures of the global south from the first century to the twentieth century. The recurrent pattern in the gospel’s interaction with successive cultures through the ages is conversion, understood at its most fundamental level as “turning,” that is, turning to God in response to God’s saving activity. By taking Christian history as a whole and inviting the reader to see it from the perspective of conversion, Walls challenges Western theology in several striking ways. First, he decenters Western theology as the standard by which to judge authentic or orthodox Christian faith and expression. Second, he suggests theological frontiers to be explored as Christianity enters the cultures of the global south. Third, he proposes a fresh way of seeing historic Christianity that is not defined by the creeds of Roman-Hellenistic Christianity. As southern expressions of Christianity increasingly become the dominant forms of the faith, new themes and priorities that never occurred to Western Christians or to earlier Christian ages will appear. Global Missiology invites submissions for this theme issue on “Conversion.”