A magisterial sweep through 1500 years of Christian history with a groundbreaking focus on the missionary role of migrants in its spread.Human migration has long been identified as a driving force of
A magisterial sweep through 1500 years of Christian history with a groundbreaking focus on the missionary role of migrants in its spread.
Human migration has long been identified as a driving force of historical change. Building on this understanding, Jehu Hanciles surveys the history of Christianity’s global expansion from its origins through 1500 CE to show how migration—more than official missionary activity or imperial designs—played a vital role in making Christianity the world’s largest religion.
Church history has tended to place a premium on political power and institutional forms, thus portraying Christianity as a religion disseminated through official representatives of church and state. But, as Hanciles illustrates, this “top-down perspective overlooks the multifarious array of social movements, cultural processes, ordinary experiences, and non-elite activities and decisions that contribute immensely to religious encounter and exchange.”
Hanciles’s socio-historical approach to understanding the growth of Christianity as a world religion disrupts the narrative of Western preeminence, while honoring and making sense of the diversity of religious expression that has characterized the world Christian movement for two millennia. In turning the focus of the story away from powerful empires and heroic missionaries, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity instead tells the more truthful story of how every Christian migrant is a vessel for the spread of the Christian faith in our deeply interconnected world.
Interpretation
“Jehu Hanciles should be commended for offering this alternative and helpful key to understanding the globalization of Christianity and for directing our attention to the place of migrations within it.”
Calvin Theological Journal
“This is an excellent book, demonstrating deep scholarship, compelling argumentation, and contemporary relevance.”
Religious Studies Review
“Through this book, Hanciles has demonstrated that he is a world-class scholar, educator, and an outstanding leader in world Christianity today.”
“In Beyond Christendom and other writings, Hanciles did so much to define an emerging field. Now, it is wonderful to see him applying his insights about migration and mission to an earlier era—nothing less than the first three-quarters of Christian history, the years before 1500. This is a remarkably ambitious goal, which he accomplishes with great success. Throughout, we must be impressed by his range of scholarship, and his acuity, as he roams through so many diverse eras and locales. He never lets us forget the links and parallels that bind those early centuries to our own day. This is an adventurous transnational history, which demands to be read and cited.”
— Philip Jenkins
from the foreword
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Jehu J. Hanciles is the D. W. and Ruth Brooks Associate Professor of World Christianity at Emory University. Originally from Sierra Leone, he is also the author of Beyond Christendom: Globalization, African Migration, and the Transformation of the West and Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context.
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Table of Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Part One: Conceptual Framework
1. Migration in Human History: A Conceptual Framework
2. Migration and the Globalization of Religion: Understanding Conversion
3. Theologizing Migration: From Eden to Exile
Part Two: Historical Assessment
4. Christianization of the Roman Empire: The Immigrant Factor
5. Frontier Flows: The Faith of Captives and the Fruit of Captivity
6. Minority Report: From the Church in Persia to the Persian Church
7. Christ and Odin: Migration and Mission in an Age of Violence
8. To the Ends of the East: The Faith of Merchants
9. Gaining the World: The Interlocking Strands of Migration, Imperial Expansion, and Christian Mission
10. Beyond Empire
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