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There is a natural assumption that maps offer objective depictions of the world. The message of this book is that they do not, and that the innumerable ways in which they do not, serve to place maps as central and significant products of their parent cultures.For [post-Columbus] cartographers, maps became ephemera, repeatedly redrawn to new information. The sea monsters and ornamental flourishes disappeared to make way for new landmasses of increasingly accurate shape.Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed onto us by those who from the very beginning were eye-witnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.Among the better-known medieval maps is the Hereford Mappa Mundi, ca. 1300, a striking example of historical and theological projection onto an image of the physical world. The map provides an abundance of European and Mediterranean detail, and is congested with familiar towns and cities from Edinburgh and Oxford to Rome and Antioch. It is onto this familiar terrain that all the significant historical and theological events are projected—the fall of man, the crucifixion, and the apocalypse. As for the rest of the world, the greater part of Africa and Asia blurs into margins featuring elaborately grotesque illustrations of prevailing myths and savage demonic forces.

Missiology can become so preoccupied with abstract global, national, or regional analyses of the Christian missionary task that it loses sight of the fact that all genuinely Christian missionary activity models the incarnation, practicing a theology of the neighbor that concerns itself with the felt needs of actual persons in everyday face-to-face encounters, whatever the context. This article illustrates this principle by tracing the roots of three of this century's outstanding mission accomplishments in India and Nepal to a “chance” encounter between two men in a YMCA shower in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, in December of 1929.

Maps not only represent but also create their own reality. Maps are “drawn” from a variety of vantage points, locating and identifying all important features of a particular cartographer's world, whilst ignoring, downplaying, or distorting the rest. This article was prepared as the presidential address for the 19–21 June 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Missiology (ASM). It looks at ways in which missiological reference tools of the past two centuries likewise bear the unmistakable imprimatur of their times. Each reveals as much about the cognitive terra firma of the mapmaker himself or herself as about the geographical, political, demographic, and religious topography and boundaries of the day.

The twentieth-century growth and character of Christianity in Africa is without historical precedent, yet information on the major creative and innovative local figures and leaders of this growth—from local evangelists and pastors to nationally known Christian leaders—is sadly lacking from standard historical and biographical reference works. This paper tells the story of an international undertaking to produce an electronic biographical database on African Christian leaders who have laid the foundations and advanced the growth of Christian communities in Africa. The Dictionary will cover the whole field of African Christianity from earliest times to the present and cover the entire continent. It will be produced in English, French, and Portuguese.

A recent re-reading of E. F. Schumacher's classic Small is Beautiful: Economics as though People Matter reminded me that while Western socio-economic systems seem to operate on the assumption that the chief end of a human life is to bring glory to the GNP, no religious person–certainly no Christian–can accept either economic theories or economic practices which functionally regard human beings as mere means to materialist ends. Western mission societies have by no means been exempt from the pressure all about them to become numerically bigger, materially richer, and technologically more powerful in response to the highly competitive world of conflicting world views. That this is not only an inappropriate but dangerous trend is the point of this article.

3 Edinburgh 2010: Common Call 4 Edinburgh 2010 Centennial World Missionary Conference: A Report Janet Carroll 5 Tokyo 2010: Global Mission Consultation Allen Yeh 7 Report on Cape Town 2010 Stanley W. Green 1

Western missionaries are increasingly rich by the standards of the majority of the world's peoples. The paucity and relative sterility of efforts by Western missionaries to bring the good news to the poorest of the poor derives from their relative personal affluence. The statuses and the strategies upon which Western missionary endeavors rely are at serious odds with New Testament teaching on the incarnation, the cross, and weakness as models for missionary life. Failure to return to the “end of the procession” model of missions outlined in 1 Corinthians 4 will spell the doom of Western missions as a vital Christian force.