Bishops are to be understood primarily as representatives of cultures regardless of where their people are territorially located. The vindication of this thesis has implications also for ecumenical reconciliation between episcopal and non-episcopal communions occupying the same geographical territory.
The author compares the approaches and insights of both Vatican II and Lambeth 89 on this issue, and then proceeds to a historical and theological analysis of the development of the threefold Order in the early centuries, which he illuminates with the aid of contemporary sociological and...

Apart from the mainline, Pentecostal, and Zionist churches, there are different types of African Independent/Indigenous Churches (AIC). The greater part of the more than four thousand denominations and eight million adherents came into the AIC during the past three decades, mainly from the traditional African religious background. The important role of the diviner in the traditional society has been replaced by the prophet in the AIC; the prophet understands the worldview of his/her people, especially the cultural diseases. In some churches the office of prophet cum diviner is...

This is a pioneering study of the impact of Christianization among the Chinese. Focusing primarily on the minority peoples of Yunnan province, it nonetheless fully mirrors the historical development of the Protestant mission in China.
Drawing on many years of observation in the field and upon a comprehensive consultation of official documents relating to Christians on the mountain peaks, the study chronicles how the early foreign missionaries, thanks to their self-sacrifice and the examples they set of religious zeal, cemented the hitherto segregatory and leaderless tribes together,...

This study presents a history, based on original archival and primary source material, of the Baptist mission educational situation of Cameroon province from 1922 to 1945. The provisions of the League of Nations' mandate, under which Great Britain administered the province in this period, included 'complete freedom of conscience and the free exercise of all forms of worship', yet from the beginning of the Mandate clear tensions existed. The missions desired education to serve evangelical purposes, while the colonial government strove for a uniform adaptionist program, suited to European...

This work is concerned with the civil authorities' and missionaries' project of the emancipation of Madarε women in the west of Burkina Faso between 1900 and 1960. The work deals successively with the place of women in the pre-colonial village community, the beginning of contacts with European civilisation, the project's initiators' assessment of the women's living conditions and their willingness to change them, the means and methods used to this end and the limitations of the project at the time of independence in 1960. The fruit of several years of research by a historian, who is a...

Missionnaires au quotidien a Tahiti immerses us in the everyday life of Catholic missionaries sent out to the Tahitian islands in the period 1834 to 1914. Using the correspondence of the 167 members of the order of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, an attempt is made to define the social and geographic origins of the Picpucian people. Priests and friars are followed in their education, from the apostolic school to the first Pacific vicariates. Right from the first days of established contact, we see the management of the day-to-day affairs of these eternal...

This volume presents the 25 years correspondence of a Roman Catholic missionary, Fr. Francois Laydevant, who worked in Lesotho from 1905 to 1954, with a Roman Catholic missiologist, Fr. Albert Perbal, based in Rome, Italy. The exchange of letters was provoked by the missiologist who needed direct information from the mission field for his own research and teaching, and first of all in order to fulfil his role of consultant with the Institute for the Study of African Languages and Cultures in London and the Conference Romaine des Missions Catholiques d'Afrique in Rome. The main result of the...

Christianity in Northern Malawi deals with the interaction of the missionary methods of the Scottish missionary Donald Fraser and the traditional culture of the Ngoni people of northern Malawi in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It looks at Ngoni origins and culture prior to first contacts with the missionaries, at the early life and ideas of Fraser, and at Fraser's disagreements with some of his Scottish colleagues. There are also sections on Ngoni interactions with the early colonial government, and the development of a genuinely Ngoni Church. The book uses primary and oral...

The Frontier Mission and Social Transformation in Western Honduras deals with the interaction between Mercedarian missionaries and the indigenous Lenca Indian population of western Honduras during the early sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries. Using an anthropological perspective, it relies heavily on previously neglected ecclesiastical archival material in conjunction with preliminary archaeological evidence as an integral source of data. A fine-grained description of the local processes of missionization in a frontier region examines the organization, operation and goals of the...

This volume contains 123 documents which illustrate the early history of the American Presbyterian Congo Mission and its struggle for human rights in the Congo from 1890-1918. The documents, many of which have never previously been published, are crucial to a full understanding of both the work of the Presbyterian Mission and its impact on the social, political, and religious life of the Congo. The book is divided into four parts. Part One documents the founding and early history of the Presbyterian Mission from 1890 to 1898. Part Two documents the deterioration of social conditions in the...