Baylor University Press Series
The “coming of Global Christianity,” as historian Philip Jenkins put it, is gaining broad interest and attention, and its signs are quite evident. Africans lead the World Council of Churches and several of the Protestant world communions as well. China and Brazil are now closing in on the United States as the world’s largest national population of Christians. And not only has the balance of Christianity’s place in the world tipped markedly toward the global South and East, but so has public and scholarly consciousness of it. This series features original scholarly works focused on particular movements, traditions, ideas or historic episodes in the development of Christianity in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, and among migrating communities from these regions.
Why is This Important?
This new interest in World Christianity and the broad and sweeping publications that stimulate it are built upon a quarter-century of patient scholarship. During the last 25 years, this “missions and World Christianity” field of inquiry has shifted its focus from the study of missionaries sent from the North Atlantic region toward the study of the Christian movements that grew up in new places. This turn has not come quickly or easily, however, because there is a great disparity between the places that enjoy institutional and financial resources for scholarship and the places where the scholarship needs to happen. Sources documenting local Christian movements, both oral and written, are very difficult for scholars in Europe and North America to gain access, but those who are closer at hand and better equipped to read and interpret them often lack the opportunity. So the interpretive desires of this field still outrun its research achievements.
Another impediment to scholarship in this field producing a greater “international effect” is the way that publishing in the North Atlantic region frequently makes important books inaccessible back home in the global South. Linguistic and price barriers frequently mean that publication in the North effectively removes one’s scholarship from its natural home in the South.
Project Process
In 2009, Nagel Institute envisaged a publishing program with Baylor University Press to address the problem of under-developed scholarship. A series would be created that would feature monographs (and occasionally, edited volumes of essays on important themes) that focus on the character and cultural contexts of popular Christianity in the global South and East. The Press would thereby build out a portfolio of titles similar to one published by Tibebe Eshete, The Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia: Resistance and Resilience (BUP 2009). Since then, this series has blossomed with new titles added to the list every year.
Project Goals
The goal of this series is to publish accessible works about World Christianity, especially in the global South and East.
More About Baylor University Press Series
Here is some helpful background regarding this series. More than forty years ago, the Scottish church historian, Andrew F. Walls, predicted that Africa would become the new Christian heartland. The few members of his profession that paid him any attention were fairly incredulous. Today, Walls looks to be a prophet. The “coming of Global Christianity,” as historian Philip Jenkins put it, is gaining broad interest and attention, and its signs are quite evident. Africans lead the World Council of Churches and several of the Protestant World Communions as well.