Looking back in order to envision forward: ASM 50th anniversary graduate student remarks

I drove down to Techny Towers to attend my first American Society of Missiology Annual Meeting in 2012 at the suggestion of Dean Tite Tiénou. I read parts of Stephen Bevans and Roger Schroeder’s Prophetic Dialogue: Reflections on Christian Mission Today (2011) in Dr Tiénou’s Theology of Mission course and so the theme of the meeting drew me.

Prior to seminary studies, I served with a Protestant mission in northern France. My work occurred primarily among college students and young adults in the L’Oise Valley. I also spent half of my weekdays volunteering in the L’Arche Community’s occupational therapy workshop. Meanwhile, the mission was envisioning a new team that would work among Muslim communities in suburban Paris in which I might serve a longer term.

I read Prophetic Dialogue four years later, during a period of discernment: would I return to France long-term as part of the mission’s new “immigrant ministries” or continue directing a local church’s new campus ministry? In my discernment, the creative dialectic that Bevans and Schroeder identify in articulating mission as prophetic dialogue held on to me. The dialogical invitation to “reverence and discernment” of that which is already holy among people resonated. The prophetic dimension they detailed, calling communities to proclaim through incarnational presence the hope of Christ and to denounce injustice, likewise resounded. The Holy Spirit encouraged that I would be free to live mission more fully as prophetic dialogue if I continued in the local campus ministry.

When I attended Annual Meeting 2012, I recall Carlos Cardoza-Orlandi delivering a plenary to a packed room, filling it with his prophetic fire. In following years, the Annual Meeting platformed scholars whose work continued to reflect the spirit of prophetic dialogue. Marla Frederick’s plenary on women gaining spiritual authority through testimony about sexual abuse, or Tite Tiénou’s plenary when he showed that female missionaries who translated hymns were theologians unearthed institutional and epistemic power struggles. Through ASM, I met Al Tizon and Ruth Padilla-Deborst and learned of the INFEMIT network. When I somewhat timidly emailed Al after hearing a paper and asked if he would be able to facilitate evangelism training for the college ministry team I led, he graciously accepted.

ASM’s culture of supporting the next generation of scholars kept me attending the Annual Meeting while I worked as a college minister. Numerous seasoned scholars took the time to engage me in conversation as a recent seminary graduate. A co-author of the book that brought me to ASM, Roger Schroeder, was kind and curious as he asked attentive questions. At the Annual Meeting held at Wheaton, I enjoyed long lunches with faculty members who shaped the course of my doctoral studies. The Women’s Lunch introduced me to the community of women who carved out space for their contributions in a field seemingly crafted by White North American men. Yes, I do recall silently fangirling when Dana Robert walked into the room.

ASM’s approach to the Annual Meeting themes modeled as well what it sounded and looked like for a North American society of scholars to collaborate ecumenically and engage globally in understanding God’s work in the world. Presenters and plenary speakers addressed realities superseding the confines of Christendom-thinking with a commitment that enhanced my reading and inquiries.

Today, I have participated in ASM for three years most consistently as the Conference Coordinator. As a coordinator, I have had the privilege of working with and supporting the visions of three presidents and collaborating with Board members and society members in delivering each year’s meeting. Perhaps most meaningful, Sister Madge Karecki and I conversed regularly as she lived out her final months and weeks on earth.

Coordinating the Annual Meeting provides behind-the-scenes knowledge and perspectives that invite me to hope and envision for ASM’s future in particularly structural ways. Since ASM’s inception, the Annual Meeting has been foundational in the emergence of missiology as a recognized field scholarship (Shenk, 2014: 33, footnote 2). As Wilbert Shenk comments in his History of the American Society of Missiology, 1973–2013, the Annual Meeting provides the time and space for conversations and networks shaping the study of mission to form. He observed, “One of the most valued features of the annual meetings has been the opportunity these occasions afford for forming friendships and collegial cooperation with scholars in the field of mission studies from diverse ecclesial streams and institutions” (Shenk, 2014: 27). Indeed, the networks created, the scholarship generated, and the intergenerational charism embodied at Annual Meetings have been integral to the development of missiology as an interdisciplinary field in North America.

Shenk (2014: 40) records that “a fundamental flaw in the ASM organization” came to light between 1997 and 1998 when an assembled 1995 task force examined “future directions for the ASM.” A report offering academic field, annual meeting, and scholarship support recommendations was delivered at the 1997 Business Meeting. However, according to Shenk (2014: 40), “no enabling actions” were taken to address the report’s suggestions. In fairness, some of the recommendations concerning the Annual Meeting have been addressed, but, from behind the scenes, I see that ASM is still in need of addressing some of the recommendations made in 1997, albeit relative to a changed world of 2023.

Shenk (2014: 40) pointedly assessed the flaw as follows: “While the secretary-treasurer and editors of publications provided continuity within their spheres of responsibility, the board of directors operated from year to year.” In my view and from my experience, Shenk’s identified organization flaw has perpetuated a short-sighted focus on producing a themed Annual Meeting with less attention devoted to long-term strategic visioning, planning, and implementing initiatives to correlate the life of the society with the future possibilities of mission studies. It would be a narrow perspective to suggest that ASM has not pursued a variety of initiatives—namely, in publishing—that have contributed to missiology becoming an established field. Nonetheless, two specific examples illustrate the impact of this structural flaw.

First, while we can appreciate that ASM membership and Annual Meeting attendance did increasingly augment to include higher numbers of women, these numbers seem to have stagnated in my cursory assessments of Annual Meeting attendance. Without an appointed team or system accumulating and analyzing data regarding membership, meeting participation, and gender, race/ethnicity, region, class (as possible), and academic position data, long-term questions regarding the sustainability of ASM in relationship to important questions of representation and society culture cannot be entertained. Such work requires a model of leadership that sustains strategic and visionary planning in relationship to the people of the society.

This correlates with a second impact of structural flaws as reflected in membership and more significantly identified by Dwight A. Radcliff, Jr in his assessment of the structure of mission studies. Radcliff (2020: 170) observes that the “internal structuring and epistemology” of mission studies dovetails the discipline’s failure “to acknowledge the catalog of existing African American scholarship that deals with missional (or missiological) themes, concepts, and terminology.” In sum, Radcliff (2020: 171) argues that the effect of these two factors contributes to “the discipline [not appearing] to be an inviting place for African American scholarship.”

Radcliffe’s assessment and lived experience substantiated my doctoral research findings at the intersection of Black Atlantic studies, African history, Malawian history, African American religious history, and world Christianity. As a White American scholar, I examined missionary consciousness in the Black Atlantic world. While I focused on an African pastor-missionary from the early 20th century, my project necessitated reliance on African American as well as African scholars’ description and analysis of important dimensions of global Black religious life central in the fashioning of Black Atlantic mission movements. Yet, dominant missiological literature, by and large, does not reflect the concerns or lived realities present in this vast literature. ¹ There is not an absence of literature but as Radcliff (2020: 178–82) argues, an omission of relevant literature, experiences, and contributions within the construction of mission studies, theory, and practice. Here I want to correlate Radcliff’s analysis of the field with the American Society of Missiology as of 2023.

The “marginalization and lack of self-representation” of African Americans in mission studies that Radcliff (2020: 175) addresses are too often reflected in the composition of ASM membership and the thematic and conceptual design of Annual Meeting meetings. I cannot speak for African American experiences in the society. I can however observe a lack of proactively envisioning an expanded and deepened field of study and scholars that reflects the lived experiences and scholarship of racialized and minoritized North Americans.

To make the point, in membership and structure, ASM has not sufficiently interrogated who and what the American in American Society of Missiology means and must consciously include. To be fair, some plenaries and papers have offered correctives and address epistemic omissions. The hybridity-themed Annual Meeting of 2021, for example, centered on North American indigenous, LatinX, and Caribbean contributions and perspectives in mission thinking and practice. Most simply put, however, who is and will be the American Society of Missiology is an important question that needs to be asked from multiple points of view. The American adjective is regional and invites being more fully realized in society membership and representation.

This returns me to Shenk’s observation for a concluding hope. At an organizational level, the American Society of Missiology needs to address inherited flaws. Representation, equity, and sustainability invite strategic envisioning and new practices if ASM is to grow as a society of scholar-practitioners of mission for 2023 and beyond. We need an organizational structure that then promotes input, collaboration, and ongoing generation of an ecumenical academic society in prophetic dialogue with itself and with a racialized, gendered world.