Association of Professors of Mission: Call for Papers

Deadline: February 15, 2017

Teaching Mission in the Complex Public Arena: Developing Missiologically Informed Models of Engagement 

2017 Annual Meeting
Wheaton College – Wheaton, IL
June 15-16, 2017

The Association of Professors of Mission extends an open call for paper presentation proposals for its annual meeting.  Anyone interested in presenting at APM should submit a proposal title with a 150-200 word abstract and a 30 word biography to Larry W. Caldwell, APM President, at lcaldwell@sfseminary.edu by February 15, 2017.

Theme:
Our North American context immerses us every day in complex contemporary issues that arise from the public arena: issues of racial justice, immigration, gender and sexuality, ecology and environment, to name but a few. Speaking to such issues responsibly from a missional perspective requires awareness of how religious language is heard, as well as how to have gracious dialog and loving engagement. This conference will seek to consider this question: What should mission and the teaching of mission look like in our increasingly complex public arena?Embodying a missionally informed perspective in today’s world can be challenging. We can be uncertain about what will offend and what will resonate, what is respectful of social difference and what is faithful to what we have seen and heard. This is especially pertinent as we prepare students for mission work globally; equipping them to appropriately interact with their various complex environments. Our students are wondering how to effectively engage in their complex public arenas in both biblically and missiologically informed ways.We seek papers that consider how to negotiate contemporary landscapes in North America and worldwide with faithful Christian witness in our mission teaching and scholarship, including models of dialog and engagement.

Plenary Speakers:

  • D.A. Carson – Research Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
  • Evelyne A. Reisacher – Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Intercultural Relations, Fuller Theological Seminary
  • Daniel White Hodge – Associate Professor of Youth Ministry and Director of the Center for Youth Ministry Studies, North Park University
Themes for Proposal:
This year’s meeting will consider the teaching of mission in the complex public arena, seeking to provide biblical and missiological models for those teaching mission that will help them retain their core missional understandings while at the same time engage the culture at large in ways that are both understandable and inoffensive.To this end, we invite papers that consider the relationship between mission teaching and public engagement. Examples of topics in line with the theme might include:

  • Models of engagement (biblical, historical, and/or missiological) that help demonstrate how one respects social difference while remaining missionally faithful.
  • Descriptions of classroom challenges in the teaching of mission, in regards to some of the complex contemporary issues, and how those challenges were met.
  • Case studies of how campus responses to specific contemporary issues have impacted the teaching of mission in the classroom.

Other Subjects: Topics of particular interest to APM contributors but not directly related to the conference them may still be submitted and will be considered by the conference organizers

SUBMISSION AND PRESENTATION REQUIREMENTS

Paper proposal deadline:                              February 15, 2017
Notification of accepted papers:                    March 1, 2017
Submission of completed papers and confirmation of meeting attendance: May 22, 2017

For the purposes of online publication of presentations, submitted papers may be up to 5,000 words in length including notes and references (about 20 double-spaced pages) and should conform to the style guide of the journal Missiology: An International Review, available at: http://asmweb.org/assets/pdf/Style-Guide-2011.pdf.  The full text of all papers approved for the conference will be made available to the members of APM online as The Proceedings of the Association of Professors of Mission, 2017

Presentations at the meeting will be limited to 15 to 20 minutes (about 5-7 pages of text, if read), plus additional time for discussion depending on the number of presentations accepted.

Please direct all submissions and questions to Larry W. Caldwell, APM President at lcaldwell@sfseminary.edu.

Registration materials will be available on the website in the Spring 2017.
We look forward to seeing in June!