Call for Papers: Assessing Mission Studies Program Titles
APM Association of Professors of Mission
Call for Paper Proposals
Deadline: February 13, 2015
2015 Annual Meeting
Wheaton College – Wheaton, IL
June 18-19, 2015
What’s in a Name?
Assessing Mission Studies Program Titles
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 Nelson Jennings, APM President, at jennings@omsc.org.
The 2015 Annual Meeting of the APM will examine the titles that educational institutions, North American and otherwise, use for their mission studies programs. Many seminaries and colleges have switched from using program titles that contain the term mission(s) to social science labels, e.g., intercultural studies, or to different religious labels, e.g., the more recently developing discipline of world Christianity. These nomenclature shifts affect students and graduates in such important ways as personal security or employability. What the titles mean for how institutions recruit students and new faculty is also an important area of consideration. Implications for a program’s curriculum – whether undergraduate, graduate, or postgraduate – as well as possibly for an institution’s other programs also merit assessment. An institution’s desired outcomes for its mission studies program relate to the title employed. The related type of degree that is earned, e.g., DMiss, DMin, PhD, ThD, MTh/ThM, enters the picture as well. The examination of these and other related areas should cast fresh light on how educators understand their various relationships to the missio Dei in today’s ever-transitioning Christian world mission movement.
SUBMISSION AND PRESENTATION REQUIREMENTS
Paper proposal deadline: February 13, 2015
Notification of accepted papers: February 27, 2015
Submission of completed papers and confirmation of meeting attendance: May 29, 2015
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, 2015.
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 Nelson Jennings, President APM, at jennings@omsc.org.
Registration materials will be available on the website in the Spring 2015.
We look forward to seeing in June!