Call for Papers: Mission/s and the Local Church
EVANGELICAL MISSIOLOGICAL SOCIETY
2016 Call for Papers Mission(s) and the Local Church
Local congregations are increasingly the site in which mission efforts are organized and supervised – with missions committees, missions pastors, missions trips, church-to-church partnerships, etc. How do we bring missiology into closer connection with congregations as mission base? What are the theological and practical implications? How do we help provide missiological insight for those providing leadership within such settings? What lessons learned in mission does the church need to be exposed to in order to not repeat them in the 21st century?
Through papers and interactive discussions we look forward to exploring the different aspects of Mission(s) and the Local Church in the 2016 regional and annual EMS meetings.
At the broadest level, categories related to mission(s) and the local church include, but are not limited to, such areas as:
Strategic, Ministerial, and Operational studies
- Church-to-church partnerships in the global context
- Local church and church multiplication
- Cross-cultural outreach in local church
- Short-term missions
- Internet and mission in local church
- Partnerships in urban mission: urban churches and urban missionaries
- Immigration and the local church
- Mission in immigrant churches: mobilization, recruitment, future generations, and transnationalism
- Congregational practices in diaspora missiology
- Developing missions leaders in the local church
- Finance for missions in the local church
- Relationship between local church and parachurch/mission organizations
- Local church as pre-field training ground for missionary candidates
- Cultural dynamics in mission and the local church
- Mobilization and recruitment in the local church
- Challenges to local church evangelism, outreach, and discipleship: secularism, postmodernism, gender, sexuality, religious diversity, multiculturalism, and multi-ethnicity
Theological, Biblical and Historical studies
- Biblical foundation of missions through the local church
- Missionary nature of the local church
- Who is a missionary?
- Biblical models of missionary involvement of the local church
- Organizational structures for mission in the local church
- Theological and historical studies of mission through the local church
- Historical review of the primary players in world mission: mission agencies or the local church
- The evolution of missions from local church to parachurch and back again
- Mission priorities in the local church: evangelism/outreach or community development
Each category contains a wealth of possibilities for research with practical implications to the way local churches engage in missionary work. Our hope is that the papers presented will provoke lively discussion of some of the most pressing issues facing local churches, mission agencies, missionaries, and national churches.
If you are interested in presenting a paper in 2016, please send an e-mail to John Wang with (1) a working title, (2) a 200-300 word abstract or a couple of paragraphs describing your proposed topic or issue and the approach you will take, and (3) a brief identification of yourself. Accepted papers should be about 4500-7000 words in length and use the Harvard documentation system. Some papers read at the regional meetings will be invited to be read at the 2016 annual EMS meeting, leading to the possibility of being published as a chapter in the EMS monograph for 2017.
The northeast conference is set for April 2, 2016 and will be held at First Baptist Church of Flushing in Flushing, NY. You can email John Wang at fbcjohnwang@yahoo.com or call him at 646-684-7837 to further discuss the details of the conference.