Doctoral dissertations on mission: ten-year update, 2002-2011.
Priest, Robert J. ; DeGeorge, Robert
Every ten years the INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH
(IBMR) commissions a review of Englishlanguage dissertations related to
Christian mission. (1) As in the past, the focus in this update is on
research doctorates (such as the Ph.D. or Th.D.), not on professional
doctorates (such as the D.Min. or D.Miss.). The first two IBMR reviews,
for the years 1945-81 (by E. Theodore Bachmann) and 1982-91 (by William
A. Smalley), focused exclusively on dissertations from North America. By
contrast, the next review, 1992-2001 (by Stanley H. Skreslet),
considered English-language dissertations from around the world, as
indeed the present update does. While previous reviews were accompanied
by a subject index and a complete list of dissertation titles, the
current availability of electronic databases and search engines makes
inclusion of such a listing and index of less strategic value. However,
as in the past, we provide an overview of patterns and trends in
research related to missiology and Christian mission.
Establishing Criteria for Inclusion
As a first step in preparing this review, it was essential to
articulate criteria for selecting dissertations that fit the parameters
of this assignment. If we think in terms of concentric circles, the
inner circle of dissertations to be included was relatively easy to
identify. Missiology itself constitutes an academic discipline with its
own history of ideas and debates, its own journals, professional
societies, departments and chairs, and leading scholars. With reference
to this inner circle of dissertations, rather than imposing a conceptual
grid for what was allowed to count as missiology, we simply included all
dissertations formally emerging from, or linked to, recognized
missiological institutions. In practical terms, this meant that if a
dissertation was produced for a school or faculty of missiology/mission
studies, then we included it in our list. Alternatively, if a
dissertation explicitly self-identified as missiological or interacted
substantively with missiological thought, we included it as well. All
dissertation titles submitted to the IBMR, but not including those
involving professional degrees (such as the D.Min. or D.Miss.), were
included.
If we consider the scope of missiology to include whatever it is
that dissertations focus on within missiology programs, one finds a wide
variety of foci. These include research oriented toward church planting
and church growth, Bible translation, church-to-church partnerships or
parish twinning, mission theology, business and mission, human
trafficking, children at risk, development and poverty alleviation, as
well as research focused on younger churches and their relations with
culture, society, and other religions, and research with a missional
focus on Europe and North America.
The very breadth of missiology makes it difficult to establish
formal criteria on what counts as missiological. Many noted
missiologists did doctoral work in missiology proper, such as Douglas
McConnell, Scott Moreau, Roger Schroeder, and Tite Tienou. But
missiology is also interdisciplinary and thus has porous boundaries. It
draws from a variety of cognate disciplines, with leading missiologists
bringing strengths from other disciplines to missiology. One thinks of
Miriam Adeney, Paul Hiebert, Louis Luzbetak, Alan Tippett, Darrell
Whiteman, and Steve Ybarrola from anthropology; Duane Elmer and James
Plueddemann from education; Steve Offut from sociology; Jehu Hanciles,
Bonnie Sue Lewis, Dana Robert, Wilbert Shenk, and Andrew Walls from
history; David Bosch from New Testament; Frances Adeney, Stephen Bevans,
Darrell Guder, Robert Schreiter, and Charles Van Engen from theology;
Charles Kraft, Eugene Nida, and Dan Shaw from linguistics/linguistic
anthropology; and Robert Hunt, Terry Muck, Harold Netland, and J. Dudley
Woodberry from comparative religions/philosophy of religion. What
distinguishes these scholars as missiologists, in comparison to many
others in these cognate disciplines, is that they participate in
missiological conversations and professional meetings, they ground their
work theologically, and they direct their writing and teaching in the
service of Christian mission.
But much of the subject matter of interest to missiology is also of
interest in other disciplines. Thus hundreds of historians around the
world share a research interest in the history of Christian missions,
although only a minority of these historians would wish to self-identify
as missiologists or to ground their work in an explicit commitment to
Christian mission. On a smaller scale, the "anthropology of
Christianity" has recently emerged as an exciting new arena of
anthropological research, with a focus on the same societies and
churches that missiologists have historically studied. Only a minority
of anthropologists of Christianity, however, would self-identify as
Christian, and even fewer as missiologists.
That is, there are clearly many dissertations in a variety of
disciplines whose subject matter is directly related to topics treated
within missiology, although the authors would not wish to be considered
missiologists. We wanted also to include these dissertations in the
outer concentric ring, though written by authors not explicitly
missiological and thus involving somewhat more subjective judgments as
to their inclusion. The following is a summary of criteria for inclusion
that were employed:
1. Dissertations completed within departments of missiology or
mission studies.
2. Dissertations reported to the IBMR.
3. Dissertations that explicitly self-identify as missiological or
that include sustained interaction with missiology or with notable
missiologists.
4. Dissertations that focus on Christian missionaries, missionary
institutions, mission-related practices, or mission theology.
5. Dissertations that focus on Christianity within North America or
Europe (included only if they met one of the first four criteria above).
6. Dissertations that focus on Christianity in regions of the world
besides North America or Europe, whether or not they met any of the
first four criteria.
Resources for Compiling Our Data Set
As never before, dissertation information is available through
online databases. Academic libraries, research organizations, and
universities have collaborated to provide a research environment that is
completely online and affords almost complete accessibility to scholarly
dissertations worldwide. We began with the "Dissertation
Notices" in the quarterly issues of the IBMR for the years 2002-11,
which included 698 academic doctoral dissertations. Then we consulted
Proquest Dissertations and Theses: UK & Ireland and Proquest
Dissertations and Theses: A&I (an international database), which
provided the largest and most comprehensive databases. These were less
than complete, however, for regions outside of North America, Europe,
and South Africa. So we extended the international scope of the data set
by searching national databases from Australia (Council of Australian
University Librarians), (2) Hong Kong (HKLIS Dissertations and Theses
Collections and the HKU Scholars Hub), (3) India (Online Union Catalogue
of Indian Universities and Shodhganga: A Reservoir of Indian Theses),
(4) New Zealand (NZresearch.org), (5) and the Philippines (National
Library of the Philippines), (6) plus those available through
WorldCatDissertations. (7)
We carried out keyword, phrase, and subject searches of these
databases, using several dozen mission-related search terms, and then
screened results in accord with the criteria summarized above. When some
of the databases provided less than complete abstracts or lacked other
information, Internet searches were conducted to assess whether the
dissertation fit our criteria, and if so, to collect information
relevant to the analysis provided in this article. In many cases, open
access to the dissertation or its abstract was available through
university library sites, Google Books, institutional web pages and/or
social media, as well as personal websites. Eventually we arrived at our
final list of 1,492 dissertations and entered the basic information upon
which this analysis rests into our database.
Dissertations by Country
Altogether we collected information on 1,492 mission-related
dissertations, a 61 percent increase from the 925 recorded for the
previous decade. These dissertations were produced in institutions
located in twenty-three different countries, as shown in table 1.
A 62 percent majority of the dissertations were from the United
States, which represents a slight drop from 67 percent the previous
decade. The United Kingdom produced 15.4 percent of these dissertations,
virtually unchanged from the previous decade's 15.2 percent.
Australia went from just 1.5 percent of the total to 6.6 percent, and
the Philippines went from no dissertations at all to 1.3 percent of the
total. Altogether, Asia expanded to 4.0 percent, from 1.2 percent in the
previous decade. With the recent addition of a significant number of
seminary-based, English-language Ph.D. programs in Africa and Asia, it
is likely that accelerated shifts from these areas will be evident in
the next ten years.
Dissertations by Ethnicity of Author
The fact that no English-language dissertations were produced
within South Korea does not tell us anything about what percentage of
the total dissertations were produced by Koreans. Unfortunately,
dissertation databases provide no explicit or consistent information on
the nationality or ethnic identity of the authors. But author names
provide one clue. And so, in consultation with several missiologists
with relevant expertise, (8) it was possible to achieve a consensus in
the majority of cases on the ethnic identity of Korean and Chinese
authors in our list based on their names. The dissertation focus often
provided confirmatory support for this assessment of ethnic ancestry.
The individuals whose names were understood as capable of being either
Korean or Chinese, or whose identity was in doubt on other grounds, were
investigated online, and in most cases we were able to learn the ethnic
origins of the authors through information on the Internet, either
correctly identifying them as Korean or Chinese or eliminating them as
neither. Following this procedure--with a warning to readers that these
numbers should be understood as approximate only--we calculate that 9.6
percent of these dissertations were written by individuals with Korean
ancestry, and 4.4 percent were written by individuals with Chinese
ancestry.
Again, while no English-language dissertations on our topic came
from a Latin American country, and only two came from African countries
other than South Africa, this tells us nothing about what percentage of
authors were African or of Hispanic/ Latino ancestry. Since many people
of European ancestry are citizens of African countries, their names
provide no clue as to their citizenship. But if we provisionally limit
ourselves to dissertations with an Africa-related focus whose authors
have names that are not European, Korean, or Chinese--for example, names
such as Nzuzi Mukuwa or Godfrey Ndubuisi--we calculate that roughly 12.9
percent of all our dissertations were written by Africans with African
ancestry. By a similar process, we estimate that 4.7 percent of our
total count were written by those of Indian ancestry, and roughly 2.5
percent by individuals with Hispanic/ Latino ancestry. Clearly evident
in these dissertations is the trend for people from around the world to
be researching and writing about the church and mission in their own
contexts, with writers of European ancestry no longer having a near
monopoly on the representation of others.
Most dissertations (73.4 percent) had a stated geographic or
culture-region focus. Table 2 shows the breakdown in terms of geographic
focus in comparison with that of the previous decade. The largest
increase was in dissertations focused on Africa. Half of these
Africa-focused dissertations appear to have been written by scholars
themselves originally from Africa. And roughly half of the
Africa-focused dissertations centered on five English-speaking
countries: Nigeria (40), Kenya (35), South Africa (35), Ghana (27), and
Uganda (25). By contrast, 80 percent of all African countries appeared
on the list only once or twice, or not at all.
Dissertations focused on Asia continued to compose over a third of
all geographically focused dissertations. Roughly 60 percent of these
dissertations were written by scholars who by nationality or ethnicity
were Burmese, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Thai, or Vietnamese.
And over two-thirds (71 percent) were concentrated on five countries:
South Korea (101), India (91), China (53), the Philippines (27), and
Japan (23). The significant increase in dissertations focused on Oceania
is largely due to work being done in the universities of Australia and
New Zealand, which is where 85 percent of these dissertations were
written. The relatively low proportion of dissertations focused on
Europe and North America is partially because we required a higher
threshold of inclusion to our database for dissertations focused here,
as mentioned earlier. The decline in proportional attention to Latin
America and the Caribbean merits attention.
Leading Degree-Granting Institutions
Table 3 shows the thirty institutions that granted ten or more
academic doctorates in missiology in the decade. These institutions
produced 51 percent of all dissertations on mission-related topics,
while the other 49 percent were produced at another 296 institutions.
The majority of these leading institutions are either in the United
States or in the United Kingdom. As in the previous decade, Fuller
Theological Seminary alone accounts for over 10 percent of all
dissertations in our list.
It is worth considering historical trends in relation to leading
institutions. Because the first two dissertation reviews included data
only on North American institutions, and since nearly two-thirds of all
dissertations are done in North America, a closer look at trends in
North America merits our attention. Table 4 lists the top ten schools in
North America for each period of time as a way of examining trends. The
top school, measured purely by number of academic dissertations
produced, is listed as 1, the second as 2, and so on.
Several observations are worth making. First, many of the leading
schools of an earlier era subsequently dropped off the map. For example,
the Kennedy School of Missions of the Hartford Seminary Foundation,
where many notable missiologists earned their doctorates (including Dean
Gilliland, Charles Kraft, and Charles Taber), showed up as number 7 on
the earliest list, despite having closed its doors in the 1960s.
Columbia University, where
Donald McGavran did his doctoral work, was number 3 on the early
list but ceased to be a significant center for mission-related research
in the 1980s. Indeed, with nine of the top ten schools currently
seminaries, the only major university left in the top ten is Boston
University, which is the only remaining "ranked top
'global' university that has missiology as a degree,"
including a doctoral program in mission studies. (9) While the growing
focus on "world Christianity" at some universities (such as
Emory and Baylor) may well place others on this list ten years from now,
world Christianity is a somewhat different focus from missiology or
mission studies, and the divergence will need to be carefully plotted.
In the earlier years, the majority of leading institutions that
produced doctoral dissertations related to Christian mission were
mainline Protestant. In the most recent decade the majority are
evangelical Protestant. Two mainline Protestant schools, however, have
consistently remained in the top ten: Princeton Theological Seminary and
Boston University. Luther Seminary is the one additional mainline
Protestant seminary in the most recent top ten listing, a newcomer to
the list. Thus three of the top ten are mainline Protestant schools
representing Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran bodies. The other
seven are evangelical Protestant, reflecting in part the current
stronger support for the Christian missionary enterprise within
evangelical circles. Apart from Boston University and Princeton
Theological Seminary, only Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary has
consistently been on the list during all four periods. Only one Catholic
institution (Catholic University of America) has periodically appeared
on the top ten list. It failed to make the list this time, with
seventeen other American institutions ahead of it.
Research Methods Employed
Dissertation abstracts often, though not always, provide
information on the research methods employed. The majority of abstracts
would have benefited from a clearer summary of method. In some cases,
even abstracts were not available. But for 74 percent of the
dissertations, enough information was available to code for the
methodology employed, using a fairly basic coding system. Since
abstracts did not consistently or clearly differentiate between purely
interview-based methods and participant-observation methods, and indeed
since many combined the two, these are coded together. Table 5 provides
a breakdown in the percentages of dissertations using each method,
including only the dissertations where it was possible to determine the
methodology employed.
A variety of observations are possible here. First, it is worth
noting that over 80 percent of the dissertations are empirically
oriented, and not purely abstract or theological. Stanley Skreslet has
suggested that many leading mission theologians are "prone to a
preference for the abstract over the particular" and thus formulate
definitions of missiology that "tend to obscure the broad scope of
contemporary research on missiology." (10) That is, if one looks at
the subjects of missiologists' dissertations, there is a mismatch
between many of the textbook definitions of missiology and what actually
happens at the cutting edge of dissertation research. Even if we limit
ourselves to looking only at the inner circle of dissertations that are
explicitly missiological, this conclusion appears to hold true. For
example, if we examine dissertations written at schools accredited by
the American Association of Theological Schools (ATS), only 24 percent
are purely library based--that is, limited to exegetical, theoretical,
and theological treatments. This is admittedly higher than the 12
percent of dissertations in other American institutions that are purely
library based. But the majority are clearly focused on empirical
research of historical or contemporary realities related to the ways in
which Christians attempt to live out Christian mission, which is not to
say that many of these do not also include theological considerations.
Only 4.3 percent of dissertations involve a primary focus on
questionnaire-based research, although an additional 11.5 percent use
mixed methods that include at least some questionnaire-based data.
Overall, the amount and quality of the quantitative research coming out
of missiological schools appears to be low. If one adds the
mixed-methods dissertations that include interviewing or participant
observation and the subset of historically oriented dissertations that
make use of oral history interviews (4.3 percent) to the dissertations
using only interviews and/or participant observation, fully 34.7 percent
make use of interviewing and/or participant observation in their
dissertations. And if we limit ourselves to ATS-accredited schools, this
usage of interviews and/or participant observation comes to 48.4 percent
of the total. A majority of these, in addition to the 6.2 percent from
ATS schools that use primarily survey data, seem to have at least some
instrumental focus on missiologically applied aspects of the research.
That is, a high proportion of the more missiological dissertations seem
to be framed intentionally as being in service to the doing of mission.
Historiographical dissertations are the largest group of
dissertations. While they compose only 24.6 percent of dissertations
from ATS-accredited schools, they constitute 61 percent of the
dissertations from other schools. Many such dissertations focus on the
subject matter of Christian missions, but without any theological
framing or expressed commitment to instrumentally serve Christian
mission. That is, many of these are written by secular scholars or by
Christian scholars without an interest in formally linking their work to
missiology as a field. The Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the
Missionary Movement and World Christianity, for example, would include
many such scholars doing research centrally focused on topics of
relevance to this review, but explicitly framing their work as
nonmissiological. Clearly, much of this is high quality scholarly work
of great value to missiologists more broadly.
Considering only historically oriented dissertations, table 6
presents a breakdown in the periods of time being studied. The results
are largely unchanged from the previous decade, when Stanley Skreslet
extended a challenge for missiologists to redirect research efforts
toward earlier eras of mission history.11 This is not to say that these
periods do not receive a great deal of attention by historians and
biblical scholars, but only that relatively little of this research
explicitly focuses on missiological themes or missionary dynamics.
Departments/Disciplines by Degrees Earned
While many of the dissertation records provided no information on
the discipline or department within which the doctoral degree was
granted, 64 percent did provide this information. Doctoral degrees were
earned in a wide variety of fields, from art history to economics,
folklore to geography, journalism to comparative literature,
women's studies to world Christianity, and French to music. Table 7
shows the disciplines or departments most frequently listed.
Most degrees (97 percent) in Intercultural Studies (ICS) were
granted by ATS-accredited seminaries (such as Asbury Theological
Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity
School), with the remainder by Biola University. Each of these
institutions has a strong focus on culture, often including
anthropologists on their faculty. But despite the intentionally neutral
nomenclature, they clearly intend their programs to be missiological.
Doctorates are also granted in missiology or mission studies or world
missions at a wide variety of institutions. But roughly twice as many
doctorates were received in ICS as in mission studies, world mission,
and missiology together. The dominance of the ICS nomenclature reflects
the desire that graduates be accredited in settings that are not
exclusively Christian. And yet these are, in part, theological degrees.
Each of the ATS-accredited schools offering the ICS Ph.D. requires a
prior theological degree for admission to its program and includes
theological coursework in its ICS curriculum. As a group, they remain
explicitly missiological. A similar rationale in nomenclature may partly
underlie the split between degrees offered in religion or religious
studies as against theology or theological studies. All of these
departments or disciplines, as well as educational studies and
psychology, were solidly present in ATS-accredited institutions, as well
as in other institutions. By contrast, 100 percent of dissertations in
anthropology, sociology, and English, along with 96.6 percent of
dissertations done in disciplines or departments of history, were in
non-ATS-accredited schools. Historically oriented dissertations at
seminaries and divinity schools typically were located within
disciplines or departments that were not exclusively historical. With
history coming in second after ICS, we again see the centrality of
history in current research related to Christian mission and world
Christianity.
The 35 dissertations in anthropology reflect a new trend in a
discipline that formerly discouraged research related to Christianity
and Christian missions, but where the "anthropology of
Christianity" is now a fertile and expanding new subfield of
research, meriting careful attention by missiologists more broadly.
Gender and Missiology
We spent a good deal of time working to identify the gender of
dissertation authors. We estimate that we were able to code with
reasonable confidence the gender of 97.5 percent of the authors. (12) Of
these, 26.3 percent were women, and 73.7 percent men. And while 32.4
percent of authors at non-ATS-accredited schools were women, only 17.3
percent of dissertation authors at ATS-accredited schools were women,
with 82.7 percent men. In the top five ATS-accredited mainline
Protestant institutions (Boston, Drew, GTU, Luther, Princeton), 26.5
percent of dissertations were by women, while at the five top
evangelical Protestant institutions (Asbury, Concordia, Fuller,
Southern, TEDS), only 14.3 percent of dissertations were by women. Women
composed roughly 27 percent of the Chinese authors, 18 percent of the
Korean authors, and 12 percent of the African authors. Since more than
half of all missionaries are women, and more than half of all church
members around the world are women, these figures show a significant
underrepresentation of women in missiology. Gender, we noticed, matters
significantly in the way in which missiology is conducted. Only 2
percent of all male authors included a central focus in their
dissertations on gender and/or on the lives of women, while 24 percent
of female authors included such a central focus.
Missiology, Mission Studies, and World Christianity
Missiology has historically had a close connection with the
missionary movement and indeed has centrally focused on studying and
serving this movement, not least by training those serving as
missionaries. And missionaries have been understood as traveling to
"mission fields'--geographic regions and/or ethnolinguistic
groups that were clearly differentiated from "home" spaces and
people, which were often presumed to be Christian.
This central concern to communicate the Gospel to unevangelized
people continues to be one thrust within missiology today. Reflecting
this concern, the World Christian Database employs a typology to
categorize countries of the world as follows:
World A: countries where less than 50 percent of the people have
been evangelized
World B: countries where at least 50 percent have been evangelized
but where less than 60 percent are Christian
World C: countries that are at least 60 percent Christian (13)
The countries of World A include 13 percent of the world's
population; those of World B, 56 percent; and those of World C, 30
percent.
One purpose of this typology is clearly to highlight the importance
of attending to World A. But if we examine country-specific
dissertations in the light of this typology, we discover that 54 percent
of dissertations focus on the 30 percent of people living in World C.
That is, over half of dissertations focus on the 30 percent of the world
that is most Christian, with 43 percent of dissertations focused on the
56 percent living in World B, and less than 3 percent of dissertations
focused on the 13 percent living in World A. Even if we consider only
dissertations from ATS-accredited seminaries or from the three largest
producers of dissertations in our list (Fuller, TEDS, and Asbury), only
3 percent of dissertations have a focus on World A. That is, these
dissertations focus far more research on majority-Christian countries
from World C, such as Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Philippines, or Uganda
than on countries from World A, such as Algeria, Bangladesh, Nepal, or
Senegal.
The following patterns appear to be present in the dissertations we
examined:
* Much of the research focuses on world Christianity, with
missionaries only partially in view, if at all. Especially in
universities, a shift from mission studies to world Christianity is
clearly evident.
* Within seminaries and formal missiology programs in North
America, many doctoral students are internationals whose research is
focused on the engagement of their own Christian communities with
social, cultural, and pastoral matters.
* Even where dissertations focus on relatively unevangelized
people, these people often are part of diaspora communities in regions
where Christianity is stronger. Thus a dissertation may focus on the
evangelism of North Africans living in France, or of Mongolians living
in South Korea.
* With Christian mission increasingly conceptualized as being
"from everywhere to everywhere," an increasing number of
dissertations in formal missiology programs focus on settings within
Europe or North America. That is, missional engagement with Western
settings appears to be a growing focus. The same tool kit of cultural
analysis formerly applied by missionaries to distant places is now
applied close to home. And the agents of mission in such settings
increasingly include recent immigrants from abroad.
* Conceptions of Christian mission have broadened to include a
wider variety of social concerns, with the "whole gospel for the
whole person" increasingly central. Dissertations from the ICS
program at Fuller Theological Seminary, for example, no longer focus
almost exclusively on church growth but on everything from children at
risk to human trafficking, racial reconciliation, or poverty
alleviation. Similar trends are present across other seminaries.
In our increasingly globalized and diverse world, it appears that
doctoral students find missiology programs well suited to helping them
engage a diverse world across a wide variety of social settings, and
with a wide variety of ministries and commitments in view. Would-be
theological educators in India, Malawi, or the Philippines may find much
of theological doctoral education in North America to be rather
Eurocentric, with missiology or intercultural studies programs better
suited to helping them research pastoral and theological realities
related to witch accusations, polygamy, caste, reconciliation, Hinduism,
or poverty and wealth. American ethnic or racial minorities with an
interest in racial reconciliation are apparently finding intercultural
studies programs suited to help them pursue their interests and
callings.
In short, the fields of missiology, of mission studies, and of
world Christianity are in transition. While there are continuities here,
there is also change. But the story, at least as told through
dissertations, is less a story of demise or retrenchment than one of
expansion, revision, and reinvention.
Notes
(1.) This article is the fourth such review to appear in the IBMR,
following E. Theodore Bachrnann, "North American Doctoral
Dissertations on Mission: 1945-1981," vol. 7, no. 3 (July 1983):
98-134; William A. Smalley, "Doctoral Dissertations on Mission:
Ten-Year Update, 1982-1991," vol. 17, no. 3 (July 1993): 97-125;
and Stanley H. Skreslet, "Doctoral Dissertations on Mission:
Ten-Year Update, 1992-2001," vol. 27, no. 3 (July 2003): 98-133.
For providing invaluable feedback on an earlier version of this article,
we wish to thank Steve Bevans, Darrell Guder, Nelson Jennings, Harold
Netland, Dana Robert, Wilbert Shenk, Stanley Skreslet, and Steve
Ybarrola. Any weaknesses remaining are our own.
(2.) http://caulweb01.anu.edu.au/caul-programs/australasian_di
gital-theses / finding-theses.
(3.) http://libguides.library.cityu.edu.hk/content.php?pid=81664&sid =609665; also http://hub.hku.hk.
(4.) http: //indcat.ilfflibnet.ac.in/; also http: / /
shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in.
(5.) http://nzresearch.org.nz.
(6.) http:/ /web.nlp.gov.ph/nlp/?q=node/1613.
(7.) Accessed through the database subscription of Trinity
Evangelical Divinity School.
(8.) We thank John Cheong, Clive Chin, Ethan Christofferson,
Richard Cook, Minhee Jyun, Myunghee Lee, James Park, and Yi-Chin Swingle
for special help in this matter.
(9.) Personal email from Dana Robert to Robert Priest, June 13,
2013.
(10.) Stanley Skreslet, Comprehending Mission: The Questions,
Methods, Themes, Problems, and Prospects of Missiology (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis Books, 2012), 10, 9.
(11.) Ibid., 100.
(12.) In addition to considering each name itself, a variety of
other sources proved helpful. It was often possible to find the author
name linked to the dissertation title with a picture and brief bio
(including use of gender pronouns) on church/ministry organization
websites, graduate university and student web pages, and faculty
websites. This search was helped by the fact that ProQuest often had
links that identified authors' current or past institutional
affiliations. Facebook/LinkedIn searches also proved helpful for
explicitly identifying gender, as did book/dissertation reviews.
Abstracts and dissertation excerpts often provided an
"acknowledgment" section where the name of a husband or wife
was mentioned, thus providing a supplemental clue. Clearly, none of this
secondary research gives complete certainty; when it seemed to us
uncertain, we left the gender variable blank.
(13.) David B. Barrett and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Trends,
A.n. 30--A.D. 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus
(Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 2001), 761-69.
Robert J. Priest is G. W. Aldeen Professor of International Studies
and Professor of Mission and Anthropology at Trinity Evangelical
Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois. He currently serves as President
of the American Society of Missiology. --rpriest@tiu.edu
Robert DeGeorge, a Ph.D. student in historical theology at Trinity
Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, previously served as a
senior pastor with the Salvation Army and as an instructor of biblical
and theological studies at the Salvation Army College for Officer
Training, Chicago, Illinois. --zrdegeor@tiu.edu
Table 1. Mission-Related Degrees Granted, by Country
2002- 1992-
Country 2011 2001
United States 923 618
United Kingdom 230 141
Australia 99 14
South Africa 41 19
Italy 39 28
Canada 36 40
India 34 9
New Zealand 23 8
Philippines 19 --
Netherlands 12 18
Sweden 8 9
China/Hong Kong 5 2
Finland 5 8
Norway 4 1
Czech Republic 3 --
Germany 3 2
Belgium 2 5
Denmark 2 --
Nigeria 1 --
Poland 1 1
Taiwan 1 --
Uganda 1 --
Ireland -- 1
Spain -- 1
TOTAL 1,492 925
Table 2. Geographic Focus of Mission-Related
Dissertations by Continent, by Percentage
Continent 2002-2011 1992-2001
Africa 28.9 23.7
Asia 36.1 35.9
Europe 8.1 7.2
Latin America and the Caribbean 7.5 10.2
North America 12.3 19.5
Oceania 7.2 3.5
Table 3. Institutions Granting Ten or More Mission-
Related Doctoral Degrees, 2002-2011
United States
Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Ky. 46
Biola University, La Mirada, Calif. 12
Boston University, Boston, Mass. 35
Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. 10
Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Ind. 33
Drew University, Madison, N.J. 12
Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Calif. 151
Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, Calif. 15
Luther Seminary, Minneapolis, Minn. 18
Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary,
Memphis, Tenn. 11
Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, N.J. 19
Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Miss. 16
Regent University, Virginia Beach, Va. 13
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary,
Wake Forest, N.C. 12
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky. 31
Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary,
Fort Worth, Tex. 27
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Ill. 82
University of California, Los Angeles, Calif. 13
United Kingdom
Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, (a) Oxford, England 41
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England 45
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England 10
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland 33
University of Leeds, Leeds, England 12
University of London, London, England 19
University of Oxford, Oxford, England 12
University of Wales, Cardiff, Wales (b) 34
South Africa
University of Pretoria, Pretoria 10
University of South Africa, Pretoria 25
Italy
Pontifical Urban University, Rome 21
Netherlands
Utrecht University, Utrecht 10
(a) Doctorates at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies (OCMS)
were granted through the Open University, the University
of Wales, and the University of Leeds. Thus, in this table,
doctorates listed for the OCMS are also listed with their
respective degree-granting university.
(b) The high number of dissertations from the University of
Wales is somewhat misleading. With over 100,000 students, the
University of Wales was recently the focus of controversy over
its validation of "schemes of study" at roughly 130 centers and
colleges around the world. In 2011 it announced it would close
its validation programs, requiring institutions like the OCMS to
forge other partnerships for accrediting their programs.
Table 4. Top Ten North American Schools in Granting
Mission-Related Doctorates, by Time Period
2002- 1992- 1982- 1945-
Institution 2011 2001 1991 1981
Fuller Theological Seminary 1 1 1 --
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School 2 2 -- --
Asbury Theological Seminary 3 -- -- --
Boston University 4 6 7 1
Concordia Theological Seminary,
Fort Wayne 5 -- -- --
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary 6 5 -- 4
Southwestern Baptist Theological
Seminary 7 3 8 5
Princeton Theological Seminary 8 4 3 6
Luther Seminary 9 -- -- --
Reformed Theological Seminary 10 -- -- --
University of Chicago -- 7 9 2
Yale University -- 8 -- --
Harvard University -- 9 -- 10
Catholic University of America -- 10 10 --
Drew University -- -- 2 --
Graduate Theological Union -- -- 4 --
Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago -- -- 5 --
Union Theological Seminary, New York -- -- 6 8
Columbia University, New York -- -- -- 3
Kennedy School of Missions,
Hartford, Conn. -- -- -- 7
New York University -- -- -- 10
Table 5. Methodology Employed in Mission-Related
Dissertations, by Percentage
Library based (exegetical, theological, theoretical) 19.4 (a)
Historiographical (archival, library based, and/or
oral-history interview) 45.0
Qualitative field methods (interview and/or
participant observation) 19.9
Survey questionnaires 4.3
Mixed methods (both qualitative and quantitative
methods) 11.5
(a) Column total exceeds 100% due to rounding.
Table 6. Time Focus of Historically Oriented
Mission-Related Dissertations, by Percentage
Time period 2002-2011 (a) 1992-2001
Postapostolic church (to 600) 1.3 0.2
Medieval (600-1500) 1.8 1.7
Early modern (1500-1800) 10.9 13.2
Modern (1800-1945) 56.2 55.4
Late modern (after 1945) 29.7 29.4
(a) Column totals less than 100% due to rounding.
Table 7. Top Ten Departments or Disciplines in
Which Mission-Related Doctorates Were Earned
Intercultural studies 262
History /historical studies 148
Mission studies/world mission/ missiology 135
Theology /theological studies 110
Religion/ religious studies 48
Education/ educational studies 37
Anthropology 35
Psychology 13
Sociology 12
English 11
