This study builds an argument for ‘embrace’ as an adequate Christian response to the refugee crisis. Against the ‘church as homogenous unit’ missiological theory of Donald McGavran and Peter Wagner, the author argues that the list of greetings in Romans 16 proves that at least some of the house churches in Rome were mixed – migrants of different backgrounds living together. Thus Paul’s exhortation to welcome one another.

Those who want to make social issues a bigger part of the world evangelization agenda have “met with the opposition of evangelical forces that seem committed to pull the [missions] movement backwards, towards mission styles of the Cold War era and towards pushing the imperial marketing of theological and missiological packages created within the framework of North American society.” This article examines the Lausanne movement, including the landmark evangelization conferences of 1974 and 1989 and focuses on questions of social issues (...) and the gospel. The major purpose is to identify and describe three missiological streams which must establish dialogue with one another if the task of world evangelization is to be accomplished. The “church growth” missiological school, “managerial missiology” “fails to appreciate those aspects of missionary work that cannot be measured or reduced to figures”. (shrink)

Latin America is not one, but many. It exists in six different regions with differing forms of Catholicism. This Catholicism had acted from a position of power. The challenge of modernity and independence movements made people anti-Church if not anti-Christian. New missionary priests from North America and Europe changed the face of Latin American Catholicism after the second world war. Yet Catholicism is not deeply rooted in Latin America and thus has had to resort to political means for survival. In (...) the pluralistic world of the future, Catholicism in Latin America will have to live with change. (shrink)