Introductory Essay: Migration and World Christianity

Twenty years ago, few would have lamented the dearth of literature linking migration and mission studies more than Andrew Walls. Walls’s contribution to numerous fields and disciplines is simply colossal, as is his generational impact. While the migrant factor in Walls’s writing has perhaps garnered less explicit attention than others, several themes have greatly contributed to missiological thinking including the significant role of migration in advancing God’s missionary purposes throughout the biblical narrative, the critical function of migrancy in the cross-cultural diffusion of the Christian movement throughout its history, and the centrality of displacement, uprootedness, and sojourning for understanding the very nature of Christian life. His article, “Mission and Migration: The Diaspora Factor in Christian History,”1 remains seminal in this regard. Over the last number of years, few scholars have argued more persuasively and contributed more substantively to the role of migration in the shaping of World Christianity than Jehu J. Hanciles. The enduring relevance and contribution of Beyond Christendom (2008), combined with the recent publication of Migration and the Making of Global Christianity (2021), provide an impetus for fresh analysis and assessment of developments in the field. Towards this end, the April 2023 issue of the IBMR is dedicated to assessing the contribution of migration to missiological research and reflection with the aim of fostering new thinking, analysis, and perspectives. The essays in this issue represent a generation of scholars that have emerged and benefited from the scholarship in previous decades. Methodologically, the essays foreground the African experience in the West and are attentive to issues of power and positionality, to collaboration and partnership both in research and in writing, and to the importance of narrating religious vitality by and with often overlooked and discounted ecclesial agents and communities. First, Jehu J. Hanciles’s autobiographical essay describes the seminal impact that Andrew Walls had on his intellectual life and scholarship from the time he became a