Stanley H. Skreslet’s new book, Constructing Mission History, offers a methodological proposal for how to study mission history through the lens of speech act theory. It then follows this approach to construct an expansive history of Protestant and Catholic missionary interactions with indigenous agents from the 16th century onward. The book begins with an overview of three existing “master narratives” or approaches to mission history: (1) Promise and Fulfillment, a Christian interpretation of mission history as the fulfillment of biblical promises; (2) Mission as a form of Colonialism, a secular scholarly approach that views Christian missions critically and emphasizes the collusion between missionaries and colonialism; and (3) The Lens of World Christianity, a multidisciplinary field that emphasizes global Christian diversity and indigenous Christian agency. Noting both the strengths and disadvantages of each approach, Skreslet argues that none of them sufficiently holds missionary initiative in balance with indigenous agency. The purpose of his book is to suggest an alternate route to mission history while drawing on the insights of these three master narratives.
For Skreslet, speech act theory provides a more useful lens through which to view mission history, specifically by attending to missionaries’ communicative utterances. He translates the concepts of locution (sounds producing speech), illocution (speech linked to intention), and perlocution (the effects of speech) into a two-fold formula, which becomes the basic outline for the book. First, the book attends to missionaries assertions and intentions in their written texts, focusing on three key themes in Part I: salvation, knowledge-sharing, and benevolence. Second, the book turns to missionaries’ performances or accomplished actions, identifying four processes of mission performance in Part II: power encounters, constructions of Christianopolis, vernacular Christianities, and subversive witnessing. The book is thus arranged thematically rather than chronologically. By offering multiple examples from modern missionary endeavors across the globe, Skreslet demonstrates that the seven aforementioned concepts have been significant for both Protestant and Catholic missions.
Chapter 1 argues that different kinds of missionaries (including the Jesuit Francis Xavier, Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, and early Pietist and Puritan missionaries) have consistently made claims about salvation. The chapter also shows a modernist shift in 20th-century missionary thinking away from conversion and toward social development, humanization, and ecumenism. The second chapter covers the missionary desire to share worldly knowledge with non-western peoples. Among the missionaries featured are Jesuit scientists under the influence of the Renaissance and post-Enlightenment Protestants who emphasized education as a path to human progress. Chapter 3 considers the importance of benevolence in mission history, with Catholic roots in the medieval Latin Christian concept of charity and Protestant roots in Luther’s new regulations for almsgiving. From Jesuit confraternal organizations in China to Protestant “Women’s Work for Women” to the YMCA and more recent Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant NGOs, Skreslet shows that social services have been integral to the practice of mission.
The second part of the book addresses “performance patterns,” moving from missionary motives to the actual outcomes of missionary actions. Chapter 4 examines the power dynamics involved in modern missions, arguing that mission history is a product of struggles for dominance. Power dynamics included missionaries benefitting from colonial power or emulating colonizers, local political power expelling missionaries, rivalries between missionaries and indigenous spiritual leaders, and the influence of indigenous Christians. Chapter 5 then offers historical examples of missionaries seeking to construct Christianopolis, or socially engineer an ideal Christian community. Such efforts abound in each region of the world that Skreslet surveys—from Jesuit reductions in Paraguay to Native American “praying towns” in Puritan New England to Protestant villages for freed slaves in Sierra Leone to the Taiping movement in China, the latter being an entirely indigenous endeavor.
The 6th chapter turns to vernacular Christianities, first documenting ways that missionaries presented the gospel in new cultural contexts through the translation of Bibles, catechisms, and other literature. Emphasizing that such projects always involved collaborations with local people, Skreslet also highlights other mediums through which missionary religion and indigenous culture blended together: art, music, artifacts, architecture, and norms of living. Finally, Chapter 7 addresses the theme of subversive witnessing, recognizing that the few missionaries (like Las Casas) who challenged colonial power and sought to humanize indigenous people were outliers. Indigenous subversive witness was more successful and took multiple forms, including revolts generated outside of mission control and movements like Ethiopianism, Dalit theology, and Pentecostalism.
The second part of this book is substantially longer than the first. This helpfully allows the book to emphasize not just missionary actions but also the responses of indigenous people, including those who rejected missionary messages and those who adopted and adapted the missionaries’ faith. Throughout the book, Skreslet engages with the three master narratives on mission history, balancing his own theological understanding of mission as a Christian calling with a clear recognition that missionaries frequently supported European imperial designs or viewed Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans with a colonial mindset of Western superiority. This is not, therefore, a one-sided history, but one that gives careful attention to multiple perspectives. The book also achieves balance in its treatment of both Catholic and Protestant history, which is not always the case for studies on mission and World Christianity. Several examples are also taken from Orthodox contexts.
Although an emphasis on indigenous Christian agency is not absent from the first half of the book, in Part II, this World Christianity principle appears most strongly. Here, as well, the book recognizes that European male protagonists are often the focus of mission histories, and it notes the activist contributions of a few missionary women like Mary Slessor in Nigeria, Emma Cushman in Turkey, Elise Shepping in Korea, and the Maryknoll Sisters in Latin America. Further insight might be gained by reading Skreslet’s text alongside Dana Robert’s American Women in Mission: A Social History of Their Thought and Practice (Mercer University Press, 1997) to discern whether the seven themes of Constructing Mission History apply equally well to women’s missionary movements or if a gendered perspective might raise different themes.
This book draws from an impressive array of existing scholarship on mission history and a sampling of primary texts by missionaries working in a variety of global contexts. The bibliography itself is a valuable resource, while the model Skreslet offers of examining missionary intentions against the outcomes of missions would be just as useful for studying mission history in contexts, like the Middle East, that do not appear often in the book. With its broad historical and geographical scope, its reflections on key themes of mission, and the fresh insights it draws from speech act theory, this is a book that all students, teachers, and scholars of mission will want on their shelves.
