This volume comprises an excellent introductory survey of Christian missions from A.D. 30 to the twentieth century.

Fall '26
Required FLBC textbook for History of Missions course, taught by Dr. Steve Mundfrom. 

A deeper understanding of the grand history of mission leads to a faithful expression of God's mission today.

From the beginning, God's mission has been carried out by people sent around the world. From Abraham to Jesus, the thread that weaves its way throughout Scripture is a God who sends his people across the world, proclaiming his kingdom. As the world has evolved, Christian mission continues to be a foundational tradition in the church.

In this one-volume textbook, Edward Smither weaves together a comprehensive history of Christian mission, from the apostles to the modern church. In each era, he focuses on the people sent by God to the ends of the earth, while also describing the cultural context they encountered. Smither highlights the continuity and development across thousands of years of global mission.

Fall '26
Required FLBC textbook for History of Missions course, taught by Dr. Steve Mundfrom. 

Fall '25
Required FLBC textbook for History of Missions course, taught by Pr. Andrew Kneeland.

Fall '24
Required FLBC textbook for History of Missions course, taught by Pr. Andrew Kneeland.

Brings together lectures and articles by the renowned historian of world Christianity, making them available, many for the first time, to scholars and students of world mission. While examining the many aspects that have characterized mission, indigenous Christianity, and colonialism in modern Africa, The Missionary Movement in Christian History has a far broader reach. Essays such as “The Gospel as the Prisoner and Liberator of Culture” reveal the paradoxes of the Christian movement as a whole in discussing how different primitive Mediterranean Christianity is from early Catholicism, from Celtic monasticism, from Reformation Protestantism, and from Nigerian Spirit Christianity.

Andrew Walls shows how the central question for Christianity has always been one of identity in many different forms, a phenomenon revealed at each stage of its history by the missionary movement. What this means for theology, however, has hardly been explored. This is the subtext of Walls’ work, providing extraordinary insights and successful counters to secular critiques of world Christianity.

Fall '26
Recommended FLBC textbook for History of Missions course, taught by Dr. Steve Mundfrom.