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Dana L. Robert, Christian Mission: How Christianity Became A World Religion (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase world religion? Historian Dana Robert insists that we think of Christianity as a world religion, too. After all, she insists, a third of the world's people are Christians, nearly two-thirds of all Christians live outside of Europe and North America, and Christians are more diverse in how they practice their faith than the adherents of any other great world religion. This book's main task is to explain how Christianity came to be that way. Since its very early days, Robert shows, Christianity crossed cultural boundaries. Indeed, she says, cross-cultural movement is basic to Christianity's nature. It lifts people's gaze beyond their local horizons; at the same time, it helps them fashion godly lives in a huge variety of cultural settings.

In four brief chapters, Robert shows how Christianity spread. Its followers moved quickly around the Mediterranean world and into the regions south and east, such as Arabia, Babylon (Iraq), Egypt, Ethiopia, and the lower Nile (today's Sudan). Churches proliferated in the Persian Empire, and missionaries went as far as India and China by the seventh century. By the fifth century Christianity was moving north into the tribal reaches of Gothic, Celtic, and Slavic Europe. While the rise of Islam in the seventh century brought stress and contraction to Christianity in Africa and the Middle East, Christian influence solidified in Europe.

When Europeans ventured in Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries, and throughout the long era of European overseas trade and empire, Christian churches and missionaries came along. Protestants were slow to engage in cross-cultural missions at first, but when they did, their commitment to giving people the Bible and worship in their own language became the bedrock of missionary work.

Translation, in fact, is this book's basic idea for understanding what Christian mission is and does. Christianity became a world religion because it proved to be very translatable. Wherever the Bible was translated, local people heard the great biblical drama in their own words. What started as stories of a foreign god and others' faith became part of the local story too. The universal ideas of the Christian faith were clothed in local fabric.

This book is rich with stories of people on the edges of cross-cultural engagement and religious change. We hear of familiar saints such as Boniface, the Saxon missionary bishop on the German frontier, but also of Sorkaktani Beki, the Christian mother of the great Moghul emporer of China and Persia, Khubilai Khan. Robert wants readers to know who led the new Christian movements as well as the foreign missionaries who brought the new faith. So we meet Simon Kimbangu, who founded the largest independent Christian movement in central Africa, as well as the Scottish missionary explorer of that region, David Livingstone.

The second half of this short book features thematic chapters on politics, women, and conversion, and here the story becomes even more complex and fascinating. In the politics chapter, Robert focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, when Western missions rode the wave of European trade, empire, and colonization into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, and participated in the rapid social and cultural changes that came to many parts of the world. This age of European empire involved many cruel, selfish, and arrogant projects, but should missionaries simply be identified with it as cultural imperialists?

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