Implications of the American Theological Higher Education Crisis

Mission and the Church-Academy Rift [3]

Series: Mission and the Church-Academy Rift

1. Chapter Preview: “Mission between Theory and Practice”

2. The Lay of the Land in Twenty-First-Century Missiology

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In the American context, I see three major tectonic forces underlying the church-academy rift in missiology: (1) anti-intellectualism, (2) the crisis of theological higher education, and (3) the majority-world paradigm shift in theological education.

First is the deep divide between popular culture and academe. The populism amid which the American experiment was born has mutated into a full-bore anti-intellectualism. In “Mission between Theory and Practice,” I portray how the uniquely American religious movement led by Barton W. Stone, the Campbells, and their compatriots followed this trajectory, with terrible consequences for Churches of Christ missiology. Though that chapter attends to a particular denominational context, and I will continue to focus on my tradition here, the argument is relevant far more broadly. Since I’ve covered anti-intellectualism in the published essay, this article and the next will focus on the other two tectonic forces at work in the church-academy rift.