The Missionary Movement from the West

A posthumous book built from lectures Andrew Walls gave in Ghana, New York and New Haven between 2005 and 2008. He spoke from handwritten notes; after his death in 2021 Brian Stanley, his successor at Edinburgh, edited the transcribed recordings into this volume, adding qualifications in the footnotes where the lectures had dated. Eerdmans published it in 2023, with a foreword by Gillian Mary Bediako. The subtitle treats the movement as a life. Its sixteen chapters fall into four parts: birth and early years (Catholic missions and European migration, the Puritan and Pietist origins of Protestant missions, the Great Commission, abolition and humanitarian work); middle age (prophecy and missions, the 'three-self' principle, race, colonial Africa, China); midlife crises (the 1910 World Missionary Conference, medical missions, the 1938 Tambaram conference); and old age (the end of empire in India, China and Africa, and the theological questions left by a church that is now mostly non-Western). Apart from the first chapter the account is largely Protestant. It is the nearest Walls came to a single narrative history of the movement he studied.