From reverse to inverse to omni-nodal dissenting Protestant mission

This chapter traces the shift from unidirectional Protestant foreign missions at the beginning of the twentieth century to globalized missionary efforts at the end of the century, often fuelled by global migration patterns. These can originate in any country or culture, and end up (along relatively predicable paths dictated by rational markets in education, migration, business, and national interest) in almost any other country. The chapter compares the ‘World Missionary Conference 1910’ in Edinburgh with the 1989 ‘Global Consultation on World Evangelization’ held in Manila, as ‘bookends’ for a period of rapid change and indigenization of Christianity around the world. It points to four key vectors as determinative: the rise of short-term missional experientialism, the co-option of non-missionary globalized settings, diasporic mission, and conversion as resistance. The counter-logical global upsurge of grass-roots Christianity after Edinburgh 1910 demonstrates that people appropriating new futures start from where they are, and go to unpredictable places.