Trauma challenges Christian approaches to suffering and healing, for the unnarratability and the unspeakability of trauma fundamentally disrupt our understanding of witness and its relationship with healing. Although missiological reflection on healing and reconciliation has not adequately grappled with trauma’s implications for the theology and practice of mission, historical examples of women’s healing mission practice show the capacity for trauma healing embedded in the Christian tradition and afford resources for developing a trauma-centered account of healing mission for the twenty-first century. Reading the story of the hemorrhaging woman (Mark 5:25–34) from a trauma-centered perspective alongside case studies from Indonesia reveals healing as an ongoing, multidimensional process known and witnessed through embodied experience. The chapter proposes an aftermath model of mission centered on “poetic witnessing” as a model of healing mission capable of addressing trauma’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual effects.
Mission studies, or missiology, is an interdisciplinary field that utilizes theological, historical, and social scientific methods. It represents over a century of scholarship related to the theology, history, and methodology of the propagation of Christian faith and the development of Christianity worldwide. We examine the current state of the field of mission studies, explaining how the structure of this Handbook mirrors the field’s structure and concerns. Then we analyze current trends in mission studies that emerge across the Handbook’s chapters, areas of growth that will shape the practice of missiology moving forward. In particular, we highlight emerging critical approaches within missiological scholarship to ecumenism, interreligious engagement, the missio Dei paradigm, grassroots agency, human mobility, and academic knowledge production. We underscore the relevance of the study of the history, motives, and operations of missions for academics in diverse fields, and policy makers in contexts of religious plurality, social need, and conflict.
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