Response to Epp Weaver by Anicka Fast*
“Making room for the vitality of world Christianity” within MCC
A review of Alain Epp Weaver, Service and the Ministry of Reconciliation: A Missiological History of Mennonite Central Committee (North Newton: Bethel College, 2020).
In Service and the Ministry of Reconciliation, Alain Epp Weaver outlines the development over the last century of MCC’s missiology. In this short volume that developed out of a series of lectures delivered at Bethel College in 2020, he argues that MCC has continually sought to articulate “the rootedness of its relief, development, and peacebuilding work within God’s reconciling mission in the world” (7-8).
Various past and present experiences have predisposed me to be sympathetic to Epp Weaver’s argument. I live in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and work part-time as MCC co-representative and part-time for Mennonite Mission Network. I spent much of my childhood in the midst of a cross-cultural missionary encounter in Papua New Guinea. Later, I studied missiology, conducted research into Mennonite missionary encounters in DR Congo, and have continued to teach the importance of reclaiming mission as the effort of the church to “render itself universal” [1] by bringing people “together to become and to recognize each other as one people.” [2] With my interest in mission as global ecclesiology, I found Epp Weaver’s choice of terminology refreshing and encouraging. I feel right at home with his insistence that questions about the nature and meaning of service “in the name of Christ,” as well as questions about the power held by beneficiaries and initiators of such service, and the “imagined landscapes” in which such service took place, are indeed “missiological questions”: these questions “probe what it means to take part in God’s mission to reconcile all of creation and humanity back to God” (97).
In five chapters, Epp Weaver presents MCC’s mission as a participation “in the ministry of reconciliation given to the church” (3). After presenting this ideal in sermon form in Chapter 1, the remaining chapters offer a historical overview of the shifting landscapes and geographies that have shaped understandings of MCC service, from ecumenical inter-Mennonite collaboration in the 1920s to decolonizing landscapes beginning in the 1960s. Epp Weaver analyses the discourse of MCC leaders to trace changing understandings of Christian service as relief, peace witness, patriotic duty, transformative education, and listening, waiting and presence. He highlights the abiding tension between MCC programs focused primarily on fellow Mennonites and those that choose beneficiaries based primarily on a “neutral” criterion of need, examines the intersections between MCC and the humanitarian movement, and notes the important role of MCC as an “ecumenical engine” for the global Anabaptist church (69). A final chapter traces the many contextual factors that supported the often-contested move from accompaniment approaches and “relational programming” in the 1970s and 1980s to the adoption of outcomes-based management tools such as Results-Based Management (RBM) beginning in the 1990s.
Epp Weaver has highlighted multiple themes within MCC’s history that merit further exploration, and he does not shy away from the conclusion that MCC workers have both participated in and sought to undermine racialized and oppressive modes of “service.” I particularly appreciated Epp Weaver’s attention to MCC’s role in bringing people together across boundaries of race, class, gender, and geography. Even though he relies primarily on the words of MCC leaders (mostly male), he is able to show how these leaders’ attitudes shifted over time from a focus on fellow Russian and Swiss-south German Mennonites to a broadening vision of fellowship with Christians and even non-Christians around the world. What has the Spirit been doing through MCC over the last 100 years? According to Epp Weaver, s/he has been moving “to create ever new and expanding global networks and bonds of fellowship through collaborative efforts to reach out to neighbors and enemies in ministries of relief, development, and peace” (xvii). I tend to agree.
At the same time, I find two important weaknesses in Epp Weaver’s analysis.
First, the dramatically global composition of MCC workers around the world today remains nearly invisible in this volume. In Burkina Faso, my husband and I supervise a team of eleven MCC staff that includes only one North American worker besides ourselves. And the staff composition of the MCC Burkina Faso office is far from unique in MCC’s international program. Today, 60% of all workers in MCC’s international program come from outside Canada and the United States. In 2019, the steadily increasing number of “national staff” – MCC workers who serve in their country of citizenship (but outside North America) as employees – attained a high of 268, far surpassing the declining group of “international service workers” (of whom 29% of the 163, in 2019, were also from outside North America). [3] Outside Canada and the United States, the face of MCC on the ground is non-Western. Those who are implementing MCC’s vision and mission, accompanying partners in seeking the welfare of their communities, and supporting MCC country office operations as guards, cooks, and logistical assistants, are not from the global North.
Epp Weaver is aware of the changing composition of MCC workers: he shared these statistics at a recent orientation. Nevertheless, he introduces this centennial history of MCC with the assumption that “most of [his] readers,” at least, are drawn primarily from among the American and Canadian English-speaking constituency of quilters, thrift shop volunteers, and school kit-stuffers (xiii). In the introduction, he lists various ways in which his readers, he imagines, may have intersected with MCC in their lives. IVEP host families are mentioned, but not IVEP participants. North American donors are mentioned, but not staff from Africa working as reps and project coordinators in MCC offices across this continent. Pie-bakers for relief sales are mentioned, but not partners working for change in their communities in the global South. Later in the book, he gives brief recognition to the role of MCC workers from outside the global North as he traces MCC’s shift away from “direct implementation” toward a partnership and secondment model in the 1980s, and notes that MCC began to reflect more explicitly on the role of “in-country nationals” in administering its programs at this time. He admits, however – in a footnote – that his book is “no exception” to the ongoing tendency to account for MCC’s work without adequate reference to the contribution of these workers (38).
This omission is compounded by Epp Weaver’s discussion of his own “personal geography of MCC” (16). Weaver claims that his intersections with MCC – beginning with basement slideshow images of Congo’s TAP program that evoked “restless yearning” and moving through relief sales, SELFHELP stores, and More-with-Less cooking to end up with the roles of MCC service worker and then administrator in Akron – are not “broadly representative” but comprise one of many “global landscapes” of MCC service (24). Here, non-Western MCC staff get a welcome mention as equally important contributors to MCC’s global mission (26), but at the same time, the central power of Akron is oddly downplayed. For Epp Weaver, Akron is not the “Vatican of the global Mennonite world,” but just “a sleepy, quiet township,” and its position within MCC is not at the “center or at the top” of a “command-and-control” corporate structure, but just another node in a “rhizome-like network” (24). An honest overview of his own intersections with MCC, and an attempt to give equal space and importance to colleagues from outside an American or Canadian context, does not square with Epp Weaver’s seeming hesitation to realize how his own personal geography – and not that of the female Muslim MCC project coordinator in Kolkata (26) – helped give him the pedigree that allowed him to become a powerful spokesperson for MCC as its director of strategic planning.
To be fair, Epp Weaver is probably being realistic, rather than prescriptive, when he assumes that his readers are mostly North American MCC supporters. Why, then, does this relative invisibility of MCC stakeholders from the global South in Epp Weaver’s narrative matter? It matters precisely because Epp Weaver proposes that an MCC missiology faithful to the major currents of its 100-year history should be centered on participation in reconciliation and on global interconnections for mutual service. In other words, MCC’s mission has global ecclesiological implications. I agree with Epp Weaver that MCC is – or should be – largely about mutual service and participation in reconciliation, and this is why I find it disconcerting that a centennial history of MCC still sidelines those who have become the main actors in most of the countries where MCC has its programming.
For the last several decades, MCC has claimed that it lives out its mission of reconciliation primarily through an investment in relationships. In a 75th anniversary booklet, Personnel Director Melody Rupley stated that “[i]n an age of technology, MCC focuses on people. In a culture that relies on polls and statistics, MCC invests in relationships.” She emphasized that MCC’s “incarnational” strategy involved placing “Christian workers in communities where people are suffering” in order to “share… the good news that God is with us, encouraging, reconciling, giving the gift of faith, denying despair the last word.” [4] Overseas Service Director Ray Brubacher, one of the MCC leaders whom Epp Weaver profiles in his search for a missiology for MCC (97-98), emphasizes in the same booklet that “people are at the heart of MCC’s ministry as they link people with people,” with Christians from both richer and poorer countries serving and learning, “meeting people, as Jesus did, at their point of greatest need.” [5] In 1995, the shift in composition of MCC staff was far less advanced than it is today. However, then-Executive Secretary John A. Lapp, well-conversant with the southward shift of the center of gravity of the global church, had already noted that the challenge to MCC for the twenty-first century would center on “making room for the vitality of world Christianity,” and emphasized that this would include learning “to work as partner and friend with the global Christian movement despite a world system built on inequality and self-centeredness.” [6] While Epp Weaver points out that MCC’s focus on “mutually transformative relationships” in the 1990s and 2000s has shifted partially toward a greater emphasis on outcomes-based planning, he suggests that MCC’s work is still fundamentally compatible with a missiology of “presence and accompaniment” (121-123). If this is so, then the perspectives of Rupley, Brubacher, and Lapp are no less relevant now than they were 25 years ago.
Although MCC’s New Wine/New Wineskins process did not end up leading to a much-anticipated shared ownership of MCC by Anabaptist agencies around the world, [7] MCC still retains its self-appellation, adopted at the outset of this process in 2009, as a “worldwide ministry of Anabaptist churches.” [8] MCC sees itself as an “arm of the church” rather than a “parachurch organization.” [9] And today, it finds itself engaging in mission through multicultural teams that pursue (very imperfectly) a simple and modest lifestyle, while bearing “witness to Christ”: perhaps taking a small step toward the missional vision once articulated by Mennonite World Conference General Secretary César García. [10] This reality deserves more than a cursory mention.
My second concern, which is related to the first, is that Epp Weaver narrates the story of MCC’s evolving missiologies without grounding them historically in the modern Protestant missionary movement, including its Mennonite episodes. For example, he doesn’t emphasize the ways in which MCC’s international program built directly on the long-term relationships that North American Mennonite and Brethren in Christ missionaries had been cultivating for decades. [11] Former MCC Africa director Tim Lind claimed in 1989 that, even with regard to MCC work outside Africa, “the case can probably be made that MCC was formed more as a supplementary, perhaps even temporary arm of the Mennonite churches for the primary purpose of supporting and extending the work for Mennonite missions as well as of supporting existing Mennonite churches in Europe.” [12] As I was conducting research into early twentieth-century Mennonite mission efforts in Belgian Congo, I constantly bumped into archival documents that revealed close collaboration between MCC, Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission and the American Mennonite Brethren Mission in Congo during the early 1960s, in ways that cannot be reduced to MCC workers’ post-colonial critiques of “colonial” Mennonite mission work, significant and important as these were (101). [13] While MCC undoubtedly played a massive role in the post-World War II era in globalizing the consciousness of North American Mennonites, it was the missionaries of previous decades, through complex and messy encounters in the midst of racism and inequality, who laid the groundwork for the development of a catholic ecclesiology – one in which Mennonites from South and North first began to recognize each other as belonging to a single worldwide body of faith. [14]
In addition to a deeper historical awareness of the many continuities between MCC and North American Mennonite missions, Epp Weaver’s analysis would have benefited from more explicitly recognizing the ways in which MCC’s very existence – both as a humanitarian organization and as a church agency – is intertwined with the Protestant mission movement in general. For example, while MCC developed missiologies of “presence” in the 1970s to 1990s in part as a reaction against the paternalism of colonial-era Mennonite missions (101-103), Protestant missionaries had pioneered this missiological stance decades earlier. [15] Indeed, post-colonial consciousness itself, as Dana Robert has painstakingly shown, has its origins “not in current academic critiques of political empire, but in the growing self-awareness that characterized missionary attempts to transmit theologies across cultures.” [16] Even the humanitarian movement, while developing to some extent in parallel to the nineteenth-century Protestant missionary movement, had historical roots in the evangelical revival and in abolitionism, [17] to the point that Chris Rice, now MCC’s UN Office director, could quip in his DMin thesis, “No evangelical religion, no humanitarianism.” [18]
I think that the failure to recognize these connections is part of what leads Epp Weaver to set up a “tension” around the question of how MCC chooses the recipients of its aid. Is MCC relief destined for fellow church members, so contributing to stronger global Anabaptist solidarity, or does it follow the principle of impartiality promoted by the modern humanitarian movement that originated in the International Red Cross, founded several decades before MCC? Epp Weaver claims that this ongoing “tension” is due to the fact that MCC has tried to do two potentially incompatible things: “meet basic human needs” while also “functioning as an ecumenical engine” (69). He frames MCC’s tendency to focus on fellow Mennonites as a church-y option (a “theologically-grounded mission of working with, through and for the church”) that is in “tension” with a “commitment to humanitarian principles such as impartiality, proportionality, and neutrality” that ensures aid is given to all in need (68). After the 1950s, he shows, the latter approach with its ideal of impartiality became “embedded” within MCC discourse, yet the “tension” did not disappear (69).
Within Epp Weaver’s concern with this “tension,” I sense that what is at stake is whether or not Epp Weaver is willing to explicitly ground MCC’s ministry of reconciliation in the church. In my view, his appeal to the humanitarian movement for a doctrine of neutrality that can serve as a corrective to MCC’s apparent tendency to be too church-focused throws a wrench into his missiological analysis: it leaves him unable to explain the missiological significance of MCC’s contribution to developing a global Anabaptist ecclesial imagination. Epp Weaver skillfully shows that collaboration in service to others is precisely the force that pushed Mennonites beyond their limited ethnic and national identities as they crossed borders to help others. But I disagree with his implication that Mennonites needed to rub shoulders with secular humanitarian principles in order to complete this shift toward “neutrality.” Rather, mission – in the sense of crossing boundaries to become the church more fully – led Mennonites to enlarge their ecclesial consciousness. This was not a process of becoming more “neutral,” but a process of recognizing that God’s vision for the restoration of all creation requires us to move beyond ourselves.
Within such an understanding, the moments in MCC’s history when it prioritized aid to fellow ethnic Mennonites over non-Mennonites in greater need can be lamented as moments when MCC was less than faithful to its missionary mandate. But crucially, this failure occurred not because MCC’s vision was too ecclesial, but because it was not ecclesial, or catholic, enough. As Tim Lind once argued in one of MCC’s Development Monographs, Biblical Obedience and Development, what is at stake is whether or not the “church agency” recognizes that God’s mission in the world is going to move ahead not through the development movement, but through the church, that flawed but beautiful “structure through which God’s justice, God’s plan for humankind, is made known.” [19] This does not mean limiting aid to fellow church members – but it does mean inviting all to an alternative community that is not oriented toward values of “progress and materialism” but toward living out “the just order now through reconciliation and through doing justice.” [20] In short, an important challenge for MCC as it discerns its missiology is to recognize its own ecclesial identity, so that it does not presume, as Jack Suderman once warned in an address to MCC workers during the New Wine/New Wineskins process, to be like a “toe … trying to serve the body from an amputated stance.” [21]
When MCC’s continuity with the missionary movement is appropriately recognized, and when its ecclesial identity is re-appropriated, then at least two additional aspects of MCC’s centennial accomplishments come to the fore. First, reclaiming the history of MCC’s continuity with the missionary movement can help to bring out MCC’s distinctive contribution to peacebuilding as an ecclesiological contribution – one unimaginable without the ecumenical inter-Mennonite connections fostered by MCC. One of my favorite parts of Epp Weaver’s analysis is his overview of how global Anabaptist church relationships that developed with the support of MCC directly contributed to the development of a unified Anabaptist peace witness (89-93). This is an inspiring example of how deepening global church connections allowed Mennonites to make a major contribution to the development of peace theology and practice. And second, recognizing MCC’s mission as global ecclesiology helps to highlight the missiological significance of MCC’s multicultural international teams.
I have deep appreciation for Epp Weaver’s careful research, and for his boldness in defining MCC’s work as mission at a time when some North American MCC constituents are increasingly mission-wary. [22] This book will be a reference for me as I present MCC to its newer stakeholders in Burkina Faso and beyond. However, I find myself longing for MCC to reclaim the word “mission” even more boldly than Epp Weaver has done here, while grounding this mission in the ecclesial global networks that have developed under MCC auspices in continuity with earlier, equally imperfect attempts at boundary-crossing friendships and partnerships. These mutually transformative relationships first began right in the midst of the ugliness of colonial exploitation, and the work of developing such relationships within the structures of oppression and injustice continues today. Indeed, such relationships are the only way to catholicity – the only way for the church to practice its mission of being more truly itself and more truly universal through the mutual recognition of others as sisters and brothers. I would love to see multicultural service and learning teams – which are becoming increasingly present within this organization – taking the gospel of peace and moving into new territory as they reappropriate MCC’s participation in the mission of the church.
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*Co-Representative for Burkina Faso (MCC); Specialist in church history and missiology – francophone Africa (Mennonite Mission Network)
[1] Jean-Marc Ela, African Cry, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 9.
[2] Kwame Bediako as interviewed in James Ault, African Christianity Rising (James Ault Productions, 2013). See also Fast, Anicka, “Reclaiming Mission in Light of the Global Church: A Response to Skeptics,” Anabaptist Witness (blog), October 2018, https://www.anabaptistwitness.org/journal_entry/reclaiming-mission/.
[3] Mennonite Central Committee, “Future Trends of Personnel in MCC’s International Program: MCC IP’s Personnel Vision for the next Five Years Considering the FYE 2021-2025 Strategic Directions,” February 2020.
[4] Mennonite Central Committee, “Celebrate, Reflect, Recommit,” Anniversary photo essay, 1995, 21.
[5] Mennonite Central Committee, 5.
[6] Mennonite Central Committee, 22–23. For some of the earliest articulations of the theological and missiological significance of this shift, see Wilbert R. Shenk, “Toward a Global Church History,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 20, no. 2 (April 1996): 50–57; Dana L. Robert, “Shifting Southward: Global Christianity since 1945,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24, no. 2 (2000): 50–58.
[7] Will Braun, “MCC Centrality Questioned,” MB Herald, February 1, 2011, https://mbherald.com/mcc-centrality-questioned/.
[8] Paul Schrag, “MCC’s ‘New Wine’: Agency Seeks Closer Partnerships with Churches around the World,” MB Herald, July 1, 2009, https://mbherald.com/mccs-new-wine/. For MCC’s mission and vision statement, see https://mcc.org/learn/about/mission.
[9] Henry Neufeld, “MCC Grapples with Changes at Last Binational AGM,” MB Herald, August 1, 2011, https://mbherald.com/mcc-grapples-with-changes-at-last-binational-agm/.
[10] César García, “A Vision for Global Mission amidst Shifting Realities,” Anabaptist Witness 1, no. 1 (October 2014): 5–6.
[11] With regard to MCC’s Africa program, for example, Tim Lind points out that MCC work on this continent began after Orie Miller visited Mennonite mission work in Congo five times between 1951 and 1960; indeed, MCC’s first interventions in Africa were all “developed and discussed” with Mennonite mission boards, if not directly initiated by them. See Tim Lind, “MCC Africa Program: Historical Background,” MCC Occasional Papers, No. 10 (Mennonite Central Committee, August 1989), 5–7, 13–15.
[12] Lind, 2.
[13] See, for example, Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission Records, 1911-2018, X-68, Mennonite Church USA Archives, Elkhart, Indiana), and MB Mission [Multiply] records of mission work in Congo, A250-10, Mennonite Library and Archives, Fresno Pacific University. For more on the post-colonial critiques of expatriate Mennonite missionaries by a younger generation of MCC workers in Congo, see Elmer Neufeld, The Unfinished Revolution: Congo History and Missionary-African Relations Today (Akron, PA: Mennonite Central Committee, 1963); Lind, “MCC Africa Program: Historical Background,” 13–14.
[14] Steven M. Nolt, “Globalizing a Separate People: World Christianity and North American Mennonites, 1940-1990,” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 84, no. 4 (October 2010): 487–506; Fast, Anicka, “Becoming Global Mennonites: The Politics of Catholicity and Memory in a Missionary Encounter in Belgian Congo, 1905-1939” (PhD. diss., Boston University, 2020), 58, 580.
[15] A missiology of Christian presence was articulated by Anglican missionary Max Warren in the late 1950s as the manifestation of a growing self-awareness among Protestant missionaries of their paternalistic and colonialist attitudes. See for example Max Warren, “General Introduction,” in The Primal Vision; Christian Presence amid African Religion, by John V. Taylor (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963), 5–12; Warren, Max, “Presence and Proclamation,” in The Conciliar-Evangelical Debate : The Crucial Documents, 1964-1976 : Expanded Edition of Eye of the Storm, The Great Debate in Mission, Including Documents on Bangkok and Nairobi, ed. Donald Anderson McGavran, 2d ed. enl.. (South Pasadena, Calif: William Carey Library, 1977), 189–204. For an overview of missiologies of presence in relation to post-colonialism, see Dana L. Robert, “Missiology and Post-Colonial Consciousness,” in Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of Christian Theology, ed. Sarah Coakley and Richard Cross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), 7. Prior to the articulation of a missiology of presence by Warren, other influential critiques of Protestant missionary paternalism or collaboration with colonialism emerged first from within the movement. See for example Roland Allen, The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder It, 1st paperback ed (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, [1927] 2006); J. H. Oldham, Christianity and the Race Problem. (New York, Negro Universities Press, [1924] 1969); David MacDonald Paton, Christian Missions and the Judgment of God. (London, SCM Press, 1953).
[16] Robert, “Missiology and Post-Colonial Consciousness,” 1.
[17] Christopher Paul Rice, “Toward a Framework for a Practical Theology of Institutions for Faith-Based Organizations” (D.Min., Durham, NC, Duke University Department of Divinity, 2014), 23–24, https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/9473/Rice_divinity.duke_0066A_10027.pdf;sequence=1. Sylvia Salvatici has traced some of the more distant roots of the “archeology” of the humanitarian movement in Protestant missionary activity, showing for example the links between the abolition movement and the humanitarian movement. – Silvia Salvatici, A History of Humanitarianism, 1755-1989: In the Name of Others, 2020.
[18] Rice, “Practical Theology for FBOs,” 24. See also Michael Barnett and Janice Gross Stein, Sacred Aid: Faith and Humanitarianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
[19] Tim Lind, “Biblical Obedience and Development,” Development Monograph Series 6 (Akron, PA: Mennonite Central Committee, 1987 1981), 7.
[20] Lind, 20–21.
[21] Robert J. Suderman, Re-Imagining the Church: Implications of Being a People in the World, ed. Andrew Gregory Suderman (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 29.
[22] See a recent podcast series by Mennonite Mission Network that seeks to engage this audience: https://www.mennonitemission.net/podcasts/missionwary.
References
Allen, Roland. The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes Which Hinder It. 1st paperback ed. Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2006.
Ault, James. African Christianity Rising. James Ault Productions, 2013.
Barnett, Michael, and Janice Gross Stein. Sacred Aid: Faith and Humanitarianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Braun, Will. “MCC Centrality Questioned.” MB Herald, February 1, 2011. https://mbherald.com/mcc-centrality-questioned/.
Ela, Jean-Marc. African Cry. Translated by Robert R. Barr. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986.
Fast, Anicka. “Becoming Global Mennonites: The Politics of Catholicity and Memory in a Missionary Encounter in Belgian Congo, 1905-1939.” PhD. diss., Boston University, 2020.
———. “Reclaiming Mission in Light of the Global Church: A Response to Skeptics.” Anabaptist Witness (blog), October 2018. https://www.anabaptistwitness.org/journal_entry/reclaiming-mission/.
García, César. “A Vision for Global Mission amidst Shifting Realities.” Anabaptist Witness 1, no. 1 (October 2014): 27–36.
Lind, Tim. “Biblical Obedience and Development.” Development Monograph Series 6. Akron, PA: Mennonite Central Committee, 1987 1981.
———. “MCC Africa Program: Historical Background.” MCC Occasional Papers, No. 10. Mennonite Central Committee, August 1989.
Mennonite Central Committee. “Celebrate, Reflect, Recommit.” Anniversary photo essay, 1995.
———. “Future Trends of Personnel in MCC’s International Program: MCC IP’s Personnel Vision for the next Five Years Considering the FYE 2021-2025 Strategic Directions,” February 2020.
Neufeld, Elmer. The Unfinished Revolution: Congo History and Missionary-African Relations Today. Akron, PA: Mennonite Central Committee, 1963.
Neufeld, Henry. “MCC Grapples with Changes at Last Binational AGM.” MB Herald, August 1, 2011. https://mbherald.com/mcc-grapples-with-changes-at-last-binational-agm/.
Nolt, Steven M. “Globalizing a Separate People: World Christianity and North American Mennonites, 1940-1990.” The Mennonite Quarterly Review 84, no. 4 (October 2010): 487–506.
Oldham, J. H. Christianity and the Race Problem. New York, Negro Universities Press, 1969.
Paton, David MacDonald. Christian Missions and the Judgment of God. London, SCM Press, 1953.
Rice, Christopher Paul. “Toward a Framework for a Practical Theology of Institutions for Faith-Based Organizations.” D.Min., Duke University Department of Divinity, 2014. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/9473/Rice_divinity.duke_0066A_10027.pdf;sequence=1.
Robert, Dana L. “Missiology and Post-Colonial Consciousness.” In Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of Christian Theology, edited by Sarah Coakley and Richard Cross, Part 1.c. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
———. “Shifting Southward: Global Christianity since 1945.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 24, no. 2 (2000): 50–58.
Salvatici, Silvia. A History of Humanitarianism, 1755-1989: In the Name of Others, 2020.
Schrag, Paul. “MCC’s ‘New Wine’: Agency Seeks Closer Partnerships with Churches around the World.” MB Herald, July 1, 2009. https://mbherald.com/mccs-new-wine/.
Shenk, Wilbert R. “Toward a Global Church History.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 20, no. 2 (April 1996): 50–57.
Suderman, Robert J. Re-Imagining the Church: Implications of Being a People in the World. Edited by Andrew Gregory Suderman. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016.
Warren, Max. “General Introduction.” In The Primal Vision; Christian Presence amid African Religion, by John V. Taylor, 5–12. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1963.
Warren, Max. “Presence and Proclamation.” In The Conciliar-Evangelical Debate : The Crucial Documents, 1964-1976 : Expanded Edition of Eye of the Storm, The Great Debate in Mission, Including Documents on Bangkok and Nairobi, edited by Donald Anderson McGavran, 2d ed. enl.., 189–204. South Pasadena, Calif: William Carey Library, 1977.
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