Missiology Lectures 2025

This year, Fuller Seminary is commemorating 60 years of teaching and developing missiology as an academic discipline. Begun in 1965 under the auspices of the School of World Mission (SWM), and continued from 2003 in the renamed School of Intercultural Studies (SIS), missiology has been taught and researched within the School of Mission and Theology (SMT) since 2021. During these six decades, the discipline of missiology has undergone various transformations and developments in dialogue with the church, the world at large, and generations of faculty and students. We have moved from a nearly exclusive focus on mission methods to a multidisciplinary approach that engages and integrates various social sciences with history and theology. We study both local and global expressions of mission by churches and agencies from a vast array of peoples and in diverse contexts throughout Christian history and today.

Our 60th Missiology Lectures this October celebrate and assess missiology at Fuller by critically and appreciatively exploring “Missiology in a New Generation.” This is a working conference. We have asked four scholars who know Fuller to join us so that they can offer critical feedback and insights about what they see as the new horizons for missiology. These perspectives will then be discussed by and with our faculty, students, alumni, and trustees, as we discern what parts of the legacy of SWM/SIS will be most relevant to SMT in the coming years, and which new topics, approaches, and disciplines hold promise for missiological inquiry in the next decades.

Registration

General registration: $50

Alumni and non-Fuller students: $25

Fuller students, staff, and faculty: Free

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Speakers 

David Bennett is the Global Associate Director for the Lausanne Movement , overseeing the leaders of six departments and functioning as deputy to the Lausanne CEO. He has served globally and been involved with churches in California, Oregon, and Massachusetts. He holds a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an MDiv, DMin and PhD in Intercultural Studies from Fuller.

Dr. Bennett has engaged in teaching, preaching, and research in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America, with particular focus on India. He has written three books on biblical principles of leadership, including Metaphors of Ministry: Biblical Images for Leaders and Followers (Wipf and Stock, 2004).

Bennett has been on the board of First Fruit, Inc., an evangelical foundation, since 1990 and on the board of A3 (formerly Asian Access) since 2000. He and his wife, Phyllis, reside in Washougal, Washington, and recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary with their two sons and daughters-in-law and eight grandchildren.

Bokyoung Park is a Korean missiologist, theological educator, and current president of the International Association for Mission Studies (IAMS). She serves as professor of mission studies at Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary in Seoul. Her research involves narrative missiology, missional spirituality, gender and mission, integral mission, and the formation of Korean missiology.

Dr. Park founded the Korea IAMS Fellowship to empower emerging scholars from Korea and the Global South to confidently share their theologies in global conversations. Through this initiative she established the Adullam Grant to support academic incubation, which led to the founding of the House of Adullam, a monastic and missional community rooted in hospitality and healing that serves as a space for embodied, relational theological apprenticeship. Her formation framework—incubation, cultivation, and forestation—seeks to nurture hopeful and contextually rooted expressions of decolonial theology through leadership development and spiritual accompaniment.

Inspired by the Celtic Anam Cara, Park envisions theological education as lifelong formation in presence and friendship. Her recent work explores mission as resonance, integrating theology, art, embodiment, and spirituality in response to a fragmented world.

Christian Tsekpoe is an ordained minister of the Church of Pentecost, pastoring A-Lang Worship Centre, a congregation of over one thousand members in Accra, Ghana. He holds a PhD from the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies in the UK and served as research faculty at Fuller Seminary, where he undertook his postdoctoral research fellowship. He is a senior lecturer, a head of department, and a member of the governing council of Pentecost University. He is also a member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches and the Executive Editor of Pentecostal Education, the journal of the World Alliance for Pentecostal Theological Education. His research focuses on Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, and he has authored numerous articles and books, including Intergenerational Missiology: An African Pentecostal-Charismatic Perspective (Regnum, 2022).

Martin Rodriguez is associate professor of practical theology and missiology at Azusa Pacific University, where he teaches courses on mission, leadership, and spiritual formation. Raised on the mission field in Puebla, Mexico, and later serving as a missionary in East Asia, Martin’s life has been shaped by the tensions and gifts of border-crossing faith. A graduate of Fuller Seminary’s PhD in Intercultural Studies program, his work explores how communities discern God’s activity together—usually in the messy middle of culture, theology, relationships, and real life. His current research explores borderland missiology, appreciative inquiry, and the role of the Holy Spirit in intercultural learning communities. He is (still) preparing his dissertation, Borderland Church: Relational Pathways for Cultivating Missional Discernment in Multicultural Ministry, for publication, while also co-authoring The Praxis of Practical Theology with Mark Lau Branson and Testimonios: Narrative, Agency, and Theology in Hispanic Churches with Juan F. Martínez. He hosts the Missiology Podcast, a mix of thoughtful interviews and his own half-baked musings on mission, church, leadership, and the occasional identity crisis. Martin lives in Altadena, California with his wife Erin and their three kids, who daily remind him that God’s mission is often less about strategy and more about improvisation, bedtime stories, and wonder. 

Conference Organizers

David H. Scott, Accreditation Liaison Officer and Professor of Intercultural Studies and Children at Risk

Kirsteen Kim, Associate Dean for the Center for Missiological Research and Paul E. Pierson Chair in World Christianity

More information here

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