A magisterial sweep through 1500 years of Christian history with a groundbreaking focus on the missionary role of migrants in Christianity’s spread

Human migration has long been identified as a driving force of historical change. Building on this understanding, Jehu Hanciles surveys the history of Christianity’s global expansion from its origins through 1500 CE to show how migration—more than official missionary activity or imperial designs—played a vital role in making Christianity the world’s largest religion.

Church history has tended to place a premium on political power and institutional forms, thus portraying Christianity as a religion disseminated through official representatives of church and state. But, as Hanciles illustrates, this “top-down perspective overlooks the multifarious array of social movements, cultural processes, ordinary experiences, and non-elite activities and decisions that contribute immensely to religious encounter and exchange.”

Hanciles’s sociohistorical approach to understanding the growth of Christianity as a world religion disrupts the narrative of Western preeminence, while honoring and making sense of the diversity of religious expression that has characterized the world Christian movement for two millennia. In turning the focus away from powerful empires and heroic missionaries, Migration and the Making of Global Christianity tells the story of how every Christian migrant is a vessel for the spread of the Christian faith in our interconnected world.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Philip Jenkins

Introduction

Part One: Conceptual Overview

          1. Migration in Human History: A Conceptual Overview

          2. Migration and the Globalization of Religion: Understanding Conversion

          3. Theologizing Migration: From Eden to Exile

Part Two: Historical Assessment

          4. Christianization of the Roman Empire: The Immigrant Factor

          5. Frontier Flows: The Faith of Captives and the Fruit of Captivity

          6. Minority Report: From the Church in Persia to the Persian Church

          7. Christ and Odin: Migration and Mission in an Age of Violence

          8. To the Ends of the East: The Faith of Merchants

          9. Gaining the World: The Interlocking Strands of Migration, Imperial Expansion, and Christian Mission

          10. Beyond Empire