Ubuntu, Migration and Ministry invites the reader to rethink ubuntu (Nguni: humanness/humanity) as a moral notion in the context of local communities. The socio-moral patterns that emerge at the crossroads between ethnography and social ethics offer a fresh perspective to what it means to be human in contemporary Johannesburg. The Central Methodist Mission is known for sheltering thousands of migrants and homeless people in the inner city. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, primarily conducted in 2009, Elina Hankela unpacks the church leader’s liberationist vision of humanity and analyses the tension between the congregation and the migrants, linked to the refugee ministry. While relational virtues mark the community’s moral code, various regulating rules and structures shape the actual relationships at the church. Here ubuntu challenges and is challenged. Winner of the 2014 Donner Institute Prize for Outstanding Research into Religion.

Ubuntu is a dynamic and celebrated concept in Africa. In the great Sutu-nguni family of Southern Africa, being humane is regarded as the supreme virtue. The essence of this philosophy of life, called ubuntu or botho, is human relatedness and dignity. The Shona from Zimbabwe articulate it as: I am because we are; I exist because the community exists. This volume offers twenty-two such reflections on practicing ubuntu as it relates to justice, personhood, and human dignity, both in Southern Africa, as well as in a wider international context. It highlights the potential of ubuntu for enriching our understanding of justice, personhood, and human dignity in a globalizing world. (Series: International Practical Theology, Vol. 20) [Subject: African Studies, Religious Studies]

Ubuntu is premised on the ethical belief that an individual's humanity is fostered in a network of human relationships: I am because you are; we are because you are. The essays in this lively volume elevate the debate about ubuntu beyond the buzzword it has become, especially within South African religious and political contexts. The seasoned scholars and younger voices gathered here grapple with a range of challenges that ubuntu puts forward. They break down its history and analyze its intellectual surroundings in African philosophical traditions, European modernism, religious contexts, and human rights discourses. The discussion embraces questions about what it means to be human and to be a part of a community, giving attention to moments of loss and fragmentation in postcolonial modernity, to come to a more meaningful definition of belonging in a globalizing world. Taken together, these essays offer a rich understanding of ubuntu in all of its complexity and reflect on a value system rooted in the everyday practices of ordinary people in their daily encounters with churches, schools, and other social institutions.

“If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 2 Chronicles 7:14 Kenya is a diverse nation, with many ethnic communities and cultural traditions. However, this diversity has led to deep divisions over the years, resulting in entrenched ethnopolitical tension and conflict. In this book, Dr David Kirwa Tarus advocates for a Christian theological response to the nation’s divisions by presenting various theological perspectives on anthropology, society, and politics including those of John Calvin and John Mbiti, as well as other prominent Kenyan theologians. This work traces the history of ethnopolitical conflict in Kenya and the church’s response from 1895 to 2013 and thoroughly examines how a reformed theology can provide a pathway to social cohesion in Kenya. David Tarus humbly yet boldly challenges Kenyans to pursue national unity and peace by interrogating their allegiances to their ethnic communities and political parties. This book carefully argues why it is only a Christian identity, commitment to humanity as bearing the divine image, and the triune God himself, that can heal the divisions in this land and in turn bring an end to other social evils such as corruption, intolerance, and violence. Ethnopolitical conflict is not confined to one nation, and this study will bear much fruit in other contexts where people yearn for social cohesion.

In Religion, Migration and Identity scholars from various disciplines explore issues related to identity and religion, that people - individually and communally -, encounter when affected by migration dynamics; the volume foregrounds methodology as its main concern.

Only 15 kilometres away from the border of Zimbabwe, Musina is an obscure town in South Africa that the media cast into the public eye in the wake of the 2008 Zimbabwean economic crisis. Taking as its starting point the arrival of thousands of displaced Zimbabwean migrants at Musina, this book presents valuable new perspectives on the temporality of migration and the governance of immobilities. The author explores the role of humanitarian actors in supporting migrants and examines the outcomes of government-led activities in the longer term. This is an insightful assessment of how state and non-state practices intertwine in the management of largely immobile people, and of the importance of time in understanding African migration and borders.

Given the consistent challenge of Islamist acute violence, particularly in Nigeria, this monograph attempts to respond to the question: How can Jesus’s followers pattern response to violence after Jesus’s model demonstrated in his triumph over death, evil, sin, and violence through staurocentric pathways? And how can Jesus’s followers in Nigeria adopt the same staurocentric model in order to not only overcome acute violence within the country but also to extend hands, heads, hearts, and homes of staurocentric forgiveness, hospitality, and other practices toward Muslims? In this study, I posit that peacebuilding contextual theology be grounded on the mystery of the cross (σταυρός–stauros)—a theologico-theoretical framework that the church in Nigeria should espouse in order to position herself to extend hands, heads, hearts, and homes of staurocentric practices, whose appropriation must be undertaken through constructive and critical integration of the God-given African peacebuilding concepts autochthonous to Africa’s mosaic cultural contexts. The pivotal thesis is that the staurocentric model remains the triune God’s instrument for triumphing over violence, and thus should be espoused by Jesus's followers in every era and context for peacebuilding in contexts of violence through a triadic constructive and critical integration of indigenous peacebuilding concepts.

The Oxford Handbook of Mission Studies represents more than a century of scholarship related to the theology, history, and methodology of the propagation of Christian faith and the engagement of Christians with cultures, religions, and societies worldwide. It contains more than 40 articles by experts from different disciplinary and ecclesial perspectives, who are from all continents. It not only offers a broad overview of key approaches and issues in mission studies but it also highlights current trends and suggests future developments. The Handbook builds on renewed interest in mission studies this century generated by recent key statements on mission from ecumenical, evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox sources, and by a spate of academic works on the topic. Western church leaders now apply insights from foreign missions (such as, inculturation, liberation, interfaith work, and power encounter) to today's multicultural societies. Meanwhile, there are new initiatives in mission from the Majority World, where most Christians live, so that sending is not only 'from the west to the rest' but 'from everywhere to everywhere'. Therefore, this volume aims to reflect the voices of the receivers of mission as well as its protagonists and to raise awareness of new movements. In a time of growing recognition of 'religions' more generally, this work examines and theorizes the missional dimensions of the world's largest religion: its agendas, growth, outreach, role in public life, effect on cultures, relevance for development, and its approaches to other communities.

Foundations of Pastoral Counselling offers a completely new approach to its subject, through an integration of philosophical ideas, theological thought, and psychotherapeutic psychology. Using the work of philosophers including Martin Buber, Simone Weil and Søren Kierkegaard to begin the conversation in each chapter the author then draws on relevant theologians and psychotherapeutic thinkers to enrich the dialogue. The result is a rich, multi-faceted, and often surprising round-table discussion about the fundamental issues in pastoral counselling. Introduction 1 Part 1: Fundamental Attitudes and Skills 1 Respect for the Uniqueness of the Counsellee, or Resisting the Totalizing Tendency 2 Empathy and the Body, or the Quest for Participatory Sense-Making 3 Deep Listening, or Being Formed in the Discipline of Attention 4 Conditions for Genuine Dialogue, or It’s the Relationship that Heals 5 ‘Relational Humanness’ and ‘Relational Justice’, or Caring for Two Worlds Part 2: Fundamental Interventions and Strategies 6 Revising Faulty Thinking, or a Socratic Approach to Healing ‘Belief-Sickness’ 7 Facilitating Self-Challenge, or Learning the Art of Indirection 8 Working with Counsellee Images, or Exploring the ‘Metaphors We Live By’ 9 Connecting with a Community of Hope, or Pastoral Rituals that Shine a Light Concluding Reflection: It’s Also about Personal Spirituality

This thought-provoking book is an exploration of the ways religion and diverse forms of mobility have shaped post-apartheid Johannesburg, South Africa. It analyses transnational and local migration in contemporary and historical perspective, along with movements of commodities, ideas, sounds and colours within the city. It re-theorizes urban ‘super-diversity’ as a plurality of religious, ethnic, national and racial groups but also as the diverse processes through which religion produces urban space. The authors argue that while religion facilitates movement, belonging and aspiration in the city, it is complicit in establishing new forms of enclosure, moral order and spatial and gendered control. Multi-authored and interdisciplinary, this edited collection deals with a wide variety of sites and religions, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Judaism. Its original reading of post-apartheid Johannesburg advances global debates around religion, urbanization, migration and diversity, and will appeal to students and scholars working in these fields.