Gerald H. Anderson and the Overseas Ministries Study Center: “Mission Trends” from Postcolonialism to World Christianity

Abstract

This article introduces the scholarship and administrative accomplishments of Dr. Gerald H. Anderson, longtime Director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center and Editor of the International Bulletin of Missionary Research. Based on his missionary experience in the Philippines, his voluminous writings, and his founding of major missiological organizations, Anderson was central to the reframing of mission studies in the postcolonial era of the last third of the twentieth century. Under his leadership, the Overseas Ministries Study Center (OMSC) became a hub for the emerging network of World Christianity scholarship. Unlike the rigidity of academic institutions caught in the discourse of secularization theory, the OMSC represented a creative liminal space with the flexibility to innovate. Anderson and the OMSC incubated teams of scholars and practitioners who cumulatively formulated a new approach to the study of mission and to the understanding of Christianity as a worldwide rather than Western religion.