Yale-Edinburgh Group
Founded in 1992 to study the development of world Christianity

Yale-Edinburgh Group on World Christianity and the History of Mission

Andrew Walls (University of Edinburgh) and Lamin Sanneh (Yale University) founded the Yale Edinburgh group in 1992. The Group’s conferences and LISTSERV facilitate discussion and exchange of information about the development of world Christianity and historical aspects of mission, with special emphasis on the sources for documentation. The conferences are hosted by the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh and the Yale Divinity School.

The 2024 Yale-Edinburgh Group conference will be hosted by the Yale Divinity School. For more information about the Yale-Edinburgh Group, contact:

Kyama Mugambi
World Christianity
409 Prospect Street
New Haven CT 06511
world.christianity@yale.edu
 

Yale Edinburgh Conference Registration

The theme is Spirit and the Spiritual: Ancestors, Deities and the Holy Spirit in Church and Mission. Registration is now open for the Yale-Edinburgh 2024 conference. The conference will be hosted by the Yale Divinity School, New Haven CT, 8am 26 June to 2pm 28 June, 2024. 

Conference registration Link:  https://cvent.me/NeALVy

Conference Hubs: Conference participants wishing to join either the Nairobi or Singapore hub may use this registration link as well. The hubs will then communicate directly with scholars wishing to attend via the hub.

There are a variety of accommodation options for New Haven which include several hotels in the area and Airbnbs. Limited rooms are available at conference rates in the hotels listed below.

Yale-Edinburgh 2024 Call for papers 

 

The Yale-Edinburgh 2024 conference will be hosted by the Yale Divinity School, New Haven CT, 26th-28th June, 2024. 

The theme is Spirit and the Spiritual: Ancestors, Deities and the Holy Spirit in Church and Mission.

Missions from the West brought Christianity into worlds with a wide array of cosmologies. Recipient cultures embraced Christian faith while negotiating differing perspectives of spiritual realities. The subsequent transition from missionary Christianity to indigenous faith produced a range of responses to the notion of ‘spiritual beings.’ Through mission, Christianity encountered traditional religions which venerated ancestors, revered spiritual beings, and navigated intricate relationships between deities in a world far more complex than the typical Western experience. From Korea to Brazil, Nigeria to Samoa, France to India - these multifaceted cosmologies continue to animate the Christian experience producing dynamic expressions of the faith. Movements of the Holy Spirit represent another dimension of Christianity. A wide range of pneumatic Christianities populate the long history of Christian expansion around the world.

World Christianity scholarship is deeply enriched through exploration of the historical, theological and missiological implications of these relationships between the Holy Spirit and the Spiritual worlds of Christians across the globe. The Yale Edinburgh conference 2024 especially welcomes contributions that: illuminate the interactions between spiritual realities of recipient cultures and missionary notions of the Holy Spirit; provide historical accounts of religious transformations with respect to ancestors, deities, and other spiritual beings in the process of Christian expansion; enlarge current understandings of local and diasporic perspectives of spiritual beings and their role in Christian expressions; provide comparative studies of missionary approaches to spirits and deities across denominations and across time; venture into ecumenical and interfaith dynamics with respect to spirits and the spiritual; or map trajectories of discourses on the Holy Spirit and other beings in a rapidly changing world.

Please supply an abstract of 250 words to world.christianity@yale.edu by 15th February 2024. Your abstract should clearly state, among other things, the enquiry, method, and historical context in which you situate your paper.

The gathering at New Haven will be in-person. There will a will be a conference hub in Nairobi and in Singapore on the same theme, and on the same dates.

New Haven Hotel Information

Limited rooms are available at conference rates in the hotels listed below. Rates are available if booked before 1 June. Click the links to start your reseveration at the conference rates.

Past Meetings

2023 Creation, Climate Change, and World Christianity
2022 World Christianity: Legacy and the State of the Field
2021 Oral, Print, and Digital Cultures in World Christianity and the History of Mission
2020 Postponed until 2021
2019 Diversity and Difference in Custom, Belief, and Practice in the History of Missions and World Christianity
2018 Scripture, Prayer and Worship in the History of Missions and World Christianity
2017 Migration, Exile, and Pilgrimage in the History of Missions and World Christianity
2016 Responses to Missions: Appropriations, Revisions, and Rejections
2015 Religion and Religions in the History of Missions and World Christianity
2014 Gender and Family in the History of Missions and World Christianity
2013 Health, Healing, and Medicine in the History of Missions and World Christianity
2012 Religious Movements of Renewal, Revival, and Revitalization in the History of Missions and World Christianity
2011 Missions and Education
2010 Consultation and Cooperation in the History of Missions
2009 Missions, Law, and Custom
2008 Perceptions and Portrayals: heroes and villains in mission historiography
2007 Liberty, Slavery, and Christian Missions
2006 Sight, Sound, and Touch: Visual, Musical, and Material Aspects of Christian Mission
2005 Identity, Ethnic and Christian, in the History of Christian Missions
2004 Missions, Money, and Privilege
2003 Conversion and Converts
2002 Missions and the Powers: Seen and Unseen
2001 Missions and Human Rights
2000 Representations and Misrepresentations of Missions
1999 Youth and the Leadership of the Missionary Movement: Inter-Generational Challenge and Opportunity
1998 War and Peace in the History of Missions
1997 Missions and Consequences: The Historical Impact of the Missionary Movement
1996 Missions and Ethnicity
1995 World Christianity and the Teaching of History
1994 The Churches and the Missionary Movement
1993 Language, Culture, and Translation
1992 Intercontinental Connexions
1992 From Christendom to World Christianity

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