Andrew Walls
Professor Andrew Finlay Walls, OBE, is a British Christian theologian and missiologist, best known for his pioneering studies of the history of the African church and a pioneer in the academic field of world Christianity.[1] He is currently Professor of the History of Mission at Liverpool Hope University, Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh,[2] Research Professor at Africa International University's Center for World Christianity.[3] and Professor Emeritus at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture . Liverpool Hope University has a research centre named in honour of him, which encourages and supports research in the field of African and Asian Christianity.
His most significant observations have concerned the geographical trends in Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially in terms of expansion in Africa. Historian Lamin Sanneh commented that he was 'one of the few scholars who saw that African Christianity was not just an exotic, curious phenomenon in an obscure part of the world, but that African Christianity might be the shape of things to come'.[4] His pioneering research led the magazine Christianity Today to describe him in 2007 as 'a historian ahead of his time' and 'the most important person you don’t know'.[4]
Walls also founded the Journal of Religion in Africa in 1967 and Studies in World Christianity in 1995. He taught at Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone (1957-62) and the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (1962-65). He later served as the first head of the Department of Religious Studies in the University of Aberdeen (1970) and founded the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh.[5]
In 2012, he married Dr Ingrid Reneau, a Research Fellow with the Presbyterian Mission Agency.[6]
Bibliography
- The Missionary Movement in Christian History. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1996.
- The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission and Appropriation of Faith. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2002.
Full bibliography of works can be found in William Burrows, Mark Gornik and Janice McLean (eds) Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2011).
References
- ↑ Burrows, William R.; Gornik, Mark R.; McLean, Janice A., eds. (2011). Understanding World Christianity: The Vision and Work of Andrew F. Walls. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.
- ↑ "Academic Staff". Retrieved 18 August 2015.
- ↑ "Research Professor at the Center for World Christianity of AIU". Africa International University. Retrieved 14 September 2011.
- 1 2 Stafford, Tim (February 2007). "Historian Ahead of His Time". Christianity Today. Retrieved 14 September 2011.
- ↑ "Frost's Scottish Who's Who".
- ↑ "Dr. Ingrid Reneau Walls".