International Association for Mission Studies
International Association for Mission Studies
18 August 2004
To all the Participants of our IAMS Conference at Port Dickson
Dear Colleagues,
I had intended to make some closing comments at our final session last Saturday, but time got away from us and so I am doing it via this letter to you. I trust you have all returned home safely, or on to your next event or conference, but that you have found time to reflect on the wonderful week we had together at Port Dickson. The conversations were stimulating, the food was good, and the swimming pool was great. We were able to make new friends and reaffirm our friendships with old ones. We genuinely like each other, as Dale Irvin observed in his summary remarks of the conference. The passion surrounding the discussion of missiology as a discipline on Saturday morning certainly indicated the level of enthusiasm we have had this week as we met together.
As the conference comes to a close now, I want to remind us that this is not the end, but rather the beginning. If IAMS serves you best, it will do so by increasing the depth and breadth of our reflections and scholarship in the many areas that make up the field of mission studies and missiology. So, I want to challenge us to get to work on the topics in our Mission Study Groups, so that our next General Assembly in Budapest will be truly the culmination of several years of research and study in our groups, and not just another conference. This is important. We need to think that the real work of IAMS is done between conferences, not during them.
I also want to encourage each of you to personally invite several people to become members of IAMS. Our organization needs to reflect better the composition of global Christianity, so that we have more members from the South and East where the Christian Church is growing the most.
And finally, it is my prayer that the theme of our conference will become an integral part of our lives:
-We must have integrity in our mission reflection and practices. This begins by
-integrity in our personal lives
-integrity in our relationships in our institutions and churches where we make our living
-integrity in our broader church families and hopefully within our nations.
I wish you God's best as we go our many different directions. So, may we leave Port Dickson with bold confidence in the Gospel, with a humble spirit as we communicate and live out the Gospel, and may we go with the assurance that our Lord goes with us. Wishing you all the best.
Sincerely yours,
Darrell Whiteman
President, IAMS
The disciples preached with joyful urgency that life can be radically different. Mark 6:12
Darrell Whiteman,
Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Dean
E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism
Asbury Theological Seminary
Wilmore, KY 40390
859-858-2215
859-858-2375 (fax)