World Christianity Unit

For the 2026 annual meeting, the World Christianity Unit plans feature two sessions solely within our unit, as well as one session co-sponsored with the Chinese Christianities Unit. We are hoping that all our sessions will speak in some way to the AAR presidential theme of Future/s. 

In 2006, historian Dana L. Robert asked a pointed question in the International Bulletin of Mission Research: “What would the study of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America look like if scholars put women into the center of their research?” Bolstered by decades of research on the history of women in mission, her question sparked a wave of new historical, missiological, and social scientific research on the role of women in World Christianity in the past, present, and future. The World Christianity unit calls for papers on the study of women in World Christianity 20 years after Robert’s appeal, that dialogue with the main contours of the article, such as women’s majority status in congregations worldwide, leadership imbalance, gendered dynamics of pilgrimage and popular Catholicism, etc. while also interrogating the (re)imaginations, and actions required to construct future(s) that critically interrogate the realities women encounter - gender-based violence, discrimination, impact of climate change, and war, economic inequalities and the attending intersections these issues engender. At the same time there is the need to engage with Robert’s concluding thoughts on the relationship between gender and church decline. As women undergo different forms of religious conversion and switching within Christianity and other religious practices, what is the impact on the future and vitality of Christianity? 

Second, we invite proposals that explore how Christian communities around the world imagine, negotiate, and bring into being various futures, whether social, theological, ecological, technological, or political. The theme offers an opportunity to consider how Christian actors draw on dis/inherited narratives, material practices, and ritual sensibilities to craft possibilities that move beyond dystopic inevitability or superficial hope. Possible approaches include the reimagining of theology and ethics in global contexts; eschatological and apocalyptic sensibilities that shape communal horizons; and changing patterns of Christian belonging amid processes of deconversion, disaffiliation, or reconfigured religious authority. We especially welcome proposals attentive to generational and technological transformations—such as the role of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, digital networks, artificial intelligence, and other modes of emerging Christian practice.

Finally, we seek to explore the multiple crises and uncertainties that frame contemporary Christian life and that animate diverse visions of the future. We invite proposals that address how Christian communities imagine ecological futures amid accelerating environmental degradation; how conflict, migration, and political instability reconfigure Christian identities and moral commitments; and how local practices or traditions perceived as “disappearing” shape communal responses to vulnerability and change. We are especially interested in papers that illuminate how Christian narratives, rituals, and social ethics are mobilized to confront global precarity, generate resilience, or articulate alternative social worlds.

In co-sponsorship with the Chinese Christianities unit, we invite reflection on the future(s) of “Chinese Christianities as World Christianity,” focusing on how Chinese Churches around the world adapt, change, and express their faith in different parts of the world, negotiating their cultural identities and their conception of the global Church in conversation with local life in any place where the Chinese find themselves, from Brazil to Canada, Indonesia to Spain, and across the African continent.