OCMS: Embodying Integral Mission Research
Overview This lecture is primarily about the rise and dynamic nature of OCMS as a centre of research at the doctoral level and only secondarily concerns the history of the ideas and vision that gave rise to it. It draws from personal experience, interviews with founders, academic officers, faculty, alumni, and current students.
Speaker Tom Harvey
About the speaker Tom’s expertise is in China and Southeast Asian Church and State. In Singapore he served as Chair of the Theological Review and Response Committee of the Presbyterian Church and as an executive board member of the National Council of Churches. He authored Acquainted With Grief: Wang Mingdao’s Stand for the Persecuted Church in China as well as numerous articles on Christianity and Christian social engagement in Asia and Southeast Asia. Tom is a member of the Lausanne Congress Global Diaspora Network and European Coordinator of the Lausanne European Diaspora Educator’s Group and is a missionary co-worker with the Presbyterian Church USA.
This lecture follows the journey of scholarship at OCMS. Accordingly, I will attempt to trace in part the OCMS tradition of inquiry as ‘a coherent movement of thought’ that has had a significant impact on the modern understanding of mission and in particular the ways in which that understanding has in part been informed by OCMS scholars from over fifty nations.
It draws from personal experience, interviews with founders, academic officers, faculty, alumni, and current students. It is primarily about the rise and dynamic nature of OCMS as an centre of research at the doctoral level and only secondarily a history of the ideas and vision that gave rise to OCMS. Certainly, the latter informs the former, but it is the former that brings to light OCMS’s dynamic embodiment; i.e it is a living tale of OCMS research and the ways OCMS goes about fulfilling its calling as a centre of mission study
