The Center for the Study of World
Christian Revitalization Movements is a research center that grew out
of a concern to take the pulse and heart of the various movements of
revitalization which are developing in a variety of cultural settings
across world Christianity. It is significant that this research is
being pursued within the arena of theological education. This means
the Center intends to assist those persons called of God for ministry
in the early twenty first century to discern new realities not
observed in previous generations of Christian leadership, and to
minister effectively within those realities. The Center seeks to track
with the Spirit of God, as revealed in the biblical and confessional
documents of our Triune faith, in discerning how God is at work amid
the crucial human demographic and cultural developments that are
redefining the shape of Christianity. Our learning and praxis need to
be responsive to these shifts, that include post-denominationalism,
transnationalism, urbanization, and globalization. Social scientists
are at work in these fields, but here it is being asked, how is
Christian revitalization occurring in the midst of these realities,
and in what ways is it making a difference at all levels of human
culture, amid its brokenness? We expect to be finding new ways of
doing homiletics, Christian discipleship, and, yes, historical and
systematic theology, by seeing how preaching and Christian formation
are being practiced in the midst of revival, as it is in the Global
South and East. Revival is being manifested in the midst of these
shifting social realities. In so doing, it tends to move ahead of and
apart from the routinized life of congregations concerned with their
own survival and well-being.
About the Author:
J. Steven O’Malley (B.A., Indiana
Central University; B.D., Yale University Divinity School; Ph.D.,
Drew University) is the J. T. Seamands Professor of Methodist
Holiness History, Asbury Theological Seminary. An ordained minister
in the United Methodist Church, O’Malley has earned recognition for
his research and publications in post-Reformation and modern Church
history, with special emphasis upon Pietism, German-American
evangelicalism and the Holiness movement. He is the author of
numerous works and is noted for his definitive study of the
Otterbeins’ theology, Pilgrimage of Faith: The Legacy of the
Otterbeins.
