Thirty Years of Studies in World Christianity

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Studies in World Christianity, established in 1995. It has been the first and foremost journal to promote the academic discourse of World Christianity. Its history has included the publication of many field-defining articles. It also continues to be the outlet of choice for studies on the local and the global particularities of Christianity as a worldwide religion.

Thirty years on, it is worth correcting two common misunderstandings of the journal’s legacy. First, many automatically presume the journal was started by the historian Andrew Walls, the doyen of the field. Rather, the journal was established — not by Walls, but by that scholar of World Christianity studies James Mackey. Mackey? Who is James Mackey? I suspect many readers of this journal would not readily know this name, because he is rarely mentioned in standard primers on World Christianity. James Mackey was a Catholic theologian — and, no less, the Thomas Chalmers Chair of Theology and the Dean of the Faculty (now School) of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Importantly, this esteemed theologian established the journal during a time when ‘World Christianity’ was still a nascent discourse.