This year, Studies in World Christianity celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. Today, readers will recognise it as the leading journal in the study of World Christianity, and often presume it to be founded by the historian Andrew Walls and an extension of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh. In actuality, the journal was founded in 1995 by a theologian—and one with an international and egalitarian vision—during a time when ‘World Christianity’ was still a nascent discourse.

The Centre itself had a different name when it was established by Andrew Walls in 1982 at the University of Aberdeen, before it moved to Edinburgh in 1987. The Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, as Walls called it, highlighted the history of Christianity beyond a glorified form of ‘European clan history’ (hence, ‘Non-Western’). Brian Stanley, the Centre’s fourth director, renamed it in 2009 to its current name, because ‘World Christianity’ includes Europe and North America, and is mindful of migratory and indigenous populations.