In The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History, Andrew F. Walls shows he has not lost the capacity to surprise readers with new insights into things they thought long settled. In essays that sparkle with wit and insight Walls reaches back to Eusebius of Edessa in the fourth century and down to the contemporary world. His seer’s eyes reach from “Old Athens” and “New Jerusalem” to the vast continents of South America and Asia, to his beloved Africa. On the way he offers fresh understandings of Pentecostalism, African traditional religion, and the ironic ways in which the Western missionary movement often accomplished things—both for good and for ill—that its agents never dreamed of.

Andrew F. Walls is professor of world Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and the founder of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Edinburgh. His first Orbis book, The Missionary Movement in Christian History was named one of the most influential one hundred books of the twentieth century by Christianity Today.