#132. Does Your Missiology Need an Adversary?

Chances are it does.

While writing Decolonizing Mission, it struck me that much of our theology and practice of mission still carries the imprint of Europe’s military anxieties in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Put bluntly, I have become persuaded that our missiology today—even in the twenty-first century—still lives in the shadow of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Yet the story runs deeper than that. This is not a new dynamic, especially when it comes to Christian thoughts and engagements with Muslims. It has deep historical roots. One can trace it further back through the Crusades, and even to the Constantinian moment, when Christian identity became entangled with imperial power and territorial imagination. Much of the way Christians imagine mission has been shaped by long historical memories that quietly shape how we see the religious “other.”

For instance, a closer look at Christian history reveals that Christian imagination about Islam has often been formed in moments when Muslim political power seemed overwhelming—whether during the rise of Islam in the seventh century or the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in the fifteenth. Such moments left deep marks on the Christian imagination, marks that continue to influence how Christians think about mission today.

Let us start with the rise of Islam in the 630s CE. Within a few decades of the Prophet Muhammad's death, Muslim rule had spread across regions that had been deeply Christian for centuries: Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and much of the Near East. These were not marginal territories. They were among the intellectual and spiritual centres of early Christianity. Alexandria, Antioch, Carthage, and Jerusalem had been central to Christian theological life.

For Christians living through these changes, the expansion of Muslim rule was not simply a political shift. It was experienced as a theological shock. Christian communities that had once lived within the framework of the Roman and Byzantine empires suddenly found themselves negotiating life under a different political and religious order. In response, Christian thinkers began writing apologetic works engaging Islam. For this reason, much of the earliest Christian writing about Islam emerged from this experience of loss and displacement. Thus, Christian engagement with Islam did not begin primarily as missionary enthusiasm. It began as a response to historical trauma.

That memory did not disappear.

Centuries later, this memory resurfaced in dramatic form. In 1453, the twenty-one-year-old Sultan Mehmed II led the Ottoman Turks in capturing Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. For more than a thousand years, the city had stood as one of the great centres of Christian civilisation. Its fall sent shockwaves across Europe and intensified the perception that Islam represented a political and civilisational challenge to Christendom. The papacy itself reflected this anxiety. In a series of papal bulls issued in the second half of the fifteenth century, popes repeatedly called on Christian rulers to raise armies and retake Constantinople from the Ottomans. In such a context, it is hardly surprising that medieval European Christianity increasingly imagined the world through the lens of civilisational struggle—Christendom on one side, Islam on the other.

This imagination shaped not only politics, but also theology and the church’s understanding of mission.

By the time the modern missionary movement emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these older memories had not disappeared. If anything, they continued to shape how many Christians imagined the religious landscape of the world. Islam was frequently portrayed in missionary literature as Christianity’s great rival, and Muslim societies were often described as particularly resistant mission fields. In subtle ways, the older civilisational imagination—Christendom on one side and Islam on the other—continued to linger within the theology and strategy of modern missions.

Missionary strategy reflected this perception.

Large sections of the world where Muslims lived are still described as the most urgent missionary “frontiers.” Even today, Christian mission conversations often assume that Islam represents Christianity’s primary religious competitor. One can hear echoes of this thinking in phrases like “reaching the Muslim world,” or in strategic maps that identify Muslim-majority regions as the most critical zones of Christian mission. Even contemporary mission strategies such as the “10/40 Window” still map the world in ways that echo older civilisational anxieties.

What Does the Global South Say?

I sometimes wonder whether this framing tells us more about Christian historical memory than about the realities of the contemporary church. The demographic centre of Christianity has shifted dramatically over the past century. The majority of Christians today live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Christianity is growing most rapidly in places where the old Christendom–Islam rivalry was never the central story. Yet our missiology often still operates within mental maps inherited from the conflicts of earlier centuries. We sometimes talk about mission as though the church were still defending Christendom against an encroaching Islamic world. Our language easily slips into the grammar of anxiety, competition, and strategic rivalry.

But mission driven by fear is rarely faithful to the gospel.

The New Testament does not present mission as a civilisational contest between religions. It presents mission as witness to the good news of the kingdom of God. The early church did not spread because it was trying to defend an empire. It spread because communities of believers bore witness to Christ within the plural and contested religious world of the Roman Empire.

Perhaps, then, the question is worth asking again: Does our missiology need an enemy? At different moments the “enemy” has taken different forms: animism in Africa, Islam in the Middle East, communism during the Cold War, secularism in Europe.

If our imagination of mission depends on rivalry with another religion, then we may still be living inside the mental world created by the conflicts of the seventh and fifteenth centuries. The gospel invites the church to imagine something different. Christian mission cannot be sustained by anxiety about another religion’s power. It must instead be grounded in confidence in the gospel, humility in encounter, and hospitality toward neighbours of other faiths. And perhaps this is where the conversation about mission without empire becomes especially important.

For much of Christian history, mission was entangled with imperial imagination—sometimes Roman, sometimes European, sometimes Western. Those entanglements often produced a missionary posture shaped by competition, expansion, and the fear of losing territory. But the future of Christian mission may depend on learning to imagine witness without those imperial anxieties. Mission without empire does not need an enemy in order to justify itself. It simply needs a church faithful enough to bear witness to Christ in the world as it is.