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In the November/December 1996 issue of Books & Culture, reviewing Andrew Walls's book The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith (Orbis), Mark Noll wrote that "if a more important book on the general meaning of Christian history is published this year—or even this decade—it will be a surprise." Last year, the book was included in Christianity Today's list of the 100 most influential Christian books of the twentieth century. That's a fair measure of the impact of Andrew Walls's work. Walls, who is professor of world Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and founder of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World at the University of Edinburgh, has a new book just out from Orbis, The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History. Don Yerxa spoke with Walls at Eastern Nazarene College in January of this year prior to Walls's lecture in the ENC History Department's Distinguished Lecture Series.

Would you tell us a little bit about your childhood and early religious experiences?

I come from a working-class family. My mother was traditionally devout. Though I believe he prayed every day of his life, I don't recall my father ever going to church. Like many people from that generation, he believed that the church had abandoned working people and was not standing for righteousness. The person I have realized since that was a great influence on me was my grandfather, who lived with us. He had run away to sea from Dundee at the age of twelve and had traveled the world. He eventually settled down looking after sheep in Patagonia. My earliest memories include floods of what I now realize to be very bad Spanish, but also insights into things from all over the world. He himself was a rugged old unbeliever, but the impressions remained with me for a long time.

I went to Sunday school and church and in adolescent years made a commitment to Christ.

Did your education encourage or hinder your call to missions?

Influences while a student were very important in shaping my Christian life and understanding. A deep impression of the mission field was there from an early stage and a very definite consciousness of the rest of the world, which I think had come from this early exposure from my grandfather. During my student years at Exeter College, Oxford, I felt a tension. A desire to be a missionary remained. I was very conscious, however, of gifts I didn't have, including the obvious pastoral gifts you are looking for in a minister. The other part of the tension was my deep absorption in academic work—a desire and, as I believed, a calling for Christians to continue in these lines. I couldn't reconcile the missionary and the academic lines, possibly because I was thinking of mission work in rather conventional terms that one got from Sunday school and church. They did come together, of course, and when the opening came it was indeed desired that it be someone with a good academic background, with graduate work, and so on. I had, in the meantime, become the librarian and general factotum at Tyndale House in Cambridge in its early days as a biblical research library. I had been in a research setting for some time and was still not clear how this reconciled with what I still retained from the missionary vocation.

You have written about an epiphany experience early in your time in West Africa in which you came to recognize that the African church was experiencing essentially the same tensions as those of the early church. Could you describe how that realization dawned on you?

In the 1950s, we still talked about "the younger churches," and the expectation was that the younger churches would learn from the experience of the older ones. I was to teach early church history. Church history was my background; I had done my work at Oxford in Patristics and had written on the apostolic tradition of Hippolytus. I started teaching still very much with this idea of imparting the lessons of the past—as the arbiter of this—to an expectant audience, which obviously had great difficulty in making anything out of this peculiar set of information. The students wrote it all down. Ritual transfer of knowledge was important. But it clearly didn't have any impact or make any particular sense to people. This attitude of imparting lessons was combined with a very critical sense of the existing African church and great awareness of its faults,—and very little awareness, as I began to discover, of its inwardness, of where it had come from.

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