Geographies of contemporary Christian mission(aries)

This paper draws together emerging literature within Geography, and from across the broader social sciences, around contemporary mission and missionaries. It argues for the importance of recognising mission organisations and missionaries not just as historic relics, but as important, active, and geographically far ranging actors in the modern world. In mapping out the little work that has been conducted, three themes are addressed, missionary geopolitics; mission, welfare and development; and transnational migration, religion and cosmopolitanism. The article highlights the potential contributions that a (re)examination of missionary lives, beliefs and praxis can make to these disparate bodies of literature, and calls for further research in these directions within geographical scholarship.