This is the UECF.NET web edition of The Theology of the Christian Mission, edited and with an introduction by Gerald H. Anderson, with a foreword by Lesslie Newbigin. The book was first published by McGraw-Hill in 1961 and reprinted by Abingdon Press (Nashville) by arrangement with McGraw-Hill; this edition was prepared from a scan of the Abingdon paperback (Standard Book Number 687-41523-3, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-53347), the same scan that is offered here as a downloadable PDF.
What is the book’s and what is UECF.NET’s
| The original book (1961) | Every word of the text — foreword, introduction, the twenty-five essays, footnotes, the dedication poem, contributors, acknowledgments, bibliography and index — is the authors’ and the editor’s. Nothing has been summarized, abridged, modernized, or commented upon. The chapter numbers 1–25 are a navigational convenience of this edition; the printed book lists the essays without numbers under its four parts. |
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| UECF.NET web navigation | The site header and footer, the book home page, the hierarchical Contents (parts → chapters → sections), Previous/Next links, breadcrumbs, the sidebar table of contents, the reading toolbar (text size, dark mode, printed page numbers) and the reading-progress bar were added for reading on screen. |
| Search | A client-side full-text index of every paragraph, heading, note, bibliography entry and index entry, with filters for chapters, headings, content and notes, quoted-phrase search, and highlighted results. Nothing is sent to a server. |
| Bookmarks and reading position | Stored only in your own browser (localStorage); no account or cookie is involved. The Continue reading link returns you to the chapter you last read. |
| Responsive design and print | The layout adapts from phones to large screens; a print stylesheet removes the navigation and prints the text at full width. |
| Other enhancements | Stable anchors for every chapter, section and printed page (?p=123 or #p-123), Scripture references set in a distinct style, footnotes gathered at the end of each chapter with their printed page, an index whose page numbers link into the text, and Open Graph / schema.org metadata for sharing. |
How the text was prepared
The 364-page scan was re-recognised at 300 dpi with Tesseract 5, and the resulting text was analysed page by page: running heads and page numbers were removed, footnotes (set in smaller type at the foot of each page) were separated from the body and collected at the end of each chapter, hyphenated line-ends were rejoined, paragraphs and block quotations were reconstructed from the typesetting, and the four pages that are bound out of order in the scan (printed pages 228–231) were restored to their printed sequence. Chapter titles and authors were checked against the book’s own table of contents, and the printed page numbers of every chapter match it.
Because the book was recognised from a scan, a small number of characters may still be misread — most often superscript footnote numbers, foreign-language titles in the notes and bibliography, and italic type, which the scan does not preserve (italics in the original are therefore shown as ordinary text). Only unambiguous scanning artifacts were normalised (for example “Tbid.” → “Ibid.”, “fiir” → “für”); the wording is otherwise exactly as printed. Where a footnote’s superscript number could not be recovered from the scan, the note still appears in the chapter’s Notes with the page on which it was printed. The original page images remain available in the PDF for anyone who needs to check a reading.
Validation of the extracted text
The scan has 364 PDF pages; the printed book runs from page 3 (Introduction) to page 341 (end of Index), with front matter i–xvii. Tesseract recognised 129,303 words (mean word confidence 95.5%); the Internet Archive text layer supplied with the PDF has 128,229 words. The reading text of this edition contains 128,038 words in 26 chapters, 28 numbered sections, 976 paragraphs and quotations, 249 footnotes (75 of them linked from a recovered superscript), 215 bibliography entries and 273 index entries. Page-by-page comparison of the 315 body pages against their OCR shows a mean word coverage of 96.8% (minimum 90.8%); 0 page(s) fall below 90% and were inspected. The printed page sequence 3–313 (essays) is complete and in order.
Copyright
The book is © 1961 by Gerald H. Anderson, all rights reserved; it was reprinted by arrangement with McGraw-Hill Book Company. The essays by Karl Barth, Paul Tillich and Oscar Cullmann and the poem by Vachel Lindsay were reproduced in the book by permission of their respective publishers, as listed in the Acknowledgments. UECF.NET makes this text available for study and reference and claims no rights in it; the web navigation, search index and design of this edition are UECF.NET’s. If you are a rights holder with a concern about this edition, please write to info@uecf.net.
How to cite
Gerald H. Anderson, ed., The Theology of the Christian Mission (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961; reprint, Nashville: Abingdon Press). UECF.NET web edition, https://www.uecf.net/books/theology-of-the-christian-mission/. Page numbers of the printed edition are marked in the text and can be linked directly, e.g. https://www.uecf.net/books/theology-of-the-christian-mission/index.html?p=55.