Map of the Heart/Map of the World: Mapping, Movement, and the Evangelical Global Imaginary

Before missionaries can convert others, they themselves must be converted to the missionary enterprise. In the parlance of contemporary evangelical missionary culture, this work of “converting Christians to missions” is the task of mission mobilization. Contemporary mobilizers engage in a number of activities to attract, recruit, and motivate their fellow evangelicals to the missionary cause, but the most foundational of these is to disseminate a particular image and understanding of the world and Christians’ roles within it. Paraphrasing the words of a staff member for Youth With a Mission (YWAM), a prominent mission mobilization and sending organization, mobilization exists to “cast a vision for God’s global mission” and help create “world Christians” who think, feel, and act in service of this greater global purpose. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research on Evangelical mission mobilization organizations, actors, and literatures, I analyze one significant element of this missions-focused global imaginary: the cultural production of space. For World Christians, the world both at home and abroad is to be perceived as an ever-present mission field – an all-encompassing site of God’s redemptive power and his followers’ redemptive potential. This presentation examines how practices and representations of 1) mapping and 2) movement are central to imagining this spatial ordering of the global. It also demonstrates the intimate relationships cultivated between the territories of the self and those of the world, analyzing how central the production of affect and emotion is for “Getting God’s heart for the world.”