: IAMS AFRICA

IAMS ASSEMBLY – 2026 PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA

Walking Together in Mission: Facing Global Challenges for a Sustainable World.

Date: July 17, 2026 – July 21, 2026

Address: University of South Africa, Kgorong Building, Preller St, Muckleneuk, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa

Plenary/Keynote Speakers

Prof Bokyoung Park

Bokyoung Park, PhD, is a Korean missiologist and theological educator, currently serving as President of the International Association for Mission Studies (IAMS). She is Professor of missiology at Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary (PUTS) in Seoul, where she has played a formative role in shaping contemporary Korean missiology within an increasingly global and polycentric theological landscape.

Her research interests include narrative missiology, missional spirituality, gender and mission, integral mission, and the formation of Korean missiology in dialogue with global Christianity. Dr. Park emphasizes mission as a relational, embodied, and contextually grounded practice – one that emerges from lived stories, communal discernment, and theological imagination.

In pursuit of this vision, she founded the Korea IAMS Fellowship (K-IAMS) to empower emerging scholars from Korea and the Global South, enabling them to articulate their theologies with confidence and contribute meaningfully to global academic conversations. Through this initiative, she launched the Adullam Grant, an academic incubation program designed to support early-stage researchers through mentoring, funding, and scholarly accompaniment. This work organically expanded into the founding of the House of Adullam, a monastic and missional community rooted in hospitality, healing, and shared life. The House of Adullam functions as a space for embodied and relational theological apprenticeship, where intellectual inquiry is deeply intertwined with practices of care, prayer, creativity, and everyday life.

Most recently, she launched an alternative theological education program, Adullam Theological Chalet. This experimental initiative intentionally moves beyond the categories of traditional seminary education, rejecting hierarchical models of knowledge transmission. Instead, it begins with lived experiences and concrete life issues, engaging theology through the five senses and embodied practices. The Adullam Theological Chalet represents Dr. Park’s ongoing commitment to reimagining theological education as a holistic, dialogical, and life-giving journey, one that forms theologians not only in thought, but in wisdom, presence, and shared humanity.

Dr Estêvão (Stefano) Raschietti

Estêvão (Stefano) Raschietti is an Italian Xaverian missionary and Catholic priest who has been in Brazil for over 30 years. He holds a master’s degree in Dogmatic Theology with a concentration in Missiology from the Pontifical Faculty of Theology Nossa Senhora da Assunção – São Paulo, SP, Brazil; and a doctorate in Theology with a concentration in Systematic-Pastoral Theology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil. Within the Catholic Church, he was a member and secretary of the National Missionary Council of Brazil; executive director of the Missionary Cultural Centre of the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference; advisor to the Conference of Religious of Brazil; and member of the advisory group of the Department of Mission and Spirituality of the Latin American Episcopal Council (CELAM). For more than twenty years, he has been an advisor, essayist, and professor of Pastoral Theology and Missiology at various faculties in Brazil and a member of the Latin American Ecumenical Network of Missiologists (RELAMI). Among other books, he is the author of “Mission in Question: The Emergence of a Latin American Missionary Paradigm from a Decolonial Perspective.”

Prof Dana L. Robert

Dana L. Robert is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission at Boston University. She has mentored numerous post-graduate students. Her publications include Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (2009); Faithful Friendships: Embracing Diversity in Christian Community(2019); African Christian Biography (ed. 2018); and Nationalism and Internationalism in the Young Ecumenical Movement, 1895–1920s (ed. with Judith Becker, 2025). For the centennial of the International Missionary Council, she directed the research on North America that resulted in the co-edited volume Creative Collaborations: Case Studies of North American Missional Practices (2023). She was keynote speaker at the Edinburgh 2010 conference. She is currently creating a digital archive of the forty years’ research on Shona religion and eco-theology by her beloved late husband M.L. Daneel. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2017 and of IAMS since 1984.

Prof Upolu Luma Vaai

Upolu Luma Vaai is Principal and Professor of Theology & Ethics at the Pacific Theological College (PTC) in Suva, Fiji. He holds a PhD degree from Griffith University in Australia. He held board director positions in Samoa government ministries. He joined the faculty staff of PTC in 2014 as Senior Lecturer and Head of Department for Theology and Ethics. He was elected as the nineth Principal of the College in 2019.

Dr Vaai is a decolonial educator and theologian. A regional leading voice in reclaiming Pasifika ‘whole of life’ philosophies and theologies to underpin a new development story, he is regularly invited by international forums to speak on Pasifika relationality, relational philosophy, relational hermeneutics, relational theology, and relational ways of knowing and being, which are ideas scattered throughout his many publications and research projects. He is an ordained minister of the Methodist Church of Samoa.

He is committee & board member, chair, and advisor to many regional and international organizations. To name a few: member of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches; UN Office on Drugs and Crimes; advisor to Asia Development Bank; advisor to World Bank, Facilitator of the WCC Global Ecumenical Theological Institute (GETI); Chair of the Oceania Centre Advisory Committee, University of the South Pacific; Co-chair of the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies, Oxford University; Chair and Convenor of 2018 Pacific Philosophy Conference; Member of the G20 Anti-Racism Initiative; Member of the G20 Environment Working Group; Expert Member of the Anti-corruption Academic Initiative (ACAD) of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC); Member of the TODA Institute Steering Committee; Member of the Berkeley Centre of Religion, Peace, and World Affairs; Advisory board of the Laudato Si Institute, Oxford University; Editorial board member of 6 International Journals; Member of Executive committee of the Pacific Conference of Churches, and the Association of South Pacific Theological Schools. He currently chairs most of the committees and leads the transitioning of the College towards University by 2025.

Dr Gabriel Hanganu

Gabriel is an anthropologist and community manager at the Alan Turing Institute in London, the UK’s National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He is also a priest in the Romanian Orthodox Archdiocese of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and has served for many years in Oxford and more recently in London. He has a PhD in Anthropology from Oxford, where he has worked on the production of material culture in religious communities and on the co-creation of open source software in globally distributed communities. He managed linked data and research infrastructure projects, coordinated European research data infrastructure consortia, and advised researchers across the UK on open source software development.He is currently interested in the impact of artificial intelligence on religious communities, in particular on Orthodox immigrant groups in Europe as they communicate online across their native and adopted countries.

Prof Isabel Apawo Phiri

Professor Isabel Apawo Phiri is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Blantyre Synod (UBS) starting from 2nd February 2023. She previously served as the Deputy General Secretary of the World Council of Churches from 1st January 2017 up to December 2022 when she retired. Before that, she served as the Associate General Secretary of the World Council of Churches from July 2012 to December 2016.

Professor Phiri was previously appointed Head of the Faculty of Theology at the University of KwaZulu Natal from 2005 to 2005. She was also appointed Dean and Head of the School of Religion Philosophy and Classics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, from January 2012 just before she was appointed to work for the World Council of Churches in July 2012. She also worked at the University of Malawi and University of Namibia.

Prof Phiri is passionate about research. Her early research examined how Chewa women in the Church of Central Africa, Nkhoma Synod negotiated leadership positions in the church and society. Her research was inspired by the work of the Circle of Concerned African Theologians which was founded in Legon Ghana in September 1989. In 2003, she became a General Coordinator of the Circle up to 2007. The Circle promotes research and writing by women on issues that affect women in the church and society. Wherever she studied and worked, she established chapters of the Circle. During her time of leadership, the Circle focused on researching on how religion and culture fuelled HIV vulnerability of women.

Professor Phiri has a wide array of published work on gender, religion, the HIV and AIDS, Diakonia, Racism, climate justice, theological education from the perspective of an African theologian. She has authored/edited/co-authored twelve books. She has edited a peer reviewed Journal of Constructive Theology from Vol. l. 3, No. 2, December, 1997 to Vol. 16.No. 2. December 2010. It was renamed Journal of Gender and Religion in Africa, 19.1 Dec 2014. She has forty articles in peer-reviewed, internationally recognised journals. Eight articles in other journals. She has published thirty-five chapters in books and has twelve entries in reference books. She has also supervised and co supervised eighteen Doctor of Philosophy students and seventeen Masters degree students who graduated from the University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Professor Phiri was educated in Malawi, United Kingdom and South Africa. She received herB. Ed in Religious Studies and History from Chancellor College, the University of Malawi in 1981. Her MA in Religious Education was obtained from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom in 1983. Her PhD in Religious Studies is from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, obtained in 1992.

In addition, she obtained a Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) in Modern Management for Non-Profit Organizations. The Certificate is awarded by the Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences of the University of Geneva, Switzerland, 2017. Furthermore, the Faculty of Theology and Religion, the University of Pretoria (UP) conferred to her Doctor of Divinity (honoris causa) in recognition of her significant contributions to academia, church and society in 2023. She also obtained a Certificate in Theology from the Zomba Theological University in 2025 as part of preparations to be ordained as a minister in the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, Blantyre Synod.