About

Daryl R. Ireland is a Research Associate Professor at the Boston University School of Theology. His academic background includes a PhD from Boston University, an MA from Nazarene Theological Seminary, an MDiv from Nazarene Theological Seminary, and a BA from Wheaton College. Ireland is fascinated by popular forms of Christianity and explores how faith is expressed by different groups, including young urbanites, illiterate farmers, and various cultural contexts. His work investigates the ways in which the gospel appeals across diverse populations, examining phenomena such as Chinese revivals, West African Pentecostal films, and the North American Sanctuary Movement. He has contributed to documenting popular Christianity through collaborations on digital tools like the China Historical Christian Database and the Chinese Christian Posters project. As the Associate Director of the Center for Global Christianity and Mission, Ireland maintains a focus on the many expressions of Christianity around the world. His scholarly contributions include editing and co-authoring works on Chinese Christian witness, American missiology, and Chinese Christian propaganda posters, among others.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Archaeology
• History
• Philosophy
• Information Retrieval
• Sociology
• Religious studies
• Telecommunications
• Geography
• Theology
• Database
• Classics
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Forming and Reforming the American Society of Missiology, 1973-2023

  Missiology An International Review · 2025-10-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The American Society of Missiology recently passed its 50th anniversary. That initiated a new history of the society, New Wineskins: Forming and Reforming the American Society of Missiology, 1973-2023 , which argues that the vitality of the ASM waxes when its members seriously wrestle with what it means to be American, a society, and probe the meaning of missiology. Likewise, it wanes when those questions are temporarily resolved or ignored. As the ASM begins its sixth decade, an appreciation for this historical pattern may be a key to the society’s renewal.

  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology Protestant Missionaries in China: Robert Morrison and Early Sinology. By SeitzJonathan A.Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2024. Pp. xvi, 235. Hardcover $70; e-book $55.99.

  International Bulletin of Mission Research · 2025-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The China Historical Christian Database: A Dataset Quantifying Christianity in China from 1550 to 1950

  Data · 2024 · 1 citations

  • Information Retrieval
  • Computer Science
  • History

  The era of digitization is revolutionizing traditional humanities research, presenting both novel methodologies and challenges. This field harnesses quantitative techniques to yield groundbreaking insights, contingent upon comprehensive datasets on historical subjects. The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) exemplifies this trend, furnishing researchers with a rich repository of historical, relational, and geographical data about Christianity in China from 1550 to 1950. The study of Christianity in China confronts formidable obstacles, including the mobility of historical agents, fluctuating relational networks, and linguistic disparities among scattered sources. The CHCD addresses these challenges by curating an open-access database built in neo4j that records information about Christian institutions in China and those that worked inside of them. Drawing on historical sources, the CHCD contains temporal, relational, and geographic data. The database currently has over 40,000 nodes and 200,000 relationships, and continues to grow. Beyond its utility for religious studies, the CHCD encompasses broader interdisciplinary inquiries including social network analysis, geospatial visualization, and economic modeling. This article introduces the CHCD’s structure, and explains the data collection and curation process.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hong Kong's Last English Bishop: The Life and Times of John Gilbert Hindley Baker. By Philip L. Wickeri. Sheng Kung Kui: Historical Studies of Anglican Christianity in China Series. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2021. xv + 196 pp. $62.00 cloth.

  Church History · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Theology
  • Religious studies

  Hong Kong's Last English Bishop: The Life and Times of John Gilbert Hindley Baker. By Philip L. Wickeri. Sheng Kung Kui: Historical Studies of Anglican Christianity in China Series. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2021. xv + 196 pp. $62.00 cloth. - Volume 91 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• Schism: Seventh-Day Adventism in Post-Denominational China, written by Christie Chui-Shan Chow

  Mission Studies · 2022-12-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Guest Editorial

  Mission Studies · 2022-12-05

  editorialOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lift High the Cross: The Visual Message of Popular Chinese Christianity

  International Bulletin of Mission Research · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Religious studies

  What does popular Chinese Christianity look like? Answers are elusive, because the materials that survive tend to be books and buildings—artifacts that tell us more about the elites who produced them than the average believers who used them. The Center for Global Christianity and Mission’s digitization of 700 Chinese Christian propaganda posters at ccposters.com offers a rare glimpse into the Christian ideas and images that circulated on the street. Produced between 1920 and 1950, these posters packaged Christianity for mass consumption, and what they offered China was not Jesus Christ but his cross. Popular Christianity was crucicentric, not Christocentric.

  PublisherDOI

• XiaoliYang. A Dialogue Between Haizi’s Poetry and the Gospel of Luke: Chinese Homecoming and the Relationship with Jesus Christ. Theology and Mission in World Christianity. Leiden: Brill, 2018. 334 pp.

  International Review of Mission · 2021-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Encountering China: the evolution of Timothy Richard's missionary thought (1870-1891)

  OpenBU (Boston University) · 2019-12-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In pursuit of the conversion of others, cross-cultural missionaries often experience their own “conversions.” This thesis explores the ways in which one particular missionary, the Welshman Timothy Richard (1845–1919), was transformed by his encounter with China. Focusing specifically on the evolution of his understanding and practice of Christian mission during the first half of his career with the Baptist Missionary Society, the study is structured chronologically in order to capture the important ways in which Richard’s experiences shaped his adaptations in mission. Each of Richard’s adaptations is examined within its appropriate historical and cultural context through analysis of his published and unpublished writings—all while paying careful attention to Richard’s identity as a Welsh Baptist missionary. This approach reveals that rather than softening his commitment to conversion in response to his encounters with China, Richard was driven by his persistent evangelical convictions to adapt his missionary methods in pursuit of greater results. When his experiences in Shandong and Shanxi provinces convinced him that Christianity fulfilled China’s own religious past and that God’s Kingdom promised blessings for souls in this life as well as in the next, Richard widened his theological horizons to incorporate these ideas without abandoning his essential understanding of the Christian gospel. As Richard adjusted to the realities of mission in the Chinese context, his growing empathy for Chinese people and their culture increasingly shaped his adaptations, ultimately leading him to advocate methods and emphases on the moral evidences for Christianity that were unacceptable to some of his missionary colleagues and to leaders in other missions, notably James Hudson Taylor. As the first critical work of length to focus on the early half of Richard’s missionary career, this thesis fills a gap in current scholarship on Victorian Protestant missions in China, offering a challenge to the simplistic conservative/liberal dichotomies often used to categorize missionaries. The revised picture of Richard that emerges reveals his original understanding of “the worthy” in Matthew 10, his indebtedness to Chinese sectarian religion, his early application of indigenous principles, his integration of evangelism and famine relief work, his relative unimportance in the China Inland Mission “Shanxi spirit” controversies of the 1880s, and—most significantly—his instrumental rather than evangelistic interest in the scholar-officials of China. By highlighting the priority of the Chinese (religious) context for Richard’s transformation, this thesis also contributes to the growing volume of historiography on Christianity in modern China that emphasizes the multidirectional influences present in the encounters between Christianity and Chinese culture and religion. Finally, connections between Richard’s evolution and changes taking place within the larger missionary community are also explored, situating Richard within wider discussions of accommodationism in mission, the rise of social Christianity, and evangelistic precursors to fulfillment theology.

  Publisher

• Christianity in the twentieth century: a world history

  OpenBU (Boston University) · 2019-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Alex Mayfield

  Boston University

  2 shared

• Eugenio Menegon

  1 shared

• David Li

  Westwood College

  1 shared

• Margaret Frei

  Boston University

  1 shared