The study of religion and international relations has achieved renewed attention in the last two decades. This study investigates a specific aspect of this field: religious soft power. It focuses on individuals who were affected by religious soft power and develop a typology of courses of action these individuals can take vis-à-vis their home state. I argue that individuals can take three different types of actions: disruptive, reformative, and transnational. Using the cases of the Catholic Church and its followers, ISIS and Sunni believers, and the relations between Israel and the Evangelicals, I assess how these alternative actions are being manifested by different groups of individuals. Lastly, I offer an answer to the question of when individuals would use disruptive action and when will they use reformative one.

The Arctic has claimed much interest in both popular discourse and academic scholarship, most notably concerning the voyages of Sir John Franklin. However, the explorers of the British Navy were not the only representatives of imperial expansion in what is now the Canadian Arctic. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the evangelical missionary society of the Church of England, undertook a substantial programme of evangelism throughout the region, not just aiming to convert indigenous people, but also to claim the land for the British empire and establish a strong presence in the region as an integral aspect of the providential expansion of empire. This article contends that the CMS attempted to achieve those aims through the creation of permanent infrastructure which brought the region into the fold of empire in a way that exploration could not, as missionaries used buildings to transform the land and its inhabitants as part of the duty of empire and its agents towards all its inhabitants. In claiming the land for empire, architecture was not just a by-product of occupation but rather a vital and integral agent in securing northern territories for God and empire.

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey has seldom been associated with the University of Cambridge. But in a little-known episode, he was invited to follow John Fisher as chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 1514. Although Wolsey declined, his willingness to protect Cambridge’s evangelicals, even after he burned Martin Luther’s books in 1521, has been an overlooked phase in the history of the university and in the Reformation in England.

This essay draws on the typological framework of Stephen B. Bevans and Roger P. Schroeder in Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2004), to analyse a case study church drawn from the Church of England. It investigates key elements of the theology and life of the church, in particular its implicit eschatology and understanding of salvation, and its approach to evangelism, to identify and establish which of Bevans and Schroeder's models it most closely expresses. This correlation is then used to draw out certain practical implications for the life of the church, most notably how it can more consistently and therefore with more integrity live out its inherent approach to mission. This shows the general practical usefulness of this methodology for other churches in different settings.