Roberta King is associate professor of communication and ethnomusicology in the School of Intercultural Studies. Since coming to Fuller in 2000, she has served as All-Seminary Chapel director and developed a new curriculum for “Ethnomusicology in Mission”--renamed Global Christian Worship (ethnomusicology)--at the MA level, and has recently launched a new Doctor of Missiology in Ethnomusicology.

After studying music at the undergraduate and graduate levels, King began her missionary career in Kenya at Daystar Communications, now Daystar University in Nairobi, Kenya. While there, she recognized the power of music to communicate the gospel profoundly within varying cultural contexts. She directed and led worship at Nairobi Baptist Church and established the Department of Christian Music Communication at Daystar University. King also served for 20 years with WorldVenture, a U.S.-based Baptist mission society, working with church leaders in 11 African nations, from Senegal to Madagascar, to develop appropriate songs for communicating the gospel in over 80 different languages.

In addition to her academic responsibilities at Fuller, King continues to reach out to the global Church, teaching and holding recent workshops in Chennai, India; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Nairobi, Kenya; and serving as the Hearn Innovator in Christian Music speaker at Baylor University’s School of Music. Though she teaches such subjects as qualitative research and intercultural communication, her passion is to communicate Christ through song and the arts of a culture in ways that lead to her ultimate missional goal: to release God’s people, from all nations, to worship Jesus Christ.

King has published Music in the Life of the African Church (2008), A Time to Sing: A Manual for the African Church (1999), and articles in journals such as Missiology and the Evangelical Missions Quarterly. She is also a regular contributor to Worship Leader magazine and EthnoDoxology, the journal of the International Council of EthnoDoxologists, an organization which she helped to found and now serves on both its Founders and Academic Programs committees.   She is currently the recipient of a Luce Research Grant focused on “Songs of Peace and Reconciliation: A Comparative Studies of Music, Worship and the Arts Among Muslims and Christians” as part of a Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts initiative.  The major research will take place in Lebanon and Indonesia.