Daily Reading for October 30
Mistakes that Christian missionaries from the Global North made in their work in the Global South have become so well known that caution and suspicion are the first reactions many people have to the mention of world mission. Many missionaries have dismissed the primal religions of Africa and Polynesia and have demonized such world religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. Some have presented the gospel through their own ethnic and cultural identity, depicting Jesus, for instance, as a blonde European. Missionaries have sometimes not bothered to learn the language of the people to whom they were sent, insisting that their hosts should learn English or French or German. Some missionaries have disparaged and dismissed indigenous cultures as lacking worthwhile values and have sought to substitute western norms. In their evangelistic zeal, they have ignored human needs, and some have lived a lifestyle far removed from that of the people they seek to serve. The style and content of development projects have sometimes been misconceived and poorly implemented.
It is very important that Christians in the Global North absorb this history and avoid naïve optimism about mission, both historically and for the future. It is equally important that we not be paralyzed by this history. Not only is Christianity now a global religion, but Christians in many recently evangelized societies have vital and growing autonomous churches, and they have their own affirmations and critiques of the western missionary enterprise. These indigenous Christians describe the mistakes that western missionaries made much more acutely and eloquently than we can, for they experience them from the inside. Often they also celebrate how missionaries preached the gospel, established churches, and founded institutions of education and healthcare that continue to be crucial in the indigenous churches’ witness in newly independent nations. Assessments of those on the receiving end, in other words, tend to be more balanced between shortcomings and gifts, while our own soul-searching is often more uniformly negative about the past and pessimistic about the future. If we are serious about learning from our partners, we need to listen to their perspective on the missionary legacy.
From Horizons of Mission by Titus Presler, Volume 11 of the New Church’s Teaching Series (Cowley Publications, 2001).