•nternatlona•etln

Vol. 19, No.1 January 1995

Mission and Statistics: Use with Care N o feature of this journal is quoted or anticipated more

eagerly than the "Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission," by David B. Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE), published in 1982.

Barrett's 1995 update in this issue illustrates the power of statistics to illuminate major issues-in this case, the way mis­sionaries are deployed: most go where established Christian bodies are willing to invite them. Barrett's graph shows how out­of-sync the results of this principle are with the neediest, least­evangelized areas of the world.

A second statistical article appears in this issue. Assistant editor Robert T. Coote scrutinizes the data on the number of North American Protestant missionaries over the last twenty­five years. He contends that reports of major personnel increases in the 1980s require substantial revision.

Statistics have been known to baffle ordinary mortals. Oth­ers use statistics with little appreciation of the potential for misapplication. Valid statistics are difficult both to assemble and to interpret. In some editions of the Mission Handbook, which lists North American Protestant mission agencies, readers have found a cautionary note: "Compilation and analysis of mission statis­tics is a very tenuous business.... The total number of North American overseas personnel reported is the sum of all the questionnaires returned plus some estimates. The actual number may be somewhat different."

Barrett tells inquirers something similar. His annual statisti­cal table reports the total of data gathered from some 250nations. Every year his office uncovers new information that may change numbers and projections reported in prior years. Two years ago, for instance, population totals for 1970 were adjusted upward from what had been reported previously. The revised numbers reflected new demographic analysis provided by researchers at the United Nations. This year the projection for some religions for the year A.D. 2025 is up, while for others the projection is down as compared with what was reported last year. Projections for Protestants are also up (due to rates of growth in Third World countries), while those for most other Christianecclesialblocs are down. Sometimes changing numbers reflect the adoption of new definitions. User beware: What you proclaim this year based on

the IBMR's most popular feature may be subject to significant revision at a future date.

Given the breadth of Barrett's statistical research, some line items in the annual table raise questions that cannotbe addressed in the limited space available. We look forward to fuller explica­tion in WorldChristianEncyclopedia II, to be published in a year or two by Oxford University Press.

On Page 2 Interreligious Dialogue: A View from Asia

Michael Amaladoss, s.; 6 Good News, Bad News: North American

Protestant Overseas Personnel Statistics in Twenty-Five-Year Perspective RobertT. Coote

13 Ironies of Indigenization: Some Cultural Repercussions of Mission in South India Susan Billington Harper

21 My Pilgrimage in Mission Gerald E. Currens

24 Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 1995 David B. Barrett

26 The Legacy of John Ritchie G. Stewart McIntosh

28 Noteworthy

32 Book Reviews

33 Fifteen Outstanding Books of 1994 for Mission Studies

45 Dissertation Notices

48 Book Notes

of issionary Research

Interreligious Dialogue: A View from Asia

Michael Amaladoss, S. J.

P aradigms and models have their usefulness in theologi­cal reflection. But they also tend to iron out potentially

useful differences and nuances in theological positions while attempting to classify them according to prefabricated frame­works. I think that the prevailing tendency to classify all reflec­tion in the field of interreligious dialogue as exclusive, inclusive, or pluralist leads to a misunderstanding of Asian reflection. I would like to offer a simple presentation of an emerging consen­sus with regard to interreligious dialogue among Catholic theo­logians in Asia. After indicating the experiential, ecclesial, and reflective contexts of such a consensus, I shall explore some questions that arise in any discussion of dialogue.

The Experiential Context

For us Asian Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and others are part of our life. We share a common culture and way of life. We belong to a common economic and political system. We have a common history. Our religious differences have cultural, politi­cal, and even economic implications. In this ongoing dialogue of life we have begun to appreciate the believers of other religions. We respect and read with profit their scriptures and other sacred writings. We learn from their sadhana, methods of prayer, and religious experience. We regard positively their moral conduct. We collaborate with them in the promotion of common human and spiritual values like freedom and justice, love and service. We do not feel superior to them. On the contrary, some mystical, nondualistic traditions in Asia consider our Christian communi­ties as being at a stage of inferior spiritual development, still busy with rituals and symbols. We are often sought after more for our social and educational services than for our spiritual example or leadership.

At least for some of us, interreligious dialogue is also an interior, personal search for our own religious roots, which we want to rediscover and integrate.

The Ecclesial Context

Although this openness to other believers started in Asia, it was supported and strengthened by the Second Vatican Council. A positive view of other believers and religions emerges from a convergence of texts. The Asian bishops, in their first declaration on evangelization from Taipei in 1974, saw in other believers God's self-manifestation. John Paul II, in his symbolic gesture of inviting other religious leaders to Assisi in 1986to pray with him for peace, acknowledged the legitimacy of other religions. He also frequently calls for the collaboration of all believers and of all people of good will for the promotion and defense of common human and religious values.

Michael Amaladoss, S./., is from South India. He has taught theology in Vidyajyoti Theological College, Delhi. At present he is oneof theAssistants, particularlyfor mission concerns, tothesuperiorgeneral oftheSociety ofJesus, in Rome. He is also thePresident of theInternational Association for Mission Studies. He is the author, besides other books and articles, of Making All Things New: Dialogue, Pluralism, and Evangelization in Asia andWalk­ing Together: The Practice of Inter-Religious Dialogue.

The Reflective Context

While theologians tend to speak of the religions as systems or as ways of salvation, we prefer to speak of people and of God reaching out to them. Religions do not save; God does. Religions are only expressive mediations of divine-human encounter. What is important is the experiential and personal aspects of this encounter, not the rituals in which it is celebrated and the systems that organize, express, and reflect on it.

Because of this change in approach, our way of expression and reflection moves away from abstract, conceptual categories to experiential, symbolic ones. While concepts tend to be clear and distinct, and are used to distinguish and separate (either-or) and to compare and contrast, symbols are rich and polyvalent, integrating and inclusive (both-and), seeking convergence and harmony. An interpretative reflection need not be less rigorous than a deductive one.

Let me now consider some of the questions that are fre­quently raised with reference to Asian theology in the field of interreligious dialogue.

A Positive View of Other Religions

One of the starting points of an Asian theology of interreligious dialogue is the acceptance of the reality and legitimacy of other religions as social-symbolic mediations of divine-human en­counter. This perception of other religions is based not on an evaluation of them as systems but on the experience of people who practice them and of the action of God in those people as shown by their moral and spiritual action. It is not helpful to isolate and reify the religions as systems in themselves, set apart from this experiential complex. As systems, they are limited expressions; they may have sinful elements too, because they are human expressions. But they are also symbolic mediations of divine action and human response in freedom.

This quality of real, if limited, legitimacy also characterizes the elements that constitute the religious system, such as scrip­tures, rituals, and symbols. Indian theologians, for example, have asked whether other religious scriptures can be considered to be inspired and revealed and whether we can participate in the rituals of other religions. Inspiration and revelation are not qualities in themselves to be attributed to texts independently of a community and of God's action in it. Ritual symbols have meaning only in the context of the life of a community in its relationship to God. If our attitude to divine-human relationship in a religious community is positive, then it will be positive also to its scriptures and rituals, without ceasing to be critical.

To look at other religions in this manner has consequences for the way we look at our own. Though we speak of the church as pilgrim and think of ourselves as sinful, we tend to think of the church institution itself as somehow escaping all historical and cultural conditioning. We give the impression that inspiration and revelation are used as absolute qualities of the Christian Scriptures, though we accept the need for interpretation. With regard to rituals, the ex opere operata principle, instead of affirm­ing the primacy of God's action as compared with the human disposition or response, seems to be reified in the ritual itself in

2 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

International Bulletin of Missionary Research Established 1950 by R. Pierce Beaver as Occasional Bulletin from the Missionary Research Library. Named Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 1977. Renamed INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH 1981.

Published quarterly in January, April, July, and October by

Overseas Ministries Study Center 490 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511, U.S.A. Telephone: (203) 624-6672 Fax: (203) 865-2857

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ISSN 0272-6122

a magical way. Some extend it also to the church. It is difficult for us to accept that whatever we may say about the "mystery of the church," the institutional community to which we belong is limited and culturally and historically conditioned. I do not in any way deny or minimize the authenticity and absoluteness of the action of God in and through the social-symbolic structures of the church. I only question the attribution of such authenticity and absoluteness to institutional aspects and practices of the church.

The Pluralism of Religions

To accept the legitimacy of other religions is to accept the plural­ism of religions. But we do not seem to have found a proper way of speaking about pluralism. Pluralism of religions does not mean that all religions are the same. They are not. Ifwe take some attribute like "salvific," then it may apply to all religions. But there is no reason to reduce the significance of religion to a particular attribute like that. Another way of handling pluralism is to place religions in a linear, developmental mode and see them as more or less true or revealed or perfect. Or one speaks of complementarity. This approach can have two sources. One sees the relationship of pluralism and unity as that of the parts to the whole. The unifying principle, then, is either complementarity or proportion (more or less). Another source is the view of history as a linear process leading to more and more perfection or development. This approach has its origin partly in a positivist view of history and partly in a projection on the whole of human history of the particular historical structure offered by the Bible. Even the classification of religions as exclusive and inclusive does not avoid a quantitative perspective.

I think that to have an adequate understanding of pluralism we must exchange these quantitative categories for personal ones. The roots of pluralism are the freedom of God and of humans and their relationships. God's free self-communication is neither limited nor conditioned by anything exterior to it. The Spirit blows where, when, and how it wills. The response of humans may be conditioned by history, culture, and their own limited possibilities; but it is still free and creative and therefore pluralistic. The resulting pluralism is not chaotic, because God is one, and we believe that God has a plan for humanity. This assures a basic community. But it is a community of persons that has to be explored in human terms of communion and conver­gence or of freedom and harmony, and not in material terms of quantity and number, complementarity and comparison.

The Role of the Church

The experience of the pluralism of religions raises the question of the identity of the church. What is it for? As long as we thought that it had a monopoly of revelation and salvation, religious pluralism was merely a fact to note but had no significance in the history of salvation. The whole world was destined to become church. When this monolithic view of the churchbroke down, we sought to understand its significance in terms of partial versus full revelation, of implicit versus explicit faith, of a difficult versus an easy divine-human relationship. But where God's real self-communication is recognized, such categorizations seem exterior to it, if not meaningless.

The Second Vatican Council spoke of the church as a sacra­ment-that is, symbol and servant of communion with God and of unity among all peoples. This is the reality of the reign of God. Starting with this, the Asian theologians speak of the church as

January 1995 3

the symbol and servant of the reign of God. Sacrament affirms a symbolic and social dimension. It speaks of a real, but a nonexclusive, relationship. The reign of God is larger than the church. This difference between the church and the reign of God makes space for other religions. It gives the church not a domi­nant but a servant role. The church is not focused on itself but on the reign of God. It does not proclaim itselfbut Jesus and the reign of God that Jesus himself proclaimed. It welcomes people as disciples of Jesus to continue fulfilling the church's role of service of the reign of God in the world. But its primary aim is building up the reign of God. It builds itself up only in view of its service to the reign. It thus discovers a wider field of service and mission. The church and the reign of God must not be separated, neither should they be confused. The church has its existence and mean­ing only in the context of the reign of God. The reign of God, in God's plan as we know it, is related to the church, though it transcends it.

One important element of this complex awareness is that the church does not monopolize God's presence and action in the world. Evenwithin the church, while Paul n1ayplantand Apollos may water, it is God who gives life and growth. But God also continues to act in the world, outside the church, in other peoples. Some theologians speak of this as the mission of God. Other talk

We can proclaim what God has accomplished in us, without denying what God may be doing in others.

about the work of the Spirit. Still others suggest the cosmic Christ. This depends on one's theology of the Trinity. The mis­sion of the church is set in the context of the mission of God, not vice versa. The church is called to proclaim the good news revealed to it. But perhaps it should listen first, so that its proclamation may be relevant to the situation and respectful of God's own continuing action there.

I think that in the kind of approach we are developing, focused on divine-human relationship, theological discourse that remains at the level of truth and its revelation and of faith as its acceptance and affirmation is not denied but transcended. Similarly, the divine project of salvation is not limited to indi­viduals but extends to the whole world, leading to cosmic reconciliation and unification. The church is aware of a special indispensable role and mission in this cosmic process, without, however, identifying itself with it, simply because the action of God transcends it. That the church is not able always to under­stand the mysterious ways of God does not in any way weaken its call to witness to what it knows of the mystery. We can always proclaim the great work that God has accomplished in us, without denying what God may be doing among others. Unfor­tunately, our vision of unity is reductive and possessive.

In this connection I wonder whether the church can consider itself as normative in God's plan of salvation. Today we would rather speak of the Word of God as the ultimate norm. But if the Word of God, both as revealing and as active, is not limited to its expression in the Bible as text and story, our familiar framework breaks down. We have to explore other frameworks like analogy or compatibility. The Word of God cannot contradict itself. But it need not repeat the same thing. And contradiction should not be

assumed too easily, looking at things from our limited point of view. We should rather imitate Mary in pondering in the heart the significance of experiences and expressions that we do not fully understand.

Proclamation and Dialogue

Considered from this broad perspective, the tension between proclamation and dialogue disappears because their orientation and focus are different, though convergent. Proclamation wit­nesses to God's mystery as it has been manifested to us. Dialogue reaches out to the mystery of God active in others. Both procla­mation and dialogue have their role in building up both the church and the reign of God. The tension between them arises when they are both focused on building up the church.

In the practical sphere, too, an opposition between procla­mation and dialogue is artificial. One can define them in the abstract in such a way that one stresses their difference from one another. But they are not primarily concepts; they are relation­ships of communication between people. When we are in a situation of the dialogue of life with other believers, we do not proclaim at one moment and dialogue at the next. They are aspects or elements of one complex relationship. Their mutual relation within this one relationship may be articulated differ­ently at different times and places or with different persons and groups. But even when I am proclaiming my faith to another person, I cannot do so seriously without taking into account the other's God-experience and liberty-that is, I must communicate dialogically. This is what the Asian bishops mean when they describe evangelization in Asia as a dialogue between the Gos­pel, on the one hand, and the religions, cultures, and the poor of Asia, on the other. It is proclamation in a dialogic mode. To look on this holistic vision from the point of view of the proclamation­dialogue dichotomy is foreign to Asian experience and perspec­tive. Similarly, if dialogue is frank sharing of one's faith convic­tions, it is also proclamationaI.

I think that a dichotomous view of proclamation and dia­logue arises from an atti tude to the believers of other religions as people simply to be won over. In such a perspective, unity is possible only in subordinating dialogue to proclamation. One detects a desire for domination (however nuanced, of course, in the name of God and of Truth). One speaks of "conquering" the world for Christ. This reflects, not the spirit of Christ who chose to humble himself even unto death, but other historical forces. Indian theologians have spoken about the kenotic dimension of Christianity in the context of religious pluralism.

The Reign of God

We have been using the phrase "reign of God" rather frequently in the foregoing sections. I think that the meaning that Asian theologians give to it is often misunderstood. Some think of the reign of God in a purely ecclesial context. The church is growing in history toward the reign of God in an alreadyI not-yet dialec­tic. The reign of God is then seen as the eschatological future of the church. The reality of the other religions does not directly enter into this framework.

Others are opposed to a merely interior, spiritual vision of the reign of God and wish to give it a socioeconomic and political content, even if it is still in an eschatological framework of alreadyI not-yet. They emphasize that the reign of God must be built up here and now in history and must be realized in commu­nities of freedom, fellowship, and justice, even if the fullness of

4 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

its realization may be in the future. This is seen by some as an effort to historicize and materialize the reign of the God. This is an ongoing dispute between the liberation theologians and oth­ers opposed to them.

Asians tend to use the phrase "reign of God" in a double sense. On the one hand, it indicates the wider reality of God's mystery, not merely eschatologically, but also in history, which serves as a counterpoint to the reality of the church as a visible, institutional community. On the other hand, it refers to the common human community of freedom, fellowship, and justice, toward the building up of which all believers are invited to collaborate. Believers individually find inspiration and motiva­tion for their commitment in their own religion. But they try to develop a common human vision and project through dialogue. Part of this common project is also the harmony among the religions themselves. Some seem to think that an effort at build­ing a common human community is disloyalty to the project of building the church. Is it not possible to promote both the church and the reign of God, neither identifying them nor opposing them one to the other?

Talk about interreligious dialogue tends to remain at the religious level. But religion is for life. It has to do more with behavior than with knowledge. Orthopraxis must concern us more in the process of dialogue than orthodoxy. Common action for justice is not merely a context for, but an expression, of interreligious relationships. Unfortunately our tendency is to instrumentalize everything in the service of religion. Interreli­gious conflicts can be avoided only when the religions stop focusing on themselves and find their common focus in discov­ering God in human community.

The Place of Christ

Where is Christ in this whole process? The uniqueness of Christ is often presented as a burning issue in the context of dialogue. I think that in Asia the person and role of Christ is not a problem. The real problem is the attempt of the church to monopolize Christ. I have the impression that what is often presented as the question of the uniqueness of Christ is actually the problem of the uniqueness of Christianity. If we do not identify Christ with Christianity, then Christ need not be an obstacle to dialogue between religions. The ghost of the claim "There is no salvation outside the church" often takes new forms in formulas like the "necessity of the church for salvation." The church then becomes the visible part of a mysterious, ahistorical entity, identified as the mystical body of Christ, and every person who is saved becomes an anonymous Christian. To call a believing Hindu an anonymous Christian is offensive, unless one is also ready to be considered an anonymous Hindu. If we believe with the Second Vatican Council that the Holy Spirit offers to everyone the possibility of participating in the paschal mystery in ways un­known to us; if we are aware that more than 80 percent of humanity are not Christian (including among the non-Christian community all those who are Christians in name only); and if we do not continue to play with concepts like "implicit" and "ex­plicit" that come not from experience but from a priori argumen­tation, then we can make space for other religions. What seems clear to us today is that God's universal salvific will does not depend on the historic-symbolic mediation of the visible, institu­tional church alone. However the tendency to identify the church with Christ is so great that some prefer to attribute to the Spirit any divine action outside the church-though the Spirit will be immediately characterized as the Spirit of Christ, thus taking

January 1995

away with one hand what is given by the other. We believe in the centrality of the paschal mystery of Christ

in God's saving action. But we need not adopt the sacrificial, juridical, and ontological theories developed in a different cul­tural and philosophical context. Considering universality as the universalization of a historical particularity also depends on a particular view of history and its relation to mystery. We also believe that this mystery is linked to the church in a special, but not an exclusive, way, provided this specificity is spelled out not triumphalistically but in terms of kenosis and service. To our traditional questions we may add a new one: How is salvation in Christ mediated to people through other religions or even no religion at all? But the practice of interreligious dialogue need not wait for a clear answer to these questions and explorations. Perhaps interreligious dialogue may throw further light on some of these mysteries.

Conclusion

I think that what we are facing in Asia is a new and different type of living faith experience that gives rise to new questions and to a new theology. When questions are asked about this theology, it is not enough to look at the questions in themselves; we have to look at the presuppositions, perspectives, and experiences that lie behind the questions.

In concluding these reflections, I would like to point to two principles of Asian theology that are relevant to the area of interreligious dialogue. The first is the need to go beyond physi­cal and conceptual categories to personal ones like freedom and relationships. This is the basis for pluralism. Without personal categories, unity in pluralism can be thought of only in terms of hierarchy. I am also wary of easy and neat classifications like exclusivism and inclusivism, theocentric and Christocentric, and so forth. I think that the development in Asia of a theology of harmony is worth pursuing.

The second principle that seems to be guiding Asian theo­logical reflection, consciously or unconsciously, is that of the advaita, or nonduality. The principle of advaita, explained in various ways by the philosophers, tries to hold together two realities that are experienced as neither one nor two. It resists the temptation to solve the problemby identifying them. Rather than enter into a metaphysical discussion here, I shall illustrate it with a couple of examples. The Second Vatican Council says that the one church of Christ subsists in the Roman Catholic Church. The tendency today seems to be equate "subsists in" with "is." For a dichotomous way of thinking, if one does not say "is," then one is saying "is not." There is no middle ground. "Subsists in," however, indicates a middle ground that seems difficult to understand or express in a certain philosophical approach.

Similarly, one starts with saying that Jesus proclaims the reign of God. Then one goes on to assert that Jesus in person is the realization of this reign. A further step leads to the affirmation of the church as the progressive realization of the reign of God in history. It seems only one more step to identify all three and make claims on behalf of the church that can properly be made only on behalf of Christ. There are certainly relationships here, but there are also real differences.

The spirit of dialogue is the ability to live with difference, accepting tensions but overcoming them through human rela­tionships converging toward harmony. We have to discover today that one of the goals of evangelization is the promotion of reconciliation and harmony in the world in view of God's plan for the unification of all things.

5

Good News, Bad News: North American Protestant Overseas Personnel Statistics in Twenty-Five-Year Perspective

Robert T. Coote

T he fifteenth edition of the Mission Handbook: A Guide to USA/Canada Christian Ministries Overseas, published in

1993, reported an unanticipated decline in the number of North American Protestant overseas missionaries. The decline, wrote editor John A. Siewert, reversed "a growth trend that goes back to the 1940s."1Regular users of the Mission Handbook series may recall that previous personnel totals were reported in the range of 60,000 to 70,000. But the latest edition reports less than 45,OOO! Could the decline of the last four years, since publication of the fourteenth edition, really be that great?

This article analyzes the decline from the perspective of a quarter of a century of Mission Handbook reports. It assumes, first of all, the obvious: that numbers are not everything and that quantitative analysis must ultimately be weighed in the light of more probing qualitative analysis. Nevertheless, analysis of statistical indices serves as an important, though limited, tool in assessing the state of the missionary enterprise.

Underlying the following analysis is another all-important assumption: In a world where hundreds of millions have yet to hear the name of Christ and additional millions have not heard the Gospel presented effectively in their cultural context, there is no substitute for the career missionary. Making this assumption, one can take only limited satisfaction in reports of uncounted thousands of short-termers engaged in mission, of local churches and schools undertaking cross-cultural "exposure" forays, and of various forms of high-tech media lending support to the proclamation of the Gospel. These and other positive factors cannot balance a real decline in long-term commitments by men and women who are prepared to take a profoundly incarnational approach to communicating the Gospel of Jesus Christ to people of other cultures.

For many years, this journal has featured biographical es­says on the legacies of missionary pioneers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With few exceptions, the subjects of these essays invested a lifetime in overseas ministry. The legacies are valued for, among other things, the insights they give from the lifelong wrestling of our predecessors with the cross-cultural challenge of communicating the love of God in Christ. (It is difficult to imagine a compilation of the biographies, a century from now, of "great short-termers" who advanced the cause of Christ in the late twentieth century.)

Assuming that the category of career missionary is the key category to consider when measuring the state of mission­sending from North America, there are three points to be made. First, impressions of robust numerical growth of the North American missionary community have been created by adding short-term totals to career totals and giving the result as "total personnel." I believe this is dubious at best, and it is made more problematic by unreliable reporting of short-term personnel.

Robert T. Coote isAssistant Editor oftheINTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSION­

ARY RESEARCH and Assistant to the Director for Planning and Research, Overseas MinistriesStudy Center, New Haven, Connecticut. An alphabetized schedule of the 184 agencies included in the study of associational trends is available from theauthorupon request, at the OMSC address in New Haven.

Mission Handbook Editions

Total personnel Edition Copyright Data as of as reported number year January 1 by the agencies

8 1968 1968 32,083

9 1970 1970 33,289

10 1973 1973 35,070

11 1976 1976 36,950

12 1980 1980 53,494

13 1986 1984* 67,242

14 1989 1988 75,167

15 1993 1992 44,713

"Some data collected in 1985; editions 13 and 14 cite this as 1985

rather than 1984.

Second, over the last quarter century, the category "career missionary" has come to embrace many who, from the outset, have not necessarily intended to make a lifelong career of mis­sionary service. Thus, even if the career category were to increase substantially, our generation might not be capable of making as significant a contribution to fulfillment of the Great Commission as previous generations, which gave the major share of their adult lives to overseas mission and which thereby brought to their task more extensive and more seasoned cross-cultural skills and insights. Today, although "career missionary" evidently overstates the expected span of service of many in that category, the terminology continues to be used in the North American Protestant missionary community, and we will use it in this article.

Third, and most serious of all, the numerical growth rate of career missionaries over the last twenty-five years has failed to keep pace with the population growth rate in North America, let alone with the growth rates in regions of the globe least exposed to the Gospel. This does not mean, of course, that what has been accomplished is insignificant. But if one assumes that it is desir­able to increase proportionately the number of career missionar­ies in order to make a greater contribution to world evangeliza­tion, then, since 1968 the Protestant missionary community in North America has only marked time.

Little Gain Since 1968

Contrary to what readers of previous editions of the Mission Handbook may have understood, there has been little gain in North American overseas personnel totals as compared with the totals reported in 1968. True, the Handbook editions of the 1980s gave an impression of vigorous growth. The twelfth edition reported more than 53,000 total personnel (career plus short­term), up from 37,000 just four years earlier. The thirteenth edition reported more than 67,000 (p. 562) and noted that this represented an 82 percent increase in ten years (p. 29). The fourteenth edition reported a new high of 75,167 (U.S., p. 51, top

6 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

__

30

70

60'

50

40

SHORT-TERM BUBBLE

Totals in question due to varying agency definitions and methods of reporting.

CAREER PERSONNEL As adjusted and reported in the Mission Handbook.

(2-4 year category included in 1992 total)

44,713

...-­03% per yr. __---------­

wth rate: 1. __---­ -­ short­. n 9ro ... -­populat1o ...__-­ ... -­ term ...---­...-­---­...-­

TOTAL PERSONNEL Career plus Short-term as originally reported

by the agencies

-----­---------­

75,167

6,742--.}

34,150------

1968 1970 1973 1976 1980 t9g4· 1988 1992 (8) (9) (10) (11 ) (12) (13) (14) (15)

Fig. 1. North American Protestant Overseas Personnel. Data approximate as of January 1 of respective years (survey instrument circulated in prior year). Mission Handbook edition numbers in parentheses.

line; plus Canada, p. 66).It would appear that compared with this latter total, the report of less than 45,000 in 1992 (15th ed.) indicates a major collapse. (See Fig. 1, top line, indicating total personnel.)

However, when the numbers are reviewed and interpreted, it becomes clear that a collapse of such magnitudedid not occur. How, then, is the decline of 30,000 in just four years-23,000 short-term and 7,000 career missionaries-to be explained?

We begin with an analysis of short-term, which dropped from 31,000 as reported in 1988 to 8,000 in 1992. First of all, in previous years mission agencies were generally invited to use their own definitions of short-term when submitting data to MARC researchers. These definitions varied from agency to agency and even from year to year within the same agency. This is understandable considering that the individual at the person­nel desk who completed the survey questionnaire for 1988 was probably not the one who handled it for 1973 and succeeding years. Attitudes toward the use and value of short-termers varied widely, with the result that some agencies chose not to include them in their figures for total personnel. At least one agency included personnel in its short-term total who were citizens of countries outside of North America, whereas the Handbookis intended to report North Americans only.

In the survey questionnaires returned to MARC, mission agencies reported short-term service that ranged widely, from as little as a week to as long as six years. At the higher end of this range there is overlap with current definitions of career person­nel. Through the 1970s and 1980s MARC's data collectors struggled to interpolate and reconcile the numbers. In the mid­1980s the Handbookreported all persons who served at least one month; in the fourteenth edition (1988data) the editors decided to report only those who served at least two months; and they recalculated the preceding edition's total in order to provide comparable figures.

Finally, in preparing for publication of the fifteenth edition (1992 data), MARC dropped the term "short-term" altogether. They did so by changing the format used to collect data on both career and short-term personnel. Responders had to check the

How is a decline of 30,000 Protestant overseas personnel in four years to be explained?

number of personnel in each of the following categories: Length of service expected to be: [J 2 months up to 1 year r 1-2 years [J 2-4 years

over 4 years This new data-collecting scheme, by virtue of its concreteness, can be expected to yield more precise and consistent reporting. (However, for the researcher interested in trends over time, it necessitates making a decision as to which of the four categories are to be considered comparable to the former category of short­term. We will deal with this below.)

The latest survey (15th ed.) also asked agencies to report short-term personnel by region, just as career has always been reported. This might also be expected to produce more precise totals and reduce reliance on gross estimates of short-term per­sonnel. The neteffect, MARC researchers believe, was to produce more accurate and somewhat more modest figures for short­term personnel in 1992.

In addition, as MARC received and studied the data submit-

January 1995 7

ted for 1992, they discovered other factors that clearly had the effect of moving short-term totals downward as compared with previous reports. For example, in recent years, as awareness has grown about issues of liability and payroll taxes, mission execu­tives have become more careful to report only those short­termers who are actually funded by the mission. One major agency formerly reported unpaid volunteers, generally consist­ing of church groups traveling overseas for limited projects. This agency, in reporting 1992 data, dropped the entire two-months­to-one-year category, eliminating all such volunteers. Had this been the case in 1988, the short-term total for that year would have been reduced by more than 7,000. (MARC made the appro­priate adjustment in 1988 totals when, in the fifteenth edition, a comparison is offered between 1992 and 1988 data; see p. 56 for U.S., p. 68 for Canada.) This is obviously a major factor in comparing 1988 with 1992 data. It is anyone's guess as to how much the totals for 1988-and prior years as well-would be reduced if all agencies were canvassed on the matter.'

Furthermore, maturing of agency management systems has resulted in better record keeping, enabling, in turn, more precise reporting. One agency with large numbers of short-termers formerly did not keep records of short-termers in sufficient detail to distinguish North Americans from non-North Americans, and so, in previous editions, they simply reported their entire short­term total. For 1992 data, this agency was able for the first time to isolate the number of non-North Americans, and they were not included in the total. Had this been possible in 1988, the short­term total for this one agency would have been reduced by more

Although decline of short-term personnel has occurred since 1988, it is far less than original numbers would suggest.

than 11,000! (Again, in the fifteenth edition, MARC made the appropriate downward adjustment when providing the 1988 comparative figure.) The total downward adjustment for short­term personnel in 1988, traced to these two agencies, is almost 19,000.

Our conclusion must be that although decline has no doubt occurred in short-term personnel since 1988, it is far less than the unadjusted original numbers would suggest.

What about the total for career missionaries, down from nearly 44,000 in 1988 to 36,407 in 1992? First, one needs to know that each edition of the Mission Handbook carries adjusted figures for the previous edition. In earlier editions the adjustments have most often been modest and resulted in personnel increases (accounting for agencies that existed at the time of the previous Handbook but that were then unknown to MARC). Occasionally MARC researchers have sought clarification of data when an agency's survey response appeared to be inconsistent with ear­lier reports, and this could also give rise to an adjustment of a previously published figure.'

In keeping with this pattern of offering adjusted totals, the fifteenth edition provides not only 1992 data but also adjusted numbers for 1988. But this time the adjustments are substantial, and they are downward by nearly 3,000. Taking into account this

Protestant Overseas Personnel, Mission Handbook 14th and 15th Editions

1988 data as originally reported by the agencies, compared with 1988 data as subsequently adjusted and reported in the 15th ed. (shown in boldface type):

Career Short-T Total Career Short-T Total

U.S.A. 40,221 30,748 70,969 36,600 11,900 48,500 Canada 3.427 -----.ZZl 4,198 4,198 ~ 4,969

Total 43,648 31,519 75,167 40,798 12,671 53,469

Adjustment from original to revised report: -21,698

More than 2 mos.­1992data as reported in the 15th ed.: 4 years 4 years Total

U.S.A. 33,260 7,882 41,142 Canada 3,147 424 3.571

Total 36,407 8,306 44,713 Transfer 1,564 persons serving

2 to 4 years from "Short-term" to "Career" +1.564 -1.564

Adjusted total 37,971 6,742 44,713

Decline in Career, 1988 to 1992, after adjustment of 1988 data: 2,827 Decline in Short-term, 1988 to 1992, after adjustment of 1988 data: 5,929

decrease of 3,000, the decline in the number of career missionar­ies from 1988 to 1992 is not 7,000 but 4,000.

But I believe an additional adjustment is warranted involv­ing the two-to-four-years category of missionaries. This adjust­ment will increase the 1992 career total by almost 1,600 and thus further reduce the 1988-1992 decline.'

Table 1 in the Handbook (15th ed., pp. 56 and 68, U.S. and Canada) creates the impression that those in the two-to-four­years category are best compared with the old category of short­term. But I would argue that in many if not most cases such persons should be considered as being closer to the category of career." If one transfers nearly 1,600 persons (my estimate is 1,564)out of the short-term category into the career category, the decline in career missionaries from 1988 to 1992 becomes less than 3,000. (The table above recapitulates career and short-term totals for the fourteenth and fifteenth editions of the Mission Handbook, highlighting in boldface type the result of the latter's adjustment of the 1988 figures.)

The good news is that the current downturn is not as great as we might have supposed. The bad news is that the kind of factors that come into play to adjust downward the 1988 totals (thus diminishing the degree of decline in 1992)also suggests the need to similarlyadjustdownward the totals produced all through the 1980s, particularly in regard to short-term. In short, the growth of the North American Protestant missionary commu­nity in the 1980s was not nearly as great as we had imagined.

When we focus explicitly on the career category, using adjusted totals as presented in this article, we see that this category has increased relatively little since 1968-only about 10 percent in a quarter of a century (Fig. 1, bold line). During those years North American population grew at an annualized rate of about 1 percent. If the career missionary category simply had kept pace with population growth, the number of Protestant career missionaries from North American today would exceed 43,000, nearly 6,000 more than the actual total (Fig. 1, broken line).

"Career" Isn't What It Used to Be

Even the modest growth the career category has experienced

8 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

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must be qualified by contemporary definitions of "career." Each Mission Handbook, beginning with the tenth edition in 1973, has drawn attention to the diminishment of the concept of career missionary. "There was a time when the missionary occupation was considered a lifetime vocation. This meant that any mission­ary who did not I complete' his service was viewed by Christians in North America as somehow having failed" (10th ed., p. 70). The eleventh edition (1976)reiterates this and goes on to exp lain, "The concept of missionary career is taking its place alongside other career concepts such as engineering, medicine, or law. [North Americans, in general] move in and out of such careers with a surprising degree of ease. Many men and women embark­ing upon a career in overseas ministry do so in full expectation that at some point in their life they will change careers or return

Many missionaries plan in advance to discontinue or interrupt their missionary career.

to their home country" (p. 23). Again, "Now many missionaries plan in advance to discontinue or interrupt their missionary career sometime during their lifetime.... Some mission agencies have recognized this trend and are commissioning missionaries for only one term of service at a time" (p. 31). The" thirteenth edition (1986)was even more explicit: "Others take up a mission­ary career for eight or ten years" (p. 578).

An essay in the thirteenth edition, contributed by the present author, cited Edwin L. Frizen, executive secretary of the Interde­nominational Foreign Mission Association (IFMA), and Arthur F. Glasser to highlight the negative implications:

"The tendency toward return to the U.S. during children's high school and/or college years is perhaps unfortunate, as these tend to be some of the most productive years of the missionary's life" (Frizen). "The present pattern ... in which all too many mission­aries leave the field because of the educational needs of their teenagers, and do not return is hardly in the best interests of a vigorous church-planting program" (Glasser). (P. 63)

Ted Ward, speaking at the 1985EFMA (Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, now renamed Evangelical Fellowship of Mission Agencies) Mission Executives Retreat, reckoned that the most typical length of service was between two and ten years rather than ten and more.

And so, although the 1992 total has not declined nearly as much as unadjusted numbers would indicate, the altered defini­tion of career missionary means that even if the numbers were greater, the cause of missions might be more poorly served today than twenty-five years ago. The Pioneer of the missionary voca­tion invested thirty-some years in the development ofhis incarna­tiona1ministry. What can we expect to accomplish in ten or less?

Short-Term: A Bubble That Burst

Given the expectations generated over the last two decades by the short-term phenomenon, a closer look may be worthwhile.

In 1970 the Mission Handbook (9th ed.) briefly acknowledged the budding reality of short-termers as a category. The editors indicated that future Handbook surveys would explicitly seek

short-term data. Accordingly, the tenthedition (1973)gave major attention to the subject. It reported slightly more than 3,000short­termers (p. 81) and speculated that the actual number could exceed 5,000. (The range 3,000-5,000 then represented 9 to 14 percent of the total personneL)

For the purpose of short-term definition, the 1973 survey instrument suggested a range of service of six months to three years, while a special essay onshort-term service (pp.16-23) cited a 1972 study of eight-five predominantly evangelical agencies that established two or three months to two years as the most common term of service." Subsequent editions of the Handbook reported terms as short as one week (1976 and 1980) and one month (1984);then in 1988MARC settled upon two months as the lower limit. As already noted, our proposal to transfer nearly 1,600 persons reported in the short-term category in 1992 to the careercategory is based on two months as the lower limit and two years as the upper limit for defining short-term. In other words, by making this transfer from short-term to career, we are affirm­ing the parameters suggested in the 1973 essay-two months to two years.

Incorporated in that same essay was a graph illustrating the rapid growth of the short-termcategory. It projected the possibil­ity that by 1975 the number of short-termers could equal the number of career missionaries (p. 17). It did not happen. Not by 1975,not by 1980,not by 1984,and not by 1988when the number of short-termers reported was 31,519 (U.S. and Canada com­bined). But as already noted, the latest Mission Handbook has adjusted this number downward by nearly 19,000(to 12,671).For 1992, the Handbook reports 8,306-and when this is further re­duced as a result of our proposal to reclassify 1,564 persons as career, the 1992 figure for short-term drops below 7,000. This is about 15 percent of the total personnel reported in 1992. Obvi­ously, North American short-termers, when defined as persons serving two months to two years, who are financed by a sponsor­ing mission agency, are not about to overtake career personneL

But short-termers are a disappointment not only because they seem to number far less than we had imagined. Equally important is the fact that they have not had the effect of building up the career category by "reenlisting" in high numbers for career service after completing a short term overseas. To put it another way, given the number of early resignations within the career group, the number of conversions from short-term to career service has not been sufficient to make a substantial difference in career personnel totals? (It may also be said that without the conversion of short-termers to career status, the present level of career personnel would not be as high as it is.)

The good news is that the short-term category did not really collapse in the last four years. The disappointing corollary is that neither were earlier totals as high as we thought. No doubt there has been a measure of decline, but by far the larger factor is that the 1992 total is much closer to reality than the totals that were being reported in the 1980s.

Career Personnel Trends

Most readers are aware of the precipitous decline among U.S. mainline Protestant mission societies since 1968. The year 1968 marked the end of a twenty-year plateau for mainline career missionaries, who then numbered about 10,000.According to the most recent Handbook, the total has dropped to about 2,700. (This number should be adjusted upward by about 500 to take account of persons serving two to four years.)

The following analysis of career personnel trends is based

10 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

1

20

15

10

5

_________20,418 yet by virtue of their well known independence ______- --......-w- - ~;;ation growth rate: 1.03% per yr. and conservative stance, they are also perceived

as close to the fundamentalist community. In any case, the number of career missionar­

~-----10,353 ies in these twenty agencies has increased from 4,291 in 1968 to 10,353 in 1992, more than balanc­ing the decline in mainline agencies (see Fig. 2). The annual rate of growth is 3.75 percent-al­most four times the rate of population growth." If the entire category of career missionaries, start­ing from a base of 34,150 in 1968, had grown at this rate, the 1992 total would be in excess of

15,819

3,235 80,000, not under 40,000 as reported in the latest Mission Handbook.

Charismatic/Pentecostal 2,054 The good news is that at least one North I ~ American missionarycommunityhas been grow­~ ing significantly faster than the general popula­s tion-the fundamentalists. The bad news is that

with few exceptions other conservative agencies 1968 1980 1984 1988 1992 have done little better than mark time or have

actually lost ground.Fig. 2. Protestant Career Personnel: Trends of four broadly defined sectors. Several observations can be made.

not on grand totals but rather on data for 133 U.S. and 51 1. Growth rates aredown. Even the fundamentalist agencies Canadian agencies as reported in the Handbook series, using experienced a 1988-1992 leveling of the rate of growth. This, statistics from the eighth edition (1968) as the baseline. Together coupled with the observation that the long-term growth rate of these 184 agencies, which include all agencies that reported at most of the other conservative groups is less than or barely least thirty overseas career personnel in 1992, account for 95 equal to the population growth rate as a whole, warns that the percent of the career missionaries covered in the fifteenth edi- situation bears watching. tion." In addition, the author has grouped the agencies according 2. Thepresuppositionsfor astrongmissionmaybeeroding. What to the following traditions: mainline (ecumenical), evangelical might account, at least in part, for the growth of the fundamen­(member agencies of IFMA and EFMA, plus a number of unaffili- talist mission? Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, in his Gospel inaPluralist ated agencies), fundamentalist (including some that are identi- Society,speaks of the difficulty of adopting a mind-set indepen­fied simply as "independent," "Baptist," or both), and charis­marie/Pentecostal."

Given the sharp decline of mainline societies, the question The increase of missionariesarises, What would be the overall picture if the mainline group were placed to one side and their losses were not a factor? in fundamentalist ranks Nonecumenical agencies, almost without exception, represent about balances the losses the conservative Christian traditions in North America. We find that the number of missionaries supported by these agencies has of mainline agencies. grown from 20,000 in 1968 to almost 33,000 in 1992, achieving in the process an annualized growth rate of 2 percent. When main­line (ecumenical) agencies are included in the picture, the rate of dent of the "plausibility structure" of the larger community. growth is only 1 percent. However, he allows that sometimes small, isolated groups sue-

But which segments-evangelical, fundamentalist, or char- cessfully construct and maintain their own plausibility structure ismatic/Pentecostal-account for this increase? The bad news is in opposition to the mainstream of society.12 Many fundamental­that not all share the honor. IFMA agencies, taken as a whole, are ists would take pride in being credited with doing exactly that. flat throughout the period, starting at about 5,400 in 1968 and Perhaps mainline Christians, and many conservative evangelicals recording about 5,200 in 1992. EFMA begins at just under 7,000 as well, have been more thoroughly co-opted by the reigning and rises to 9,572 in 1992.10 This is a 1.3 percent annualized plausibility structure of North American society than they are growth rate, running ahead of population growth, though not by prepared to recognize. Among the key issues are the uniqueness much. The charismatic/Pentecostal group is relatively marginal of Christ, the necessity of his atoning death, and the urgency of in the total picture: less than 300 in 1968, rising to 3,838 in 1988, sharing the Gospel with those who have not heard. (If salvation but then dropping to just over 2,000 in 1992. is available by other means, why be urgent about the role of

That leaves the twenty agencies that are identified as funda- missionaries?) mentalist, independent, or Baptist. With a few exceptions, these 3. A downturn is not necessarily aprelude tofurther loss. This is agencies operate without associational ties. The majority have not the first time that the Mission Handbook has reported a decline selected the term "fundamentalist" as their descriptor in the in the number of career missionaries. The ninth, tenth, and Mission Handbook. Of those identified solely as Baptist or inde- eleventh editions presented a sluggish state of affairs. (See Fig. 1.) pendent, some, such as the Association of Baptists for World Yet, after a few years, growth resumed. It is possible that this will Evangelization, generally would be perceived as standing within happen again. a fundamentalist framework. Some, disavowing labels, see them- 4. Longer, unwelcome trends should be taken seriously. We selves as unique. The Southern Baptists, for instance, claim cannot rule out the possibility, however, that North American certain affinities with both mainline and evangelical traditions; Protestant missions are facing a substantial decline, perhaps

January 1995 11

-------across all sectors. The mainline statistical record suggests a pattern: Two decades of plateau, fol­lowed by two decades of massive decline. IFMA agencies have already repeated the first portion of that pattern, and EFMA agencies are not far behind. (Three-quarters of the sixty-six EFMA agencies in this analysis have not grown or have declined over the decade of the 1980s.)

Conclusion

The good news is that the decline reflected in the latest edition of the Mission Handbook is not as alarming as it initially appeared. The bad news is that the growth of the North American Protes­tant missionary community was not as strong during the 1980s as we had thought. Unfortu­

11 10

9 8

7

6

5

4

3

nately, the good news rests on the foundation of the bad news. The good news is that over the last two decades many

thousands of North Americans have seen, via short-term service, opportunities for overseas ministry. The bad news is that their numbers-depending on one's definition of short-term-have been overstated. More significantly, wha tever their impact, it has only had the effect of producing at best a compensation for decreases in the career category.

The good news is that drastic decline in the career category, such as has been witnessed wi thin mainline agencies since 1968, has not yet appeared in the conservative community. Yet those

2 From a study of 184 largest agencies as of January 1, 1992.

1968 1980 1984 1988 1992

Fig. 3. Evangelical Career Personnel by association.

9,572

EFMA .-.. ;;;;a-;;' 1.03% peryr.population gro .

IFMA 5,645 5,201

Unaffiliated Evangelicals

agencies identified as evangelical are barely keeping pace with the population growth rate (Fig. 2). As for the two large associa­tions of evangelical agencies, we find that IFMA has experienced a numerical plateau and EFMA shows only modest growth relative to the population growth rate (Fig. 3).13 It is to be hoped that these evidences do not represent a prelude to major decline.

In any case, we will be well advised to ponder carefully the rise and decline of the various agencies represented in the Mission Handbook. As these records and reports are spread out before us, are we looking in some contemporary sense at the "handwriting on the wall"?

Notes----------------------------------------­1. Mission Handbook: A Guide to USA/Canada ChristianMinistries Over­

seas, 15th edition, ed. John A.Siewert and John A. Kenyon (Monrovia, Calif.: MARC, 1993), p. 55. Previous editions of the Handbook pre­sented statistical data on Protestant agencies only; the fifteenth edition introduced a section of statistics on Roman Catholic societies as well. Roman Catholic missionaries are not included in the present study.

2. The survey instrument indicated that agencies should report only persons supported directly by the mission. In the four previous Handbook survey questionnaires, this qualification was not stated in regard to short-term personnel. One has to go back to the tenth edition (1972 data) to find a similar directive, as applied to short­term, in the survey questionnaire.

3. In the course of earlier research connected with the MissionHandbook series I had occasion to question data reported by several mission agencies. For instance, one mainline relief agency reported 650career missionaries. When I contacted the agency's headquarters, I learned that they actually employed only a handful of Americans, all as administrative officers and none based overseas; the 650 "career personnel" were overseas nationals. On another occasion I asked a large evangelical agency how it accounted for a huge increase in career personnel from one Handbook edition to the next; my contact had no idea as to the source of the number reported.

4. This number is derived from Table 2-b, p. 63 of the fifteenth edition, as compared with individual agency listings, but the explanation is too lengthy to give here. I am aware that the MARC editors, in preparing the fifteenth edition of the Handbook, carefully avoided using the terms "career" and "short-term." However, I continue to employ the terms in order to connect meaningfully with the history of the subject. My analysis, somewhat arbitrarily to be sure, consid­ers persons serving two months to two years to be in the short-term category, while persons serving two to four years, as well as those serving more than four years, are considered to be in the career category.

5. The rationale for this suggestion involves agencies that favor send­ing out their personnel under renewable two-year or four-year

12

contracts. The Presbyterian Church (USA), the Disciples of Christ, and the United Church of Christ each report substantial numbers in the two-to-four-year column rather than the more-than-four-years column. But this does not necessarily indicate a short-term intention on the part of the missionaries. Something similar may apply to conservative agencies, with or without the use of contracts. In the IFMA agency I serve as a board member, perhaps half of our missionaries go overseas without committing in advance to more than four years, but they do not thereby see themselves as short­termers.

6. "The Increasing Role of Short-Term Service in Today's Mission," pp. 16-23. The study referred to was conducted by Thomas W. Chandler at Fuller School of World Mission. Three months to two years is found on page 17; two months to two years is indicated on p. 19.

7. The eleventh edition of the Handbook (1976) reported that about 25 percent of short-termers returned as career missionaries, based on individual agency reports (see p. 35).

8. The fifteenth edition of the Mission Handbook lists 833 agencies (710 U.S. and 123 Canadian). Of these, 424 are "sending" agencies; the balance provide services of various sorts but do not send career missionaries overseas for in-place, ongoing ministries. In 1992 there were more support agencies but fewer sending agencies than two decades ago (465 sending agencies were reported in 1975).

The study of the 184 agencies takes account of mergers, so that, for instance, in the total of career personnel for 1968,agencies such as the Andes Evangelical Mission and International Christian Fellowship (which subsequently merged with SIM International) were included in the 1968 total for SIM. At the same time, agencies that no longer send career personnel overseas are not included in the study (even if they were sending personnel in 1968).

The fact that as few as 184agencies out of 424account for 95 percent of all career personnel assigned to overseas ministries in 1992under­lines the fact that the great majority of agencies send relatively few people.

9. The categories used in the study of 184agencies-ecumenical (in this article I prefer the term "mainline"), evangelical, fundamentalist,

INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

Pentecostal, and charismatic-have been selected from a wider set of descriptors tha t the MissionHandbook provides for identifying agency tradition. Most agencies select one or more of these particular descriptors, while a minority prefer to be identified simply by their denominational tradition: Baptist, Lutheran, and so forth.

10. The increase was influenced slightly by the addition of agencies founded subsequent to 1968 (350 out of the total of 9,572).

11. The largest share of this gain can be attributed to just two agencies, New Tribes Mission (growth rate nearly 6 percent per year) and the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (growth rate of about 2 percent). Between them they increased by more than 4,000 missionaries, thereby accounting for two out of every three gained by the fundamentalist missionary community since 1968.

Parenthetically, it should be noted that the entry for Southern Baptist FMB (15th ed., p. 221) states that missionaries on furlough were not included in the total for career missionaries. If furloughed missionaries had been included (as they always were in the past), several hundred would be added to the total. This illustrates how variation in the method of reporting a large agency can have a major impact upon grand totals and skew comparisons of successive editions of the Mission Handbook.

12. Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989, repro 1992), p. 65.

13. Fig. 3 includes 131 agencies, almost all of which are identified in the

Mission Handbook as "evangelical" (pp. 249ff). A few are identified simply by denominational tradition; e.g., the Lutheran Brethren (affiliated with EFMA; identified with the Lutheran tradition), and the Apostolic Christian Church (unaffiliated; identified with the Holiness tradition). Two of the IFMA agencies use both"evangeli­cal" and "fundamentalist" to identify themselves: UFM Interna­tional and CAM International.

The group labeled "unaffiliated evangelicals" in Fig. 3 consists of twenty-two agencies that are not related either to EFMA or IFMA. Seven agencies in this group appear in the Handbook as"evangelical," including Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT). The others are identi­fied generally by denominational tradition: Anabaptist, Brethren, Holiness, Lutheran, Mennonite, and Restoration. I perceive these denominational agencies as having most affinity with the evangeli­cal stream. From 1968 to 1992 the "unaffiliated evangelical" group grew at an annualized rate of 2 percent, with WBT accounting for the largest share of the growth.

Although charismatic and Pentecostal agencies are often identi­fied as evangelical, for the purposes of this study they are considered in the separate category of charismatic/Pentecostal. However, a few Pentecostal agencies have long been associated with EFMA and accordingly are included in the evangelical group displayed in Fig. 3 (e.g., the Assemblies of God, and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada).

Ironies of Indigenization: Some Cultural Repercussions of Mission in South India

Susan Billington Harper

Theologies and mission strategies that stress the funda­mental importance of indigenization bear an unmistak­

able resemblance to secular ideologies of ethnic or national self­determination. Indigenization as a central principle of mission constrains the church to operate respectfully within boundaries established by underlying ethnic groups or nationalities. It is citizenship in genetic and geographic entities rather than in a "higher kingdom" that defines many proper rules of conduct, according to this point of view.

Christian missionaries were influenced by, and contributed to, the historical shift in ideologies of sovereignty that accompa­nied rapid decolonization in this century. Concepts of self­determination were fundamental to Anglican advocates of mis­sionary "euthanasia" and younger church indigenization from Henry Venn onward. But violence in the modern world related to the politicization of ethnic and religious or communal identi­ties-from Bosnia to Ayodhya-raises critical questions about the principle and practice of indigenization itself. Careful scru­tiny of the meaning and operation of indigenization in concrete and varied historical situations is clearly warranted.

"Indigenousness" is the concept most commonly used today by ethnic groups laying claim to entitlements. "To be legitimate," writes David Horowitz in his analysis of ethnic group conflict, "is to be identified with the territory." But any claim to group legitimacy deriving from attachment to the soil usually involves the reverse "psychological denial" that another group might also own equal shares in the land.' This exclusivist aspect to collective "indigenous" moral claims to legitimacy has led to numerous

Susan Billington Harper is a Lecturer in History and Literature and in Expository Writing at Harvard University.

wars and partitions in this century, not to mention more subtle forms of alienation and discrimination. The use of indigenous­ness as grounds for inclusion or exclusion has its parallels in church life, for example in the anti-Western reaction to mission­ary dominance in some sections of the younger churches.

It was therefore interesting to me when I embarked on my study of one of India's greatest indigenous leaders, V. S. Azariah (1874-1945), to discover his absolute rejection of an exclusivist attitude toward Western missionaries on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality, and indeed toward many other aspects of Western cul ture that permeated the church in India. Explaining the appar­ent contradiction between his reputation as an ardent Indian na tionalist and his con tinuing reliance upon Western missionary support and Western literature and cultural symbols during his career as a missionary and bishop became one of the central preoccupations of my work on Azariah's life.' His highly am­bivalent and sometimes surprising approach to the process of church indigenization suggested to me the need for a deeper exploration of Christianity's relation to culture in the particular historical setting of South India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Revival and Rejection of Culture

Christian missions have clearly helped to inspire vernacular cultural revivals in South Asia as well as Africa by, in Lamin Sanneh's words, "uncapp[ing] the springs of indigenization."3 Of eight statues honoring the makers of Tamil culture on the Madras Marina, no less than three are Christian missionaries.' Joseph Constantius Beschi, a Jesuit, and Anglicans Robert Caldwell and George Pope are remembered for their pioneering

January 1995 13

grammars of spoken and classical Tamil, as well as for their creative contributions to Tamil literature and history. Beschi is hailed as one of the founders of literary prose in Tamil, and Robert Caldwell's Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian orSouth Indian Family of Languages (1856) helped to inspire the renais­sance of Tamil language and literature in the nineteenth century. Christianity's contributions to Tamil culture did not stop with the missionaries. The first Tamil novel was written by Christian convert Samuel Vedanayagam Pillai.

Yet, if Christian missions helped to ignite unexpected ver­nacular revivals in South Asia, they largely failed to ignite widespread conversion movements, at least in comparison with the scale witnessed in Africa. The primary motive of missionaries to India to convert the heathen was overtaken by the inescapable cultural consequences of their work. Most cultural systems in South Asia have been influenced by Christianity, but South Asians have, on the whole, remained stubbornly hostile to evan­gelization, with only about 3 percent of today's population claiming to be Christian. Foreign missionaries were clearly in­strumental in stirring up a greater awareness of ethnic and, later, national identities among some Indians. But the relative marginalization of Christianity in India has occurred at least in partbecause of the resourcefulness with which certain sections of Indian society responded to the Christian challenge by revitaliz­ing their own traditions and identities and, in consequence, constructing a cultural wall against conversion.

This outcome was deeply influenced by India's complex, hierarchicallybased social structure. Caste-not the sta tic groups described by British colonial ethnographers but what we now know to be fluid, changing, and dynamic social groupings-was perhaps the most important determinate of the highly variable way in which Indian society responded to Christian mission. It was among some of the least culturally proud sections of Indian society that Christianity planted its deepest roots during the last century of British rule. Despite the efforts of virtually all early missionaries to convert India "from the top down" via the upper castes, only the lowest, or "untouchable," castes and tribal groups

The impetus to Indianize the church came more from Westerners than from Indian Christians.

responded to the Gospel in significant numbers. The semi­untouchable Shanars (now Nadars) were the subject of Robert Caldwell's most scathing criticisms for their low morals and, to him, barbarous religious practices. It was these lowly Nadars, rather than the more respectable higher-caste elites, who re­sponded most enthusiastically to the Gospel in Tirunelveli. This pattern was repeated elsewhere on the subcontinent and led missionaries to conclude, rather reluctantly, that India would be converted to Christianity "from the bottom up," if at all.

Although responses to Christian mission were as varied as Indian society itself, Bible translations and the production of vernacular literatures from missionary presses fundamentally altered the cultures that became evangelized. Interaction and communication with foreign missionaries within the broader political context of foreign imperial rule led to radical self­questioning, reinterpretation, and, sometimes, rejection of many

inherited rituals and symbols of indigenous culture. But the character of newly emerging Christian cultures was also medi­ated by extra-Christian factors such as wider historical circum­stances and by sociological factors, such as caste mobilization and regional competition.

In this essay I examine some cultural repercussions of the missionary-translation enterprise among two depressed class groups: nineteenth-century Nadars, located in the present-day South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and twentieth-century un­touchable Malas and Madigas in Andhra Pradesh. In both of these areas, Anglican church leaders (both Western and Indian) made concerted efforts to "indigenize" the church, but several factors combined to produce what were clearly ironic conse­quences. Use of the word "ironic" is appropriate because the emerging shape of indigenization was far from what well-mean­ing orientalist indigenizers had intended to cultivate in their converts.

Christian converts frequently resisted orientalizing efforts to promote indigenization and instead embraced opportunities for Westernization. For them, their natural inclinations seemed to lead toward Westernization. Hence, an indigenized form of Christianity for many outcastes was, in fact, a Westernized form that struck missionary indigenizers as not indigenous at all. For reasons to be explored below, low-caste converts often preferred Western ways to prima facie indigenous ones; frequently the latter signified to them aspects of caste or regional oppression that they wished to avoid rather than embrace. The election of Western church leaders and the adoption of some Western cultural practices by Christian converts was often the result not of missionary hegemony but of indigenous pressure. In fact, the impetus to Indianize the church came more consistently from Westerners than from Indian Christians. Christian conversion generated a highly eclectic process of culture change, mixing elements from Western, Sanskritic, and local vernacular cul­tures. The emerging cultural systems cannot be described as either fully foreign or fully indigenous, for it is in the nature of Christianity both to respect and to transcend ethnic and political categories.

Nadar Conversion and Culture Change

Group conversions of the semi-untouchable Nadar caste in the old British districts of Tinnevelly (now Tirunelveli) and neigh­boring Travancore transformed the Protestant church inherited from Lutheran missionaries in the early nineteenth century.' By 1851, the Nadars of Tirunelveli and neighboring Travancore comprised more than half of the Christian converts registered with Protestant missions in India," the numbers in Tirunelveli alone reaching forty-three thousand by 1857.7 By the end of the nineteenth century, 95 percent of the Christians in the Madras Presidency came from the Nadar caste.

One such Nadar convert was born in 1821 to a small mer­chant family and named Velayudham after the popular deity Subramanya. Little is known about the circumstances of his conversion or its impact on his immediate or extended family. Records show merely that Velayudham entered the CMS school in Megnanapuram at the age of eighteen, where he was baptized "Thomas Vedanayagam," a name combining the surname of the local Welsh missionary, John Thomas, with a Christian equiva­lent of his Hinduname (veda meaning "knowledge" butprobably referring in this case to the Bible, and nayagam meaning "master" or "leader").8

The vehicle of Christian education permitted Thomas

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Vedanayagam to abandon the stigmatized hereditary occupa­tions of his caste-with their associated low social and ritual rankings-and to enter the employ of the CMS as a catechist. After thirty years' service as a vernacular agent for Western missionaries, he was recruited by JohnThomas for a new training scheme designed to promote Indians to positions of greater authority in the church." Stringent requirements for the priest­hood, including an English-medium theology course, Greek, and Hebrew, had hitherto been an effective barrier to most Indians interested in the ordained ministry. Thomas's reformed curriculum was designed to meet the needs of local congrega­tions by requiring experience in village ministry (at least fifteen years), loyalty to the church, and personal reputation, rather than academic accomplishments in foreign languages, as criteria for ordination. The training scheme included "intensive study of the Bible in Tamil, an outline of church history, Christian doctrine based on the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, preaching (of which they already had considerable experience), and pastoral care and village problems."!" This course prepared Thomas Vedanayagam for ordination as a deacon with twenty­one others in 1869, and as a priest in 1871. He then served the years remaining before his death in 1889 as priest of the village congregation ofVellalanvilai, where he adopted largely Western models of religious practice (from liturgy to music) and built Holy Trinity Church, a semi-Gothic structure erected upon foun­dation stones taken from a shrine to the goddess Essakiamman that had been destroyed after the conversion of local inhabitants.

Vernacular ordination training was a key component in the so-called structural indigenization of the Tirunelveli church, whichgave IndianChristians greatercontrolover their churches.11

Yet neither translation of church liturgy and hymns nor Indianization of church leadership fundamentally altered the Western, even quintessentially English, cultural character of the church. Anglican liturgy and Western hymns translated into Tamil were used regularly for worship, and Western institu­tional structures were reproduced among the palmyra trees. Except perhaps in the area of hymnody where the Tamil lyrics of Vedanayagam Sastriar became increasingly popular, neither Indian leadership nor Indian congregations seemed particularly interested in replacing Western with more indigenous forms of ritual and expression. This is well illustrated by the extremely limited impact of Sattampillai's Hindu Church of Lord Jesus, which was established to free Indian Christians from white missionary influences. The Hindu Christian movement reached the height of its membership in 1860 (about six thousand) and thereafter declined until today there is only a tiny community of Hindu Christians in existence." The Gothic-style steeples visible in villages throughout Tirunelveli today attest to the enduringly Western character of much of nineteenth- and even twentieth­century church life, its aesthetic expressions, liturgy, and ritual.

Indian Christians who adopted Western symbols have often been described by critics as "denationalized." Attitudes of de­pendence typical of colonial situations, combined with domi­neering missionary paternalism, have been identified as the chief culprits in this process of denying ethnic self-determination and self-realization. Missionaries such as John Thomas could indeed exert a domineering influence in village affairs. During his thirty four years in Megnanapuram, he built a Gothic church with a 192-foot spire, a large mission compound, and a school." After a particularly severe storm, he basically redesigned the whole village: streets were straightened, houses were rebuilt in rows, trees were planted, and wells were improved.

But records suggest that Nadar converts were as eager to adopt Western cultural symbols and practices as John Thomas

January 1995

was to share them. Thomas Vedanayagam's congregation-and, by 1899, over a thousand others in CMS areas of Tirunelveli alone-made very considerable voluntary sacrifices to raise the money, quarry the rocks, and build Westernstylevillage churches and smaller chapels." In Vellalanvilai, converts carried rocks on their heads for five kilometers from the quarry to the church building site. John Thomas could not have made them do this. He did not force Thomas Vedanayagam's son, S. V. Thomas, to become an avid reader and stylistic imitator ofThomas Babington Macaulay. (It was said that S. V. Thomas's writings were "often mistaken by the press for those of an English gentleman, and were quoted as sUCh.")15 Nor did John Thomas or any other missionary force S. V. Thomas to write articles critical of Indian nationalism, which he did. Those who credit Western missionar-

Churches in Tirunelveli still have a Western character in architecture, aesthetics, and liturgy.

ies with this kind of power and influence are unrealistic, not only about the capabilities of Westerners but also about the malleabil­ity of IndianChristians. Instead, many Indian converts wanted to adopt foreign symbols for their faith and ironically chose West­ern cultural expressions for indigenous reasons.

Reasons for these choices have less to do with perceived judgments about the relative value of Western and Indian cul­tural systems than with the dynamics of South Indian caste mobilization under British imperial rule. Western cultural sym­bols served as important tools in competitive bids by the Nadar caste to improve its social ranking through the rejection of stigmatized indigenous cultural symbols and practices. The Nadar caste was one of nineteenth-century South India's most rapidly changing communities." Nadar moneylenders and mer­chants, like Thomas Vedanayagam's father, took advantage of improved transportation and communication created by the Pax Britannica in the wake of the PoligarWars (1755-1801) to develop trade links to the north in cotton and tobacco. As their wealth grew, and as trade towns were established in the north, many of the merchant communities sought to dissociate themselves from caste fellows in Tirunelveli and, from about the 1860s, to lift their social status through the process of "Sanskritization," that is, the adoption of manners and practices of the higher castes. Many other Nadars chose to follow the differentpa th ofChristianization and were similarly uninhibited about adopting the manners and practices of the British imperial elite.

The communal context of Nadar conversions to Christianity deeply influenced the character of the newly emerging Nadar cultural systems-both Christian and non-Christian. Christian missions were responsible for awakening Nadar community self-consciousness over wide geographic areas, and Nadar con­verts became the pacemakers for the wider Nadar community with regard to social change. Missions provided a spiritual and organizational base for unity among the previously fractionated community, which extended eventually beyond the Christian core as the caste gained political consciousness and sought to uplift itself and to take advantage of economic and educational opportunities in British India. Nadars abandoned their old ap­pellation "Shanar" for the new, less-stigmatized "Nadar," fought a bloody battle against an upper-caste requirement that Nadar

15

women go naked above the waist, and generally turned their backs on many ritual rules and regulations that for centuries had kept them in thraldom." The mass movements to Christianity must be understood as a part of-indeed, as a catalyzing agent in-this broader effort to reject caste traditions and to adopt new, more respectable forms of social identity.

Having traditionally been forbidden from entering Hindu temples, it is perhaps not surprising that Nadar Christians did not want their churches to resemble Hindu temples. Unlike the Sanskritizing Nadars, these Nadars turned their backs on exclusivist higher Hinduism. Nor, however, did they want their churches to resemble their former local shrines-those thatched mud huts or simple altars eulogized by Westerners as "indig­enous" but representing to the converts little but their former poverty and ritually polluting untouchability. A pukka stone Gothic church was infinitely preferable to these indigenous alternatives, particularly if its steeple was higher than the nearest Hindu temple gopurams." Far from being a weak concession to domineering missionaries, Westernization represented a sym­bolic challenge by long-suppressed lower classes to an oppres­sive indigenous social order. In this context, indigenization along the lines expected by Western orientalizing indigenizers would have been viewed as just another form of indigenous oppression.

Western Indigenizers and Indigenous Westernizers

It was not until the twentieth century that Indian Christians were faced regularly with the challenge of resisting cultural indigenization proposed by Westerners. The rise of nationalism deep1y affected many of India's more highly educa ted Christians by the end of the nineteenth century, although it left the vast majority of Christian converts untouched and unmoved. Indeed, the cleavages that developed between the pro-indigenizing Western and Indian Christian leadership-often located in ur­ban areas-and the pro-Westernizing Indian Christian villagers were similar to the cleavages that developed in wider Indian society and were described with cutting irony in Kipling's fasci­nating but little-known short story "The Enlightenments of Pagett, M.P."19 The shock experienced by the liberal British M.P. Pagett, who discovers that only a small elite of Western- (often missionary-) educated Indians is interested in the new Indian National Congress is similar to the frustration experienced by progressive Western missionaries and many highly educated Indian Christians who discovered that most Indian Christians were not at all interested in church indigenization.

This ambivalence toward indigenization among many In­dian Christians is well illustrated by the career of Thomas Vedanayagam's third and youngest son, V. S. Azariah, who became one of India's earliest indigenous missionaries and is remembered today mainly as the first Indian bishop of the Anglican Church." Azariah was, and continues to be in mission history, a prominent symbol of church indigenization by virtue of his appointment as an Indian bishop and because of his Indianizing policies in Dornakal. Neglected in the popular pic­ture are two realities that emerge from the written and oral historical records: first, that Indianization was often advocated more strongly by Azariah's Western mentors than by Azariah himself; second, that Indianizing strategies were often actively resisted by local Indian village congregations. A few examples from the beginning and ending of Azariah's career will suffice to illustrate the point.

Western Bishops for Andhra

To begin, there was strong resistance among Indian Christians to Azariah's initial appointment as bishop. Azariah's consecration in 1912 would never have occurred without the steadfast defense and advocacy of the British bishop of Madras, Henry Whitehead (brother of the famous philosopher Alfred North Whitehead), and the British metropolitan, Reginald Copleston, against stub­born indigenous opposition. This is not the place to explore the complexities of this controversy and its implications for church­state relations in the British Raj.21 Suffice it to say that petitions sent to protest Azariah's consecration were signed by a wide range of Tamil and Telugu Christians, criticizing him for lack of experience and education, for low social position, for noncon­formist associations with the YMCA, and for Tamil origins." These protestswere interpreted by his mentor, HenryWhitehead, as expressions of the "four sick passions that are the curse of the Church in South India: race prejudice, caste feeling, party spirit and personal jealousy."23 Azariah's consecration clearly became an occasionfor the openarticulation of interregional and intercaste disputes, but their effect was limited by the closed nature of the episcopal selection process, which did not require clerical or congregational consent, and by the constant patronage of a small group of liberal-minded Western church leaders.

As appointment procedures were opened to greater demo­cratic participation after the 1930 disestablishment of the Angli­can church in India, it became harder rather than easier to appoint Indians to high posts in the church. After Azariah's death in 1945, a similarly vehement campaign was launched by Indian Christians against the appointment of an Indian succes-

Mass movements to Christianity must be understood as a part of a broader effort to adopt more respectable forms of social identity.

sor. Numerous petitions to the metropolitan complained that the aspirations of "Andhra Christians" had been ignored under the "Native Tamil Bishop." One letter accused Azariah of distancing the Dornakal church from "the Mother Church of England, just as a child was forcibly removed from the hands of her mother: making us to lament the loss." Some congregations were so opposed to native bishops that they threatened to desert to Catholicism, and most petitions ended with a call for the election of a European or English bishop."

In the end, five Europeans, three Tamils, and three Telugus were nominated for the Dornakal post. An Irish CMS missionary, A. B.Elliot, was elected by a vast majority of the diocesan synod but accepted the post only with reluctance. "It is undoubtedly desirable tha t there should againbe an Indian Bishop of Domakal," Elliot wrote to the metropolitan after the vote, accepting the post only on the condition that he could help to prepare the way for another Indian bishop by "preparing an assistant bishop or bishops and then making way for another election.?"

Although Azariah would undoubtedly have been disap­pointed to witness this denouement to Henry Whitehead and

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Reginald Copleston's experiment in Indian leadership, he would not have been surprised. Azariah had analyzed the reasons for Indian Christian resistance to indigenization of church leader­ship in a report to the Episcopal Synod of 1942. He argued that the chances of an Indian being elected bishop decreased after 1930, when the new Church of India, Burma, and Ceylon placed most episcopal elections into the hands of their dioceses. "According to the present Constitution whereby Bishops are elected by the Dioceses themselves," Azariah concluded, "there does not ap­pear to be much chance for any of the Dioceses with large Indian Church populations to elect Indians as Diocesan Bishops." The dioceses of Tirunelveli, Travancore, and Chota Nagpur had all elected foreign bishopssince disestablishment. "RuralChristian[s] probably think they need a European Bishop to watch over their interests. Communal and personal jealousies also often come into play," Azariah explained." As a layman's association in Dornakal expressed it, "We would prefer to be ruled by a European to being ruled by an Indian as the former has generally a broad outlook and no vested interests in this country.'?" The preference for European over native church leaders was wide­spread and did not end with the coming of national indepen­dence. Bishop Neill wrote in 1952 that "in the (Anglican) Church of India, the inclination still to elect European and not Indian bishops is so strong as to cause some dismay to those who believe firmly in the principle of indigenous leadership.?"

In Andhra, resistance to orientalizing indigenization sprang mainly from caste conflict between the two major untouchable groups-the Malas and the Madigas-neither of whom wanted their rivals to gain privileged access to ecclesiastical authority and resources. Resistance was also attributable to interregional conflict during a period in which Telugus increasingly resented the political, linguistic, and cultural dominance of their Tamil neighbors. The so-called Andhra Movement challenged their perceived subordination and led to the establishment of a sepa­rate Telugu language university within Azariah's diocese in 1926. Azariah's educational policies, which stressed village re­construction over higher education and included the closing of a missionary college that functioned importantly as a conduit for those aspiring to escape from local village life, were perceived by Telugus-Christians and non-Christians alike-as a Tamil effort to block their legitimate aspirations. However, indigenous Telugu intercaste competition for social, economic, and ritual prefer­ment stifled the effects of the Andhra awakening in the episcopal selection process.

Orientalizing Sahibs and Memsahibs

Many other illustrations of this unexpectedly complex reaction to indigenization in Dornakal could be examined, such as why local Christians preferred white Victorian representations of Christ over brown indigenized versions in the otherwise indig­enous Dornakal Cathedral, or why they rejected some Hindu customs but voluntarily adopted others such as a prohibition on beef eating. But I would like to conclude by taking a brief look at the dilemma of Western missionaries in India and at the way in which their zeal for indigenization-for the development of some kind of Indian ethnic self-determination and self-expres­sion in ecclesiastical matters-ultimately threatened to under­mine itself by becoming another form of foreign domination.

Although Azariah's education at Madras Christian College and his early career as a YMCA secretary had exposed him to Indian nationalism, it was primarily his understanding of the Gospel that inspired him to establish the first major indigenous

Indian missionary society and to go himself as a missionary to the Telugus. There is almost no textual evidence, even of an indirect kind, to support the theory that the founders of the Indian Missionary Society (IMS)were motivated by anything other than the biblical commission to preach the Gospel to nonbelievers. The study of Scripture and of inspirational works by Andrew Murray and A. H. Arden, combined with prayer in the context of spiritual revival, led the founders of the IMS to conclude that missionary service was a duty incumbent on all Christians. The society was the fruit of an enthusiastic and serious spiritual maturity, not ethnic or national self-expression.

Azariah emerged from the rural culture of Tirunelveli with a relatively secure sense of his own identity as an Indian Chris­tian. He was fundamentally uninterested in becoming more "indigenous." But letters to his wife indicate that pressure to indigenize was exerted, first by his beloved YMCA colleague Sherwood Eddy, and then by his Anglican mentor Henry Whitehead and Whitehead's wife, Isabel, a rather formidable active memsahib of the old school. In 1906 Azariah wrote that he was promoting another "indigenous" missionary society, the National Missionary Society, "simply because of Mr. Eddy and not because I feel that it is the Lord's will for me.'?"

A few years later, when Azariah was preparing for episco­pacy, he felt obliged to reject the Whiteheads' efforts to Indianize him. Isabel Whitehead, who assumed the task (to her exceed­ingly important) of finding suitably oriental-styled vestments for the new Indian bishop, at first insisted upon the classic symbol of oriental dignity in the West: a turban. From Azariah's perspec­tive, a turban seemed about as foreign as it would to most Westerners, so he launched a determined campaign of noncoop­eration against Isabel's orientalizing plans, writing to his wife, "Mrs. Whitehead is taking me to task for not buying a turban!"30 Mrs. Whitehead's symbol clearly made Azariah distinctly un­comfortable. One year later, he was persuaded to purchase two turbans (one brown and one white silk) for his first trip to England with the Whiteheads but conceded to his wife from the outgoing ship that he did not have the courage to wear them. Instead, he donated the white one to an English gentleman from the First Class attending a fancy dress ball as an Indian prince." To Azariah, turbans were more appropriate as dress-ups for Englishmen acting out their perceptions of a largely imaginary Orient than as working attire for the episcopacy. Azariah faced the awkward reality that, in being groomed for the first Indian bishopric, he was being sculpted into a symbol of Indianization for and by Westerners.

For the most part, Azariah successfully resisted Isabel Whitehead's attempts to dress him up as the Indian bishop of her own orientalist imagination. The turban was abandoned, and eventually a simple cassock was substituted for the costly En­glish coat and breeches donned by the other bishops (and likened to that of a Highlander going to a funeral)." The Whiteheads succeeded, however, in persuading Azariah to shave off his fashionable mustache before his 1912entry into the conservative, albeit amply whiskered, company of India's British bishops. (Three of these bishops sported mustaches with beards, and expansive muttonchop sideburns had successfully colonized most of the metropolitan's face.):"

Pressure to conform to an English interpretation of what it meant to be Indian persisted and caused Azariah continuing discomfort. The cassock Azariah chose was widely adopted by Anglican bishops, who eventually took efforts to present them­selves in a more Indian manner than Azariah himself. Stephen Neill wrote in later years, "It has always amused me that,

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whereas I the foreigner always went to Churchbarefoot, Azariah, the Indian, always wore leather shoes.":" Azariah took a good­humored approach to Westerners who advocated Indian prac­tices he considered inappropriate, joking in response that they should introduce the "real Indian ecclesiastical vestment ... nothing at all!":" But he was never entirely free from Western pressure to Indianize. During the Whiteheads' regular visits to Dornakal, Mrs. Whitehead used to berate the bishop and his family for eating English breakfasts rather than Indian iddli. When Azariah named a new Christian village in his diocese Whitehead Farm, the Whiteheads insisted that he rename it Vedanayagapuram."

The irony of indigenization in twentieth-century South In­dia is that it was so often initiated by well-meaning Westerners without strong guidance and support from the majority of Indian Christians. This caused it to have a certain artificial quality." "To be indigenous," an Anglican divine has written, "means simply to be free to respond to Christ and to the world without any of the self-consciousness which is imposed by the attitudes of others.":" But it was perhaps as difficult for many liberal Westerners as it was for Indian nationalists to accept that, in some situations, Indian Christians desired closer identification with the West than with their own local or national traditions. Liberation is always an indigenous desire, and Christianity, in its Anglican missions-mediated forms, apparently provided the most clear and straightforward path out of the demeaning cultural matrix from which these converts wished to exit.

The Universal Gospel

Azariah frequently objected to descriptions of the Christian community in India as a static communal group, stressing in­stead its dynamic and inclusive qualities for"all races, all tongues and all castes.":" "The religion of Christ is one of the most dynamic factors in the world. It always bursts its boundaries, however strong and rigid those boundaries may be .... It refuses to be confined to anyone race, class, or caste. It seeks to embrace all.":" This recognition of the Gospel's dynamism led him to oppose, with Gandhi, the system of separate electorates erected by the British government. But his belief in the universal mission­ary ambitions of Christianity also led him into a bitter dispute with Gandhi over the legitimacy of conversion in South Asia." It was his belief that in Christianity Indians could participate in a universal brotherhood fundamentally different from India's oppressive hierarchical caste system that led him to work so tirelessly for church unity in South Asia. Denominationalism threatened to create a community as divided as the former caste society, particularly as denominational lines in India began to correspond remarkably with caste lines. The enormous frustra­tion Azariah and his colleagues felt as "denomination" was translated into "caste" was a prime motivation in the formation

of the Church of South India in 1947. It was children of former untouchables who helped to reconcile many highly educated Western leaders of Episcopal and non-Episcopal churches to each other for the first time in history. Church unity did not eradicate the influence of caste in postindependence South In­dian church life, particularly on disputes over episcopal succes­sion. Nor, however, did the simultaneous achievement of Indian national independence lead to the severing of ties between Indian and Western Christians. The Church of South India appointed Lesslie Newbigin as bishop of Madurai and Ramnad in 1947and as bishop in Madras in 1965. Being both a dispassion­ate "outsider" by virtue of his foreign nationality and lack of caste affiliation, and a committed "insider" by virtue of his missionary work in South India and his fluency in Tamil, Bishop Newbigin suited perfectly the needs of his Indian dioceses at that time. His appointments symbolized the important degree to which Indian Christianity desired to transcend local ethnic and national boundaries and to retain access to a more universal Christian community.

Thus, we see in mission history the rediscovery of a crucial aspect of the Christian revelation. It is sometimes argued that it was the prophet Amos who discovered, or at least applied, the potent idea of "one God of all the nations." It can also be argued that the rise of Christianity in the ancient world was an explosion of this potent universalizing theology from within the overcompressed confines of Judaic nationalism into the broad spaces of the diverse Hellenistic multiethnic conglomerate of the Roman Empire. In this way, it was Jesus Christ who extended (Christians would say fulfilled) the prophetic hope of a God of all the nations and united, for the first time, one godly people from all nations. It was the divine sovereignty of Jesus the King, rather than a democratic sovereignty of collective ethnicity or national­ity, that provided the focus of loyalty for this new universal brotherhood and, I would suggest hopefully, continues to do so today. In this sense, Christianity is a religion that fits more comfortably into the multiethnic empires of the first or the nineteenth centuries than into the democratically self-determin­ing but competing and increasingly fractionated ethnicities, nationalisms, and class identities of our blood-drenched twenti­eth century. The irony of nineteenth- and twentieth-century church indigenization in South India is that it so often under­mined its goal of being midwife to the birth of an authentic Indian Christianitybecause of its focus upon legitimizing perceptions of Indian national and ethnic identity and, ultimately therefore, because of its subservience to the modernizing Zeitgeist. As history shows so clearly, the church that is wedded to the spirit of the age will be widow to the next generation. The beauty of missionary history is that, in penetrating appearances, realities are discovered that greatly enrich our understanding of the distinctive contributions of this much more culturally complex church to world Christianity.

Notes---------------------------------------­1. David L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: Univ. of

California Press, 1985), pp. 201-2. 2. Susan B.Harper, "Azariah and Indian Christianity in the Late Years

of the Raj" (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford Univ., 1991), which contains more detailed discussion and documentation of issues raised in this essay.

3. Lamin Sanneh, "Christian Mission in the Pluralist Milieu: The Afri­can Experience," International Review of Mission, 74, no. 294 (April 1985): 199-211. See also Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impacton Culture (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1989).

January 1995 19

4. L. Newbigin, UnfinishedAgenda:An Autobiography(London: SPCK, 1985), pp. 218-19. On Christian influence in the Tamil and Bengali renaissances, see Charles Ryerson, Regionalism and Religion: The TamilRenaissance and Popular Hinduism (Madras: CLS, 1988), pp. 60­81; and M. A. Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal: 1793-1837 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 55-58, 265.

5. The membership of the Lutheran church in South India grew to about thirty-seven thousand during the first century of its existence. See exact figures taken from Julius Richter in S. C. Neill, A Historyof

Christianityin India: 1707-1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), p. 56.

6. Of a total of 91,092 Christians, 51,355 belonged to Tirunelveli's CMS and SPG missions and to South Travancore's London Missionary Society (LMS) (J.Richter, A HistoryofMissionsin India, trans. Sydney H. Moore [Edinburgh: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1908],p. 201). On LMS work in Travancore, see Dick Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equalityin India (New Delhi: South Asia Pubs., n.d.).

7. This is the number of converts received by the CMS and SPG missions given in Robert Caldwell, Lectures on theTinnevellyMissions (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857), p. 14.

8. On Thomas Vedanayagam's early life, see "Bishop Azariah's Family and Early Life," Dornakal Diocesan Magazine 22, no. 5 (May 1945); A. J.Azariah, A Biographical Sketch ofSamuelVedanayagam Thomas (1855­1890) (Saidapet, Madras: Mount Printing Works, 1970); Mercy Azariah, Bishop Azariahof Dornakal: A Play (Coonoor, Nilgiris: India Sunday School Union, 1948); Carol Graham, Azariah of Dornakal (London: SCM, 1946); J. Z. Hodge, Bishop Azariah of Dornakal (Ma­dras, CLS, 1946). Information has also been taken from a group interview on March 10, 1986, with K. Thasiah, C. Christian Devaraj, and other villagers in Vellalanvilai; and from interviews and corre­spondence with Thomas Vedanayagam's grandson, Ambrose Azariah, of Madras.

9. The scheme has been described as revolutionary by Stephen Neill (A History of Christianity in India, p. 400).

10. Ibid., p. 400. Although Hebrew and Greek ceased to be required of candidates, there is evidence that Thomas Vedanayagam acquired some knowledge of those languages anyway. See Henry Whitehead, "Vedanayagam Samuel Azariah," International ReviewofMissions34, no. 134 (April 1945): 184.

11. For useful distinctions between different types, or levels, of indigenization, see Immanuel S. David, "The Development of the Concept of Indigenisation Among Protestant Christians in India from the Time of Henry Venn" (M.Th. thesis, United Theological College, Bangalore, 1975).

12. Neill, A History of Christianity in India, pp. 231-33. 13. "Western" cultural expressions were (and are) as eclectic as Indian

ones, and the use of Gothic styles in Tirunelveli was the result of nineteenth-century England's Gothic revival, not of any simple consensus among Westerners about the superiority or supreme "Westernness" of Gothic modes. John Thomas built his English Gothic-style church with the help of plans from the Oxford Society for Promoting the Study of Gothic Architecture (A. H. Grey-Edwards, Memoirof the Rev. John Thomas: C.M.S. Missionaryat Megnanapuram Tinnevelly,South India, 1836-1870 [London: Paternoster Press, 1904], p.67).

14. By 1899 a total of 1,028 churches and smaller chapels had been built. See D. S. George Muller and V. Joseph Abraham, The Trail of the Tirunelveli Church (Palamcottah: Literature Work Standing Commit­tee of the Tirunelveli Diocesan Council, 1964), p. 8. See also Grey­Edwards, Memoirof theRev.John Thomas, pp. 66-67, on the establish­ment of native church-building funds to which villagers gave their best day's earnings each year.

15. "Introduction," in Essays by Samuel V. Thomas, M.A. (Medalist in Sanskrit, Universityof Madras), p. i. This bound volume of essays, in the personal possession of Dr. D. Packiamuthu of Palaymkottai, includes no information on date or place of publication.

16. This is clearly demonstrated in Robert Hardgrave, The Nadars of Tamilnad: The Political Culture of a Community in Change (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), upon which the following discus­sion is based.

17. Ibid., pp. 43-70, 96-109, 265-66; and Duncan Forrester, "The De­pressed Classes and Conversion to Christianity, 1860-1960," in Religion in South Asia:Religious Conversion and RevivalMovements in SouthAsia in Medieval andModern Times,ed. G. A. Oddie (New Delhi: Manohar, 1977), p. 53.

18. This sense of competition with Hindus is expressed in Tirunelveli today mainly through jokes and tongue-in-cheek comparisons. For

John Thomas on this subject, see Grey-Edwards, Memoirof the Rev. John Thomas, p. 70.

19. R. Kipling, "The Enlightenments of Pagett, M.P.," Contemporary Review58 (1890): 333-55.

20. Harper, "Azariah and Indian Christianity." 21. Susan B. Harper, "The Making of an Oriental Bishop: V. S. Azariah

and the Anglican Church in India," to appear in Festschrift honoring Professor Robert E. Frykenberg.

22. Petitions may be found in 178:369-72, 386-88, Davidson Papers, Lambeth Palace, London; and in 5:1/4, Dornakal, Metropolitan Archives of the Church of India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon (MACIPBC), Bishop's College, Calcutta.

23. Whitehead to Copleston, November 8, 1911, 5:1/2, Dornakal, MACIPBC.

24. Petitions may be found in 5:2/7, Dornakal, MACIPBC. 25. A. B. Elliot to the Metropolitan, April 27, 1945, 5:2/7, Dornakal,

MACIPBC. 26. "Circular Letter," November 16, 1942, 1:4, Episcopal Synod,

MACIPBC. 27. Manifesto of the Layman's Association of the CMS Churches of the

Dornakal Diocese 5:2/6, Dornakal, MACIPBC. 28. S. C. Neill, The Christian Society (London: Fontana Library, Collins,

1952), p. 253. See also Graham Houghton, The Impoverishment of Dependency: TheHistoryof theProtestant Church in Madras, 1870-1920 (Madras: CLS, 1983).

29. V. S. Azariah (VSA) to Anbu, August 17, 1906, Azariah Collection, Madras (ACM).

30. VSA to Anbu, May 21, 1909, ACM. On the subject of orientalism and discourses of identity produced by colonialism, see Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Press, 1978).

31. VSA to Anbu, April 11 and 19, 1910, ACM. 32. As one historian has written of the younger churches' persistent use

of Western clothing styles, "Native priests were dressed up like European clergymen, and even native bishops, when there came to be such, adorned themselves in the riding attire of eighteenth­century English prelates, which has sometimes been mistaken for that of a Highlander going to a funeral" (Alec R. Vidler, The Church in the Age of Revolution: 1789 to the Present Day [London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1962], p. 252).

33. VSA to Mrs. Whitehead, October 3, 1912, Sundkler Collection, Uppsala. The Whiteheads' reasons for making him shave off his mustache remain a matter for speculation. John Carman has sug­gested to me in conversation that the mustache may not have been acceptable because of its association with the martial castes.

34. S. C. Neill, "Bishop Azariah," in Birth Centenary of Bishop Azariah­1974 (Madras: Diocesan Press, 1974), p. 38.

35. That is, nothing above the waist or below the knee (ibid.). 36. Interviews with Ambrose Azariah, March 2 and 24, 1986, Madras;

and interviews with Rev. M. Daniel, March 29 and April 8, 1986, Dornakal.

37. Interviewwith Bishop Michael Hollis, September 7,1984,Manormead, Hindhead, England. See also K. M. de Silva, "From Elite Status to Beleaguered Minority: The Christians in Twentieth Century Sri Lanka," in Asie du Sud:Traditions et Changements, European Confer­ence on Modern South Asian Studies, VI, 1978,Sevres, France (Paris: CNRS, 1979), p. 349.

38. John V. Taylor, "Selfhood-Presence or Persona?" in The Church Crossing Frontiers: Essays on the Nature of Mission in Honourof Bengt Sundkler,ed. P. Beyerhaus and C. F. Hallencreutz (Uppsala: Gleerup, 1969), p. 176.

39. VSA,"Christians and the New Government: The Bishop of Domakal's Call for Support," Madras Diocesan Magazine 33, no: 2 (February 1938): 60-62.

40. VSA, "The Communal Award," Guardian (Madras), 10, no. 31 (Sep­tember 8, 1932): 368.

41. S. B. Harper, "The Politics of Conversion: The Azariah-Gandhi Controversy over Christian Mission to the Depressed Classes in the 1930's," Indo-British Review,Special Issue on Religion and National­ism (1988), pp. 147-75.

20 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

My Pilgrimage in Mission

Gerald E. Currens

I t was about halfway through our first year as missionaries with the Lutheran Church in Liberia. In preparation for

working in the Loma-speaking area in the interior of this West African nation, I had been assigned to language study. A small village of a hundred or so thatch-roofed houses and several hundred people was home during that year for my wife, Vir­ginia, and me. That morning the town chief, a distinguished man of mature years, had been called away on business and had delegated a young fellow to be chief for the few days he would be away. My teacher and I were seated in the shade of the overhanging eave of our house working when we saw the chief pro tem striding rather imperiously toward us. He was robed in a flowing gown and swinging the cow-tail switch that was the symbol of his newly bestowed authority. Accompanied by sev­eral of his fawning friends and a cluster of curious children, he paused to greet us. Then he moved on to survey his diminutive domain. An elder of the village seated near us looked amused and then captured the scene neatly. "The small pond's crocodile is a bullfrog," he observed and said no more.

Missionary in a Small Pond

As I reflect back on those early years of missionary service, I sometimes wonder if that comment could have applied as well to us. We were a group of young, naive, ambitious, and probably at times arrogant-appearing new missionaries, eager to make our mark in what was a small church in a small country. By virtue of our being missionaries, we were thrust into positions of author­ity for which we were ill prepared. After completing language study, I-who had never served as a minister of a congregation­was appointed district pastor of an area comprising over twenty village churches and evangelistic outposts. Not too long after that, I-who had never taken a course in education or taught in a classroom-was assigned as principal of the church district's large elementary boarding school.

It was 1951 when we went to Liberia. In that corner of the world at least, it was still the era of the mission organization and the missionary. It would remain so for at least another decade. Although a Lutheran church had been organized a few years earlier, the mission and the missionaries ran things. The things we ran, of course, were of our own making, institutions and organizations familiar to us and, we thought, essential to the work.

I was and still am ambivalent about the appropriateness for another culture and society of schools, hospitals, church struc­tures, and programs set up to function on a Western model. Within the Liberian national context, however, this was ex­pected. Such institutions were desired and highly regarded by the Westernized elite. To the village people of traditional culture, they were utterly foreign. We were not the only mission or church confronted by this dilemma, then or now. In a world in

Gerald E. Currens wasamissionary in Liberiafornineteen years. In 1976 hewas appointed secretary for Africaand laterexecutive director of the Division for WorldMissionandEcumenism oftheLutheran Church inAmerica. From 1988 until hisretirement in 1993, hewasdirectorforOverseas Operations andLong­range PlanningfortheDivision forGlobal MissionoftheEvangelical Lutheran Church in America. He and his wife,Virginia, now live in Eugene, Oregon.

which mission is international and cross-cultural, church organi­zations and related educational, health, and economic develop­ment programs need to operate according to commonly accepted standards and procedures. But locally, there need to be mediat­ing mechanisms-people, groups, organizations-that facilitate movement between the familiar and traditional ways and the unfamiliar institutions and operations adopted from a different culture.

My career as principal was very brief. I immediately re­quested an experienced, able teacher to assume the responsibili­ties of leading the school as de facto principal. He was soon appointed principal, the first Liberian to head a Lutheran church school. This man was a mature, respected member of the commu­nity and a highly competent teacher, although he had himself only completed eighth grade. For me, the issue here was, What are the criteria for leadership, and more critically, who deter­mines them? It was not the last time in my experience that this question needed to be addressed.

I did, however, become the district pastor. I had received theological education and was an ordained minister of the Lutheran Church. At that time, there was no ordained Loma­speaking minister to serve the area. The real ministry and evan­gelistic outreach was carried out by laymen and laywomen in these village churches. I toured the district periodically to baptize new believers and administer Holy Communion, an itinerant and sporadic dispenser of the sacraments. A church polity re­garding the ministry that may have made sense in Europe and America was ill suited to effective mission in rural Africa.

I was impatient with these constraints on ministry and the discipling and nurturing of a growing Christian community. The Lutheran Church later made changes in its polity when, after a surge of church growth in the Loma area, many of these lay leaders were ordained as"deacons" (the title of "pastor" was still reserved for those with theological education). They could now not only preach and teach but also baptize and preside at Holy Communion in their local churches.

This was my first lesson in the difference the ordering of ministry can make in how well the church carries out its vocation to mission. This was an issue that recurred at other times and other places. I believe it is an issue that still weighs heavily upon many churches around the world thathave inherited unexamined the traditions of ministry brought by those who introduced them to the Gospel.

When, in retrospect, I am embarrassed by my participation in the missionary dominance of those early years, I remind myself that we were children of our time. We always are. The deeper understandings and broader experience I think I have gained in the forty years since may-forty years from now-be as easily deplored.

I was a child of my time, but the times were changing, and so was I. Anticipating the needs of the future, the church and mission had launched a major, long-range effort at leadership development. Beginning with the first Lutheran missionary in 1860, the aim had been to build up the church on the foundation of schools offering Western education in English, the official language of Liberia. This was regarded as a "civilizing" as well as an evangelistic effort, an attitude shared by the Liberian ruling class, descendants of freed slaves who had returned to Africa.

January 1995 21

There were some students who moved on to positions of leader­ship in the nation and others who became faithful mission workers. But the expectations on the part of those early mission­aries for an educated leadership were not high, and the opportu­nities were meager.

Once the interior opened up and adult believers from the several ethnic groups grew in number, a village-based church worshiping in the vernacular became the norm. Leadership development could now mean both expanding the opportunities for formal education in the schools and emphasizing nonformal training in the vernacular for potential leaders in the village setting.

To move forward in the one direction, the mission estab­lished and later turned over to the church a high-quality second­ary school, a Bible school, and schools of nursing associated with the hospitals. Students were sponsored for studies in many fields, at the university level in Liberia and for graduate study abroad. Within ten to fifteen years there were young, capable, well-educated leaders in all areas of the church's work.

In the 1960s, the move to Liberian leadership, the disappear­ance of the mission organization, and the transfer of authority to the Liberian church was hard on many missionaries. They left service in large numbers.

During this period of transition, a senior missionary pro­vided for some of us a model of how to welcome and undergird the changes that were taking place. He was my father. I was a missionary kid, born in Liberia. We had returned to the United States when I was in second grade. My memories of those early years were mostly family anecdotes that had a reality all their own, the old black-and-white photos we sometimes looked at, and an attitude-the deep love and respect my parents had for the people they had lived and worked among. While I was in college, my parents went back to Liberia. My own journey there was on a twisted path of rebellion and rejection: first, of vocation to the ministry, and second, of any kind of missionary service. I changed, but not easily.

During those transition years, my father moved from top positions in mission and church to become a subordinate, quietly supportive helper to the bishop of the church. He knew how to pick up the slack, fill in the gaps, and follow. I never achieved the same graciousness and genuine humility of service, but it was not because I lacked an example.

With the new emphasis on leadership development, I chose to be involved in nonformal, grassroots educational efforts in the vernacular. That first year of Loma language study was, for me, invigorating and successful. It opened up another world of thought, perception, and experience. I was eager to know more about the worldview and lifeways of the people to whom I had been sent with the Gospel.

During those early years I was fortunate in having a mentor. Dr. Wesley Sadler was a linguist who had analyzed and devel­oped the orthography for the Loma language, initiated an adult literacy program, and translated some Scripture. He had also written the comprehensive set of lessons for language learning that I and others used so successfully. He guided my early interest in learning about African cultures. When he moved on to set up the Africa Writing Centre in Kitwe, Zambia (then North­ern Rhodesia), I succeeded him as director of the Loma literacy and language program. The translation of Scripture was my primary assignment.

In the Loma area in the late 1950s and 1960s, we had a virtual laboratory for experimenting with the response of Christians to increasing exposure to Scripture. For a generation, since the

beginning of mission work in the area, the only persons who could preach and teach from the Bible (using the King James Version, of course) were the few persons who had gone to elementary school, had a rudimentary command of English, and stayed in their home area as church workers. Until I completed language study, no missionary pastor in the area had worked in the vernacular. This meant that, as those with little formal education taught and preached or interpreted for missionaries, the hearers received at best idiosyncratic translations of the Scripture. Then, with the beginning of a literacy effort, mature men and women who had never been to school could for the first time read and write in their own language.

Nevertheless, when I began translation work, only the Gos­pels of Mark and John were available. I worked with an ex­tremely gifted Liberian translator whose command of his own language and knowledge of his cul ture far exceeded his years. As we translated, we tested and revised the various New Testament books, putting the drafts out in mimeographed form before publication of the entire New Testament by the United Bible Societies some years later.

Scripture in Dialogue with the Community

I remember the change in some of the elders of the congregation in the village where we lived and where the literacy center was located. During the evening services, one old fellow, a Christian of long standing, always led us in a lengthy, almost formulaic prayer. The petitions were predictable and numbing. Then as the congregation began studying the Epistles, the rich variety of experience and insights, the struggles and victories of the early church became their own. Gradually but dramatically, the old man's vocabulary of faith grew and blossomed. The prayers became lively and pertinent. In these New Testament writers he had heard voices that spoke to his experience and from whom he found a new voice to express his faith. I could see a similar change taking place in the lay leaders of the other village churches with whom I met monthly, I do not believe that one must possess a wide biblical vocabulary to live out one's faith, but as one enters more fully into the world of ideas, beliefs, and experiences that have been shared by the church through the ages, the vocabulary becomes one's own. If I had not already been an advocate for translation of Scripture in the vernacular, I certainly would have become one after this experience. I saw the Word of God in the language of heart and home change and renew lives.

I also saw the excitement of Christians as they discovered that these newly available Scriptures could be searched for guidance in the issues they faced in their daily lives. In one town a feast was being planned as part of the ritual sacrifice to the ancestors. Such periodic rituals ensured the blessings of the ancestors-and the deity-upon the community. Some mem­bers of the church had wondered why it would not be right for them to take part in the meal. The leader of the congregation suggested that the elders look at the First Letter to the Corinthians. The debate was lively, worthy of a class in exegesis. Of course, church law had prohibited participation in such ceremonies­"Christians don't take part in sacrifices." It was a rule first heard from the missionaries and, at least occasionally, discreetly bro­ken. Noteworthy now was the open discussion of the question, the frank differences of opinion, and the probing of Scripture for help in resolving the question.

At the close of the 1950s and into the 1960s the map of Africa was dramatically altered. In rapid succession the vast swaths of color indicating European colonies became a mosaic of newly

22 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

independent nations. Leaders in the struggle for independence became heads of state. Massive economic development and aid programs promised a bright future. New business ventures multiplied. Optimism was in the air.

Liberia, though never a colony, experienced its own rapid economic and social change as roads were built into the interior; schools and clinics were opened in rural areas; the city of Monrovia, fast becoming a modern West African capital, at­tracted more and more people; deposits of high-grade iron ore were discovered and exploited; and natural rubber was still a profitable export. Men and women left their farms and villages to join the n1any others in the new towns and workers' camps at mines and plantations.

The rural-based church was slow to realize what was hap­pening. The Lorna literacy program had followed people into the urban and industrial areas with a network of distributors of bilingual materials that we were now producing in both the vernacular and English. I, with some others, became acutely aware of the need for the church to face up to the changes that were all around. I urged the Liberian church leadership to ask the mission agency to send a sociologist or anthropologist to work with us for a time. This person could, we thought, help the church understand and deal with the rapid social change that was profoundly affecting so many of its members. When no such person was forthcoming and with the end in sight for the trans­lation of the New Testament, I requested a study leave to do graduate work in anthropology. Largely because of generous financial assistance from the university, this leave became an extended doctoral program including field research back in Liberia.

This immersion in the field of anthropology was rewarding in many ways. Two learnings, in particular, led me to a deeper understanding of my vocation to mission.

One came from seeing things from the perspective afforded by cultural anthropology. I discovered how much I and my whole involvement in mission were formed by my own culture.

I saw the Word of God in the language of the heart change and renew lives.

With my active interest in learning about the worldview and lifeways of the people among whom I worked, I had considered myself rather enlightened. I would have been more enlightened had I understood how much the assumptions and worldview of my culture shaped my ministry. I wanted to learn to know their culture when I needed most to question my own.

As a result of this experience and from observing and talking with missionaries around the world, I am convinced that the best preparation for missionary service is an orientation that includes a healthy appreciation for the powerful way one's own society and culture shapes who one is and what one does. Any intelli­gent, motivated person can learn something about another cul­ture; it takes a special effort to uncover the powerful, formative influence of one's own.

For example, it seems strange that for one whose profession was "religion," I had to become a graduate student of anthropol­ogy before I could admit the reality of the African spirit-world, of ancestors, sorcery, magic, the manipulation and effects of occult powers. I did not refer to my neighbors' worldview as supersti-

January 1995

tious. Nevertheless, I was conditioned by my education and cul tural heritage to take less seriously than they deserved the forces and powers that so pervade an African's life.

A second insight came from my field research back in Liberia. I learned what it meant to be a guest, dependent upon the hospitality of my Liberian hosts. For the seventeen years that we had been missionaries, the mission and church structures had provided for our basic needs: transportation, housing, and a special identity and status. We were welcome, I am sure, in part for what we represented, in part for ourselves as persons. But it was during the year of field research, in an area distant from our former place of work, where I was unconnected to church struc­tures and not known as a missionary, that I became a guest. I was totally dependent upon the hospitality and goodwill of the community that let Virginia and me live among them. The experience was salutary. I was not then serving as a missionary, but my relationship with my neighbors and hosts was in many ways more servantlike than everbefore. The bullfrog had learned that it was not a crocodile.

Bullfrog in a Bigger Pond

And the pond got bigger. I had two years as a practicing anthro­pologist and missionary pastor in Liberia and then was called to a succession of staff positions in the United States. Each step expanded my world and my understanding of mission.

As staff person responsible for relationships with churches and agencies in Africa, I got to know other parts of the continent. Later, as executive director, I dealt with churches and agencies worldwide. The Board of Foreign Missions that had sent us to Liberia in 1951 had-in the parlance of the day-six mission fields. With the 1988 merger of three Lutheran churches here in the United States, I was given oversight of relationships with partners in mission in sixty countries. The world for mission in which I was now involved had grown much bigger.

As my responsibilities grew, so did my experience with persons from other confessions and other faiths. In my role as staff liaison for Africa, working relationships and friendships embraced persons from many other denominations, some Afri­can independent churches, national and regional councils of churches. Attending the 1983 Vancouver Assembly of the World Council of Churches and years of active participation in the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. confirmed my long-standing commitment to interchurch cooperation and ecumenical efforts.

Bigger is not necessarily better. But becoming associated ­over the years with such a variety of Christians in so many different places has made very real for me the universality and particularity of the church.

The move from being a missionary and anthropologist to mission staffwas not as difficult as Ihad anticipated. I discovered that I could be administrator and still be a pastor, evangelist, social scientist, and student. I was fascinated by how institutions and organizations work, and I was committed to working within the church as an organization instituted for mission.

When I did on occasion look over my shoulder and reflect on the past, I was grateful for the variety of opportunities and wealth of experiences that I had been given. But I do not have a gift for nostalgia. TILe last few years of my active service were directed even more toward the future. In my work in long-range planning with mission agency board, staff, missionaries, and church leaders, I used to challenge them: "Envisionwhat mission will be like a generation from now, thirty or forty years. Plan now! That day will be here sooner than you think." I know.

23

Annual Statistical Table on Global Mission: 1995 David B. Barrett

T he table opposite is the eleventh in an annual series describing statistics and trends in wo rld mission . This year we illustr ate the

value of anal yzing these data by selecting several figures from this year's table and focusing on the question, Where should foreign missionaries work? or, How should the global foreign missionary force be deployed?

The graph and accompanying table below explore this question by examining the proportions of missionaries to be sent to World A, B, and C countries if various categori es of people are the pr imary point of entry or target. Six very different organizing principles emerge, as advocated by different mission agencies.

Principle 1: Foreign miss ionaries should operate through existing churches. The 1.9 billion Christians thus become their immedia te or primary entry point, wh ether in World A, B, or C countries. This is termed the partnership principle.

Principle2:The world 's 4.6billion wh o have already heard the Gospel (evangelized persons) should be the primary entry po int and target in World A, B, and C countries. Foreign missionaries then utili ze this hu ge pool as their launching pad.

Principle 3: Every person on the globe is equally deserving of the attention of the global missionary force. World A, B, and C countries should thus receive foreign missionaries in exact proportion to their populations.

Principle 4: Thinking in mor e strategic terms, some agencies targe t those who belong to non-Christian religions or no religion at all-the 3.8 billion non -Chri stians of World A, B, and C countries.

Principle 5: Narrowing the focus even more , a small number of agencies consider those who have never heard the Gospel (the 1.1billion World A indi viduals) as the immed iate, direct targ ets of foreign mission­ar ies.Such indi viduals are present in all World A, B, and C countries but on th is pr incipl e should receive the proportional share shown in Prin­ciple 5 below.

Principle6: Finally, man y agencies see no need to employ any overall pr inciple .They support the actu al deployment of foreign missionaries as it is tod ay, largely based on invi tations from the younger churches in the field . This has produced actu al deployment that appears to ignore the kind of strategic planning necessary for reaching all peoples with the Gospel.

Agenci es and churches might well ponder the profound inequities in the graph below and work to change them.

David B. Barrett, a contributing editor, works with mission agencies as a researchconsultant.Sourcesanddef initionsasgiven in INTERNATIONALBuLL ETIN

OF M ISSIONARY R ESEARCH 18, 110. 1 (january 1994): 24.

Graph I. FOREIGN MISSIONARY DEPLOY MENT IN THE GLOBE'S 250 COUNTRIES, DEPICTED UNDER SIX ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES.

1 2 3 4 5100 % deploym ent o (

missionaries 90

80

• WorldA 70

[ill WorldB 60

D WorldC 50

TIleabov e box class ifies 40 countr ies receiving foreign missionaries into

~ur~i::~~~~~~~~n;; 30 in World A (the unevangelized world), 75 countriesin WorldB 20 (the evangelized. non-Christianworld),

~~r~~(:~~e:~an 10 world).

o Principle 2 Principle 3 Principle 4 Princip le 1

Deploy exact ly as Chrl.tlan.

are located

Principle 5 Deploy exactly as Unevangellnd

per.on. are located

6

Principle 6 Deploy exactly as Deploy exactly as Deploy exactly as Go where invited; Evangelized Po pulation Non.Chrl. t1an. hence Ac tual

per_n. is located are located deployment are located today,

Current foreign missionaries

332,000

300,000

250,000

200,000

150,000

100,00 0

50,000

o

Table 1. FOREIGN MISSIONARY DEPLOYMENT IN WORLDS A, B, AND C, ENUMERATED UNDER SIX ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES .

Locations Principle 1 Principle 2 Principle 3 Principle 4 Principle 5 Principle 6

Basis Persons in: Wor ld A countries World B countries World C cou ntries G LOBAL TOTAL

Christians

91,252,000 390,954,000

1,457,213,000 1,939,419,000

Evangelized

895,760,000 2,162,871,000 1,557,031,000 4,615,662,000

Papulation

1,846,927,000 2,339,590,000 1,572,759.000 5,759,276,000

Non-Christians

1,755,675,000 1,948,636,000

115,546,000 3,819,8S7,OOO

Unetangelized

951,167,000 176,719,000 15,728,000

1,143,614,000

No agreed basis

----

Percent1.es in: World countries World Bcountries World C countries G LOBAL TOTAL

Christians

5% 20% 75%

100%

Evangelized

19% 47% 34%

100%

Papulation

32% 41% 27%

100%

Non-Christians

46% 51%

3% 100%

Uneiangelized

83% 16% 1%

100%

Actual missionforce

1% 8%

91% 100%

Missionaries (usi n~ above %s) in: Wor aA countries World B countries World C countries G LOBAL TOTAL

Missionforce

16,000 67,000

249,000 332,000

Missionforce

64,000 156,000 112,000 332,000

Missionforce

106,000 135,000 91,000

332,000

Missionforce

145,000 164,000 23,000

332,000

Missionforce

276,000 53.000

3,000 332,000

Actual missionforce

4,000 27,000

301,000 332,000

. . . . Footnote . Data refer to nud -1995. Global totals: from Stalus ofGlobal M,SSIOn, oppo stte, lines I, 11,21 ,4 7, 71. Full data and Interpretation are gIVen In forthconu ng World Christian Encydop edu. fl .

24 I NTERNATIONAL BU LLETIN OF MISSIONARY RE SEARCH

·Status of Global Mission, 1995, in Context of 20th and 21st Centuries Year:

WORLD POPULATION 1. Total pOEulation 2. Urban wellers (urbanites) 3. Rural dwellers 4. Adult population (over 15 yrs.) 5. Literates 6. Nonliterates

WORLDWIDE EXPANSION OF CITIES 7. Metropolises (over 100,000 population) 8. Megacities (over 1 million population) 9. Uroan poor

10. Urban slum dwellers WORLD POPULATION BY RELIGION 11. Christians (total all kinds) (= World C) 12. Muslims 13. Nonreligious 14. Hindus 15. Buddhists 16. Atheists 17. New-Religionists 18. Tribal religionists 19. Sikhs 20. Jews 21. Non-Christians (= Worlds A and B) GLOBAL CHRISTIANITY 22. Total Christians as % of world (= World C) 23. Affiliated church members 24. Practicing Christians 25. Pentecostals / Charismatics 26. Great Commission Christians (active) 27. Average Christian martyrs per year MEMBERSHIP BY ECCLESIASTICAL BLOC 28. An~icans 29. Cat olics (non-Roman) 30. Marginal Protestants 31. Nonwhite indigenous Christians 32. Orthodox 33. Protestants 34. Roman Catholics MEMBERSHIP BY CONTINENT 35. Africa 36. East Asia 37. Europe 38. Eurasia (formerly USSR) 39. Latin America 40. Northern America 41. Oceania 42. South Asia CHRISTIAN ORGANIZATIONS 43. Service agencies 44. ForeiSn-mission sendin~ agencies 45. Standa one global monohths CHRISTIAN WORKERS 46. Nationals (all denominations) 47. Aliens (foreign missionaries) CHRISTIAN FINANCE (in US $, per year) 48. Personal income of church members 49. Personal income of Pentecostals/Charismatics 50. Givin~to Christian causes 51. Churc es'income 52. Parachurch and institutional income 53. Ecclesiastical crime 54. Income of global foreign missions 55. Computers in Christian use (total numbers) CHRISTIAN LITERATURE 56. New commercial book titles per year 57. Christian periodicals 58. New books.' articles on evangelization per year SCRIPTURE DISTRIBUTION (all sources) 59. Bible~er year 60. New estamentsler year 61. Scriptures, inclu ing gospels, selections, per year CHRISTIAN BROADCASTING 62. Christian radio/TV stations 63. Total monthly listeners/viewers 64. over Christian stations 65. over secular stations CHRISTIAN URBAN MISSION 66. Non-Christian megacities 67. New non-Christian urban dwellers per day 68. Urban Christians CHRISTIAN EVANGELISM 69. Evangelism-hours per year 70. Disciple-opportunities per capita per year WORLD EVANGELIZATION 71. Unevangelized p0f,ulation (= World A) 72. Unevangelized as Yo of world 73. World evangelization plans since A.D. 30

1900

1,619,886,800 232,694,900

1,387,191,900 1,025,938,000

286,705,000 739,233,000

300 20

100 million 20 million

558/056,300 200,102,200

2,923,300 203,033,300 127,159,000

225,600 5,910,000

106,339,600 2,960,600

12,269,800 1,061,830,500

34.4 521,563,200 469,259,800

3,700,000 50 million

35,600

30,573,700 276,000 927,600

7,743,100 115,897,700 103,056,700 266,419,400

8,756,400 1,763,000

273,788,400 97,002,000 60,025,100 59,569,700

4,311,400 16,347,200

1,500 600

35

1,050,000 62,000

270 billion 250,000,000

8 billion 7 billion 1 billion 300,000

200,000,000

° 2,200 3,500

500

5,452,600 7,300,000

20 million

0

° ° ° 5

5,200 159,600,000

10 billion 6

788,159,000 48.7 250

1970

3,697,849,000 1,352,449,000 2,345,400,000 2,311,156,000 1,479,980,000

831,176,000

2,400 161

650 million 260 million

1,246,173,000 564,320,000 556,275,000 477,115,000 237,308,000 169,309,000

78,303,000 90,220,000 10,870,000 13,605,000

2,451,676,000

33.7 1,159,341,000

905,526,000 74,366,000

300 million 230,000

48,714,000 3,211,000

11,094,000 60,130,000

146,891,000 239,102,000 688,673,000

118,744,000 10,295,000

406,768,000 88,105,000

268,402,000 173,364,000

15,026,000 78,638,000

14,100 2,200

62

2,350,000 240,000

4,100 billion 157 billion 70 billion 50 billion 20 billion 5,000,000

3.0 billion 1,000

17,100 23,000

3,100

25,000,000 45,000,000

281 million

1,230 750,000,000 150,000,000 650,000,000

65 51,100

660,800,000

99 billion 27

1,391,956,000 38.6 510

mid-1995

5,759,276,000 2,603,193,000 3,156,083,000 3,922,067,000 2,510,123,000 1,411,944,000

3,800 380

1,650 million 900 million

1,939,419,000 1,057,599,000

937,185,000 777,372,000 341,096,000 242,590,000 128,587,000

99,246,000 20,550,000 13,543,000

3,819,857,000

33.7 1,791,227,000 1,291,602,000

463,741,000 705 million

157,000

57,401,000 4,076,000

21,121,000 173,033,000 189,617,000 354,705,000

1,052,116,000

307,235,000 116,652,000 416,906,000 119,503,000 451,175,000 200,784,000 19,236,000

159,099,000

23,000 4,400

90

4,207,000 332,000

10,760 billion 1,267 billion

187 billion 92 billion 96 billion

1.4 billion 10.2 billion 180,212,000

24,000 29,000 13,000

60,436,000 92,883,000

1,702 million

3,000 1,743,835,000

523,950,000 1,469,461,000

175 119,000

1,240,774,000

402 billion 70

1,143,614,000 19.9

1,145

2000 2025

6,228,254,000 8,472,446,000 2,964,649,000 5,185,137,000 3,263,605,000 3,287,309,000 4,291,267,000 6,362,807,000 3,038,217,000 5,202,867,000 1,253,050,000 1,159,940,000

4,200 6,800 433 650

2,000 million 3,050 million 1,300 million 2,100 million

2,119,342,000 3,051,179,000 1,153,871,000 1,709,679,000

984,962,000 1,284,707,000 836,421,000 1,089,018,000 359,387,000 452,734,000 232,088,000 236,370,000 143,667,000 216,502,000 96,174,000 76,738,000 21,410,000 28,264,000 14,082,000 15,100,000

4,108,912,000 5,421,267,000

34.0 36.0 1,959,825,000 2,850,000,000 1,371,978,000 2,280,000,000

560,474,000 1,140,000,000 990 million 1,500 million

165,000 300,000

59,119,000 83,289,000 4,198,000 5,915,000

23,349,000 32,895,000 197,688,000 278,509,000 193,541,000 272,668,000 373,873,000 526,724,000

1,108,056/000 1,561,066,000

366,427,000 811,178,000 141,024,000 230,393,000 415,178,000 413,342,000 128/673,000 194,058,000 489,251,000 675,205,000 202,773,000 225,629,000 19,814,000 24,015,000

196,683,000 327,240,000

24,000 40,000 4,800 8,500

120 5,000

4,500,000 8,500,000 400,000 500,000

12,700 billion 26,000 billion 1,550 billion 9,500 billion

220 billion 870 billion 100 billion 300 billion 120 billion 570 billion

2 billion 18 billion 12 billion 60 billion

340,000,000 2,500,000,000

25,000 70,000 35,000 100,000 16,000 80,000

70,000,000 180,000,000 110,000,000 250,000,000

2,050 million 4,000 million

4,000 10,000 2,150,000,000 3,800,000,000

600,000,000 1,300,000,000 1,810,000,000 2,800,000,000

202 280 140,000 360,000

1,393,700,000 2,448,800,000

480 billion 4,250 billion 77 500

1,038,819,000 600,000,000 16.6 7.1

1,400 3,000

January 1995 25

The Legacy of John Ritchie

G. Stewart McIntosh

Oh, little did my mither ken, The day she cradled me, The lands I was tae travel in And the death I was taedee.

(Scot's ballad)

j ohn Ritchie, like so many other Scots, was to spend the greater part of his life far away from his homeland. It was

part of the bitter harvest of the nineteenth-century industrial revolution and the "clearances" of the Highlands of Scotland; it was also part of Scotland's extraordinary contribution to the mission of God.

Ritchie was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, on November 11, 1878, the son of a cabinetmaker. He had to leave school at the age of eleven and worked in a large Glasgow printers. One cold winter's night in 1893, returning from the tavern, he was invited to attend a temperance meeting by a young friend. The question asked of all at the meeting, "What doth it profit a man that he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" stuck in his mind. Later the answer and the commitment to the Lord came through his hearing of the Gospel and the shaping of his missionary career by a self-taught pastor and convert of Moody's Glasgow cam­paigns, D. J. Findlay,' founder of Glasgow's St. George's Cross Tabernacle.

The influence of Findlay on this young convert was such that it would also shape the nature of the nascent Protestant Church in Peru for decades to come-Christian Endeavour movement, consistory above the pastor, women's league, temperance, and the second coming were all part of Ritchie's transplantation of Findlay's teaching to Peru.'

By 1901Ritchie was organizing and conducting gospel meet­ings in the printing works where he was employed and had begun, like Livingstone and Mary Slessor before him, to educate himself. The following year he was accepted into the Harley House Bible Institute" in the notorious slums of the East End of London, under the auspices of H. Grattan Guinness. The pro­gram there was basically Bible study in the morning and preach­ing and ministering to the poor and sick in the afternoons. It was there that he read in the Chamber's Journal an article about Bolivia,' which confirmed his call to serve his Master in South America.

On May 24, 1905, Ritchie had his interview with the South American and Indian Council of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union, which "unanimously accepted Mr. Ritchie for service in Peru.... Who will send this brother as the representative to dark Peruj?" Part of the answer to that lugubrious question was taken up by the Bridge of Weir Orphan Homes" in Scotland and the orphans, who had some of their scant pocket money deducted to help Ritchie on his way! They were to be one of his sources of income from his arrival in Peru in August 1906 until 1929, when he was to resign from the Evangelical Union of South America

G. Stewart McIntosh is Professor of Missiology in the Facultad Eoangelica "OrlandoE. Costas,"Lima,Peru,a memberof theLatinAmericanTheological Fraternity, and Editor of the Mac Research Bulletin: Studies in Ibero­Amerindian Missiology.

(EUSA)? He married a daughter of a wealthy Peruvian mer­chant, a Methodist herself, and had four children. However he was to have only one true love-the church that he brought to birth with others. One of his daughters sadly commented, "My father had only one daughter-The Peruvian Evangelical Church!"?

Ritchie's legacy and contribution to the Protestant church in Peru was formidable. In an era when fundamentalism and premillennial hopes began to set at naught a message of noncon­formist radicalism, Ritchie was a man out of season. Indeed on reading and studying him now, one gains the impression that he would have been very much at home with the holistic mission of today.

Ritchie and Politics

Soon after his arrival in Peru in 1906, Ritchie became immersed in politics and the struggle for religious liberty and constitutional changes in Peru." Ritchie's political influence centered on the use of the media. With his own printing press, from 1911 onward he was able to bombard sections of the community with his thoughts about religious liberty, nor was he slow in writing in the national press."

One observes in Ritchie the difference in the contribution to the understanding of the Latin American scene and Latin Ameri­can missiology from his perspective of praxis, compared with that of his friend John A. Mackay." The American Bible Society (ABS), which employed Ritchie from 1932, noted that "Mr. Ritchie feels that it is dangerous for [John A.] Mackay's writing to connect Haya de la Torre with the evangelical meetings to project Haya's ideas."12

Ritchie, like Mackay, was a prolific writer and spokesman for much of the material before, during, and after the Panama Mission Conference of 1916. He wrote the "Report on Survey and Occupation," in which he foresaw the evangelization of Peru accomplished by only forty to fifty male missionaries." He expressed the thought that if the right type of men were forth­coming and a satisfactory cooperation of all the missionary societies obtained, coupled with a capable native ministry, soon even this number of foreign missionaries might diminish." This was not to come to fruition, but his thought that foreign mission­aries should devote themselves to discipling rather than mere soul-winning resulted in the formation of the Lima Bible Institute in 1935, where Ritchie was administrator and teacher."

Ritchie and the Amerindian World

In the Andean Republics of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador there are over 10 million Quechua speakers, descendants of tribal groups united by the Inca Empire. In his geographic introduction to the conference in 1916, Ritchie mentioned that about 50 percent of the population was Indian, only 15 percent whites, and the remainder mestizo of several degrees, Negroes, and Chinese. Not unsurprisingly there was a general feeling at that time that translation work was useless, even inadvisable, for Quechua speakers. A missionary leader wrote, "There is a feeling among

26 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

them of aversion to their native language [and] the printed page is useless among the Indians. [Therefore it is] useless to make translations of the Bible or tracts into their native tongue.":"

Ritchie took a more critical position and expressed himself in favor of at least primary teaching in native Quechua as a means to the preservation of the glorious traditions of the race. He drew a comparison with the Gaelic speakers of Scotland who were nonetheless "an integral part of the British empire." Ritchie became a champion for the translation work of Quechua in his latter days in the ABS,and he was shrewd enough to realize the innate fear of the whites and mestizos of a take-over by the

Ritchie favored the use of the Quechua language in teaching as a means to preserve the traditions of their race.

Quechua. "The government of Peru fears that the Indian, edu­cated as an Indian, would take control of the government, which his numerical strength would enable him to do, hence the gov­ernment wishes to have the Indian assimilated into the Spanish­speaking mass."17 Ritchie always sided with the rural, Quechua­speaking church.

National Evangelical Council of Churches

As early as 1916 Ritchie advocated formation of a national Protestant church council. A provisional constitution had been drafted in 1932 by the Alliance of Christian Missions in Peru, an alliance that Ritchie had been instrumental in founding some eighteen years previously. But it was not until 1940 that the National Evangelical Council of Churches, the first in Latin America, became a reality.

In 1934 Ritchie had written to the ABS:

The steady growth and expansion of the evangelical movement, with the increase in number of different missions and missionar­ies, as well as the rise of national and independent Christian movements, several of which have no official representation in the Capital [Lima], indicate the possibility of organizing such a body not only for the representation suggested above, but also as a medium of mutual understanding, a clearing house of common interests, a means to facilitate cooperation between those bodies, which though sometimes widely separated in their origins are similar in their aim and spirit and find themselves in proximity in this country.

As, however, we look forward to the time when the Christian movement of Peru will be self-governing, and when the foreign missionary effort will have largely passed away, it has seemed wiser, instead of reorganising the Committee of MissionCoopera­tion, to lay the foundation of a National Christian Council which should be the vehicle of a catholic spirit in the Protestant Churches of Peru.18

Six years later, after a week of meetings, a constitution was hammered out and finally approved. However, the delegates "were so exhausted by the effort that they declared the confer­ence closed and hurried off to their respective homes without formulating a plan of action or leaving any instructions for the newly elected executive.... When Ritchie was informed, he

January 1995

threw up his hands in despair and exclaimed: 'The mountain was in travail and 10, it brought forth a mouse!'" (p. 63). Ritchie perhaps had the right to be exasperated; he had only, after all, been waiting since 1916, a mere twenty-four years! He had to learn yet again the need for patience in Latin America.

Ritchie and Social Concern

Ritchie was "forty years ahead of his time" in the field of family planning and social concern." As far back as 1912 he had been involved in the formation of libraries, recreational centers, tem­perance leagues, schools, and reform legislation for the working week and prisons in Peru. "Two classes of abuse might demand our intervention ... those directed against the evangelical move­ment and any occurrence of national crimes that destroy the liberty of defenseless tribes or races" (pp. 65, 66).

From his own working-class background, he could not fail to sympathize with the lot of the typical working-class mother. Most wives in Latin America were obliged to bear children at the rate of one every year as long as they were physically able to do so. He had translated and published a book on birth control, which offered a modicum of protection for those overburdened mothers. In 1924, however, Ritchie, was denounced by single lady missionaries to the London board of the mission for includ­ing "immoral" literature on his evangelicalbookstore shelves. By 1928, the mission board had redefined the basic aim of the mission in a way that Ritchie, with his holistic vision, could not accept. The minute read: "Our sole objective as a society is that of winning men and women to a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord and gathering of these into Christian Churches on a New Testament basis with no qualification of denominational character" (p. 64).

In April 1929the Committee on Cooperation in Latin America offered Ritchie a post in its New York office, which he accepted. Ritchie had resigned from EUSA the previous year, due to the narrowing of the mission's purpose. From New York he returned to Peru in 1931, with appointment by the American Bible Society as the society's secretary for the Upper Andes. He settled into his new post in Lima on January I, 1932, and remained there for the rest of his life.

Ritchie and National Training

Ritchie had always worked on the principle that it was the national who would be on the ground when the foreign mission­ary had gone. Although he had his share of concern for buildings and in trying to cope with new, untried missionaries, especially women, it was resistance from the home churches, missions, and others throughout the years toward investment in men from Peru that irked Ritchie. "As the missionary himself will never have time for pastoral duties ... he will give his time to educating these national leaders in the affairs and ministry of the Church rather than attend to these himself. It will be more important to him that the national brethren learn to conduct the affairs of the Church rather than these be conducted perfectly" (p. 67).

Indigenous Church Principles

Although more prolific in writing articles and editorials in Span­ish through his magazines, Ritchie also left a substantial written legacy in English, the largest part of which deals with indigenous church principles. The core of the indigenous churchmovement's thinking was stated in the cliche of forming "self-supporting,

27

self-governing, and self-propagating churches." Ritchie com­mented acidly: "Had he been an experienced missionary, Mr. Sidney Clark [one of the movement's advocates] would have recognised that this plan, so neat and adequate on paper, could be carried out only in very favoured circumstances, if ever.... Moreover such continuous visits by a foreign-led group would be calculated to arouse hostility and beget organized opposition" (p.68).

Ritchie felt it to be more important for nationals to learn to conduct the affairs of the church than for these to be conducted perfectly.

Ritchie, however, at least agreed with the goal of indigenous leadership: "So long as missionaries think of themselves as successors to be succeeded by other missionaries, they fail to prepare the Church for a self-sufficient life. The successful mis­sionary needs no successor" (p. 67).

Although writing some fifty years ago, Ritchie put his finger on the main reason of tension in church/mission and ecclesias­tical relationships in the world today:

Noteworthy Announcing

The Ninth International Conference of the International As­sociation for Mission Studies will be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 10-19, 1996. The theme of the conference for 150 or more participants from around the world will be "God or Mammon: Economies in Conflict." Inquiries for further information about the conference and membership in lAMS can be sent to: Secretariat, lAMS, Normannenweg 17-21, 0-20537 Hamburg, Germany.

A new piece of software for mission research, designed to meet needs identified by the lAMS, is now available from Global Mapping International, 7899 Lexington Drive, Colo­rado Springs, Colorado 80920. Called the 20:21 Library, it contains bibliographic, full-text, and database information, plus a new thesaurus specifically designed for missiological work. Major bibliographic collections, such as the WCC Li­brary, Missionalia and the index of International Review of Mission will be included as the "library of mission and evan­gelism resources" grows.

Personalia For the first time in its 129-year history, the London-based Salvation Army has elected an American as its top interna­tionalleader. General Paul A. Rader, 60, and his wife served as missionaries in Korea for 22 years. Rader has headed Salvation Army operations in the Western United States for the past four years. A graduate of Asbury College and South­ern Baptist Theological Seminary, Rader has a doctorate in missiology from Fuller Theological Seminary.

One of the curious phenomena of missionary work is the extent to which missionaries are often dominated by their fears. Their procedures are largely determined by these fears. They fear lest their native converts read something of which they disapprove, including publications of other Christian bodies. They fear the influence of organization, even though they work in disinterested cooperation. They fear the initiative of every national which they did not prompt or cannot control. They fear the word that is in disfavour back at home, or which is not their favourite "Shibbo­leth." They fear communism or Modernism, real or imagined, sometimes with a fear that robs them of the capacity for discern­ment and deliberate judgment. They speak and act as if every enemy had abetter message than theirs .... Such fear isparalyzing. . . . He should have a genuine and intelligent faith which will not fear ... a faith that will enable him to go straight on doing the will of God without being distracted at the windmills or chasing ghosts to the alarm of the Christian Church. (P. 67).

Ritchie reacted strongly against unstructured Christianity.

The view expressed by Clark that "we have too much machinery" is held tenaciously by some missionaries, especially by zealous evangelists that go out under what are called "faith missions." ... they feel that the ecclesiastical machine strangles the spirit of Life in them. They attribute this condition to organization.... The abuse of any good thing does not warrant its rejection. The permanence of the work of John Wesley as compared to that of George Whitefield is that the former organised everything and the latter nothing! ... Founding churches where there are none is, therefore, the only permanent way to extend the Gospel over the whole earth. (P. 69)

Scott William Sunquist will become the W. Don McClure Associate Professor of World Mission and Evangelism at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in September 1995. He re­ceived his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1990 and is currently a lecturer in Church history, Asian Church History and Ecumenics at Trinity Theological College in Singapore.

The INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN sends congratulations and best wishes to two colleagues who have made distinguished con­tributions to mission studies: Hans-Werner Gensichen in Heidelberg, Germany, who was the first president of the lAMS, will be 80 years old on March 10, 1995, and Olav G. Myklebust in Oslo, Norway, who was the founding general secretary of the lAMS, will celebrate his 90th birthday on July 24, 1995.

Columban priest Donald M. Wodarz, an American missiologist teaching at the Columban Mission Institute near Sydney, Australia, died of a heart attack on October 1, 1994.He was 58. After missionary service in the Philippines in 1963-70, he taught at the Major Seminary in Milton, Massachusetts, until he went to Rome for further study. When the American Society of Missiology was inaugurated at St. Louis in 1973, Father Wodarz was elected vice president. He received a doctorate in missiology in 1980 from the Gregorian University in Rome, summa cum laude, and he was awarded a gold medal for his dissertation on "Church Growth: The Missiology of Donald Anderson McGavran." In Australia he was active in the South Pacific Association of Mission Studies and was chairperson of the editorial board for the South Pacific Journal ofMission Studies.

28 INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

SCRIPTURE AND STRATEGY: The Use of the Bible in Post-Modern

Church and Mission by David Hesselgrave

1994, paperback, 205 pages. David Hesselgrave uses the work of ten influential men to describe what is going on in missions. Each chapter deals with a different as­pect of the use of the Bible in the church and in mission, from the study of the Bible to teaching biblical principles to church leaders on t.he mission field. This is the first title in the new Evangelical Missio­logical Society series.

"David Hesselgrave helps us underst.and the discussions on herme­neutics, contextualization, discipling and training, and shows the un­derlying unity that lies in starting with a high view of Scripture. His work provides an agenda for missiology in the 21st century" Paul G. Hiebert, professor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

"David Hesselgrave is a doer's thinker. Based on his background of field ministry in Japan and ext.ensive observation of the world's mission scene, he has produced a series of foundational texts to guide practitioners. Scripture and Strategy constitutes a strong call to build the future of missions on the only effective foundation: the Word of God." Michael Pocock, professor, Dallas Theological Seminary

WCL375-S Retail $S.95x Special Postpaid Discount $7.75

THE GOSPEL UNHINDERED

Modern Missions and the Book of Acts Doug Priest Jr., Editor

1994, paperback, 225 pages The unhindered spread of the gospel is Luke's passion in the Acts of the Apostles. That same gospel continues to penetrate the world to this day and claims more followers than any other faith. Fifteen mis­sionaries address questions we all ask in the proclamation of the gos­pel. Is the current approach to Bible translation into new languages too slow? What happens to a church undergoing persecution? Have missionaries overlooked spiritual warfare in work with animists? Is there any hope for a greater understanding between Muslims and Christians? WCL256-5 Retail $7.95x

Special Postpaid Discount $7.00

VILLAGE MEDICAL MANUAL A Layman's Guide to

Health Care in Developing CountriesVolume I • Principles ana Procedures Volume II - Diagnosis and Treatment

Mary Vanderkooi, M.D., D.T.M.&H. 1994, 8 1/2 x 11 paperbacks, 736 pages combined.

This important 2-set manual has already been widely used and is in its 4th edition. Years of practical experience and field testing by Dr. Van­derkooi and others has made the VILLAGE MEDICAL MANUAL one of the most important references available for missionary person­nel working in remote areas where medical services are not available. This set is primarily intended for use by missionaries, linguists, and community development workers living in isolated locations who, by necessity, must sometimes function as physicians. The intention is to provide these people with a reference book, using a vocabulary which they can understand, to treat the problems they can treat and to intelli­gently refer those that need referral.

WCL251/2 Retail $2S.95x Sold in Sets Only

Special Postpaid Discount $25.50

MEDIA IN CHURCH AND MISSION Communicating the Gospel

Viggo Sogaard 1993, paperback, 304 pages.

Viggo Sogaard, a native of Denmark, is Associate Professor of Com­munications at Fuller School of World Mission, and Media Consultant for the United Bible Societies, offers a highly readable and practical synthesis of what has been learned through the new wave of thinking about communications. His Thesis is a simple one-we cannot com­munication effectively and create understanding unless we take the au­dience seriously. If this is not done, well-intended Christian communi­cation will be avoided, misunderstood, or ignored. The 16 chapters are broken down in three sections:Foundational Principles for Use ofMe­dia in Church and Mission, Selected Media Descriptions, and Practi­cal Guidelines for Media in Church and Mission. Dr. Bruce Larson, Dean of the International School of Christian Com­munications says of the book "Much of the secret of communicating the gospel effectively is knowing and understanding your audience. [The author] has written a book from a lifetime of study that will help anyone rethink what they say and how they say it."

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To the theorists who insisted that when a church was "self­supporting" itwas "indigenous," Ritchiewamed:" 'Indigenous' should express the conception of a Christian Church which sustains its own life, rather than pays its own expenses or exists without any external aid, and whose mode and being of expres­sion arises from its own nature and environment rather than arising out of ecclesiastical, theological and political conflicts of the Church in some other land" (p. 70). How pertinent are these words for mission in Latin America today!

Ritchie at the End

When Ritchie was nearing the end of his life, he remarked wryly:

It is usually the younger missionary who knows it all! He has yet to learn his own limitations and the value of the insights which come with experience.... The missionary who goes forth to win souls requires a knowledge of many more things than his Bible. ... When our Lord came to this sin-cursed world of ignorant and

perverse mankind, He laid aside his glory, emptied Himself of all that marked Him as belonging to another world, divested Himself of whatever might have given Him superiority in the eyes of men. ... The foreign missionary above all Christians requires to have this mind.... He should seek to know, understand, or at least sympathize with the view of the national, for as long as he thinks as he did "back-home" there will a chasm between him and the people, and he is liable to give unnecessary offence to those he went to win.

If men are to work together building an indigenous church it is important that they cultivate a spirit of cooperation and mutual respect, lest they sow in it seeds of distrust, suspicion and division, and fail to set an example of loyalty. (P. 73)

Despite a long and painful illness, Ritchie worked, thought, and prayed on to the end. He died at 9:30P.M. on April 2, 1952,in Lima. Perhaps the greatest legacy of John Ritchie is to be found, not now in his writing, but in the 1,600 congregations of the Iglesia Evangelica Peruana that have come to birth through him and his disciples."

Notes---------------------------------------­1. Alexander Gammie, Pastor D. J. Findlay: A UniquePersonality (Lon­

don: Pickering & Ingles, 1949). 2. G. Stewart McIntosh, Genesis delaIglesia Eoangelica en el Peru(Lima:

Pusel, 1982), pp. 6-8. 3. Elizabeth Pritchard, For Such a Time (Eastboume: Victory Press,

1973), pp. 17-43. 4. "Undeveloped Bolivia; or, Between the Andes and the Amazon," in

Chamber's Journals, 6th ser., vols. 1900-1901 (London, 1902),pp. 157­60.

5. RBMU Council Minutes, May 24,1905 (London-RBMU, 1899-1911). 6. Anna Magnusson, TheVillage, aHistoryofQuarrier's (Bridge of Weir:

Quarrier's Homes, 1984). 7. The EUSA was formed in 1911 from various small missions, includ­

ing the RBMU. 8. G. Stewart McIntosh, TheLifeandTimesofJohn Ritchie(Tayport: Mac

Research, 1988), p. 31. Subsequent page references in the text are to this volume.

9. The main area of struggle from 1911 to 1913 was to change article 4 of the Peruvian Constitution, which prohibited the exercise of any religion in Peru other than that of Roman Catholicism.

10. Ritchie was editor and publisher in Peru of the Christian magazines El Cristiano (1911-15), El Heraldo (1916-21), and then Renacimiento (1921-52). He put to good use the provision in the Peruvian postal system for free distribution of magazines.

11. John A. Mackay, missionary to Peru for the Free Church of Scotland, 1916-1924, later went to Princeton Theological Seminary.

12. Victor Raul Haya de la Torre was the founder and political leader of Peru's APRA party and a close friend of Mackay. Though Haya de la Torre was not a confessed Protestant himself, many of the early evangelicals sided with him.

13. It is worth noting that there were more nationals working as full-time missionary colporteurs than there were expatriates in 1916, which belies the notion that foreign missionaries were the primary source of church planting in Peru.

14. In Homer C. Stuntz, SouthAmerican Neighbours (New York, 1918),pp. 13-25.

15. The Lima Bible Institute became the Lima Evangelical Seminary in 1960. In 1990 its postgraduate'department of missiology, the first in Latin America, became the Evangelical Faculty "Orlando E.Costas."

16. Stuntz, South American Neighbours. 17. Ibid. 18. American Bible Society Files, New York City, February 23, 1934.His

vision was far ahead of other mission leaders in Latin America. For instance, it was not till 1970 that Bolivia had its own Association of Evangelical Churches.

19. G. Stewart McIntosh, The Money Memoirs, 3 vols. (Tayport: Mac Research, 1990), 2:38.

20. The Iglesia Evangelica Peruana was formed by Ritchie and others with twenty-two congregations in 1922.He had hoped that it would be a single united church of Peru. That was not to be, although it has the largest number of Protestant congregations, and 250,000 mem­bers.

Selected Bibliography Material Written in English by Ritchie 1932 TheIndigenous Church in Peru.New York: World Dominion Press. 1946 Indigenous Church Principles in Theory and in Practice. New York:

Fleming H. Revell. 1946 The Gospel in the High Andes. London: EUSA.

Material Written About Ritchie Kessler, John B.A. A Study oftheOlderProtestant Missions andChurches in

Peruand Chile. Goes, Holland: Oosterbaan and Le Cointre, 1967. McIntosh, G. Stewart. Genesis de la Iglesia Euangelica en el Peru. Lima:

Pusel, 1982. __ . The Lifeand Timesof John Ritchie, Scotland and Peru, 1878-1952.

Tayport: Mac Research, 1988.

30

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Book Reviews

The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano ill Sixteenth-Century Japan.

ByJ. F. Moran. London: Routledge, 1993. Pp. 238. $69.95.

J. F. Moran, head of the Department of Japanese Studies at the University of Stirling, Scotland, has written the first­ever study in English of Alessandro Valignano, father visitor of the Society of Jesus in the East. Valignano planned and supervised the Jesuit Mission in Japan, with a brief interval, from 1573 until his death in 1606; he was also responsible for the policy of Jesuit mission in China so brilliantly developed by Matteo Ricci. It is the Japanese half of this extraordinary man's career with which the author deals in this well-constructed and readable study.

Valignano, an Italian aristocrat, con­verted from a far-from-holy life to a state of faith that led him to enter the Society of Jesus in 1566. Only seven years later, the minimum legal time permitted by the con-

Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ.

ByGustavo Gutierrez. Maryknoll, N.Y.:Orbis Books, 1993. Pp. xxii, 682. $29.95.

This work was a monumental task for Gustavo Gutierrez, a principal figure in contemporary Latin American theology. He spent much of the 1972-92 period in­volved in theological reflection on the writings and the work of Bartolome de Las Casas. The result is a salient examina­tion of a major missionary writer, one of the first of the modern period.

In large part Gutierrez was able to carry out his effort because of historical advances made by scholars such as Lewis Hanke, Helen Rand Parish, and Isacio Perez Fernandez. Nonetheless Gutierrez had to painfully trace the evolution of Las Casas's thought. Las Casas emerges as an original missiologist, not a derivative thinker. His accomplishments includeboth framing questions about mission work and its relations to justice issues and es­tablishing a theological basis for an en­counter with people of distinct cultures. In calling attention to unjust social and economic structures, Las Casas acted as a pivotal figure. Missionaries had tended to take these structures for granted, devot­

stitution of the society, he became part of the elite of the society, a professed priest of the fourth vow. Even more extraordi­nary, he was, a few months later, ap­pointed Visitor to the East. This meant that he had full authority over all the Jesuits from Goa to Japan; given the three years needed to write to Rome and receive a reply, clearly he was entrusted with enormous authority.

As Moran so succinctly sums up his achievement, "It was the Father Visitor, more than anyone else, who taught the missionaries that becoming a follower of Christ does not mean becoming a Euro­pean or ceasing to be Japanese." This was his great insight, and this study shows how he attempted consistently, though not always successfully, to carry it out. How Valignano, supported by a group of

ing themselves to individualistic moral dilemmas.

As a theological starting point, Las Casas devoted great energy to describing the social and political realities of the New World. He followed this with scriptural reflection on the situation. Fromboth steps he derived a pastoral policy. He thus an­ticipated a Latin American theology of description, reflection, and praxis.

The magnitude of the book and the issues that Las Casas and Gutierrez take up make difficult reading. But as Justo Gonzalez once remarked about Las Casas and other early Dominican missionaries: "These 'voices of compassion' spoke as they did because they heard a different Voice." Gutierrez shows how others may hear as Las Casas heard.

-Edward L. Cleary, a.p.

Edward L. Cleary, a.p., isProfessor ofLatinAmeri­canStudies, Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island. He served as a missionary and teacher for sevenyears in Bolivia.

32

other Italian Jesuits, reached this spiritual and intellectual freedom from the Eurocentrism that dogged Catholic mis­sions at the time and from which Catholic and Protestant missions have only begun to escape in the second half of the twenti­eth century, Moran does not attempt to explain; after all, he is a historian of Japan. It is good, however, that he has produced this well-crafted and thoroughly re­searched book, which makes knowledge of that initiative available to the world of English-language mission studies, which has hitherto hardly been aware of it.

-Andrew C. Ross

AndrewC. Rossis Senior Lecturer in theHistoryof Missions at theUniversityofEdinburgh, Scotland.

The Great Commission: Biblical Models for Evangelism.

ByMortimerAriasandAlan Johnson. Nash­ville: AbingdonPress, 1992. Paperback $12.95.

Without sounding negativist, the authors show how a parochial understanding of the scope of the Great Commission has led, in the past, to impoverished and un­imaginative presentations of the Gospel. To correct this situation, the authors ex­plore the Great Commission, by way of painstaking exegesis, in each of the four Gospels.

Even though presented differently, each of the Gospels, the authors assert, is about the Great Commission on every page. Thus to preach the Gospel and to obey the Great Commission biblically will involve diligent redactional study and painstaking exegesis.

The authors insist that such a disci­plined approach is crucial for full obedi­ence to the Great Commission and the proper preaching of the Gospel. Accord­ing to the study, the Gospel cannot be said to have been preached unless its presenta­tion goes beyond mere proclamation to include careful teaching that is both theo­logical and ethical, as well as a practical demonstration of the life and message of

INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

the kingdom in the community of faith as bearers of the evangel.

This is a very timely book. Carefully written, it requires concentrated study to get the full wealth of insight it has to offer. It is not a book for those who are in a hurry to "spread" the Gospel or "Gospelize" the nations. It is an unusual study: An at­tempt at a systematic study of the Great Commission from the four Gospels to understand its full meaning and so preach its full message. In these days such a seri­ous-minded work comes as a vital force and challenge.

-Cyril C. Okorocha

Cyril C. Okorocha is Director for Mission and Evangelism, and Officer for the Decade of Evange­lism, in the Anglican Communion, London, En­gland.

A Global Ethic: The Declaration of the Parliament of the World's Religions.

Editedby Hans Kung and Karl-Josef Kuschel. New York: Continuum, 1993. Pp.124. Paper­back $9.95.

One of the most significant results of the Second Parliament of the World's Reli­gions held in Chicago August 28-Septem­ber 4, 1993, was the "Declaration Toward a Global Ethic" originally drafted by Hans Kung, then revised, and finally endorsed by the whole parliament. The revised ver­sion of the declaration forms the core of this book, and it represents a milestone in interreligious dialogue and cooperation. The book, however, contains much more than the declaration. Kiing's account of his work and the somewhat cumbersome process followed in revising and finaliz­ing it, together with Kuschel's succinct history of the 1893 and 1993 parliaments, provides readers with a crucial document ideal for intra- and interfaith discussions.

The declaration isnot a political, philo­sophical, or religious proclamation, nor is it a statement on human rights. It is simply a concise affirmation of a common core of religious beliefs that apply to the current global crisis. It is presented, however, as an initial, not a final, statement on a global ethic.

There are, of course, underlying as­sumptions: the belief in the intrinsic unity of the human family; that a different (i.e., better) global order must arise out of a different (and better) global ethic; that a different global order will not come sim­ply from "laws, prescriptions, and con­ventions alone" (p. 20); and that "an ethic already exists within religious teachings which can counter the global distress" (p.

January 1995

Fifteen Outstanding Books of 1994 for Mission Studies The editors of the INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH have selected the following books for special recognition of their contribution to mission studies in 1994. We have limited our selection to books in English, since it would be impossible to consider fairly the books in many other languages that are not readily available to us. We commend the authors, editors, and publishers represented here for their contribution to the advancement of scholarship in studies of Christian mission and world Christianity.

Anderson, Gerald H., Robert T. Coote, Norman A. Horner, and James M. Phillips, eds. Mission Legacies: Biographical Studies of Leaders of the Modem Missionary Movement. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. $34.95.

Burrows,William R., ed. Redemption and Dialogue: Reading Redemptoris Missio and Dialogue and Proclamation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Paperback $19.95.

Conn, HarvieM. The American City and the Evangelical Church: A Historical Overview. GrandRapids,Mich.: Baker Book House. Paperback $15.99.

Cook, Guillermo, ed. The New Face of the Church in Latin America: Between Tradition and Change. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Paperback $19.95.

Cox, Harvie. Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley PublishingCo. $24.

Ernst, Manfred. Winds of Change: Rapidly Growing Religious Groups in the Pacific Islands. Suva, Fiji: Pacific Conference of Churches. Paperback $15.

Hiebert, Paul G. Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues. GrandRapids,Mich.: Baker Book House. Paperback $16.99.

Newbigin, Lesslie. A Word in Season: Perspectives on Christian World Missions. Grand Rapids,Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., and Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Paperback $14.99.

Renault, Francois. Cardinal Lavigerie: Churchman, Prophet and Missionary. London and Atlantic Highlands, N.].:Athlone Press. £32/$60.

Ross,Andrew C. A Vision Betrayed: The Jesuits in Japan and China, 1542-1742. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, and Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press. $34.95/£29.50.

Scherer, James A., and Stephen B. Bevans, eds. New Directions in Mission and Evangelization 2: Theological Foundations. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books. Paperback $18.95.

Shank, David A., and abridged by Jocelyn Murray. Prophet Harris, The "Black Elijah" of West Africa. Leiden: Brill.$120.

Thorogood, Bernard, ed. Gales of Change: Responding to a Shifting Missionary Context. The Story of the London Missionary Society, 1945-1977. Geneva: WCC Publications. Paperback Sfr 27.50/$17.90/£11.90.

Van Engen, Charles, and Jude Tiersma, eds. God So Loves the City: Seeking a Theology for Urban Mission. Monrovia, Calif.: MARC/World Vision. Paperback $21.95.

Yates, Timothy. Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. £35/$59.95.

33

18). The specifics of this already-existing ethic are spelled out in the declaration, but, it is admitted, they will effect little withouta profound religious"conversion" (p. 22). "Earth cannot be changed for the better unless the consciousness of indi­viduals is changed" (p. 36). The signers of the declaration therefore pledged them­selves to work not merely for a change in the social order but for "a conversion of the heart" (p. 22).

A number of evangelicals have criti­cized the declaration for not mentioning

God. "God" as a title or designation is not included, and Kung's explanation for not including it is both reasonable and dis­cerning (see pp. 60-65). But the assertion that transcendent reality-which most religious people call "God" or some other name-is not mentioned is simply inaccu­rate. Is "Ultimate Reality," on which, as the declaration affirms, "webase our lives" (p. 19), not a term for God? It is unfortu­nate when detractors who either were not present at the parliament or did not read carefully this central document dismiss it,

THE PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS

Research Advancement Grants for Projects in Mission Studies and World Christianity

The Religion Program of The Pew Charitable Trusts invites proposals for large-scale projects that will enhance team research and publication in studies of Christian Mission and non-Western Christianity. Grants for two- to three-year collaborative projects with costs ranging from $50,000-$100,000 (U.S.) per year will be nlade on a competitive basis for work that will significantly advance understanding of cross-cultural mission or the development of Christianity in the non­Western world. Projects should be directed by one or more established scholars, have access to appropriate research facilities, involve scholars from non-Western cultures and contribute to the intellectual and cross-cultural vitality of the world Christian movement. Projects that are interna­tional and interdisciplinary and that elicit signifi­cant contributions from the Two-Thirds World are particularly welcome. Two or three grants will be awarded at the end of 1995, subject to the quality of proposals received and the availability of funds.

Send letters of inquiry (three pages maximum) outlining the main purpose, components and cost of the intended project by May 15, 1995 to:

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34

for both the "DeclarationToward a Global Ethic" and theseaccompanyingcommen­taries deserve the widest possible reading and reflection.

-Alan Neely

AlanNeely,aformermissionary toColombia, is the Henry Winters Luce Professor of Ecumenics and Mission,Princeton Theological Seminary.

Patching God's Garment: Environment and Mission in the Twenty-First Century.

By W. Dayton Roberts. Monrovia, Calif.: MARC/World Vision, 1994. Pp. 168. Paper­back $13.95.

W. Dayton Roberts, a longtime American evangelical missionary in Central and South America, is pained by "the indiffer­ence of ... Christian brothers and sisters ... to the despoiling and the devastation of our environment" (p. 1). He attributes this indifference to inadequate knowledge of environmental indicators, a partial read­ing of the Scriptures, and an inappropri­ate metaphor for the creation.

The author maintains that a partial reading of the Scriptures has led Chris­tians to perceive a "false dichotomy" (p. 26); they view themselves as apart from nature rather than as a part of nature. He writes, "We have not heard what God has said, neither have we understood our own intrinsic relationship to the rest of cre­ation" (pp. 33-34).

To help Christians change their think­ing about and relationship to the environ­merit, Roberts offers a new metaphor, the creationas God's garment. He urges Chris­tians to devote themselves to patching God's garment.

The book contains responses from five Christian scholars, educators, and environmental activists who share Roberts's belief in the need for greater Christian environmental sensitivity and understanding. The responses focus upon specific changes that replenishing the earth, or patching the garment, will re­quire, such as forbearance, a new eco­nomic system, political activism, struggle for justice, and the development of new Christian educational curricula for semi­narians and Sunday school students.

Most of what Roberts writes is per­suasive. However, Native Americans and historians would likely question Roberts's perception that after the arrival of Euro­peans in North America, pioneers "could hunt, trap and farm without bothering anyone or being bothered by anyone" (p. 64). Nor is it entirely correct that at the time of settlement, "land was theirs for the

INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH

taking" (p. 64). Unresolved land disputes between Native Americans and the de­scendants of European settlers suggest that settlement was more complex and divisive than Roberts describes it.

Another difficulty is reconciling Roberts's insistence that "the Christian ethic is the world's only hope of averting environmental disaster" (p. 18, emphasis added) with his statement that "Chris­tianity is not the only religion to recognize human stewardship of the created world . . . . Islam, Buddhism and, of course, the Jewish faith make similar affirmations" (p.25).

These reservations aside, Patching God's Garment is a significant contribution to the essential task of revisioning the relationship of Christians to the environ­ment.

-Brooks A. Anderson

Brooks A. Andersonholds an M.S. degree in rural sociologyfromtheUniversityofWisconsin atMadi­son. Hehasservedasavolunteeragricultural worker onfarms in southern and central India and at the Presbyterian Church's HighDesert Research Farm in Abiquiu,New Mexico.

Mission in African Christianity: Critical Essays in Missiology.

Edited by A. Nasimiyu-Wasike and D. W. Waruta. Nairobi, Kenya: UzimaPress, 1993. Pp. vii, 184. Paperback $12.

This volume is the fourth in the African Christianity Series, which is sponsored by the Eastern Africa Ecumenical Theologi­cal Symposium. Meeting annually since 1989, the symposium selects a theological theme and addresses it from the African worldview and African philosophical pre­suppositions.

Eight pieces are presented in this work. The authors are Africans, based in Kenya and Tanzania-three women (Getui, Kinoti, Nasimiyu-Wasike) and five men (Kiogora, Magesa, Mugambi, Mwikamba, Waruta).

A nine-page introduction presents an overview of mission as well as a synopsis of each chapter. This well-written piece categorizes the individual contributions into two sections: "inculturational and innovational mission" and "liberative and prophetic mission." The volume concludes with several pages of bibliography and a useful index.

In part 1 Mwikamba and Getui deal with environmental concerns as aspects of the church's mission. Kiogora centers his reflection on the African search for wholeness or totality of existence. Mugambi explores how the church in Af­rica can effectively minister to rapidly

changing African societies. Kinoti's pre­sentation studies the impact of the New Age movement on Kenyan youth.

Part 2 includes the three best essays of the volume. Waruta examines mission­ary education and its effects on Africans. Magesa urges the church to assume its prophetic and liberative role and help pre­vent the marginalization of Africa in the "new world order." Nasimiyu-Wasike is concerned with the church's prophetic mission in the context of the conscious­ness of African women.

Several items surprised and disap­pointed this reviewer. Texts could have used the careful hand of an alert editor. Mostly Western (few African) sources are quoted as documentation. The essays are only tangentially focused on mission; it is a misnomer to subtitle these pieces "criti­cal essays in missiology."

Credit must be given to the Eastern Africa Ecumenical Theological Sympo­sium for its efforts in providing relevant inculturated theological literature from the African perspective. Hopefully, fu-

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VVe a re see king a Pr o fessor of Evan geli sm , rank ope n, co mfort­able and conversa nt with the VVes­le yan tr ad it io'n . Specia liza t io ns could be urban evange lism, cross ­cultura l minist ry, and the develop­ment of new co ngrega tio ns. Th e candidate needs to be committed to the classical Christian trad ition of evangelism and mission. The candi­date also must affirm and confor m to th e academ ic sta ndar ds of a major research University as well as being committed to the Chr istian Minist ry. Earne d doct orat e required . Boston University is an e qua l op po r tun ity/affi r ma t ive actio n employer. Please se nd full dossier to Dean Robert C. Neville, Boston University Schoo l of Th eol ­ogy, 745 Co mmo nwealth Avenue, Bost on , MA 02215. Deadlin e fo r applications: Februa ry 15, 1995.

tur e publications will more adequa tely achieve this praiseworthy goal.

- James H. Kroeger, M.M.

James H. Kroeger, M,M" obtained his doctorate in missiologyfrom the Gregorian University andfor

Mission in Quellentexten: Ge schichte der Deutschen Evangelischen Mission von der Reformation bi s zur Weltmissionskonferenz Edinburgh 1910.

Edited by Werner Raupp. Erlangen: Verlag der Eoang-Luth. Missioll, 1990. Pp. 479. Paperback OM 39.80,

Our un derstan ding of the German role in Pro tes tant missions is greatly enha nced by this collection of doc uments, The edi ­tor, a young Tiibingen-educa ted church historian, has shown extraordinary d ili­gence in ga thering ma teria ls from pub­lished and un published sources in vari ­ous Western lan gu ages- includ ing ser ­mo ns, speeches, lett ers, dia ries, mem oirs, m ission society reports, church or di ­nan ces, books, pamphl ets, and magazine ar ticles-to present a com prehensive pic­tur e of German miss ion theory and action from the Reformati on to the ea rly twenti ­eth century.

The material is arranged in chapters by century, and thematic topics are dealt with in the period groupings. Each top ic contains one or more doc uments (natu­rally, space requires tha t mos t of these be excer pts) followed by a note identifying source and secondary rna terials. Each sec ­tion concl udes wi th a more general bibli ­ography, and a comprehensive bibliogra­phy on the history of missions (includi ng Ca tholic an d Russian Orthodox works) is included at the end of the volume. For the scho lar of missions, the bibliographi cnotes alone make the book worthw hile.

In this revi ewer's op inio n the most valuable sections are the treatment of ea rly mission awareness in Germa ny, missio n­ary effor ts among Jew s, the d ifferences among the mission societies (although the curious Jerusalem bishopric of Samue l Gobat is omi tted) , an d the vie ws of mis­sion theologians. Raupp obv ious ly could not include every important figure, orga ­nizat ion, and endeavor, but the crucial debate between the German and British­American mis sion th ink ers abo u t the "Vo lkskirche" and the "kingdom of God" does deserve more atten tion. Also, some may objec t to the 1910 cutoff date, but he argues this was the poi nt where German missions en tere d the larger ecu menica l stream as full participants. The au thor is worthy of commendation for providing a

36

over two decades was a missionary in Bangladesh andthePhilippines,Presently,he is theAsia-Pacific AreaAssistant on the Maryknoll General Council. His new book on mission themes, entitled Living Mission,hasbeen copublishedbyOrbis (NewYork) and Claretian (Manila).

good introduction to the often-overlooked Ger ma n contribution to the world mis­sion endeavor.

- Richard V. Pierard

Richard V, Pierard is Professorof History at Indi­ana State University and coauthor of Two King­doms: Th e Church and Cu ltur e Throug h the Ages (Moody Press, 1993) , He served at the Free TheologicalAcademy and as a Fulbrigji! professor in Germany and is engaged in studies of German imperialism and Protestant missions,

Bread for the Journey: The Mission of Transformation and the Transformation of Mission.

ByAllthollYf.Gittins.Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1993, Pp, xx , 187. Paperback $18.95.

This book on the need ed transform ati on of mission is based on the au thor's conv ic­tion tha t "for all Christians Eucha rist is critica l," provoking eve rywhere "a crisis of sor ts" (p . 15). This conviction is backed up by the ecumenical Baptism, Eucharist and Minist ry d ocument, which states that "the Eucharist, . . transforms Christians int o the image of Chr ist. " The Eucharist has been doing this in different ages using the sa me material (brea d and wine) and the same rite. It is the way in which Jesus ma de "the dis tant God accessible ill ordi­Ilary circumstances" (p . 32), transforming society "from unthin" (p . 34) (au tho r'S emphases) .

The "mission" ques tion is whether th is ma king God accessi ble is globa lly possible by "playing and praying" wi th bread and wine (p . 96), given the fact that bread and wine are not indigenou s to many cuitur es.What abouta cuitu re where

I NTERN ATIO N AL B ULLETIN O F M ISSION ARY R ESEARCH

p eople, s uc h as the Tr ob ri ands in Mela nesia, ea t turning their ba cks to each other so as not to be seen ea ting, and where socia liza tion is done in a different way? These are qu estion s only an anthro­pological theologian like Gittins is able and qualified to ask.

He does th is referr ing to Eucharis tic developments in med ieval Europe and to his own experiences among the Mende in Africa and with Genesis Hou se, a pro­gram for the homeless in Chicago. Gittins does not give any unequivocal answer to the questions raised . The answe rs wo uld be many, and they wo uld be "polycen­tr ic." One th ing, however, is made very clea r in this engaging book: human ity's hunger for God has to be stilled, and no Eucharis tic famine cause d by ecclesiasti­cal intran sigence should be tolerated .

-J. G. Donders, M.Afr.

J. G. Danders, M.Afr., is Chair of Mission and Croes-culturat Studiesat theWashingtonTheologi­cal Union, Washington, D.C. During 1969-84 he wasaprofessorin theDepartmentofPhilosophyand Religious Studiesat theStateUniversity ofNairobi, Kenya.

Answering Islam: The Crescent in Light of the Cross.

ByNorman L.GeislerandAbdul Saleeb.Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1993. Pp. 336. Paperback$17.95.

This is a wo rk of d isputation . In the tradi ­tion of John of Dam ascus, G. C. Pfander, and Samuel Zw emer, it defend s Christian affirma tions abou t the Holy Trini ty and the saving work of Chr ist against Islamic deman ds for submission to God as kn own throu gh Muhammad . Geisler, dean of Southe rn EvangelicalSeminary, makes use of Aquinas and Augus tine on causatio n and being to attack Islam ic notion s of the unity and inscru tability of God- no tions that he believes resemble those of Plotinus. The coau tho r seems to bring a convert's sternnes s towa rd his former religion; his pseudonym Abdul Saleeb may be trans­lated "Servant of the Cross ."

Best ser ved by this work will be the Ch rist ian who need s theological reason s to persevere in p resenting to Muslims the grounds of his or her hop e. No t so we ll serve d will be the Christ ian see king an ini tial apprecia tion of Islam. The biogra­phy of the prophet Muha mmad is ske pti­cal, description of the Islamic communi ty scant, and sympa thetic accoun t of Mu s­lim prayer nil.

Despi te di stracting minor errors-the poet Oma r Khayyam was not Arab but

Persi an (p . 145)-the sum maries of main­strea m Sunni theology and of Christian Trinitar ian faith are cogent. Yet I doubt whe the r any Mus lim enq uire r who has not alrea dy rejected his heritage will find help here. Islam ic teach ing is interrogated with Christian qu estions- about God, cre­ation,sin, and salva tion-and found wa nt­ing. Even part 1, aimi ng to set forth fairly wha t a composite Islamic or thodoxy af­firms abo ut God , hu manity, the Quran, and salvation, cannot resis t anticipa ting

the task of part 2 by po inting out, in a superior tone, contrad ictions and lim ita­tions. Unfortuna tely, compelling syllo­gisms rank among the least of the agents by which Christian faith arises.

- Richard J. Jones

RichardJones is Associate Professorof Missionand World Religions, Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia. He served asa missionaryof the Episcopal Church in Ecuador, 1972- 75.

THIS CO LLECT ION O F SEVENTEEN previously unpub­lished essays, sermons, and addresses by Lesslie N ewbigin, on e of the premier missiologists of the twenti eth century, puts forth his developing view of the agenda for Christian m ission from 1960 to 1992. Considered "the quintessence ofNewbigin's thought" by edi tor Eleanor Jackson , these papers record the dy­namics of Newbigin's ideas about mission as he con­fronted new issues in the church and society.

Spanning three significant decades in the histo ry of church outreach, A Word in Season offers an impor­tant perspective on the course ofChristian mission and provides valuable instruction to tho se who struggle with the missionary task today.

ISBN 0-8028-0730-5 220 pages Paper, $14.99

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Janu ary 1995 37

CHARISMATIC CHRISTIANITY AS A GLOBAL CULTURE

Edited by Karla Poewe

In this important work, leading scholars in the field s of religion and anthropology d iscuss the thou gh t patt ern s and religious tradition s of charism atics through out the wo rld. By examining believers throughout the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe, the contributors pro vide a compre­hensive overview of a cha risma tic tap estry that appears to transcend national, ethnic, racial, and class boundaries .

"A fascinating look at a worldwide ph enomenon that has been all too easy to compartmentalize or ign ore. The shift from a North American to a global genealogy for cha rismatic religion is esp ecially revealing, as are the connections it makes between Christian movements, non-Christian one s, and everything that lies between ."-David Stoll , author of Is Latin America Turning Protestant? 290 pages, Cloth, ISBN 0-87249-996-0, $34.95

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A Church for All Peoples: Missionary Issues in a World Church.

Edited by Eugene LaVerdiere. Collegeville. Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1993. Pp. 104. Pa­perback $7.95.

Symposia occas ionally produce nourish ­ing read ing. This one fails to satisfy the missiological appetit e, notwithstanding the insights and the fresh persp ectiv es brought by au thors not primarily associ ­a ted with missiology.

The four cha pters, each followed by a "respo nse " that is too often a restatement, strong ly endo rse the Ll.S. Bishops' 1988 pastoral lett er, "To the Ends of the Earth," and the 1990 papal ency clical Redemptoris Missio. The authors' credenti als are im­peccable-theologians Dulles and DiNoia, and Bishops Stafford and George- and the endpieces by the editor and by Joan Gormley are competent. But the mixture rema ins un satisfactor y in several respects.

Dulles, lucid if jaundiced, addresses the "prolifera tion of new op inion s about the kin gd om of God" (p . 13), overlooking the subtleties ofRichard McBrien and some liberation theologian s. Stafford's enco ­mium to Pop e John Paul II , an apo loge tic argument for Roman Catholic evange li­za tion, includes an extrao rdi na ry list of imperatives glosse d as "pastoral implica­tions." In respon se, DiNoia endorses the value of cultural integrity witho ut clarify­ing how extraecclesiam nullasalus might be understood in the context of pre-Chris­tian or non-Christ ian peopl es.

In the chap ter entitled "The Churc h and Cultures," Bishop George bravely tries to engage the ecclesiological issues from the persp ective of anthropological prin ­cipl es, thou gh Bishop Stafford's resp onse unfortunately runs off at a tangent. DiNoia concludes the body of the text with a return to his theme of the speci ficity of cultures and the integrity of differences.

Two omissions mar this book: there is virtually no acknowledgment that the church ha s any thing to learn from any­one, much less that there are social and ecclesisatica l sins in need of repentance; and there is a ret rograde tendency to iden­tify mission geographically, as in " the mis­sions ." This latter was on e of the shor t­comings of the pastoral letter that this volume celebrates . Not sur p risingly, it rei tera tes some issues that readers less than in total accord wi th the U'.S. Bishop s or with Pop e John Paul II will find unhelp­ful.

- Anthony J. Gittins , C.S.Sp .

English by birth, and currently resident in the United States, Anthony Gittins has taught theo­logical anthropology at Chicago's Catholic Theo­logical Union for the past ten years. Preoiousiv he taught at the Missionary Institute in London, and for several years in Sierra Leone, West Africa.

IN TERNATION AL B ULL E1I N O F MISSIO N ARY R ESEARC H

Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America.

EditedbyVirginiaGarrard-BurnettandDavid Stoll. Philadelphia: TempleUniv. Press, 1993. Pp. 234. $39.95; paperback $18.95.

The tw elve con tributors to th is important study, represe n ting a variety of socia l sci­ence d iscipl ines, address the way in which Latin American evangelicals are resp ond­ing to the socia l crisis and how these re­spo nses affec t the societies aro und them . They address their qu est ions primar ily to laym en and laywomen and not to the lead ersh ip , whose perceptions ma y be skewed .The answers strong ly suggest that we need to rethink the stereo types regard­ing Latin Am erican Protestantism .

This book strongly bolsters the grow­ing awareness among students of religion that the Protestant faith -in particular, Pentecostali sm-is making ava ilable to the poor of Latin Am erica a so urce of empo we rment and a context of gro wth in spi ritual va lues and so cia l s tre ng th . Women , and their men, find a degree of liberation that has not been achieved by Western feminism, in the con text of their homes, which pr epares them to face the rigors of public life. Women have a better oppo rtuni ty to achieve effective lead er­ship in Pen tecos tal churches than in main­line denominations. The evidence sug­ges ts that Pentecosta lchurches d raw their members from a lower st rata of socie ty than eve n the Catho lic base communities .

While they are more po litically con­serva tive, Pentecostals are not as ham ­pered by religious struc tures as are pro­gressive Catho lics. Thus Pentecostal s can maintain thei r reli giou s id entity even while becoming radical. Pentecos tal poli­tician s in Brazil tend to vote more cons is­tently in favor of labor issues than their Catholic and Pro testant peers. In su m, Pentecostal conservatism may be as mu ch a sur viva l strategy in a hostile env iron­ment as it is ideological and theological. Also for survival reason s, religiou s affili­ation remains fluid among grassroots Latin Americans . Poor urban dwellers in Bo­livia and Mayan wom en in Gua tema la selectively ado ptdifferentbeliefs and pr ac­tices-Christian and nativistic- in surpris­ing ways.

This book sharpens the focu s of Stoll's pr eviou s work, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?ThePoliticsofEvangelicnlGrowth (1990) .

-Guillermo Coo k

GuillermoCook is theauthorofThe Expecta ti on o f th e Poor: Latin A merican Base Ecclesial Com ­munities in Protestant Perspective and is the editor of New Face o f th e Ch urch in La tin A merica: Between Tradition and Change, both by Orbis Books. He is coordinator of BRIDGES (Base Research on Indigenous Deoelopment, Gen­der, and Evangelical Spirituality), Sail Jose, Costa Rica.

January 1995

The,contents appear ing in this publication are indexed by

lislfu\uC~ 1 For further information, please contact:

Dr. Munawar A. Anees, Editor -in-Chief. Periodica Islamica

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MISSIONARY GOLD INTERNATIONAL BULLETIN OF MISSIONARY RESEARCH , 1989-92

257 Contributors · 260Book Reviews »175 Doctoral Dissertations

Here is more gold for every theological library and explor ing scholar of mission studies-with all 16 issues of 1989-1992-bound in red buckram, with vellum finish and embossed in gold lettering. It matches the earlier bound volumes of the Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research, 1977-1980 (sorry, sold out), the International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 1981-1984 (sold out),and 1985-1988(sold out). At your fingertips, in one volume: David Barrett's Annual Statistical Status of Global Mission, the Editors' selection of Fifteen Outstanding Books each year , and the four-year cumulative index.

INTERNATIO ~1l}; BULLETIN OF MISSIONA ~ Y R ESEARCH, 1 989-9~, ,'im~t~d edi­tion. Onlyadt> bound volumes available . Each volume IS individually numbered and signed personally by the editors.

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39

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Israel and Yeshua: A Fes tschrift.

Edited by Torleif Elfivin. Jerusalem: Caspari Centerfor Biblicaland Jewish Studies, 1993. Pp. 167. Paperback $20.

The Caspari Center for Biblicaland Jewish first cha irma n of the Norwegian Churc h Studies in Jerusalem is named for Ca rl Minis try to Israel, which founded the Paul Cas pari. a brilliant scho lar of the Caspa ri Center in 1982. Israel and Yeshua nineteenth cen tury of German-Jewish an­ celeb rates the tenth an niversary of the cestry . Caspa ri, professor of Old Testa­ center. ment atthe Universi ty ofOslo,became the This collection of short essays ough t

. n ers and most promment eaders of the Christian missionary movement from the late 18th century to the present: John R. Mott, Pope Pius XI, Ruth Rouse, William Carey, Francis x. Ford, Roland Allen, Hendrik Kraemer, Stephen Neill, E. Stanley Jones, Joseph Schmidlin, Wilhelm Schmidt, Alan R.Tippett, Max W arren, Helen Barnett Montgomery, Lucy Waterbury Peabody, John Philip, D avid Livingstone, Charles Simeon, and many more. Authors of these bio ­graphical sketches are a veritable "who's who" of church historians, ISBN0-88344-964-1 including D ana Robert, John C. $34.95 Cloth Bennett, Karl Miiller, SVD, Lesslie vailableJanuary '95 Newbigin , A. Christopher Smith, Eric J. Sharpe, and Jean-Paul Wiest. With biographical and bibliographic information available nowhere else, RBISOBOOKS Mission Legacies belongs in every theological library and on the book­Maryknoll, NY shelf of every student ofWorldAt bookstores or direct

G/VISA: ],-800-258-5838 Christianity and mission.

to be rea d by everyone wh o works in the field of Jewish mission or who has an in teres t in the connec tion between Jesus and the Jewish peopl e and the Jewish respon se to him.

Tor leif Elgv in, the editor and one of the in terna tiona l scholars respo nsible for the current publishing of the Dead Sea Scrolls, d irected the Cas pari Center from 1986 to 1993.Half of theessays are au thored by Gen tiles , inclu ding one Pa lesti nian Christian . All have eithe r ministered or studied in Israel. The eight Jewish con­tributors are all citizens of the State of Israel; six of them are Christians .

Ole Christian M. Kvar rne, founding director of the Cas pari Center, provides an excellent int roductory essay, "Evange­lism an d Affirmation." It is an abridgment of a pap er he prese nted in 1989 at the crucial Willowb an k Cons ultation on the Christian Gos pe l and the Jewish People. Int roducin g th e theme "Israe l and Yeshua," he maint ains tha t evangelism and Jewi sh identity are not in contradic­tion .

In this volume the Caspari Center celebra tes its firs t ten years by focusi ng on expressions of Jewish -Christi an experi ­ence an d exp loring issues of signi ficance to Chris tian eva ngeliza tion of the Jew ish peop le. The scope of the essays includes studies from past and p resen t minist ries among the Jews. With the able help of friends and colleag ues, Elgvi n has pro ­duced a valua ble contribu tion to the field of Jewish mission.

- Tuvya Zaretsky

Tuvya Zaretsky is Director of the Jews for Jesus, Southern California District.

Cross-Cultural Conflict: Building Relationships for Effective Ministry.

By Duane Elmer. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993. Pp. 189. Paperback $9.99 .

This muc h-needed and very readable book is a mus t for missionaries, tentmakers, and studen ts living overseas or cross-cu l­turally. It will also benefit pa stors, gues t speakers, and business people in our in ­creasing ly multicu ltural coun try and world .

Elme r, from the faculty of Whea ton College , bring s rich personal experience and a Ph.D. in cross -cultural communica ­tion to his wri ting . Illustra tions are clear, un derstanda ble, and pr actical. He pro ­vides a goo d bibli ography for those int er­ested in fur ther study .

40 INTERNATIO N AL B ULLETIN O f M ISSIO N ARY R ESEARCH

The reader ga ins an understand ing of shame -based cu ltu res, the issue of "los ­ing face," socio-centriccultures versus ego­cen tric typ es, the capa city to tolerat e am­biguities in man y non-Western cu ltures, and the relati on al (vs . work-or ien ted) con ­text of man y societies .

Western cu ltures resolve conflict by win-lose stra teg ies, avoidance , givi ng in , com promise, or so-called ca re fro n ting . Most othe r cultures operate th rough me­d iator s , g ro u p co nsens us, humil it y, storytelling (p rov erb s), inaction , silence, bribes, d iversion, and indefinite th ird par­ties. Westerners' in ter pre ta tions of in teg ­rity must keep in mind that in o ther cu l­tu res "whe n one's remarks ar e mad e with ­ou t de libe ra te a tte mp t to chea t, d efraud , or physically harm, they a re es sen tially ou tside of the hon est y / di shones ty spec­tru m" (p . 124).

The au th or illustrates ma ny of his points from Scripture stori es and main ­tains biblical p rin ciples wi thou t avoi di ng sticky issu es. He calls power and wi nn ing the twin d iseases and suggests tha t we learn to in terpret, probe, support, and underst and instead . He ad vises us to re­member that o ther cu ltures d o not sepa ­rate a person fro m his or her ideas; learn to read betw een the lines an d be sensi tive to innuendo ;maintain a gracious,calm,cour­teous, patient, and listen ing at titu de; and develop close ties w ith at least one na ­tion al frien d who can help in ter p ret and build bridges.

Elme r sta tes, "The God who aut hored d iversit y loves it, embraces those who d isplay it, and honors those who celebra te it " (p . 182). How slow we are to learn.

- Esther Sch ube rt

Esther Schubert, M.D., is an adult MK (China, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan) and has beena short-term missionary (Haiti and Taiwan). She is a psychiatric consultant for mission agencies, has published a book on depression and b ll rl/Ollt in missionaries, does crisis intervention, andhas pub­lished several articles and chapters on the pnfield eoaluation of missionary candidates. She and her husbandlive in New Castle, Indiana.

Kingdom Partnershi ps for Synergy in Mission.

Edited by William D. Taylor; Preface by Michael Griffiths. Pasadena, Calif.: William Carey Library, 1994. Pp. xix, 270. $11.95.

In Kingdom Partnershipsfor Synergy in Mis­sion, Taylor has provid ed an ed ited collec ­tion of the pa pers p resent ed a t the 1992 Miss ions Commission conference of the World Eva ngelical Fellowship in Man ila, con vened to examine orga niza tiona l pa r t­nership . The conference wa s a ttended by

January 1995

ninety five rep resentat ives from th irty five nati on s (p . 1), though on ly three women were presen t (p . vii). The collection of essays is d ivided in to four sections. In the first , so me of the significan t structural foundat ions of partnersh ip ar e exp lo red . In th e second, critical issues cu rren tly af­fecting partner sh ip (pa terna lism, cu ltural differ en ces, expectations, accoun tabi lity, etc.) a re presen ted . In the th ird sec tion the in tern a tionalization of mission agenci es is exp lore d, and the fourth p resen ts se ­lected models of pa r tne rsh ip for conside r ­at ion .

Ov erall , I felt that th ro ughout King­dom Partnerships the obv io us is s tated and rest ated , hash ed and reha shed , w itho u t either the substance or th e det ails neces­sary to move the d iscuss ion forward. Per­haps thi s is sim ply a reflect ion of the ac ­tua l sta tus of pa rtner ship s tod ay in ev an­gelical mission s,bu t I read the book an tici­p ating real mea t and constan tly fou nd myself di sappointed . Yes, cu ltur al differ ­ences pose s ig n ifican t prob le ms and church / mission rela tionships have been so urces o fstruggle, and th e legacy of colo­nial ism is still a ll too inti ma tely inter ­twi ned in orga nizational realities. There is no d ou bt that these need to be d iscu ssed and worked th rough , but perha ps invi t­ing p resenters to focus on a sing le issu e (e.g., trust , acco u ntability) wo u ld have preven ted the repetitive nature of the work. Even the case s tud ies left me frus-

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41

trated, as (except for Keyes) they we re presented without the details necessary for subs tantive scrutiny .

Perhaps the fact that Iwas not pr esent at the conference ma kes it impossible to sense the spirit so ably described by Tay­lor. However, the book is int ended to cap­ture those who were not there to partici­pate in the discussion ; in the end, I found myself uncaptured .

- A. Scott Moreau

A. Scott Moreau is an Assistant Professorof Mis­sions/Intercultural Studies at vvheaton Graduate School.Heservedasamissionaryeducatorin Africa (Swaziland and Kenya)for ten years.

Met Moslems in Gesprek over het Evangelie.

By J. Verkuyl. Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok, 1994. 2d rev.ed. Pp. 162. Paperback OF! 29.50.

True to its title, "In Conversation with Muslims Regard ing the Gospe l," this book is written to foster in-depth d ialogue be­tween Mu slims and Chris tians .Verkuyl is uniquely equip pe d for this task. As pa stor and professor for man y yea rs in Indon esia and later as professor of missiology at the Free University in Ams terda m, he was

he list of suggested readi ngs add f the twenty-eight essays is the

#b~!.b l iograp hy of current viewpoi ....missions that I have seen, and enough to recommend the bo

, and anyone else wh ns regard their glo

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d irectly involved at man y levels in dia­logue w ith Mu slim s.

Two main burden s impe lled Verkuyl to write this book . The first is the concern to clear away the man y p rejudices and misunder st and ings th at sur ro und th e Mu slim -Christian encoun ter. The second in his passion ate concern that the desire for cordial relat ions not supp ress the "truth qu est ion ." No one is serve d, he warns, by "ras h antithe tical judgem ents or by rash sympathe tic judgemen ts" (p. 143). He devotes successive cha pters to differences surro undi ng sacred scriptures, revelation, God, human beings, Chris t, the Trinity, final judgment, and the church / ummah.

The centra l conce rn in d ialogu e, ac­cordi ng to Verkuy l, is to seek an answe r to the "tru th ques tion ." This ques t involves a patient and resp ectful grappling with the core of the bibli cal message and of the message of Islam (p. 142). The key d iffer­ence is that between a relationship of part­nersh ip and friendship of human beings with a gracious God, as embodie d in Jesus Chris t, an d a relat ionsh ip of obedience to an exa lted and abso lu tely sov ereign law ­give r.

Altho ug h Verkuy l explores basic di f­ferences between the two religion s and wa ys of life, for him difference does not mean di stance. He enco ur ages deep per­sonal friendsh ips. Differences need to be discussed lovingly,honestly, and pa tiently in ever dee pe ning contact (p . 105).Yet, for Verkuyl dia logue involves more than a polite excha nge of ideas.Precisely because it involves the qu estion of truth, d ialogu e is not a subs titu te for witness. True dia ­logu e entails wi tness. For Christians th is mean s witness to the central truth ofJes us Chris t.

While he arg ues tirelessly for the in­trinsic role of witness in dialogu e, Verkuy l fights equa lly strong ly for the rights of Mu slim s in Wes tern nation s. He plead s for sta te funds for the building ofmosques (some thing already available in the Neth­erlands ) and eve n for aid for the training of imam s. The vigorous Christian wi tness, for which Verkuyl calls, crea tes roo m for mutual witness (p. 138).

This unique book deserves to be trans­lated in to Eng lish .

- George Vanderv elde

GeorgeVandervelde is ProfessorofSystematicThe­ologyat tilelnstitutejorChristianStudiesinToronto and President of tile North American Academyof EClImenists.

42 INTERN ATION AL B ULLETIN OF M ISSIO NARY R ESEARCH

Conversion to Christianity: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives on a Great Transformation.

Edited by Robert W. Hefner. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993, Pp. x, 326. $45; paperback $15.

This is an invaluable collection of multidisciplinary essays and diverse case studies on the social and individual pro­cesses of Christian conversion. Hefner is associate professor of anthropology at Boston University; early versions of some of the chapters were presented at the con­ference Conversion to World Religions, held at Boston University in 1988. He has deftly edited the rewritten papers and added a useful theoretical introductory chapter on the rationality of conversion that questions Robin Horton's series of essays in Africain the 1970s.

Howard Kee's perceptive chapter "From Jesus Movement to Institutional Church" summarizes his previous obser­vations in his Understanding theNew Testa­ment and leads into the case studies.

Apart from Kee and Terence Ranger, Oxford historian of Africa and African Christianity, most of the contributors are anthropologists teaching in North Ameri­can universities. Surprisingly, only one is non-Western. A chapter from a mission theologian would also have provided a stimulating missing dimension.

The case studies, using the insights of the disciplines of history, psychology, anthropology, politics, economics, and ethics, cover southernAfrica (Ranger), Java (Hefner), Mexico (Merrill), Amazonia (Pol­lock), Papua New Guinea (Barker), Aus­tralia (Yengoyan), Thailand (Keyes), and China (Jordan). An afterword by Peter Wood attempts to draw together the vari­ous themes, and each chapter has excel­lent bibliographic references.

The chapter that sparkled for me was by Ranger. He challenges Ikenga-Metuh's thesis concerning the essential contrast between Christianity and African religion that the former was macrocosmic in its focus and the latter microcosmic. Ranger shows that both of them were macrocosmic and microcosmic.

This fine, coherent symposium, though lacking a theological critique in the case studies, should be read alongside Lewis Rambo's Understanding Religious Conversion (Yale, 1993).

-Graham Kings

Graham Kings,a contributingeditor, is theHenry Martyn Lecturer in Missiology in the Cambridge Theological Federation, England, and Director of theHenryMartyn Hall. From 1985 to1991 hewas vice-principal of St. Andrew's Institute, Kabare, Kenya.

Bridging the Gap: Evangelism, Development, and Shalom.

ByBruce Bradshaw. Monrovia, Calif.: MARC (World Vision International), 1993. Pp. vii, 183.Paperback $6.95.

Books that seek to break down the di­chotomy between evangelism and social concern are always welcome. The divi­sion between word and deed has pro­foundly weakened the church's witness to the reign of God in Christ. Bruce Bradshaw, director of holistic develop­

ment research for MARC, brings to this book his experience as a teacher and de­velopment practitioner in East Africa. Bradshaw believes that underlying the tension between evangelism and devel­opment is the spiritual/physical split in the modernworldview. He seeks to bridge

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January 1995 43

this separation with a holistic worldview from Scripture that provides a larger con­text in which to resolve the conflict be­tween evangelism and development. More specifically, Bradshaw advances the idea of shalom-God's redeeming and healing work of the whole creation-as a resolu­tion to the separation. He works out this insight concretely in the areas of manage­ment, education, environmental issues, economics, healing, and the powers.

However, this tremendously fruitful insight-redemption restores the whole

creation-is partially obscured by several factors . Bradshaw's formulations often continue to be dependent on the very dualism from which he is seeking to break free . Furthermore, there is inadequate anal ysis and articulation at crucial points in his argument. For example, there is little discussion of a biblical understand­ing of shalom, even though this is the central category that bridges the gap be­tween evangelism and development.

For this reviewer the best part of the book is the numerous illustrations taken

1995-1996 Doane Missionary Scholarships

Overseas Ministries Study Center New Haven, Connecticut

The Overseas Ministries Study Center announces the Doane Missionary Scholarships for 1995-1996. Two $3000scholarships will be awarded to mission­aries who apply for residence for eight months to a year and wish to earn the OMSC Certificate in Mission Studies. The Certificate is awarded to those who participate in fourteen or more of the weekly seminars at OMSC and who write a paperreflectingon their missionaryexperiencein light of the studies undertaken atOMSC.

Applicants must meet the following requirements: • Completion of at least one term in overseasassignment • Endorsement by their mission agency • Commitment to return overseas for another term of service • Residence at OMSC for eight months to a year • EnrolIment in OMSC Certificate in Mission Studies program

The OMSC Certificateprogramallowsample time forregular deputation and family responsibilities. Familieswithchildren arewelcome. OMSC's DoaneHall offers fully furnished apartments ranging up to three bedrooms in size. Ap­plicationsshould besubmitted as far in advanceas possible. Asan alternative to application for the 1995-1996academicyear,applicants mayapplyfor the 1996 calendaryear,so long as the Certificateprogramrequirement forparticipation in at least fourteen seminars is met. Scholarship award will be distributed on a monthly basis after recipient is in residence. Application deadline: February 1, 1995. Forapplication and further information, contact:

Gerald H. Anderson, Director OverseasMinistries Study Center

490 Prospect Street New Haven, Connecticut 06511

Tel: (203) 624-6672 Fax: (203) 865-2857

44

from his own experience in Africa of the problems encountered when one is con­cerned for holistic mission. As we con­tinue to struggle with these issues, it is hoped that Bradshaw's call to hold fast to the biblical insight that redemption is re­storative in nature and comprehensive in scope will be the context for such reflec­tive action.

-Michael Goheen

Michael Goheen is Assistant Professor of Missions andWorldview Studies,RedeemerCollege, Ancaster, Ontario.

Towards a Trinitarian Theology of Religions: A Study of Paul Tilhch's Thought.

By Pan-Chiu Lai. Kampen, the Netherlands: KokPharos Publishing House, 1994. Pp. 181 . Paperback. No price given.

Pan-Chiu Lai, lecturer at Middlesex Uni­versity and minister of the Rhenish Church, London, makes a valuable contri­bution to Tillich studies and to the theory of interreligious dialogue.

Criticizing Christocentric theologies of religion as exclusivistic and theocentric philosophies of religion as relativistic, Lai proposes that Tillich's theology, viewed developmentally and in its Trinitarian fullness, offers the foundation for a more adequate alternative. Emphasizing the inadequacies of Tillich's Christocentric Logos Christology, method of correlation, and theology of the cross as developed in the first two volumes of Systematic Theol­ogy, he holds that the pneumatocentric approach of volume 3, if consistently fol­lowed, suggests a Trinitarian theology of religions that allows genuine interreligious dialogue to take place, involving substan­tive contributions by all participants, the recognition of particular claims of each participant, and serious mutual criticism between participants. The Trinity, charac­terized by Lai as the "hidden foundation of [Tillich's1theological system as a whole" (p. 148), would be explicated in such a way that "Christ is the centre of the Chris­tian doctrine of the Trinity in an epistemo­logical sense, whereas the Spirit is in an ontological sense the starting point or cen­tre of the Trinitarian principle" (p. 153).

This book leads the reader into fur­ther reflection. Two questions might be mentioned here. First, even if one recog­nizes the chronological development in Tillich's thought, might Logos and Spirit Christologies be more organically related than Lai's epistemological-ontological dis­tinction indicates? For Tillich, the knower participates in the known; the epistemo-

INT ERNATIO NAL B ULLETIN OF MISSIO NARY R ESEARCH

logical situation is an ontological reality. Second,by following Lai' sproposal, might not a reading of Tillich's theology that is even more intimately grounded in the classical Trinitarian tradition emerge? Specifically, Tillich's organic model of the Trinity seems both to reflect the classic Trinitarian understanding of the mutual interpenetration and common activity of the three divine personae and to meet Lai's concern to protect against subordi­nation of the Spirit. This is a book that probes deeply and raises intriguing ques­tions.

-Ronald B. MacLennan

Ronald B. MacLennan is Assistant Professor of Religion and Chair of the Religion-Philosophy De­partmentat Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas. His doctoral dissertation at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago was "The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Theology of PaulTillich. II

Religion in Postwar China: A Critical Analysis and Annotated Bibliography.

Compiled by David C. Yu. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Pp.xviii,365. $79.95.

This compendium of 1,005selected works on Chinese religion published between 1945 and 1990 is far more than a list of

Dissertation Notices

titles and authors. Professor Yu, author of Guide toChinese Religion (G. K. Hall, 1985), has sifted through mountains of litera­ture, both in China and the West, and has presented in this volume a critical analy­sis of each selected work, overall a stupen­dous task. Although brief, these critiques provide an invaluable aid to writers and researchers.

The book is divided into three parts: a narrative overview by Yu of research on religion in postwar China; works on Chi­nese religion by postwar Chinese schol­ars; and works on religion in postwar China by Western scholars.

Parts 2 and 3 consist of 1,005 brief, analytic reviews of books and articles or­ganized by categories, including works on theory of religion, religious policy, Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, Islam and ethnic reli­gions, Christianity, superstitions, sects, myths and legends, crypto-religion, ritual, syncretic religion, religion and state, reli­gion and science / arts /literature, religious texts, folk religion, and religious rebel­lions.

This is an essential reference work for all students of religion in contemporary China.

-Donald MacInnis

Donald MacInnis is the author of Religion in China Today: Policy and Practice (Orbis Books, 1989)andcotranslator of Religion Under Social­ism in China (M. E. Sharpe, 1991).

CENTRO

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The Kairos Center for

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For further information write to:

Guider, Margaret E. "The Church of Liberation and the Problem of Prostitution: A Brazilian Case Study." Th.D. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Divinity School, 1992.

Haidostian, PaulAra. "Armenian Evangelical Youth and Political Identity: The Socio-Political Aloofness of the Armenian Evangelical Church in the Near East in View of Hovhannes Aharonian's Agenda for an Involved Ecclesiology and Erik H. Erikson's Understanding of the Continuity between Individual and Community." Ph.D. Princeton, N./.: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1994.

Parks, Stuart Kent. IIA Theological Rationale for a Worldwide Mission: A Critical Evaluation of Jesus' Use of Old

January 1995

Testament Themes Concerning the Nations." Ph.D. Fort Worth, Texas: Southwestern BaptistTheological Seminary, 1993.

Thorpe, Douglas Mark. "Boarding the Self: Individual and Family Consequences of Mission Boarding School Experience." Ph.D. Princeton, N./.: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1994.

Tink, Fletcher Leroy "From Order to Harmony: Toward a New Hermeneutic for Urban Mission." Ph.D. Pasadena, Calif.: Fuller Theological Seminary, 1994.

Yim, Sung Bihn. "The Relevance of H.R. Niebuhr's 'Ethics of Response' for the Korean Church: A Critical Inquiry into Niebuhr's Methodology." Ph.D. Princeton, N./.: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1994.

45

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Evangelizing the Culture of Modernity.

By HerveCarrier,s.; Maryknoll, N.r ..Orbis Books, 1993. Pp. vii, 168. Paperback $18.95.

French Canadia n Jesuit Herve Carri er, professor of socio logy of culture and reli ­gion at the Gregorian University and sec­retar y of the Pontifical Co unci l for Cul­ture in Rome, has wri tten an impo rtant book on a theme that has cap ture d the attention of many miss iologists in recent yea rs. Carrier arg ues that we mu st be abo ut the business of evangelizing cul­tur es, not just individ ua ls, and that mo­dernity is itself a culture that is spr eading its influence across the globe. To evange­lize the culture of mod ernity, he says, "calls for a profound rev ision of tradi­tional meth ods of eva ngeliza tion" (p. 1). Carrier's definition of eva ngelism is com­prehensive and holistic, noting tha t " evan­geliza tion remains un finished if it does not achieve jus tice and transform cultures" (p .3).

Followi ng an excellen t int roduction that lays the groundwork for the book, cha pters 1an d 2 discuss the Rom an Catho­lic Church 's percep tion of mod ernity and describe in detail the culture of moder­nity.Carrier's analysis of mod ernity is not as comprehensive or as p rofound as that of some other authors, bu t it nevertheless gives the reader a very useful ove rview an d unders tanding of thi s mod ern cul­ture, which he conv incingly arg ues is in need of evangelizing ,

We com e next to the heart of the book, a chap ter on incu ltura tion, which he calls a modern approach to eva ngelization.This is pe rha ps one of the best succinct treat­ments of this concep t and method that I have encoun tered. He ends the chap ter with a brief, but less sa tisfactory, illustr a­tion of inculturation in Afr ica. If mod er­nity is the con tempo ra ry culture to be evangelized , then inculturation is clearly the meth od to follow.

The remaining chapters of the book are no t as s tro ng. He rev isits George Orwell's 1984, arg ues that there is an emerging conve rgence between science and religion, d iscusses the imp ortance of "cultural rights" as an express ion of hu­man rig hts, and concludes with articulat­ing the cha llenge of evangelizing modern agnostic cultu re.

Carrier writes as a Roman Catholic and scarce ly acknowledges the contribu­tions other Christians are making to this important di scu ssion, although occasion­ally he tip s his hat to ecumenical coopera­tion . Given this slight drawback, it is nev­ertheless refr eshing to see missiologists

address the bold challenge of evangeliz­ing mod ernity, Carrier has done it well , and I believe this book will become a helpful mile marker in our pilgrimage to make Christ known in intelligible wa ys to person s influenced by the culture of mo­dernity .

- Darrell L. Whiteman

Darrell L. Whiteman is Professor of Cultural An­thropology in the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Theological Seminary and serves as editor of Missiology: An Internation al Review ,

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Publisher: Gerald H. Anderson, Overseas Ministries Study Center,490 Prospect Street, New Haven,Connecticut06511. Editor:Gerald H.Anderson,Overseas MinistriesStudyCenter, 490 Prospect Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511 . Managing Editor: James M. Phillips, Overseas Ministries Study Center,490 Prospect Street, New Haven,Connecticut , 06511.

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46 INTERNATIO NAL B ULLETIN OF M IS5IONARY R ESEARCH

Improve Your Worldview David Kerr Jan. 16-20 " Prese nce, Dia logu e , Wi tness amo ng Mu s­lims." Dr. Kerr , Macdo na ld Ce nte r for the Study of Islam , Har tfo rd Seminar y, rel at es Christian wit nes s to th e dyna mics of Muslim belief and culture . Cosponso red by Men non ite Board of Missions. Eight sessions. $95

Peter Kuzmic Jan . 23-27 " Mission in Eas te rn Euro pe and Russia." Dr. Ku zmic, Evan ge lica l T heo log ica l Semi na ry, Osijek, Croatia, explores Western contributions to churc hes of the for mer Soviet bloc. Special gues t lectu rer : Rev. Leon id Kish kovsky. Eight sessions . $95

Reading Week Feb . 6-10 One-Sided Christianity? Uniting the Church to Heal a Lo st and Broken World, by Ron ald J . Sider (Zondervan, 1993). D iscussio n T hu rs . and Fri. morn ings. No tuiti on .

Ray Bakke and Dean Trulear Feb. 13-15 "Mission to U rban America." Dr. Bakke, director of Internati on al Ur ba n Associates (IUA), and Dr. Trulear, dean of New York Theological Semi­nary. Held in Birmingham, A labama; cosponsored by Beeson Global Center at Samford University, OMSC, MARC/World Vision, and IUA. $95

J ame s M. Phillips Feb. 28-Mar. 3 " Lessons for Mission from Jap an and Korea." T he OMSC Associate Dir ector exa mines two contras ting national exper iences to find applica­tion for today's mission. Four sessions. $65

William Fore Mar. 6-10 " Mass Medi a and Mission ." Forme r president

Adrian Hastings Marc h 13-17 "African Ch ristianity Today." Led by Dr. Hast­ings (Oxford History of Christian ity in A frica ). Cos po nso red by Mennonite Centra l Commi t­tee . Eight sess ions. S95

Evelyn Davis March 20-24 "Te aching and Tra in ing Adults Across Cul­tures." Led by Dr. Davis, Wyciiffe Bible Trans­lat ors . Cospo ns or ed by SIM In te rn at ional. Eight sessions. $95

Don Jacobs and Maria Rieckelman March 27-31 "Spiritua l Ren ewal in the Miss ion Com mu ­nity." Dr. Jacobs, Mennonite Christian Leader ­ship Foun da tion, and Sr. R ieckelm an , M.D ., Marykn oll Sisters , lead a time of bibli ca l and pe rson al reflecti on . Cos po nsored by Ea stern Mennon ite Missions. Eight sessions. S95

Sr. Mary Motte, F.M.M. Ap ril 3-7 " Miss io n a nd Mode rnity." OMSC 's Se nio r Mission Sch ol a r ex plo res t he cha lle nges of faithful witness today. Cosponsored by Mary­kno ll Mission In stitute , at Marykno ll, N .Y . Eight sessions. S120

Saphir Athyal Ap ril 18-21 "As ian Chris tia n Leadershi p Tra in ing Amid

Religiou s Plura lism." Led by Dr. Athyal , for ­mer pre sident of U nio n Biblical Seminary , Pu ne , In d ia. Cospo nso red by World Vis ion Internation al. Note Tues day morning, first of eight sessions. $95

Emilio Cas tro April 24-28 " M iss io n in La tin A me rica ." Dr. C a stro , Ur ug ua ya n mi ss ion le ader, assesse s th e ch urch ' s wit ness in the po st-r ad ic al e ra . Cospo nso re d by A me r ica n Bapt ist Interna­tional Ministr ies and Me nno nite Ce ntra l Com­mitt ee. Eight sess ions. $95

David Schroeder May 1-3 "How to Do Strategic Planning." Dr. Schroede r, President , Nyack Co llege, New York, help s mis­sion leaders envision future ministries. Mond ay afte rnoo n through Wednesday noon . $75

Rob Martin May 3-5 " How to Writ e Grant Prop osals for Overseas Mission Projects." T he Exec utive Director of Firs t Frui ts, Inc., help s miss ion ari es develop ef fec tiv e pro posa ls for found ati on funding. Wednesday afternoon thro ugh Friday noon . $75

Attend both the Strategic Planning and the Proposal Writing workshops for only $ILO combined fee.

r---------Sign Up for 1995 Seminars---------i o Sign me up for these seminars: o Send me more information

of the Worl d Association for Christian Co m­ NAME municati on assesses the impact and potential of the medi a revolu tion for glo ba l miss io n. ADDRESS Eight sess ions. $95 Overseas Ministries Study Center

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Book Notes Ariarajah, S. Wesley. Gospel and Cultu re: An Ongoing Di scussion within the Ecumen ical Movement. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994. Pp. xv, 51. PaperbackSfr 6.50, $4.75, £2.95.

Delathuy, A. M. Missie en Statt in Oud-Kongo, 1880-1914: Redemptoristen, trappisten, norbertijnen, priesters van het H. Hart, paters van Mill Hill. Berchem-Antwerpen, Netherlands: EPO, 1994. Pp. 455. Paperback. No price given.

Fulljames, Peter. God and Creation in Intercultu ral Perspective: Dialogue Between the Theologies of Barth, Dickson, Pobee, Nyamiti and Pannenberg. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993. Pp. ix, 194. Paperback. No pricegiven.

Hunter, Kent R. Foundations for Church Growth: Biblical Basics for the Local Church. Corunna, Indiana: Church GrowthCenter, 1994. Pp. 266. Paperback $10.

Limouris, Gennadios, comp. Orthodox Visions of Ecumensim: Statements, Mes sages and Reports on the Ecumenical Movement, 1902-1992. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994. Pp. xii, 283. Paperback Sfr 32.50, $23.50, £14.50.

MacDonnell, Joseph F. Jesuits by the Tigris : Men for Others in Baghdad. Boston:Jesuit Mission Press, 1994. Pp. xoii, 329. Paperback $25.

Olson, C. Gordon . What in the World is God Doing? The Essentials of Global Mis sions: An Introductory Guide. Cedar Knolls, N.f.: Global Gospel Publishers, 1994. 3rd rev. ed. Pp. 327. Paperback. No price given.

Perry, Cindy. A Biographical History of the Church in Nepal. Kathmandu, Nepal: Nepal Church History Project, 1993. Znded. Pp. 155. Paperback. No pricegiven.

Pranger, Jan Hendrik. Dialogue in Discussion: The World Council of Churches and the Challenge of Religious Plurality Between 1967 and 1979 . Utrecht and Leiden: Interuniversity Institutefor Missiologicaland Ecumenical Research, 1994. Pp. u, 198. Paperback Oft. 29.50.

Sullivan, Richard E. Christian Missionary Activity in the Early Middle Ages . Aldershot, Hampshire and Brookfield, Vermont: variorum/Ashgate Publishing Co., 1994. Pp. x, 265. $78 .95.

Thorogood, Bernard, ed. Gales of Change: Responding to a Shifting Missionary Context. The Story of the London Missionary Society, 1945-1977. Geneva: WCC Publications, 1994. Pp. viii, 345. Paperback Sfr 27.50, $17.90, £11.90.

Turkson, Peter and Frans Wijsen, eds. Inculturation: Abide by the Otherness of Africa and the Africans. Kampen: Kok, 1994. Pp. x, 98. Paperback Oft. 24.90.

Veronis, Luke Alexander. Missionaries, Monks and Martyrs: Making Disciples of All Nations. Minneapolis, Minn.: Light and Life Publishing Co., 1994. Pp. vii, 153. Paperback $7.95.

In Corning Issues New Developments in Nigerian Christianity Matthews A. Ojo

The Empty Basket of Presbyterian Mission: Limits and Possibilities of Partnership Stanley H. Skreslet

Jonathan Edwards : Missionary Theologian and Advocate Ronald E. Davies

Language and Cultu re in the Development of Bible Society Translation Theory and Practice William A. Smalley

Focusing on Photographic Holdings in Mission Archives PaulJenkins

German Centers of Mission Research Willi Henkel, O.M.1.

Pentecostal Phenomena and Revivals in India: Implications for Indigenous Church Leadership Gary B. McGee

In our Series on the Legacy of Outstanding Missionary Figures of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centu ries, articles about Ho race Allen Robert Ar thing ton Charles H . Brent Amy Carmichae l John Considine, M.M. G. Sherwood Eddy George Grenfell Melvin Hod ges J. C. Hoeken dijk Adoniram Judson Hannah Kilham Johann Ludwig Krap f Robert Mackie Cons tance E. Pad wic k Karl Go ttlieb Pfander Timothy Richard Jack Wins low Franz Michae l Zahn