There was a time when mission studies benefitted from a symbiotic relationship with the social sciences. However, it appears that relationship has stagnated and now is waning. The argument is made here, in the case of cultural anthropology both in Europe and the United States, that a once mutually beneficial though sometimes strained relationship has suffered a parting of the ways in recent decades. First, the article reviews the relationships between missionaries and anthropologists before World War II when it was possible to be a 'missionary anthropologist' with a foot in both disciplines. In that period, the conversation went two ways with missionary anthropologists making important contributions to anthropology. Then, the article reviews some aspects of the development of the two disciplines after World War II when increasing professionalism in both disciplines and a postmodern turn in anthropology took the disciplines in different directions. Finally, the article asks whether or not the conversation, and thus the cross-fertilization, can be restarted, especially since the youngest generation of anthropologists has recognized the reality of local Christianities in their fields of study.

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Missiologists, borrowing from anthropology as practiced from the 1950s through the 1980s, have trained a generation of missionaries by using the “standard anthropological model.” Culture is portrayed as causative, but has no cause itself. Communication is portrayed as a transmission within a dyad, involving no one else except God. Thus, the missionary problem is the communication of the gospel between two people from two different cultures. In fact, this is not the situation, if it ever was. Regional and global flows of ideas, goods, people, and beliefs have always breached the “boundaries” of seemingly self-contained cultures. People have never been slaves to the past. Instead, they selectively bring certain interpretations of the past to bear on everyday life. There have always been competing narratives about the nature of reality and the necessity of particular beliefs and actions. Contrary to the standard model, culture is contingent, culture is constructed, and culture is contested. The missionary situation is not as simple as it has seemed.

There are times when God says “Remember,” and times where God says “Do not remember.” Discerning the times is a constant requirement in mission studies and practice. The times are changing, and so are the means of interpreting the times. Urbanization, globalization, migration, and diaspora have created a world that, in many ways, is unlike any we have seen before. In missiology, updating our methods of doing research offers the best chance to reshape our models and mottoes for mission.

The 10/40 Window, as a compelling rhetorical vision for some American evangelicals, has been a stimulus to give agency to a generation of missionaries, but there is reason for suspicion, because this view of the world does not square with some other things that we know about the world and because it resonates so well with the American political discourse of the last decade and a half. Like all rhetoric, it is compelling within a certain linguistic and cultural reality. Outside those bounds, the concept may make sense or may confuse or anger those living in other realities. How does a term like this spread so fast, and what is the process by which it is linked to other concepts to form a particular rhetorical vision of the world?