The World in My Parish: Rethinking the Standard Missiological Model

Abstract

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.

Human genetics of the Kula Ring: Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA variation in the Massim of Papua New Guinea

“…However, the mtDNA-based correlation decreased and became nonsignificant when excluding Misima, which is reported to be less intensively involved in the Kula. 35,38 Genetic characterization of Rossel Islanders Rossel Islanders, who live on the easternmost and most remote island of the entire Massim, occupy a unique position within the Massim because they are its only Papuan-speaking people. Their outlier position as noted above, despite their geographic proximity to Austronesian-speaking neighboring islanders from the southeastern Massim, is therefore intriguing.…”

“…Only Misima is sometimes mentioned as a Kula partner, but trading with Misima is probably much less intense as compared with the northern and western Massim. 35,38 The presence of the Kula trading system, involving regular migrations between islands with lengthy stays away from home, raises the question whether besides the economic exchange also genetic exchange takes place. If the male-specific migration of the Kula indeed left detectable signatures in the genomes of the contemporary populations from the region, this should be evident by studying the paternally inherited non-recombining portion of the Y-chromosome (NRY), in comparison with the maternally inherited mitochondrial (mt) DNA.…”

Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture

“…While some Christian anthropologists made significant contributions in the early years of the discipline (e.g., Lienhardt [see Clifford 1997]; Pike 1967;Nida and Taber 1982), in recent years many Christian anthropologists have employed this understanding of time, placing their own faith outside culture. Culture is reduced to a functionalist/cognitive system incapable of engaging the deeply held convictions of their own faith community (see Howell 2006, 309-12;Rynkiewich 2002). For this reason, Christian academics have largely eschewed the notion of "Christian cultures," emphasizing the transcendent/noncultural nature of Christianity (or, at least, the "Christian message") (Kraft 1979;Lingenfelter 1992).…”

Beyond people group thinking: A critical reevaluation of unreached people groups

“…UPG tends to envision people groups as discrete, separate, and self-contained cultural entities, reflecting a popular missiological understanding of cultures that Rynkiewich (2002: 303–304) calls the “standard anthropological model.” This model, built upon anthropological theories from over 60 years ago, espouses essentialized views of culture as organic and indivisible wholes that are unchanging and clearly distinguished from others. With this outdated culture concept comes flawed conceptualizations of social boundaries.…”