Critical Issues in the Social Sciences and Their Implications for Mission Studies

Abstract

Missionaries and anthropologists have been at the forefront of the West's encounter with other peoples since the Age of Exploration. In this encounter their views of these people have changed as they learned to know and understand these Others better. The shift from Other as Savage and Pagan to Other as Primitive and Ancestor, and then to Other as Native and Unreached has shaped the way Western scholars and missionaries have theorized about and related to people from other parts of the world. As missiologists, we must move beyond the current views of others that dominate current anthropological and missiological thinking, and recognize that the Scriptures affirm that we are one humanity, that at the deepest level others are not other but us. Only such a change in attitudes will help us lay the foundations for the global mission of the global church.