The Reality and the Apparent: Worldviews and Missiological Strategies

Abstract

"Worldview is an abstract concept used for identifying a set of assumptions people use to organize their view of reality. Conceptualizing worldview is a challenging task. Nobody has seen a worldview, but everybody has one. A worldview informs a person’s interpretation of reality, their cosmology, and determines their actions and reactions. Charles Kraft (1988) considers worldview as the “center control box” of a person’s life and communal culture. Most assumptions reflect one’s unverified beliefs and answers to fundamental questions, such as who they are and who others are, how people should relate to each other, what causes things to happen, what time is, or how a group defines and interprets space. A people’s worldview provides the meanings to be attached to the forms they observe. People evaluate the world around them based on their assumptions. Their logic and feelings are informed by their worldview. People even read and interpret Scripture in the light of their own set of assumptions. In order to move people from where they are, missionaries need to discover where people really are. This process is made difficult by the hidden nature of assumptions. What is apparent may not be real. As Paul Hiebert notes (2008), the process of discovering a different worldview requires a metacultural grid that will make comparison between the missionaries’ and the peoples’ worldview possible. It is what Charles Van Engen calls “a cultural and spiritual interface” (1998:63). In order to further complicate the matter, missionaries too often do not know their own worldview. They cannot evaluate their own assumptions unless they are confronted or faced with a different culture sharing a different worldview."