VULNERABLE MISSION

VULNERABLE MISSION: QUESTIONS FROM A LATIN AMERICAN CONTEXT
ing into a new national identity.” 30 Here we have, for the indigenous peoples themselves,
the opportunity to choose, at least to some degree, their local language and local thinking
style. In the urban context, we must therefore reckon with the decision of migrants to
uproot their families partly in order to place their children in Spanish-only, urban, Western
schooling. Second generation migrants usually speak their parents’ language poorly
if at all and typically do not use it outside the family context. But why should they, when
their parents have sacrificed so much to assimilate to the urban environment?
The question for the missionary in urban Peru, then, is what local language and thinking
style to use. The difference between Spanish and Quechua, as well as the difference
between indigenous and urban worldviews, is every bit as significant as VM asserts. Yet,
is it the missionary’s place to overrule the indigenous migrant’s intention to live in the linguistic
world of her second language? If she speaks Spanish but still “thinks” Quechua,
need the missionary insist upon a Quechua approach—or is this even a realistic view of
language? Nida notes the complexity of what he classifies as “a heterogeneous society
with included face-to-face constituency”:
When a single over-all social structure involves not only a dominant group but an included
face-to-face constituency, it is essential to recognize not only their differences of structure,
but also their interrelations. One of the most serious mistakes in missionary work has been
to imagine that Indians in the Americas, for example, should be reached as a separate
constituency and developed as an isolated community, when all the time they are in highly
dependent relation to the urban center. 31
Nida points out that it is more common to err in the other direction, when the missionary
“lumps them together without regard to their different structures.” 32 So, even in this
urban nexus VM provides a corrective when it provokes the sub-cultural sensitivity to
which the melting pot can numb the missionary. But I emphasize Nida’s point about
“interrelations” here because VM seems to disregard the complexity of the urban environment
with its local-only formula:
In a heterogeneous society with an included folk culture there is always the acute problem
of dealing with people in a state of transition. How are they to be ministered to—in terms of
their rural circumstances, or in their city setting? In a sense, it all depends on where they
are and how they view themselves. 33
The point here is to juxtapose the urban Latin American scenario with Jim Harries’s
rural African context, from which much of the VM perspective apparently arises:
Presumably the content of African languages arises from the content of African lives. Does
learning of another language “magically” result in a change in way of life? Or is the widespread
use of English making people dependent on what they do not understand because
it is not a part of who they are? If we had examples of non-European languages ‘succeeding’
[as the medium of enlightened advanced education] then perhaps we could say that
the choice of a European language for an African student is a free or arbitrary choice. As it
is, if it is a choice at all, then it is a choice that largely precludes taking the African person’s
30 Ibid., 177.
31 Nida, Message and Mission, 188–89.
32 Ibid, 189.
33 Ibid.; emphasis added.
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