VULNERABLE MISSION

Vulnerable Mission in Angola: An Intra-
African Conversation with Jim Harries
DannY reeSe
The Vulnerable Mission movement grew first in the rich soil of rural Western Kenya, based in the deeply
contextual insights of Jim Harries. Africa, however, is large, diverse, and changing. This article considers
what Vulnerable Mission might look like in another corner of Africa: the cities of Angola. The contextual
differences require that Harries’s proposals undergo considerable alteration. Vulnerable Mission strategies
in Angola must recognize Portuguese as a truly local, African language and must take into consideration
the globalizing changes that have redefined local identity and resources.
In its relatively brief existence, the concept of Vulnerable Mission has undergone a
subtle but far-reaching seismic shift in its foundational assumptions—a shift which perhaps
the seismographs of the movement have not adequately detected. This shift, in a
word, is context. VM grew first from the fertile soil of the African continent, specifically in
the life-experience and work of Jim Harries, long-term missionary to rural Zambia and
rural Kenya. Harries’s writings draw deeply from local African culture and language,
struggles in the African church, and pan-African philosophy. As a result, Harries’s strategic
proposals are explicitly aimed at mission to Africa. 1 However, his proposals struck a
chord with mission practitioners from around the world, and in recent years his Alliance
for Vulnerable Mission2 has attracted voices from Latin America and Asia and others
who write on behalf of the “Majority World” at large. 3
Without doubt, the VM discussion has much to offer non-African contexts. But I suggest
that the shift in the discussion has happened so rapidly as to preclude careful reflection
on the side effects of abandoning the contextual roots of the discussion. 4 Therefore, in
this reflection paper I intend to take the VM conversation back to its roots: I engage in
an intra-African conversation with Jim Harries. Specifically, I will interact substantively
only with Harries’s thought as canonized in his 2011 volume Vulnerable Mission, a collection
of fourteen previously published articles written as early as 1997. 5
1 See, e.g., the subtitle of Harries’s influential volume, Vulnerable Mission: Insights into Christian Mission to Africa
from a Position of Vulnerability (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2011). Indeed, even as the VM movement gains
worldwide momentum, Harries continues to write specifically about Africa, as is apparent from a perusal of his
articles at http://jim-mission.org.uk/articles/index.html.
2 See http://vulnerablemission.org.
3 E.g., the substantive collection of VM articles concerning the Chaco in Argentina (http://jim-mission.
org.uk/discussion/index.html), Gene Daniels’s contributions on Kyrgyzstan (http://jim-mission.org.
uk/discussion/seen-in-a-different-light.pdf), and the articles in the current issue of Missio Dei from Paul
Yonggap Jeong of Korea and Jean Johnson of Cambodia. Stan Nussbaum stands as a prominent representative
of the tendency in VM circles to write concerning the Majority World, effortlessly drawing examples from
mission works of great geographical diversity without regard for contextual differences.
4 A similar concern is evident in Greg McKinzie, “Vulnerable Mission: Questions from a Latin American
Context,” Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Praxis 4, no. 1 (February 2013): 110–33.
5 Harries, Vulnerable Mission, xiv. Having read several of Harries’s other articles, I judge that the articles in this
2011 compendium well represent his larger corpus.
MISSIO DEI 4.1 (FEBRUARY 2013): 134–153