VULNERABLE MISSION

VULNERABLE MISSION IN ANGOLA: AN INTRA-AFRICAN CONVERSATION WITH JIM HARRIES
Harries’s encapsulated strategic proposals—the use of local languages and local resources—are
nothing novel to missiology. 6 Rather, the strength of his contribution lies in his
exposition and defense of those proposals grounded deeply in his personal and studied
experience of Africa over the last two and a half decades. His writings are replete with
references to Luo customs; linguistic comparisons of Dholuo, Kiswahili, and English;
and ground-level assessments of “what is really going on” in African initiated churches.
Thus he provides a refreshing and at times unsettling corrective to much current missiology
that pays lip-service to contextualization but lacks the deep contextual grounding to
substantiate its claims.
Unfortunately, Harries’s strength is also his weakness. From the vantage point of a Luo
village in Western Kenya, he writes on behalf of plenary sub-Saharan Africa. 7 In this
tendency to gloss over significant contextual differences across the continent, Harries can
claim a prestigious heritage of African scholarship. Classic studies of African culture
such as John Mbiti’s African Religions and Philosophy and Geoffrey Parrinder’s African Traditional
Religion mix examples indiscriminately from West, East, and Southern Africa, yet
still today are widely cited to substantiate missiological approaches in particular African
contexts that may or may not fit the paradigms they espouse. 8 Such generalization may
have been justified in a fledgling field of study, but it is time for African missiology to
come of age, resisting the temptation to paint with one brush a continent that incorporates
54 sovereign nations, over 1,000 languages, countless local histories, and a stunning
diversity of current economic and social influences.
To highlight the need for contextual sensitivity, therefore, I bring to the conversation
my local experience in another corner of Africa: the city of Huambo, central Angola.
Through reflection on Angola’s context and an analysis of how Harries’s assumptions
and proposals fit (or do not fit) this local setting, this essay will demonstrate the need for
two key correctives to Harries’s proposals. First, the use of local languages in African
missions may well need to include so-called “European” languages. Second, the identification
of local languages and local resources may well be more globalized, even Westernized,
than Harries is willing to admit. At stake in this discussion is our view of what
Africa really is and our willingness to fearlessly contextualize the VM approach amidst the
whirlwind of globalizing change on the African continent.
6 McKinzie, 111–12.
7 E.g., Harries, Vulnerable Mission, 57, fn 2; and 164, where he admits the possibility that there may be exceptions
to his broad brush strokes of sub-Saharan Africa.
8 John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1969); Geoffrey Parrinder, African Traditional
Religion, 3rd ed. (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1976). In relation to his own local context Harries
recognizes the danger of this generalizing tendency, e.g., when he sides with indigenous Luo scholar Okot
p’Bitek regarding the traditional Luo conception of God over against the more common generalization represented
by Mbiti and by Ghanaian Kwame Bediako. Harries, Vulnerable Mission, 4, 9; Jim Harries, “The Need for
Indigenous Languages and Resources in Mission to Africa in Light of the Presence of Monism/Witchcraft,”
Missio Dei: A Journal of Missional Theology and Praxis 4, no. 1 (February 2013): 59.
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