Communication in Mission and Development: Relating to the Church in Africa

By Jim Harries

Communication in Mission and Development identifies, unpacks, and articulates fundamental problems in communication in mission and development as it is being carried out in Africa and the majority world today. New technology, unique in the history of mankind, is throwing up vexing issues, to date barely recognized, in communication practice. This book reconsiders:
-Previous work by mission scholars on communication.
-Questions regarding materialism in Africa.
-Widespread understandings on the nature of human equality.
-The impact on communication of the holding of monistic vs. dualistic worldviews.
-African and Western approaches to hermeneutics.
-The use of European languages for communication in Africa.
-Issues related to globalization and development.
-And more . . .

Underlying differences in philosophical foundations amongst Western as against majority world people influences their respective communication to such an extent that the expectation that both sides simply understand one another because they happen to use the same international language is found to be unrealistic. Communication in Mission and Development concludes that the practice of mission and development will better cope with current realities when the use of local languages is once again given its proper decisive place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: May 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781621896715

Jim Harries

Jim Harries (b. 1964) has a PhD in theology (Birmingham, UK) and degrees in Biblical interpretation, development and agriculture. Following a call to serve God in Africa, Jim has lived in Zambia then Kenya since 1988. Jim's ministry to indigenous churches, which includes bible teaching and relationship building, is engaged using the Luo and Swahili languages. Jim has many published articles related to his work in Africa. Jim chairs the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission. My talk on Vulnerable Mission

Book preview

Illustrations

Figure 1.1 A traditional model for communication

Figure 1.2 Proposed alternative model for communication

Figure 1.3 Two people whose hands are touching

Tables

Table 1.1 Theoretical finger-touching binary code for interpersonal communication

Table 5.1 Holistic Gospel

Foreword

Jim Harries is one of those rarities amongst missionaries who think radically about what God has called them to do, who do not always agree with accepted wisdom, and who are prepared to order their lives of service according to their insights. In his writing Jim is trying to conform to more than one standard. He is attempting to be honest to the West, while being true to his home African community, and faithful to Christ. It is helpful to bear this in mind when we assess his conclusions, and how he gets to them.

Perhaps more than any other area of life, Christian missionary endeavor is dependent on effective communication from one person to another, from one culture to another. Jim acknowledges that people accept this to be the case. He also thinks we have often failed to think through, not only what it is that we are communicating, but how we think we are communicating. He asks how our communication is actually perceived and accepted by its recipients.

During Jim’s first years in Africa, which were spent in Zambia under the aegis of the Africa Evangelical Fellowship (AEF), he set out to help Zambians to improve their agriculture. He had studied the science of agriculture and knew how it worked, and was keen to help Zambians get the most out of the resources God had given them in their land. From his point of view as an educated young man from the western world the projects he proposed for the school in which he taught, and for the community, were perfectly logical and sensible ideas for relevant development. As they failed, one by one, he began to ask why, and sought to change his strategy accordingly. It was not long before he realized that communication was a lot more than just saying what is on your mind. For effective communication to take place the means of communication must be considered, the context of both sides of the communication needs to be taken seriously, and the perception of the receiver is paramount.

This book is part of his response to this need for us to think through our communication processes. In doing this he constructs four straw men, experts in communication and communication theory, in order to point out what he sees as foundational weaknesses in their approaches. The quote from Charles Kraft, one of those straw men that the understanding that what messages mean is constructed by the receiver rather than inherent in the message is perhaps the single most threatening insight of contemporary communication theory for Christian communicators (see page 27) would seem to be a good starting point for a lot of discussion.

Jim’s experience in Africa, both with AEF in Zambia and later in Kenya, living as part of a rural community, has led him to appreciate a number of the reasons that communication has not taken place in the way the proponent might think it has. Central to Jim’s thesis in this area is the dualism of the English language that is based in the western world and the monism of African society. He points out that the English based dualism, which sees the spiritual and physical as two separate realms, fails to provide a clear medium for communication with the basically monistic African who sees a spiritual background to every physical event.

Helpfully he points out that there are a number of approaches to this problem:

To ignore the differences as immaterial. This approach has led, and continues to lead, to innumerable misunderstandings and conflicts.

To encourage a dualistic understanding among Africans. If the way this is being attempted is even possible; this makes a bold assumption that western dualism is right and describes God’s world best—which must be seriously challenged.

To encourage people from the West to adopt a monistic approach. Jim claims that English as a language is set up dualistically and Westerners fail to get to grips with monism.

To let Christianity, which grew out of a monistic background of Hebraism, become a bridge between the two. Perhaps one of the weaknesses of this book is the failure to open up this possibility in more detail. Jim intends to look at this aspect in more detail in a later book that he is currently working on entitled Secular Deception in the light of the Intercultural Christ; insights from Africa.

Experience in both Zambia and Kenya has convinced Jim of the paramount significance of witchcraft in African society. The effect of the envy and jealousy that success and wealth can cause is, according to Jim, integrally related to witchcraft and intimately connected with ancestral spirits. This is something that cannot be clearly expressed in English and often passes expatriates by. In my experience of around 35 years of involvement in East and Southern Africa, I have seen this as a very real and important concern.

This is why one of the basic planks of the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM), of which Jim is founder and chairman, is ministry through local languages. Other aspects of the relevance of using local languages for effective communication come out in many places in this book.

One of the most challenging points Jim brings out regards the use of translators. It is widely recognized that a translator needs to be fully conversant with the local language and culture in order to be able to translate accurately into its context. Do we take as much pain to see that the same translator is fully conversant with the first language and culture to understand properly what it is he/she is supposed to be able to translate?

Thinking through the importance of the cultural context of communication, Jim squares up to what he calls the myth that Africans have a noble savage attitude of lack of desire for material possessions, seeing the spiritual and community as more important. If this were really the case, he asks, why is there so much material corruption? Jim blames much of the unhealthy dependency that exists between the African Church and the western world on misunderstandings that have arisen from this concept. It is this area that intrigues me most in my work on Unhealthy Dependency under the aegis of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. One of the factors in mission that has exacerbated unhealthy dependency in the past has been the inability of donors to view donated support from the viewpoint of the recipient culture.

Jim points out that almost any Christian ministry to Africa involves the passage of funds from the West to Africa. This is even more the case now that holistic mission is the clarion call. In fact, Jim is highly critical of much that goes on in the name of holistic mission today, as it can easily lead to unhealthy dependency. Projects are often envisaged and set up with a financial basis which is far out of reach of local people, without due concern for local possibilities. This can make short or long-term unhealthy dependency inevitable. Such projects frequently ignore the different mind-sets of donors and recipients, ignoring of which often leads to misunderstandings and disappointments. They scratch the surface but fail to effect the intended lasting change.

It is this approach that has given the basis for the second plank of Vulnerable Mission, as Jim sees it; that of using local resources for ministry. This is something that Jim lives out in his rural village in Western Kenya. Although he is personally supported by Christians in the UK, he does not use his funds from the UK to subsidize the ministry in which he is involved, which is largely training local Christians and leaders in their own language. There is no running water or electricity in Jim’s basic house, and when he wants to go anywhere it is his bicycle that he uses. He has no car, as he would rather use the money he’d spend on it to look after children who stay in his home; it would be too expensive for local people to run, and it would set him apart from other villagers.

Whilst recognizing that this form of ministry—in local languages and with only local resources—is not God’s calling on everyone, Jim feels that there are many more who should consider it. We hope that the deliberations of this book will encourage a more thoughtful and empathetic approach to Christian communication in cross-cultural settings.

Ralph Hanger

Oxford Centre for Mission Studies

(Retired director of African Pastors’ Fellowship.)

June 2012

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Angela Merridale who typed the original manuscript, to Ben Christine for his work on the illustrations, to Ralph Hanger for writing the Foreword and to Marilyn James for her very hard work in the editorial process.

I am extremely grateful to numerous people of many nationalities who have directly and indirectly contributed to my understanding in such a way as to have enabled the writing of this text. I cannot begin to name them, but I will always remain grateful for their allowing me in various ways to share in their lives.

Abbreviations

AEF Africa Evangelical Fellowship

AICs African Independent or Indigenous Churches

ATR African Traditional Religion

AVM Alliance for Vulnerable Mission

NIV New International Version

Introduction

This book identifies, unpacks, and articulates fundamental problems in communication in mission and development as it is being carried out in the developing world today. Its recommendations are directed primarily to the relationship between the West and Africa. It is radical in its implications and deep in its critiques. It advocates a revival in some mission’s practices that were common before the modern era but that have been neglected in recent decades. It does not suggest that what is modern is of no value; but that conceptions associated with modernism are inadequate as a complete theory of life. Perhaps even for the sake of its own survival the modern western world needs to make room for that which contradicts it, and it needs to know how to maintain the benefits of what it has without insisting on the hegemony of its philosophical positions.

The theme of communication runs throughout this text, which is about how people communicate with each other, and about how communication influences understanding and behavior. New technology unique in the history of mankind is throwing up some vexing issues that have to-date barely been recognized.¹ Along with other post-modern works, this text challenges age-old models of communication that are based on coding and decoding of signals following the conduit metaphor. The latter view of transfer of information is too narrow in the current climate of the communication revolution. Proposing alternative models that expound on the work of post-modern linguists and philosophers results in an overturning of some stones long considered laid to rest. The groundbreaking framework produced through this revising of models enables much of the penetrative critique that underlies the rest of this text.

The implicit understanding of the term communication in this work is broad. I consider influencing, impacting, revealing, depicting, affecting something, conveying, publicizing, persuading, writing, speaking, expressed emotions and relationships all to be types of communication. My reader will need to understand this to grasp that communication is the thread that unifies chapters in this book that may otherwise seem disparate.

A re-analysis of the work on communication by mission scholars who were responding to the modern era reveals that there is room for maneuver. These scholars, who have not so much been wrong as they have been responding to contexts that are not universal, continue to be considered authoritative by many. This author found this conventional missions wisdom to be wanting when he applied it to his own practical ministry situation on the field. In this book a re-evaluation of the work of four great scholars enables him to articulate why assumptions that were made by them in their time are insufficient for the challenges posed by inter-cultural communication in today’s global world.

A look at an apparent frequently observed disregard for material things on the part of African people forms a case study in this exploration of communication. The author hears Westerners describe African people as if they are much less materialistic than Westerners, and as if they place a higher value on the spiritual and social by comparison with the mechanistically oriented West. Such evaluation is often combined with a view that the masses in many majority world communities are innocent of the extreme greed and corruption found in the upper echelons of their societies. The author argues that African people are as materially oriented as any others around the world, but that their materialism (i.e., love for material things) may be expressed differently from that of Westerners.

A high valuation of notions of human equality on the part of the West determines the means, according to this author, underlying attempts at compensating for sins of the past. The sins are especially those committed against Africans often considered to be under the category of racism, including the practice of slavery. Western nations today, perhaps more than at any other time in history, seek to provide their citizens with equal opportunities. In order to do so they have to assume that diverse races have the same potential to function effectively within western society. Guilt about the racism of prior generations has brought a rebound effect particularly marked in the USA and in South Africa. Could it be that such a rebound is causing western scholarship to ignore very real difference (whether racial or cultural in origin)? Could it be that missionaries and development workers traveling to work in Africa are determined to prove that the people they meet are fundamentally no different than their fellow Westerners back home? Could it be that as a result they will for as long as possible ignore differences that are staring them in the face?

Westerners have often struggled to come to terms with African people’s failure to clearly distinguish the material from the spiritual realm. The western mission force has seen its relative material abundance as a means of facilitating the spread of a spiritual message. Because such a distinction between material and spiritual is not upheld in Africa, western mission efforts have been contributing toward the production of a gospel of prosperity. This is a very basic philosophical difference; the dualism that sees the material as being distinct from the spiritual that is very strong in the West is mostly absent in Africa. This difference is shown in this text to underlie difficulties in inter-cultural communication and in turn to be contributing to a strangling of African initiative.

Amongst the implications of some of the above, would seem to be the existence of a different foundation for hermeneutics in Africa as against in the West. Because understanding is affected by the context of an interpreter, contextual differences in Africa—be they social, textual, cultural, economic and so on—affect the way scripts, including the Bible, are interpreted. The wider implications for mission and for the church of such differences in interpretation are considered in this text.

The use of English for formal functions on the African continent is found to result in difficulties. These difficulties become visible when words are considered as having implicatures (to imply things in contexts) rather than to carry meanings. (The latter is assumed in traditional models of communication.) It is extremely difficult for African people in Africa to excel using a borrowed language that has unfamiliar roots. Diglossia,² resulting from the blanket imposition of a new language with foreign roots over existing linguistic communities, is found to be impeding the advance of indigenous understanding and possibilities for holistic social change. Finally, and perhaps most disturbing of all, is the practice of learning uses of English by rote. This can universalize ways of talking even though subjects of discourse vary between cultures. It can result in a wide divergence on the part of over-hearers between the perceived and the actually intended impact of discourses. This divergence between perception and reality impedes the close involvement of non-African people in African affairs.

An important question for my reader is whether the pragmatic rules of discourse that underlie this text are primarily western (arising from the fact that the author is British) or African (arising from the fact that he has resided in Africa for most of the last 25 years). This is a difficult question to answer. It must be said that a mixture is in use. For example, in writing about quantities or levels of a certain quality, am I as the author taking the West or Africa as the assumed base line? If I say, for example, that African people are materialistic; with whom am I comparing them? In my understanding, to state this using English implies that the point of comparison is with an assumed level of being materialistic found amongst native English-speaking peoples. It follows that by using my understanding of native English-speaking peoples as the basis for comparison, I am rendering this text only minimally useful for those African readers who are not intimately familiar with the ways of life of native-English speakers. This implies in turn that knowledge of ways of life in the West is a prerequisite to progress in scholarly endeavors in today’s supposedly global, predominantly English-language academia. On the other hand, my assumption that witchcraft is in many ways a synonym for envy,³ which is relatively little understood amongst Westerners, suggests that I am writing from an African pre-suppositional base.⁴ In reality my upbringing having been in the UK means that my writing is rooted in the West, but my long-term exposure to Africa also means that it must