Missionaries from the West like to hit the ground running to solve as many of other people's problems as possible in the increasingly short term they have available for service. Hang on, says Jim Harries! After twenty-four years in Africa, observing how poverty, traditional practices, dependency, and misunderstandings continue, Harries asks, what is the point of bringing solutions that local people cannot reproduce? Harries challenges missionaries and development workers to counter...
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...
What if the whole «God delusion» approach is a neo-colonial imposition at the linguistic and philosophical level? Could it lead to unmitigated disasters in intercultural communication and development work? This paradigm-challenging book points to the necessity, in light of contemporary impasse in intercultural understanding, of God's involvement in the encounter between the West and the majority world, especially Africa. Failure to account for God, the cradle of imagination operative in...
Secular assumptions underlie much formal communication between the West and Africa, and even intra-Africa. Secularism is dualistic by nature, but thinking in Africa is mostly monistic. This book suggests that it is better to be rooted in faith in Christ than in so-called secularism. The great respect given to the Bible in much of Africa verifies this idea. Communication of and through Christ is a bridge that can enable indigenous sustainable development. The same gospel is the bridge over which...
