Missionaries and Borderlands: «The Mission Play» and Missionary Practices in Alta California

This essay takes up a core question of this issue of Pamiętnik Teatralny: how are we to think about historiography beyond a dualism, settled in time and reflective of the status quo? With respect to the California missions, historical treatments of colonization revolve around a dualism shaped by moral dimensions of the missionary enterprise—did the missions help California Indians or harm them? Theatrical representations, like the wildly successful early twentieth century pageant drama, The Mission Play, staged a version of mission history that argued for the former. As a representation of the mission past, the play conflated missions, as institutions, with the moral character of missionaries, thus edifying a fantasy and entrenching the dualism. However, attention to missionary practices, like keeping time using the mission bell, reveal how the missions were sites where indigenous and colonial realities were in constant conflict. Through practices, relations between missionaries and indios produced a space that was neither strictly colonial nor indigenous, and yet both—a borderland. As a mode of spatial dialectics, borderlands thinking can unsettle the duality underlying representations of the mission past to question how that dualism has come into being.

Speaking for Ourselves: The Ghanaian Encounter with European Missionaries – Sixteenth–Twenty-first Centuries

This paper (re)examines European missionary encounters with Ghanaians from the sixteenth – twenty-first centuries from Ghanaian perspectives. The paper makes three main arguments: first, European missionary endeavours were quite peripheral to ongoing indigenous religious activities and daily life, with the movement of Christianity from the periphery to the center of Ghanaian society a more recent phenomenon with political implications and concerns. Secondly, missionary and colonial decisions were often made in response to indigenous activities, not vice versa. And thirdly, this methodological approach of hearing African and European voices in dialogue serves as a much-needed corrective to favouring European perspectives within African mission history. Taken together, this provides fresh insights into questions of how/why Christianity went from the periphery under European missionary leadership to Ghana’s primary religion post-independence, offering differently nuanced understandings to concepts of mission while giving dignity and respect to the local context, people, and institutions.

Evaluasi Kualitas Website Mitratel dengan Pendekatan Webqual Dan Importance Performance Analysis

PT. Dayamitra Telekomunikasi or Mitratel is a subsidiary of PT Telkom Indonesia (Persero) Tbk which is engaged in providing telecommunications infrastructure. Mitratel has been in the telecommunications tower business since 2008. To date, Mitratel has managed more than 13,700 telecommunication towers spread throughout Indonesia. The choice of a website as a company's communication medium with the public is the right decision considering that the website can provide information or messages to anyone who wants that information even though they are in different parts of the world. The website built by the company can provide information related to the company's activities that are considered worthy to be known by the public. Through the website, the public can also find out the company in sufficient detail, starting from the profile, vision and mission, history, contacts, and activities carried out by the company. So far, the Mitratel website has never been evaluated, so the authors evaluate using the Webqual method and Importance Performance Analysis. The results obtained indicate that there are still many parts of the Mitratel website that must be improved.

FINNISH MISSION HISTORY: A STUDY ON SOCIO-CULTURAL IMPACTS MADE BY FINNISH MISSIONARIES IN THE NORTH-EASTERN HIMALAYAS, INDIA

Once Winston Churchill rightly said and I quote: “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” History is not just a past to remember but history is an opportunity to explore new things and learn from it. With a great vision and mission-heart, Finnish missionaries came in the Himalayan belt in the early nineteenth century. They had a vision of entering Tibet as soon as they set foot on Indian territory. They stayed and lived difficult lives since India is riven by caste, creed, and regional backwardness, which a few of them (missionaries) correctly termed as "darkness." The Himalayan people are living considerably more comfortable lives after several decades, yet the efforts and services of Finnish missionaries are still mostly unknown among Himalayan natives. Few of numbers of published articles and books are here to describe their major contributions and chronological evidences of Finnish missionaries’ arrival to India. In this article, a thorough analysis of the socio-economic repercussions of Finnish missionaries in the Himalayan belts and Buxaduars regions of Indian states West Bengal and Sikkim was conducted using collected primary and secondary data. Therefore, this article carry out this study by collecting data (qualitative and quantitative) and information from various sources viz. Published and unpublished articles and notes, collection of primary data/information from various sources remained in India and Finland and through analysis of historical documents of Finnish Mission History. KEYWORDS:Finnish missionaries, Himalayas, Socio-economic, mission history, education, community, Scandinavian Alliance Mission, Education, Livelihood, Darjeeling, Sikkim, Buxaduars.

Polycentric mission leadership: Toward a new theoretical model: OCMS Montagu Barker Lecture Series: “Polycentric Theology, Mission, and Mission Leadership”

As the world faces rapidly increasing cycles of disruption, challenges, and disorder, mission leaders are stretched to adapt, trying to catch up with the pace of change and provide leadership to further the mission God has given his Church. This paper, presented at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies Montagu Barker Lecture Series: “Polycentric Theology, Mission, and Mission Leadership,” focuses on ways leadership is changing, suggesting a new theoretical model for mission leadership. It reviews the idea of polycentrism through mission history, mission and church organizations, movement theory, and governance, identifying themes of an emerging theory of polycentric mission leadership.

Give Them Christ: Native Agency in the Evangelization of Puerto Rico, 1900 to 1917

The scholarship on the history of Protestant missions to Puerto Rico after the Spanish– tendencies of the missionaries in the construction of the new Puerto Rican. There is no doubt that the main missionary motif during the 1890s was indeed civilization. Even though the Americanizing motif was part of the evangelistic efforts of some missionaries, new evidence shows that a minority of missionaries, among them Presbyterians James A. McAllister and Judson Underwood, had a clear vision of indigenization/contextualization for the emerging church based on language (Spanish) and culture (Puerto Rican). The spread of Christianity was successful not only because of the missionaries but also because native agents took up the task of evangelizing their own people; they were not passive spectators but active agents translating and processing the message of the gospel to fulfill their own people’s needs based on their own individual cultural assumptions. This article problematizes the past divisions of such evangelizing activities between the history of Christianity, mission history, and theology by analyzing the native ministries of Adela Sousa (a Bible woman) and Miguel Martinez in light of the teachings of the American missionaries. The investigation claims that because of Puerto Rican agents’ roles in the process of evangelization, a new fusion between the history of Christianity, mission history, and theology emerged as soon as new converts embraced and began to preach the gospel.

Thirty Years of Mission in Taiwan: The Case of Presbyterian Missionary George Leslie Mackay

The aims of this paper are to analyze the missionary endeavors of the first Canadian Presbyterian missionary in Taiwan, George Leslie Mackay (1844–1901), as described in From Far Formosa: The Islands, Its People and Missions, and to explore how Christian theology was established among and adapted to the Taiwanese people: the approaches that Mackay used and the missionary strategies that he implemented, as well as the difficulties that he faced. Given that Mackay’s missionary strategy was clearly highly successful—within 30 years, he had built 60 churches and made approximately 2000 converts—the question of how he achieved these results is certainly worth considering. Furthermore, from the outset, Mackay was perceived and received very positively in Taiwan and is considered something of a folk hero in the country even today. In the present-day narrative of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, Mackay is seen as someone whose efforts to establish an independent church with native local leadership helped to introduce democracy to Taiwan. However, in some of the scholarship, missionaries such as Mackay are portrayed as profit seekers. This paper seeks to give a voice to Mackay himself and thereby to provide a more symmetrical approach to mission history.