Finding Our Own Voice: The Quest for 
Authentic Conversion

Charles Forman is to be thanked for his masterful overview
of theological developments in the Pacific Islands,
a part of the world too seldom mentioned in this journal. His title,
“Finding Our Own Voice,” aptly reflects a ubiquitous and
quintessentially human quest that manifests itself at all levels of
life—individual, community, ethnic group, and nation—and
across the spectrum of languages, societies, and religions. This
quest is implicit in several of the articles in this issue of the IBMR.

To be spoken for implies a degree of powerlessness on the
part of those who are represented by the voice of another. This
incapacity may issue from intrinsic reasons having to do with
one’s degree of maturity, mental development, or medical condition;
or it may be the result of extrinsic conditions that foster and
perpetuate marginalization, rendering certain individuals and
groups voiceless.

Representation does not always reflect the wishes of those
represented and sometimes is brutally imposed, as with colonies
and possessions of empires. Those on whose behalf the powerful
voice of domination is raised are obliged to sit mutely by while
others explain what is “really” on their minds. In other cases,
socially amplified voices represent or misrepresent others in
matters pertaining to the Ultimate and the innermost. Theologians
speak for God, bishops speak for dioceses, clergy speak for
congregations, and missionaries speak for converts.

Anatoliy M. Ablazhei’s article, translated by David Collins,
illustrates ways in which a people can be rendered voiceless
through the well-intentioned actions of missionaries. Through
his careful study of the religious worldview of the indigenous
population of the northern Ob’, in western Siberia, Ablazhei
reminds us that while the Christian Gospel should be good news
for all peoples, regardless of their cultures, destructive forces are
unleashed when insensitive outsiders too quickly presume to
represent God within a complex cultural and linguistic milieu
that they neither adequately comprehend nor fully appreciate.
Such ignorance has at times issued in the evisceration of indigenous
cultures through the agency of Western boarding schools
for the young. Years spent on the Procrustean bed of Eurocentric
education inevitably spawn sterile hybrid cultures whose indigenous
memories and traditions have been obliterated or so denigrated 
as to no longer serve as trustworthy guides to life.
The indigenous cultures having been exorcised, the inrush of an 
incoherent concoction of values and orientations has produced
miserably dysfunctional communities whose condition is
worse now than before the “Good News” arrived.

Yet, as Jennifer Trafton reminds us in her article on Samuel
Fairbank, missionaries often got things right. It was the adaptation
of the kirttan (an indigenous style of teaching and singing) to
Christian purposes in the mid-nineteenth century that most
compellingly and effectively communicated the Gospel to the
people of Wadalé, India, resulting in what today is a socially
vibrant and predominantly Christian region. The story of
Fairbank’s agricultural work is a sober rebuke to doctrinaire
insistence on Rufus Anderson’s “self-supporting churches” ideal,
whatever the cultural and economic circumstances of a people.
Those subsisting as landless laborers, sharecroppers, or beggars,
whose destitution is compounded by droughts, blights, and
famines, have never well complied with the comfortable Western
missionary’s insistence that they be self-supporting. Something
more was needed—in Fairbank’s case industrial schools,
agricultural work, and English classes—so that Christian untouchables
might develop the capacity not merely to speak but to
be heard in their own voice.

In his essay “Christian Scholarship in Africa in the Twenty-first
Century,” appearing in the December 2001 issue of the Journal
of African Christian Thought, Andrew Walls noted that while the
health and survival of Christianity depend upon cross-cultural
diffusion, Christian conversion involves more than a cognitive
shift from incorrect to correct theological propositions. Any
transformative process aiming to redirect the breadth and width
and height and depth of a people’s culture toward Christ must
penetrate to the very DNA of that culture. And “deep translation,”
as he calls it, takes multiple generations to accomplish.

Walls went on in the same article to make the startling
prediction that if such qualitative conversion occurs in African
societies, “we may see something like what appeared in the third,
fourth and fifth centuries. We may see a great creative development
of Christian theology; new discoveries about Christ that
Christians everywhere can share; mature, discriminating standards
of Christian living; people and groups responding to the
gospel at the deep level of understanding and personality; a long-term
Christ-shaped imprint on the thinking of Africa . . . a new
stage in the church’s growth toward the full stature of Christ.”
Walls warned, however, that if this deep translation does not
occur, if African Christianity is but the hollow echo of European
Christian forms and theological formulations, “we shall see
distortion, confusion, uncertainty and, almost certainly, hypocrisy
on a large scale” (p. 46).

“Finding our own voice” and “hypocrisy on a large scale”
represent poles at either end of the Christian conversion continuum.
The latter requires only a few years, or perhaps a decade
or two, while the former consumes many generations. The second
pole quickly translates into the church growth figures so
craved by our measurement-driven culture, while the first represents
a sustained, complicated, sometimes controversial process
that eventually touches the very heart of a culture and transforms
its every fiber. The second may be a resurfacing of the same
fatally flawed proselytizing as practiced by those whom our
Lord accused of crossing “sea and land to make a single convert,”
and then making “the new convert twice as much a child of hell”
as they themselves (Matt. 23:15), while the first contributes richly
to “building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to . . . the
measure of the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:12–13). Not shallow
hypocrisy but authentic conversion should be our object, an
aspiration that we think you will agree is modestly supported by
this issue of the IBMR.

Contents 

115 Finding Our Own Voice: The Reinterpreting of Christianity by Oceanian Theologians
Charles W. Forman

123 “It Is Our Bounden Duty”: Theological
Contours of New Zealand’s Missionary
Movement, 1890–1930
Hugh Morrison

128 Women, Mission, and Medicine: Clara Swain, Anna Kugler, and Early Medical Endeavors in Colonial India
Maina Chawla Singh

130 Noteworthy

134 The Religious Worldview of the Indigenous Population of the Northern Ob’ as Understood by Christian Missionaries
Anatoliy M. Ablazhei; translated by
David N. Collins

139 My Pilgrimage in Mission
Gerald H. Anderson

140 John Paul II, 1920–2005;
Benedict XVI
Stephen Bevans, S.V.D.

144 The Legacy of Samuel Bacon Fairbank
Jennifer M. Trafton

150 The Legacy of John Duncan
John S. Ross

154 Book Reviews

166 Dissertation Notices

168 Book Notes