Mission
and Memory
A century ago 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America;
today 60 percent live in the Southern Hemisphere. Yet the tools, institutions,
and scholarly resources requisite to memory preservation—libraries, archives,
and publications—are found primarily in nations whose combined Christian
populations are of diminishing global significance.
This concern drew some fifty librarians, archivists, and scholars of mission
studies to Rome in 2002 for a conference sponsored by the International
Association for Mission Studies and the International Association of
Catholic Missiologists. The conference, called “Rescuing the Memory of
Our Peoples,” generated an ongoing series of oral-history workshops and
archival seminars in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Perhaps more than is usually the case, this issue of the IBMR is about
memory. Nothing distinctively human—personal and collective identities,
languages, social and material traditions, or religions—can exist apart
from the gift of memory. Always selective, sometimes distorted, inevitably
partial, and at times falsified, memory is nevertheless our lifeline for holding
on to these distinctives. Jehu Hanciles suggests that Western mission archives
have never been up to the task of telling the story of the African church. The
preserved letters and reports of foreign missionaries, written with an eye to
supporters and administrators back home, only touch the surface of African church
history. Not surprisingly, Africans and missionaries who occupied the same space
and time do not remember the same thing. There is a growing awareness,
to use Hanciles’s words, that the construction of African church history has
long been in thrall to “exaggerated claims for the Western missionary movement
and European initiatives . . . so that the African (or non-Western) element has
been portrayed simply as passive, dependent, and exploited.”
In a similar vein, the Dictionary of African Christian Biography is showing that the
history of Christianity in Africa is much more than a mere footnote to the story of
the European military, economic, and political hegemony. The catechists and
evangelists chiefly responsible for the astonishingly dynamic church in that
continent are beginning to take their rightful place beside their earlier African
fathers: Agrippa Castor, Cyprian, Ambrosius, and the like.
Readers will be moved by Aylward Shorter’s account of Henri Marchal and his
humbly incarnated conviction that only a “covenant of love” for Muslims—
expressed through kindness, service, and quiet witness—could span the abyss
between them and God in Jesus Christ. And Jeffrey Klaiber’s short overview of
the Peru’s Truth Commission is an encouraging reminder of the palliative role
ordinary Christians have played in protecting and assisting victims of violence.
In his essay “Poetry and American Memory” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1999),
Robert Pinsky, America’s poet laureate from 1997 to 2000, observed that “a
people is defined and unified not by blood but by shared memory,” and that
“deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.”
Our Christian story attests this to be so.
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