Dr Elizabeth Koepping, Centre
for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World, Edinburgh.
E-mail:
E.Koepping@ed.ac.uk
Abstract
This paper, derived from long term field work with rural and urban Kadazan of Sabah, Malaysia, discusses the process of mission as experienced by villagers in eastern Sabah, Malaysia over the last forty years, especially the intellectual conflict between the increasingly authoritative introduced and the local Kadazan theology. All villagers are Christian. Some are dissatisfied with what they see as the refusal of the Anglican church to acknowledge the religious validity of Kadazan thought and allow them to work out/through the relations between the systems in a way which honours ancestral teaching and personal perceptions of village life. They find the underlying assumption of the church outmoded and unacceptable – and this depends less on a person’s level of education or secularisation than on their attitudes to the performance of Kadazan identity. The mission process has been made more tense by the evolving nature of Sabah Anglican witness which has become increasingly fundamentalist and authoritarian.
This issue is of general interest, for while it is increasingly common in certain mainline churches to regard inculturation, seen as slow contestation and negotiation between religious systems based on mutual respect, as a necessary and normal part element involved in internalising Christianity into context, this has not always been the case, nor is it in certain more fundamentalist denominations today. Even where local theologies are seen as a “preparatio evangelia,” and therefore not demonised, some of those being converted may still see this as patronising denegration of their way of being a person, especially if mission practice still means the effective elimination of local theologies. It is, moreover, easy for mission workers to use metaphors which may imply less that Christ is Light and more that the missionised live in darkness. The more confident Kadazan Christian, on the other hand, feels that the peaceful and respectful coexistence of two theologies is preferable to the eradication of one, and that if this is to happen, mission needs renovation.