School of Mission and Theology has since 1843 been part of a global project, to negotiate religious truth and religious practise in a pluralist world. This research group aims at gaining new insight into the processes that make human beings transform their cultural surroundings through religiously motivated rituals and actions. The modern mission movement was a central globalization-agent, and insight into the historical processes that re-shaped religious and cultural practices in the global South needs to be developed. To some extent this movement was about transferring and transforming mental ideas, but even more it was embodied through the men and women who crossed borders in order to develop spatial relationship with the people they encountered. Relationships which initiated new rituals, started ‘long conversations,’ and slowly transformed religious beliefs and cultural practises. The mission movement did, however, not only change ‘the other’, it changed and continues to change the ‘self’ of the West and its cultures. This project therefore focuses on aspects of gender, self-narration, and ethics connected to the mission-project, in terms of word and diaconia, message and media.

This project has a wide geographical approach, but carries a particular focus on African churches, where two tendencies are emerging. On the one hand the NGO-ification of mainline churches chained to Western partners, and on the other hand charismatic movements, growing at an intense speed, beyond the control of any mother church in the North. To what extent are the practices of these churches motivated by global trends and to what extent by local initiative?

The globalization of religious movements also has moved the South to the North. To understand how human beings construct meaning under new social and spatial conditions will be the focus of another part of the project which analyse how Muslims in the North negotiate narratives, rituals and beliefs in Western mental and physical surroundings.

The group includes three sub-projects:

1. Growing up as Missionary Children
2. Mission and Diaconia
3. Negotiating Religion in Local Contexts in a Globalized World

Projects and participants

Activities

Publications