ABSTRACT

In a comprehensive understanding, mission drives multifaceted and reciprocal religious change on the individual, social, cultural, political, and economic levels and oscillates between regional and transregional dynamics. Notwithstanding, Christian missions also contributed to a changing self-awareness within non-Christian religions, including what some have come to call ‘primal’ religions, which led to modern missionary activities of their own. Missionary activities are part of reciprocal transcultural religious interactions and entanglements. They are infused with powerful interests that comprise not only the ability to assert the missionary religion or religious tradition, but also the ability to modify the shape of open or hidden acts of resistance, of camouflage, of hybrid contestations, or of the revitalization of the local pre-missionary religious traditions. Contemporary Christian missiology discourse discusses the perception of mission as a transcultural phenomenon, along with models of acculturation, accommodation, inculturation, or contextualization.