Director Marcus Grohmann: “The use of English hinders deep insights into other cultures”
The Alliance for Vulnerable Mission (AVM) is opening a new chapter. The network of mission reformers, founded years ago by Brit Jim Harries, is now registered as an association in Germany but continues to operate internationally. In this context, Marcus Grohmann took over the leadership from Harries as part of a three-member executive board.
These changes were celebrated in two virtual events (in English and German) with companions, interested parties, and multipliers from mission societies, churches, and missiologists. The founder, Dr. Jim Harries, who has been a Bible teacher in rural Kenya for 32 years, traced the beginnings of “Vulnerable Mission” through his life journey. Early experiences as a teacher of agriculture in Zambia made him realize that there are often tragic gaps in understanding between development workers and missionaries on one side and local communities on the other. Both the neglect of local languages in intercultural communication and the largely ignorant use of Western financial resources in the context of projects and relationships on the ground led him to a radical realization: “More important than learning agricultural skills for overcoming poverty are changes in people’s theology. Contributing to this sustainably, however, requires working exclusively in their mother tongues and refraining from using ‘superior’ material resources from outside in ministry.”
The new director, Marcus Grohmann, a German African studies scholar with a PhD in reconciliation research, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Beyers Naudé Center for Public Theology at Stellenbosch University. Based on his work in South Africa, he explains: “The use of former colonial languages conceals meanings and discourses that secularly influenced English cannot reproduce. Thus, people from the ‘West’ are denied deeper insights in many relationships with the Global South. These insights, however, are essential for appropriate contextualization of theology and sustainable long-term project success. Dependencies, wrong incentives and unintended consequences can also arise from so-called holistic mission. This is the case when funding from the West ends up inadvertently pressurising people to follow one’s agenda or if one ignores that in many holistically thinking societies, faith and material provision can hardly be separated.”
AVM sees itself in the interdenominational service of – especially Western – people and organizations who are concerned with reducing dominance and unhealthy dependencies in intercultural work. This is achieved through implementation of Vulnerable Mission, research and publications, as well as lectures and seminars. Since the work is internationally oriented, our events often take place online (e.g., as free webinars), and many resources on the website www.vulnerablemission.org are offered in several languages.
AVM is part of the Mission Commission of the World Evangelical Alliance, the mission umbrella organizations Global Connections in the UK and Missio Nexus in the US, as well as Micah Global.