Abstract
In this volume, Birgit Herppich evaluates the ways missionary training processes prepare candidates for intercultural encounters. The focus of her investigation is the Basel Mission Training Institute (BMTI), the missionary training program for the Basel Mission. The school reflected a German Pietist emphasis with a missional focus to train European missionaries toward Christianization efforts outside the European continent.
BMTI was founded as an institution “focused on formation of shared ideas of character and specific practices as well as intellectual learning” (p. 32). Utilizing the educational concept of “communities of practice” and the sociological concept of “trained incapacities,” Herppich offers a thorough investigation in the ways a community of practice receives “trained incapacities” that contribute to rigid structures, inflexible ideals, and cultural maladjustment.
Part one explores German Pietist spirituality that formed the foundations of missionary training processes in BMTI, with an emphasis on Pietist missiology, theology, and ministry practice. In her research, Herppich discovered that BMTI training processes led to hierarchical structures that served as unfortunate paradigms and, when replicated, proved detrimental to field-based ministry. The ideals of education as transformation, personal conversion, and sanctification reinforced rigid criteria that created boundaries for community participation.
In Part two, the author examines BMTI’s graduates as they encounter Ghanaian and West Africa culture. She found that cultural and religious similarities in the candidates “community of practice” led to processes of trained incapacities “that have strong propensity to establish inflexible mental frameworks of theological assumptions and social ideals that are potentially detrimental to intercultural engagement” (p. 4). Such trained incapacities inadequately prepared graduates for the stress of new cultural confrontations. The product was a Christianization process, which included replicating European culture, a general team dysfunction through a lack of collaboration, and personal convictions stated as universal truth.
Mission executives, program directors, and academicians will find much to glean from this volume. It is carefully researched and documented throughout. Herppich’s study stimulates a wary assessment for its readership to analyze training processes with a recognition that such programs need to reflect in some way the tentative ambiguity of intercultural encounters and prepare candidates for such uncertainties. Recognition of the inherent pitfalls in such encounters might potentially evoke a more careful investment in training programs that develop appropriate capacities reflective of pluralistic contexts. Potential missionaries might then be enabled to avoid replicating the “pitfalls of trained incapacity” Herppich so eloquently portrays.