Mission, Da’wah and Enculturation

Mission or da’wah (proselytising) by religious followers has a sensi- tive meaning, namely the contestation between religious institutions. In history, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are ways of life based on the scripture of each religious faith. And these Semitic religions in their different ways share a vision of salvation among all peoples. Both Christi- anity and Islam are missionary religions. Deeply rooted in the Christian religion is the occupation of missionaries to embrace many peoples who never understood any religious values. Equally in Islam, da’wah is the duty of Muslims to spread their religious values to peoples across many regions. If each religion lacked these mission and da’wah values, they would just grow up around and be confined to the Middle East.

The spiritual and human values at the heart of these faiths are re- sources pushing them beyond their original “homelands”. Factually, however, the mission of religious followers can be the occasion of prejudice and stereotypes in the public sphere and local communities.

Mission from Europe, America and other areas is, in a certain sense, the other side of colonialism. Mission and da’wah have the ulterior meaning to relate power and spirituality in the case of colonial and postcolonial peoples.

The basic Islamic idea of da’wah is derived from “the inviting to all”, the holy spirit among religious followers. David A Kerr says that da’wah has variant translations. “The first treats the whole community as the subject of ‘inviting’, meaning that da’wah is a collective responsibility. The second interprets community

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in the restrictive sense of ‘a band of people’… that undertakes the ‘responsibility’ of inviting on behalf of the rest of the community” (Kerr,

2000: 151). 4 The inviting mission to embrace many people to engage with a certain religion is the basic idea of the proselytising process. To spread the values of religion, Christian missionaries use cultural strategies to approach local people and native communities. Encultura- tion is a pattern to transform their agenda into the cultural context, within a certain ideological mission to emphasise Christian values and to engage with local communities. Knighton (2007, in Wisjen 2007: 63) wrote that Christian enculturation “is presented as a missiological model which can foster the confidence and morale of the Two-Thirds World churches to work out their own salvation. It is not only individuals that are acculturated into society, but also religious traditions. Until these are taken in and absorbed by a particular culture, they remain powerless to transform it, except superficially or destructively. Christian enculturation is a way for mission to realise a vernacular church of the people in a vast range of contexts, including the One-Third World, that do not de- pend on swallowing whole a history of Western ideas.”

Based on the ethic of religious mission, the Christian religion en- courages prosperity and peace and makes a deal with the culture sphere. Vatican II said that Christian religious mission “can be a source of commitment, direction, and vigour” in building up the human community and in initiating action “for the benefit of everyone, especially those in need” (Gaudium et Spes, cited by Hollenbach 2002: 107). The con- cept of prosperity in religious mission as the passion of religious followers in the sphere of society and make a dialogue with local cultures.

Hollenbach (2002: 108) said that churches and other religious communities are “uniquely positioned to make contributions to sustaining a vision of the common good and to empowering their members to partic-

Kerr is writing of variant translations of a text from the Qur’an: Sura Al Imran (Q3:104).

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ipate in the pursuit of the common good”. Thus, these are basic values in understanding religious mission in the stage of enculturation of mission.

Knighton (in Wisjen 2007: 63) says that enculturation “also includes assimilating elements, in and into, [one’s] culture without intuition, such as new music, dialect, or the habits of younger or older generation. As many members of society take minute decisions in favour of an innovation, so it gradually becomes accepted as a trait of their culture. A new tradition has been accepted and culture changes to fit it in to its dynamic pattern. Christian enculturation is the process by whereby Christian faith, as brought together by a belief in Trinity and Incarnation… is re- cruited by innovation into a culture.” Nevertheless, the enculturation process in certain places may use traditional approaches to encourage education as a spirit to spread religious values (Astley & Francis, 1994; Dé Ishtar, 2005).

Wolterstorff (Moltmann et al., 1998: 80) writes: “Always a person’s Christian enculturation will intersect and interact with other modes of cultural formation.” That points to interacting processes and intersec- tions of space around the cultural dimension within enculturation strategies towards native people. Elsewhere, Antonio says that enculturation is engaged with postcolonial discourse in the field of meaning and his- torical approach. Enculturation is “a term that derives from cultural an- trophology in which it is employed to describe the ‘process by which an individual acquires the mental representations (beliefs, knowledge and so forth) and patterns of behaviour required to function as a member of a

culture’” (Antonio, 2006). 5

In the case of Christianity, mission does not break with the colonial occupations and the subsequent idea of converting many people as the

Antonio is quoting here the definition in Barfield, Thomas (ed.), A Dictionary of Cultural Anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Inculturation, Antonio adds, is used more narrowly: as a theological term to describe the incarnation of the Christian life and message in a particular cultural context through elements proper to that culture. Inculturation presupposes enculturation.

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mission of certain empires. The heritage of colonial mission is important for Christian followers until now. So colonialism and the proselytising agenda are important issues in the context of interreligious dialogue.

In Islam, da’wah is the important duty of mission based on the Qur’an and the Hadith. But da’wah is different from the jihad as understood in present days, which refers to violence and discrimination. Thus, da’wah is the religious impulse to spread the message, promise and peaceful condition among religious followers. The mission of both religions is, admittedly, vulnerable to prejudice and violence.

Beyond the cases of the Keo and Ganjuran Church, the case of the Batak people makes an interesting comparison in analysing the pattern of enculturation of Christian mission. “The Batak people who dwelled in the area around Lake Toba for thousands of years form one tribal group made up of several members: Toba, Mandailing-Angkola, Simalungan, Karo and Pak-pak. Each of these has own distinctive characteristics, such as language and dialect, tribal law and social structure, yet they also share similarities as well, such as clan traditions, patterns related to the basis of the family, i.e, dalihan no tolu, and belief systems which formed a unity with all aspects of life” (Aritonang, 1994: 1-2).

In the context of contestation between Christian and Islamic missionaries, the relation between religious mission and cultural approach is therefore important. Aritonang (1994: 114) writes: “The [Christian] missionaries’ negative evaluation and attitude toward Islam, its teachings and sometimes towards Muslims themselves, gave rise to a violent reac- tion on the part of the Batak Islamic community. Not only that, but it stimulated among them a determination and enthusiasm to counterbal- ance mission activities by carrying out their own dakwah (missionary obligation to non-Muslims) to the heart of the Batak area in Silindung and Toba, an initiative which had been undertaken by the Paderi movement before. From the period of the movement’s fading and the coming of missionaries about 1840-1860, the desire to fulfill the dakwah was

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not particularly evident since there was no competition with other religions.”

Mission, Da’wah and Enculturation