Anthropological foundation of mission

The word “mission” in ordinary usage means “sent”. A missionary in this context is a person who is sent by somebody or a community. The subject of mission thus becomes a human person(anthropos).The message that the missionary carries is a “statement of purpose”. To deliver the message, the one sent needs the gift of communication and dialogue to properly carry out the message of the sender. The content of the message requires a “mission statement”. In management,this is a statement of the purpose of a company, organization or person. The mission statement guides the actions of the organization, spell out its overall goal, provide a path, and guide decision-making. It provides the framework or context within which the company’s strategies are formulated. It is a goal for what the company wants to do for the world (Hill, Charles; Jones, Gareth, Strategic Management: An Integrated Approach (Mason, OH: South-Western Educational Publishing, 2008, page 11).

According to Bart (1997), the commercial mission statement consists of three essential components. (1) Key market, that is “who is your target client or customer” (2) Contribution, that is “what product or service do you provide to that client?” (3) Distinction that is, “what makes your product or service unique, so that the client would choose you?” The primary target of religious mission is the human person (with body and soul) who is to receive the message of salvation. In Christianity, Jesus Christ is the custodian of this message that is meant for the whole world (Ad Gentes). This message is the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand (Mark 1:15) with this powerful mission statement of Jesus Christ:“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind,to set the oppressed free,to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour” (Luke 4:18-19). To carry out this mission, the word became flesh (incarnation) and this defined the anthropological nature of Jesus.

Jesus came to give life so he did not need to kill to convert people of other religions. He did not use violence to reach his target client. His key market strategy was rather to pay a ransom for humanity with his life. The product he provided for his client was human dignity. He served in a way and manner that everyone who accepted him through a dialogue of encounter was saved. What made the product and service of Jesus unique was his witness of life. Jesus is a role model, the prince of peace and the embodiment of a perfect human person. Jesus is a model of humanity to his followers.

Missionaries are witnesses to the life, suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Christian missionis “an organized effort for the propagation of the Christian faith” (“Mission”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Retrieved 8 January 2013), that often involves sending individuals and groups to foreign countries and to places in their homeland for the purpose of conversion to Christianity, or from one Christian tradition to another. This technically, is called mission ad extra or mission ad gentes. This mission includes evangelization and humanitarian work especially among the poor and disadvantaged.

The implication of the Christian mission is that a missionary must be an evangelized evangelizer who needs self-awareness, selfrediscovery, internal conviction about life and the faith he or she is sent to administer to others in words and deeds. The missionary must know his or her target and the message he or she is exporting to the recipients of the gospel message. Although the missionary is a human being like every other person, he or she must be different in the control of temperaments, emotions and relationships. This is why a missionary needs to study or have some knowledge of the anthropological foundation for mission using Jesus as a model.

A missionary who knows himself or herself is in a better position to understand others. Without self-knowledge, he may end up like a medical doctor who treats the symptoms of an ailment instead of the real illness. Sometimes the human person does not even properly understand himself or herself. Thus Socrates calls for a study of self and examination of consciousness since an unexamined life is not worth living (http://www. newphilosopher.com). In the world today, mission cannot be separated from dialogue hence the need for intra-personal dialogue, interpersonal dialogue, inter-cultural dialogue, inter-ethnic dialogue and inter-religious dialogue.

Religion is incarnated in the culture and world view of a people hence the human person and his cultural milieu cannot be ignored financially and in the effort of promoting peaceful coexistence. God reveals himself to a people in their own context using what is meaningful to the people to reveal his divine essence. Jesus used the custom and traditions of the Jews to reveal the Triune God. When the Church moved to Rome, the Christian Religion was proclaimed to the Hellenistic world in their own categories using the Platonic and Aristotelian schema. The knowledge of God, the awareness of his presence and the ultimate union with God is the essence of life on earth. In Christian Anthropology, Jesus is the perfect revelation of God and humanity. He is the absolute testimony to authentic mission and dialogue.

In many parts of Africa and elsewhere in the world, life is defined within the context of ethnicity and religion. This has to a great extent polarized the politics of many nations such that if a person needs something or does something wrong the person is described within the context of his or her religion. Consequently within the context of dialogue, a lot of factors come into play in understanding a partner in dialogue. The events surrounding the birth of a person (heritage at birth); the environment and life pattern of the people (cultural heritage) and the religion of the parents (religious heritage) contribute immensely to the perception of a partner in dialogue. Here a partner in dialogue is a human being with whom you share different ideology, faith and culture.

When religion is incarnated in the cultural values that promote life and human dignity, respect for life could be guaranteed. In this context we can introduce the