Christian Mission Conferences Enabling Communication across Linguistic and Economic Divides, Focusing on Africa

Abstract

Language policies are partly responsible for today’s global economic inequalities and unbalanced dependencies. Colonialists’ carefully considered efforts at proscribing the spread of European languages (English), having failed, have left a severe dependency problem. Cultural gaps disappear when one language from one context is uniformly used for intercultural communication at conferences. Being constrained to the use of European languages is like a painful open wound that Africa has to live with, but which the Christian mission enterprise should bypass. Linguistic confusion should not deceive the mission community into thinking that the day of cross-cultural Christian mission is past.