In your opinion, Brian, where are we now in world missions? Are we in a good place, a bad place? What, what do you see and feel?

Well, I think we're in a transitional phase.

Um, you know, the currents are flowing in many different directions.

Um, and it's not always easy to make sense of that complexity.

Uh, but I'm sure in the long run, that's a good thing.

Um, but maybe we paid the price for that in terms of you rarely get any

anyAny real reference to the church overseas in worship services and so on.

I think you can criticize the American usage from a different angle because missions tend still to mean what we do as North Americans, what we go out and do to the rest of the world.

[gentle music] Does it feel at times, uh, like maybe there's an, a bit of an overreaction to the ills of the missionary movement?

Yes, I think so.

Um, you know, the post-colonial mood of today, um, deals with passionate moral indignation.

Great.

Um, but actually, so did the missionaries [laughs] in the past.

They had their passionate moral indignation Um, and the post-colonial theory rarely makes distinctions between types of external influence.

You know, it talks about the colonial project as if it was one thing, and in fact, it was many different things.

Um-

Well, maybe that's going to open up new ways for us to think about and do cross-cultural mission.

With the advent of global media, social media, global music, the younger generation are increasingly... maybe not homogenized, but more homogenous than the older generation, who were perhaps more attached to more traditional cultural forms.

So wherever you go in the world, you tend to find generational arguments between Christians over what music should be sung, how it should be sung, what instruments you should use, etc., etc.

So you get into the whole subject of What do we mean by globalization? Does globalization necessarily mean everything becoming homogenous, the same? To an extent it does, but I think it's more complicated than that.

It's about the way in which the indigenous interacts with the global, and you get different amalgams coming out in different places.

So it's certainly a very different environment than it was kind of prior to this big

globalization push and prior to the Internet.

The

Going back to maybe missionaries who wanted to respect the indigenous cultures and learn and connect really with the individuals they were learning to love and to work with.

Yeah, and James Hudson Taylor came from a Methodist background in the north of England.

He went to China initially with a body called the Chinese Evangelization Society.

Later he set up his own mission, the China Inland Mission, which became the largest Protestant mission in China and which really dominated Chinese Protestant missions through to the end of the missionary era in 1949.

It still exists under a different name, the Overseas Missionary Fellowship, OMF.

Now Hudson Taylor was not very keen on the European presence in China because it was associated with the gunboats that used to sail up the great rivers trying to enforce opium on the Chinese market.

And he felt that was a very bad thing from the Christian point of view.

So, I wondered, aside from the moral issues that Neil spoke of, what were some examples of the ways missionaries pressed their culture onto others, and in what aspects did that bleed out?

So if enforcement doesn't change as well as what you've proposed, what's the point?

Well, this is, and there's a question here as well in relation to the powers the Garda have because Garda actually finished up in court a week ago facing charges on the fact that he pursued one of these scooters in Dublin and he found himself before the courts on it and was brought to court on it.

Now, subsequently the case was thrown out but the point is that Garda was trying to do his job so the Gardas need to have the powers.

I think there's a number of pieces to this and it's something that we haven't faced up to as a society over the last seven or eight years i see has become very very popular um the footpaths in fairness i do see the guards trying to keep them off the footpaths um you know but obviously they can't be everywhere all the time the guardie need the powers as well they have to have to pursue somebody which obviously they're in that precarious situation at the moment and i think the guard representative association has been out speaking on that and and they need to be supported with that but We can't have a situation where, you know, where there's these mechanically propelled vehicles, whether it's the e-bikes or whether it's the scooters that are flying around all over the place, sometimes with children on them, very young children on them.

You know, and some of them are very high powered.

Some of them are very, very high powered.

And I mean, you raised the question about the high and ellies.

He said, So are you satisfied with the response?

But there are still areas where I can grow from.

Yeah, I mean, one way of looking at it is to say that the past is another country.

That was a famous saying from a novelist, L.P. Hartley.

They do things differently there.

So a historian is a bit like a missionary or another cross-cultural traveler who, as they go into an alien culture, their first job is to observe and to try and understand before rushing to moral judgment.

It doesn't mean one abstains from all moral judgment, but one suspends it until one feels, I've got a reasonable understanding of why things work as they do here.

Until the 20th century, until the rise of social anthropology, cultural anthropology, you could arrange all human societies somewhere along a continuum from barbarism, paganism, heathenism to Christian civilization at the other end.

I'm wondering if you could maybe speak into or share a little bit about who he was and how he fits into the missionary movement.

How much do you know about this woman and her connections in the area?

Yes, good morning, Will, and good morning to your listeners.

With this woman, she worked in the incidental practice just across the road from my office here in Church Street.

They've been there a number of years.

They were there certainly a decade and a half.

They were a couple, a business couple, and lived together there.

The business was on the ground floor and there was accommodation there where they resided.

And I imagine it's the only thing people are talking about in the town today, is it?