Missionaries constantly struggle with misperceptions caused by ideas and understandings that they brought from home, some of which lie deep within their worldview. One foundational assumption posits the existence of persons according to substance, not according to relationship. It seldom occurs to the missionary that there might be other ways of understanding persons. It turns out that every culture has a folk sociology to account for things like, but not exactly like, individual, self, and society. How people perceive themselves and their world provides the context for ministry, if we can only discover how person and sociality are constructed.
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