Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | Januar/2018 |
Spalte: | 152–153 |
Kategorie: | Interkulturelle Theologie, Missionswissenschaft |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Plake, John Farquhar |
Titel/Untertitel: | Missionary Expatriate Effectiveness. How Personality, Calling, and Learned Competencies Influence the Expatriate Transitions of Pentecostal Missionaries. |
Verlag: | Leiden u. a.: Brill 2016. 272 S. = Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies, 20. Kart. EUR 55,00. ISBN 978-90-04-31381-1. |
Rezensent: | Oleg Dik |
John Farquhar Plake’s new monograph fits within the genre of books which seek to evaluate and improve the expatriate effectiveness. P.’s particular contribution lies in explicating a theory of missionary expatriate effectiveness, which, as he claims, has been implicit in missiological literature. Hereby, he employs empirical research among Pentecostal leadership and 949 missionaries work-ing in 127 nations from Assemblies of God World Missions (AGWM) in order to test the validitiy of current theories. P. defines missionary expatriate effectiveness as »covariance shared by adjustment, work engagement, and job performance among missionaries.« A former missionary himself and presently adjunct professor of missions and intercultural studies at Evangel University, a Pentecostal institution in Midwestern United States, P. seeks to improve the practice of missionaries to communicate the Christian message cross culturally. Thus, his study might be of particular interest for missiologists and leaders of mission agencies who seek to improve the performance of missionaries.
P. assumes that there is no fundamental conflict between theology and social sciences and employs methodologies across disci-plines of sociology, human resource management, theology and psychology. In the first part of his study, P. reviews the current theories in social sciences and theology concerning expatriate ef-fectiveness and missionary expatriate effectiveness. He views ex-patriate effectiveness as a more general category which serves him as a lens through which he views missionary expatriate effectiveness. In the empirical part of his study, P. employs qualitative research methods such as semi structured interviews with 35 re-gional and area directors. Then, switching to quantitative methodology, he employs a standard questionnaire with 949 missionaries from which he draws general conclusions.
P. analyzes his findings and gives his missionary expatriate effectiveness theory a statistical underpinning. In the final chapter, he demonstrates how missionary expatriate effectiveness is influenced by stable dispositions, dynamic competencies, calling and control variables. Stable dispositions refer the five psychological traits: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism and openness. Dynamic competencies refer to intercultural dy-namics such as cultural flexibility, ethnocentrism and people orientation. Considered control variables are cultural distance, educa-tion, gender, years abroad and years in work nation. P. concludes, based on his empirical findings that despite the significant role of personality profile and divine calling for missionaries, it is dynamic competencies like intercultural dynamics, which have a primary effect on missionary expatriate effectiveness. The practical implication of P.’s research is that missionary expatriate effectiveness is not determined but can be acquired through a dynamic intercultural engagement. Thus the primary task of mission agencies and theological institutions is not to filter out those missionaries deemed to be incapable, but to enable them in missionary expatriate effectiveness, which is a skill and therefore can be learned through practice and reflection.
While P. employs a rigorous empirical methodology to ground the concept of missionary expatriate effectiveness, he only briefly touches on basic presuppositions, which guide his view. As Gadamer rightly pointed out, the questions sketch out the horizons of our answers. P. is concerned with immanent causes due to his underlying question concerning the effective development of missionaries. However, as a Pentecostal Christian himself, he also acknowledges in the same breath, that the Holy Spirit continuously intervenes into the immanent sphere. Pentecostals embody this tension between continuous intervention of divine agency and predictable immanent causes. Thus, an interesting question on the nature of human agency emerges. In particular, how the methodology of social science, which aims at capturing the repetitive and controllable, can be related to the theological assumption of the uncontrollable agency of the Holy Spirit.
Assuming a harmonious relationship between social science and Pentecostal theology, P. demonstrates that a practical question in missiological praxis can be pursued through sociological methods. However, he does not touch on the deeper ontological questions, which resurface throughout his book. A secular social scientist reading this book might follow the method while not agreeing with the theological presuppositions which require further explication. German recipients, both secular academics and theologians influenced by Karl Barth, might feel unease about the ease with which P. seems to measure the unmeasurable.
I believe that also Pentecostal missionaries struggle with the question of immanent efficacy and divine agency which surpasses human possibilities. For many missionaries the question is more existential about the role of the Holy Spirit in the midst of their perceived ineffectiveness. The irony is, that while western Pentecostal academics seek evidence and predictability, secular anthropologists muse on the limits of meaning in describing paradoxes and fail-ures in the Pentecostal missionary engagement (Engelke and Tomlinson, 2006). A mission agency leader might agree with such Pentecostal presuppositions as God intervening into lives of missio-naries while failing to plow through the complex part of statistic surveys. Throughout his study P. touches briefly on more contextual interpretation of his findings, which could be developed further. However, the question remains whether a thicker cultural-anthropological grounding of the research question on the nature of effectiveness, the relation between leadership and missionaries and particular missionary struggle with missionary expatriate effectiveness would not enlighten P.’s concern more than a quan-titative structural approach. I believe that P.’s research deserves attention as he rightly attempts to bring to the light the implicit criteria of effectiveness in cross cultural missions. However, perhaps the questions which he implicitly raises rather than his results will provoke a more fruitful discussion.