| This study seeks to discern the meaning of incarnational ministry and the influences that encourage and discourage it from the perspective of the literature, the organization, and, in particular, the Southern Baptist missionaries of East Asia. Biblically, incarnational ministry is founded in the Incarnation of the Son of God and takes as its model the way Jesus lived among us. Missiologically, missionary identification is supported as the means of breaking the host culture's stereotype of missionaries in order to establish person-to-person relationships of mutual understanding through which the gospel can flow. Anthropologically, missionary identification finds a correlate in the homophilus nature of the change agent and the receptor-oriented approach to communication.; Missiologically, the bi-cultural bridge between missionary and host cultures is a powerful influence that can engage much of the missionaries' time and energy, potentially keeping them from direct encounter with the host culture. Anthropologically, the structure of status and role exerts a powerful influence upon the communication between missionaries and their hosts. Missionaries must therefore strive to discover the type of roles that enhance person-to-person communication.; Organizationally, the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention supports incarnational ministry on a philosophical level but lacks clear incentives for implementing it. Incarnational ministry is therefore left mainly to a missionary's personal choice. According to missionaries, the most concrete affirmation of missionary identification from the Foreign Mission Board is the language learning program and its required language standards that one must fulfill.; According to the analysis of missionary interviews and questionnaires, there are three spheres of influence upon missionaries in implementing incarnational ministry: the organizational, the cross-cultural, and the personal with a number of factors associated with each. The net affect of the messages from these different spheres of influence is a sense of "mixed messages," or tension between these different influences. This study concludes by offering recommendations for resolving this tension between these various "mixed messages."... |
