Birth of administration

Yesterday I started reading a book on the roots of inculturation in the Church and was very surprised to see the book, chronicle the mission history of the Church in all its aspects, positive as well as negative. The Gospel Among the Nations: A Documentary History of Inculturation by Robert A. Hunt is virtually an encyclopedia of Church documents on mission and inculturation. But what I liked most of the book is its frank presentation of facts, quite a few of which are not so moral - or even Christian - but that's only retrospectively how we look at it. Those involved in the proclamation of the Gospel in its early days, went ahead thinking that what they did was the best.

I always kept wondering what could have been the root of this whole administration bit of it in the Church. This book offers a possible and quite convincing answer: When Europeans, convinced of sharing their personal faith through an individual witness, landed on the Asian soil, they found that personal faith made no sense to the people here. In most cultures, the European-style individualism simply did not exist. Hence early missionaries were pioneers in education, agriculture, development and creating small industries because these were both necessary to create an environment in which converts could survive, and because they helped fund the mission. This created tension as missionaries found themselves distracted from what they regarded as their primary evangelistic task in order to care for infrastructure development.

I guess that's how this whole process of 'administration' is today in indispensable element of religious life.