Reading Faith in a Missionary Archive in the Soutpansberg, South Africa

ABSTRACT

The notion of faith, the fact that there is such a thing as an experience of faith, is shared by many different people, in many different kinds of religious and spiritual orientations. Faith as an experience and category of and for action has, to a large extent, been avoided as a phenomenon for study in the social sciences. This article is an attempt at exploring how to place faith back into the anthropological view of religious phenomena. It is a study of the work that faith does in the lives of those who hold faith by focusing on the particular geographical and historical location of the Lutheran church in the Soutpansberg, South Africa, which was founded by the Berlin Mission Society in the 1870s. A careful reading of the written missionary sources that are available for the study of mission Christianity allows the teasing out of indications on how Christians experienced faith. The paper argues that where first generation Christian women understood Christianity to mean severing their relationships from non-Christian family and friends, later generations of Christian women saw it as critical to integrate their Christianity into local family relationships and social structures.

Keywords:

• Mission
• religion
• Christianity
• Soutpansberg
• religious experience
• Berlin Mission Society
• South Africa
• reading the archive
• historical anthropology