‘Death of Mission Schools’ represents the end of an era of missionary work of Protestant missions in the field of education and the values and witness they represented in a largely non-Christian world. This sort of being in the world as a Christian has often been described as ‘Christian Presence’. While being a negligible minority, the nascent Christian community that the missionaries had nurtured, with the mission schools and hospitals at the centre, became the visible face of Christ in the public life of the equally nascent independent nation-states like India and Taiwan, and wielded disproportionate influence over the social and political life of the respective countries in Asia, at times, even shaping their understanding of nationhood. The word ‘death’ definitely implies a sense of loss and nostalgia about the past, but it is inevitable; but how do we carry forward our educational mission in a radically different political, economic and social scenario informed by neo-liberalism.
It is important that we distinguish between the missions of the early modern period, represented pre-dominantly by Catholic missions, and the missions of later centuries represented pre-dominantly by Protestant missions. The early missions, which reached out to the entire world in the 16th Century, initiated by the Spaniards and followed by the Portuguese, were adjunct to a crass materialistic project of colonization and hence, it often entailed a forceful conversion of ‘heathens’ to Christianity. Mission followed the ‘conquistadors’ and often became the ideological means for supporting and providing legitimacy for conquest, though we find certain lone voices among the missionaries who questioned such ‘missionary conquests.’ As the reading of the Bible and interpreting it were the special prerogatives of the ecclesiastics and anathema to the laity, intellectual engagement with and assent of the native population, who were considered lesser than humans, was least important for the early missions. They had other persuasive devices to deal with conversion to Christianity.