Missiology postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in missiology grew out of a fairly ordinary question I could not answer well. While writing my undergraduate dissertation on hymnody in Nigerian churches after independence, I kept finding congregations singing translated Victorian hymns alongside newly composed songs in Yoruba, sometimes in the same service. I had expected a story of replacement, and instead found negotiation. That pushed me towards the wider literature on world Christianity, and to Lamin Sanneh's argument in Translating the Message that Christian mission has characteristically been translatable, with vernacular translation unsettling the cultural authority of the missionary. Reading Sanneh alongside Andrew Walls on the tension between what he calls the indigenising and pilgrim principles gave me a vocabulary for what I had been describing clumsily. I want to study missiology formally because I now have questions I cannot resolve by reading around the edges of a theology degree.

My degree gave me the groundwork. Alongside biblical studies and systematic theology, I took options in the history of Christianity outside Europe and in the sociology of religion, and I have enough New Testament Greek to work slowly through a text with a lexicon. The dissertation taught me most: I worked with printed hymnbooks in a university special collections room, a denominational magazine archive available online, and two recorded interviews with older members of my own congregation who remembered mission schools. Handling those interviews responsibly was harder than I anticipated. People remembered the same institutions very differently, sometimes with real affection and real resentment at once, and I had to write in a way that did not flatten that. It left me interested in oral testimony as a source for mission history, and aware that I need proper training in research ethics and method.

Since graduating I have worked three days a week as an administrator for a small church in the city centre. The job is unglamorous: room bookings, gift aid returns, the weekly notices, chasing a boiler engineer. But it has given me a close view of a congregation where members come from perhaps a dozen countries, and where questions that appear in the literature as theory appear in practice as decisions about which language the intercessions are read in, or whether a Sunday afternoon Tamil service counts as part of the same church or a tenant. I have sat in meetings where people disagreed sincerely and thoughtfully about that. I have also learned to listen in a setting where I have no authority, which I suspect is useful preparation.

Outside work I share the care of my grandmother with my aunt, taking Saturdays and some evenings. She grew up in a church shaped by mission schooling and talks about it without nostalgia or bitterness, which has quietly corrected some of my assumptions. I also help run a weekly English conversation group at a community centre, mostly with recently arrived residents. It is ordinary volunteering, but it has made me cautious about the word contextualisation when it is used as though cultures were settled and separate.

For postgraduate study I would like to work on migration and congregational life in British cities, particularly how diaspora congregations understand their own sending and belonging. I am equally keen to be taught properly in mission history, theology of religions and qualitative method, and to have my current reading tested rather than confirmed. Longer term I am considering doctoral research, though I would want a taught year to establish whether my questions hold up.