Being in Relation: A Critical Appraisal of Religious Diversity and Mission Encounter in Madagascar

Abstract:This article presents a relational perspective on religious diversity and encounter. It argues that a relational perspective helps overcome notions of religious diversity that tend to be reductionist and rather static because they conceptualize diversity as the many subforms of a single instance or the parts of a whole. Accordingly, the article questions such notions and instead proposes to study the multiple relations in and through which religious actors and settings are constituted. The example of current mission work of a Nigerian Pentecostal church in Madagascar shows how religious actors and communities can be understood as products of continuous relational processes. Mission encounters are no longer viewed as encounters between discrete entities but as specific meshwork. To rethink diversity and mission encounters in relational terms not only takes up ideas of relational being in Madagascar but may also give new impulses to debates on religious exchange in plural contexts.