| Posted January 4, 2021 | By Douglas Tzan | Categorized under Missiology and Media |

Like many Americans, I enjoyed and appreciated the musical Hamilton and was excited when it became available to watch on Disney+, the cost of tickets to a live show being exorbitant.  Although Alexander Hamilton, played by the musical's creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, is the title character of the popular musical, while watching the performance, I came to appreciate that Miranda actually puts the focus on many other characters in the story.  The musical is about Hamilton, but we learn about that founding father primarily through his relationships with other people. 

Occasionally, Hamilton sings about himself, but more often, we see Hamilton through the eyes of others.  Aaron Burr narrates the musical and describes their parallel careers.  Sister-in-law Angelica Schuyler sings of the Hamilton she knew and loved.  Thomas Jefferson sings of the Hamilton he worked with and hated.  Hamilton's Revolutionary friends brag that future generations will remember the story of their relationship.  Notably, Hamilton's wife, Eliza, after she learns of an affair, declares she is "erasing herself from the narrative" so the story of their relationship will not be told.  In the context of the musical, some of Hamilton's actions and deeds are related, some of his ideas are mentioned, and the Revolutionary context is presented, but the story told is one of relationships. 

Hamilton is a work of historical fiction, but it offers an illustration of a tantalizing area of development in historiography of Christian missions.  What might the history of Christian missions look like through the lens of actual, lived human relationships?  Everyone familiar with mission history is familiar with the different forms it has taken over the years.  There have been those (too often hagiographic) biographies that have told a story of deeds and actions undertaken by missionaries.  Other histories focus on the missiology and theological ideas held and conveyed by missionaries and how those ideas have been received.  Still other works focus on the larger cultural, political, and religious context in which Christian mission has occurred.  Except for the hagiographic narratives, each of those historiographical approaches has its place, and the best examples of the genre address more than one area. 

Intentionally putting actual human relationships in the foreground of mission history would offer a different view on history.  To do so would require several things such as embracing a social historical approach recognizing that no two relationships are alike and that relationships change over time.  It would also require an awareness that relationships often embody and sometimes subvert ideologies and power dynamics derived from the cultural and social context. 

Perhaps the biggest challenge to using relationships as a way of exploring mission history is that history as a discipline must be grounded in solid source material.  Unlike Miranda, historians don't have the freedom to tell historical fiction.  Here, I suspect that in some instances, it is not that sources don't exist to explore different relationships, it's just that no one has looked for them.  Researching my recent book on Methodist missionary William Taylor (William Taylor and the Mapping of the Methodist Missionary Tradition: The World His Parish, Lexington Books, 2019), I was able to uncover many new sources about Taylor life and work by intentionally exploring his interpersonal relationships.  If Taylor mentioned a name in his writing, I searched to see if that person had left behind any published memoirs or archival material.  Those that I found, I looked for and often found references to Taylor.  I also researched the contexts around the world in which he worked to find other source material that might illuminate his story from a different angle, such as newspaper articles and writings of others who happened to be in those same settings at the same time.  By taking seriously relationships Taylor mentioned, I was able to discover some important sources that offered insight into how those relationships shaped Taylor's ministry.  For example, I discovered how the assassination of a friend in San Francisco prompted Taylor to write his first book. 

Without source material, however, some gaps in the narrative cannot be overcome.  Such lacunae have to stand, as is.  All perceptive readers of my book will wonder what Taylor's wife, Isabelle Anne (Kimberlin) Taylor, thought of her husband's exploits around the world while he effectively abandoned her and their children to become a global evangelist and missionary.  All I can say is, I wonder too.  I was able to find precious few sources to document her actions, thoughts, and experience.  Likewise, indigenous voices on the impact of Taylor's ministry were also hard to find and mediated through western sources.  However, such gaps and problems in source material will not surprise anyone who has worked with primary sources on mission history. 

My own experience leads me to suspect that relationships between different missionaries may be the most likely area to find source material.  Different individuals serving in the same region with the same or different sending bodies have likely been preserved in some settings.  Likewise, sources may be available on the relationships between missionaries and colonial administrators, as both church and governmental bureaucracies often generated documentation.  Internal mission documents could illuminate relationships between specific missionaries and their translators, cultural intermediaries, or other people employed by missions.  Again, my own experience makes me think familial relationships will be the most opaque, because the mundane and intimate nature of daily family life rarely generates durable records.  Day to day interactions of missionaries and indigenous persons would also be unlikely to generate records. 

One of the benefits of this potential approach to the history of Christian mission would be that it follows the lead of other missiological reflection.  The importance of relationships in missiology is nothing new.  Donald McGavran famously called them "bridges of God."  As the title of Dana Robert's recent book, Faithful Friendships, suggests, cross-cultural friendships offer a particular form of relationship as a way of thinking about Christian mission. 

The closing song of Hamilton! is titled "Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story."  In it, Eliza Hamilton declares she will, "[P]ut myself back in the narrative" by interviewing her late husband's comrades, exploring his writing, and seeking to continue his legacy.  In a sense, she puts their relationship back at center of her own story.  In the end, historians have the chance to do something similar and have the privilege of offering an answer to at least the third of those questions.  We get to choose the stories we will tell about the history of Christian mission and how we will tell those stories.  Perhaps within the rich tapestry of human relationships we can find new dimensions of historical knowledge to explore.