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The modern missionary movement has contributed profoundly not only to changing the religious topography of this globe—approximately one‐third of the world’s population is Christian now—but also, often enough, it has changed the social topography as well. Missionary activity is still one of the major agents of global transformation in the twentieth century. This paper looks at some of the driving machines of transformation, namely the images, visions, and concepts of time, space and global social change that were produced within the missionary movement as part of its spiritual topography. Three motivational trends are identified, each of which represents a fundamentally different way of approaching non‐western space and time and thus leads to different models of missionary social intervention: the emancipative‐integrationist approach, the racist‐imperialistic attitude, and the egalitarian‐inversionist trend. The overall findings of this paper are, perhaps, more or less ambivalent: visions of human salvation and global social change, missionary or other, are historically powerful. Necessary as they are for the life of humankind, global visions ought to be handled with care. They need to be tested and discussed, particularly with those who are targeted.
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