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Lamin Sanneh is the D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity and professor of history at Yale Divinity School. Gambian born, Sanneh is descended from the nyanchos, an ancient African royal line. As such, his earliest education, in the Gambia, was with fellow chiefs' sons. Following graduation from the University of London with a Ph.D. in Islamic History, he taught at the University of Ghana and at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland. He served for eight years as Assistant and Associate Professor of the History of Religion at Harvard University, before moving to Yale University in 1989. The author of a dozen books and scores of articles, he is an editor-at-large for The Christian Century and a contributing editor for the International Bulletin of Missionary Research.

Among his many books, the one that has perhaps made the deepest impact is Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Orbis 1989), in which he argues that—contrary to the folklore that passes for social science, and in sharp contrast to Islam—Christianity preserves indigenous life and culture, thanks to its emphasis on mother-tongue translation. Where indigenous culture has been strong, it has absorbed Christian life and worship, thereby sustaining and even increasing its vitality. Where conversion has been to Islam, on the other hand, indigenous cultures have tended to be weak, and soon lose entirely the capacity to think religiously in their mother tongue. The difference lies in the Christian missionary insistence upon translation, on the one hand, and diffusion as the Muslim missionary modus operandi. The converse, he argues, is also true.

His latest book, Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West, will be released by Eerdmans later this month. Sanneh and his wife, Sandra, have on son, Kelefa, and a daughter, Sia.

Jonathan Bonk is the executive director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center, editor of the International Bulletin of Mission Research, and project director for the Dictionary of African Christian Biography.

What were the circumstances of your early childhood?

I was raised in an orthodox Muslim family and, with the sons of chiefs, went to school in West Africa.

How would your early childhood and adolescence have differed from that of the "typical" North American?

It's like living on another planet. I was raised in a culture where the stress is not on the individual but on the community, on tradition, on fidelity to past models, on respect for parents and elders, on rote memorization of knowledge, on scarce material resources offset by a wealth of social capital. We had limited access to the modern world, but lavish access to family and clan achievement and honor. We had close proximity to the natural world without the demand to subdue and exploit it. One could go on.

What made you interested in Christianity?

Reading about Jesus in the Qur'an piqued my curiosity. I had no access to the Bible or to a church at the time, and so the Qur'an remained the authoritative and only source of Jesus, son of Mary (the respectful form the Qur'an uses).

Did you express this curiosity openly?

By force of circumstance, I kept counsel with myself. My teachers would react unpredictably, and my Muslim friends would be scandalized.

Were any of your teachers or fellow classmates similarly curious?

Yes, but they lacked my effrontery, perhaps.

How difficult was it to convert from Islam to Christianity?

Once the choice was made about the significance of Jesus in God's work of salvation, it was not difficult to make the decision to join the church. Getting accepted in the Protestant church, however, was a different matter altogether, thanks to the church's suspicion and skepticism. It is only now, at long last, in the Catholic Church that I feel accepted unconditionally and unreservedly. It vindicates my view that faith counts for something, though it was a long time coming.

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October 2003, Vol. 47, No. 10