@article{mangayi_baptist_2019, title = {The baptist union of South Africa’s mission orientation needs transformation: A scrutiny by an insider}, volume = {75}, doi = {10.4102/hts.v75i4.5551}, shorttitle = {The baptist union of south africa’s mission orientation needs transformation}, abstract = {This article aims to trigger a process of critical reflexive analysis relative to how colonial perspectives are played out in the contemporary mission orientation of the Baptist Union of South Africa ({BUSA}). It highlights the fact that the {BUSA}’ s mission orientation, predominantly evangelism and church planting, is still embedded in the colonial perspectives influenced by the thoughts of the 19th-century missiologists Henry Venn and Rufus Anderson. Hence, the key argument of this article is that the {BUSA}’s mission orientation should be released from these colonial perspectives in order to give way to the emergence of an authentic and contextual Baptist missional agency in South Africa. A scrutiny of the {BUSA} reveals that it faces threefold challenges, namely, historical, philosophical and methodological challenges. Failure to address these challenges has (1) robbed the {BUSA} of imagination to measure up to contemporary contextual issues, (2) made it predominantly otherworldly in worldview and mainly membership-centred in focus and (3) made it embrace and practice on the ground ‘missionary activist’ and ‘conversionist’ reductionist shortcuts. To move forward, the {BUSA} is called to go through continuous conversions and reflexive process as a prerequisite for a deep transformation experience. This article concludes by contributing three solutions, namely, generating new mission insights befitting the {SouthAfrican} context should involve the collective, avoid missionary reductionist shortcuts by opting for an integrated and holistic mission praxis and embrace participatory action research as a way forward for {BUSA}’s mission agenda. © 2019. The Authors.}, number = {4}, journaltitle = {{HTS} Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies}, author = {Mangayi, L. C.}, date = {2019}, langid = {english}, note = {free}, keywords = {Baptist Union of South Africa, Change, Mission orientation, Mission praxis, Transformation}, }