Why Decolonize Missions?
Taking Empire Out of the Kingdom
Many Christians like me have had the wholehearted desire to live and express their faith in very tangible and meaningful way. This takes many forms and has changed over the course of time, but my wife, Courtney, and I knew that the most relevant way we could share our faith was through missions. We had the desire to understand and live in another culture and that drove us toward our first vocation as global Christian workers.
As we embarked on the journey—and as the path forward toward Tanzania came to be—we began to see glimpses of some “writing on the wall” even before we left for East Africa. Our overseeing church gave us and two other families a six-month “internship” to prepare us for our work which, ultimately, consisted of a list of books to read and a glass-walled conference room for us to sit around in and strategize. We twenty-somethings were ambitious enough and decidedly engaged in conversation about how we would do what we were going to do.
Ultimately our running the conversation around in circles led to this decision: We will go and figure it out when we get there. Yes, we had a “state-of-the-art” strategy for building a network of churches and the aim at a particular geographical area, but otherwise, we didn’t have much.
And we didn’t know much either.
So when we arrived in Dar es Salaam what did we do? We did what we thought missionaries were supposed to do: We bought 4x4 vehicles, started learning the language, and hired house workers (who were, naturally, our test cases in culture and evangelism). To keep it simple, we followed the patterns of what people before us had done (or at least what we thought they did), just in our “modern” way. We walked around looking for people to disciple. We prayed—a lot.
And we also sat around together—a lot. We did this in order to develop a strategy which typically involved discussions about strategic placement for our living situation in the city so as to have the most impact and the ways we would engage each borough for the gospel.
Little did we know, we were working our way along a road that had been marked out before we even arrived in Dar. It had been walked on for a very long time by predecessors we did not even know. It is a road that spans continents and has deep rivets that make it hard to see but very easy to drive on. However, once you are on it’s hard to get off.
The road, of course, is the one built by colonialists (many of whom were missionaries or came to the “global south” alongside missionaries) and maintained by colonialists. Most of the systems we see at work in the modern, globalized world were built on the back-end of colonial systems, and function, in many ways, the same way they did during the colonial era. This “road”, or way of life, was built for the benefit of one group at the expense of the majority culture.
For our small mission team we didn’t realize then that our “divide and conquer for Jesus” mentality was just another version of an old song that has been played before. We were ignorant, and that was a problem.
Jumping into the colonial lifestyle is easy, makes us feel powerful, and creates a comfortable and somewhat homogenous social structure. It is true that self-awareness of our position and privilege can be limited, but it is as noticeable as the places we live, work, play and shop.
It is also noticeable in the way we do missions. We often live the same lifestyles, build the same types of relationships, and can be motivated by similar concerns as our predecessors. While many efforts by people have very generous intentions and are often done with as much care as possible, the underlying tensions can very often still be present it the way Christian workers operate.
And here is the kicker: The colonial (or imperial) way of doing ministry hurts the image Christ to all people.
Therefore, as followers of Jesus, we must move away from habits formed in the distant (and not so distant) past in order for a more ethical and just expression of the mission of God.
How do we accomplish this? By building a new road of course!
But in order to get where we want to go we must see where we have already been. The next few posts will be a journey back in order for us to take steps forward.