Tizon - Lecture 1 - Postcolonialism and post-Christendom

 

Lecture 1 - Postcolonialism and postchristendom

Not everything about church history is glorious and victorious. The church through its missions was not always consistent with the will of God.

Post colonialism.
To understand it, we must understand the logic of colonialism.
In a span of approximately 500 years from late 15th to mid 20th centuries, European nations and later North America used their religio, political power and military superiority to extend their respective empires in the Americas, Africa and Asia on a grand scale never before experienced in human history.

There were 4 motivators that drove colonization forward, what I call the 4C's of colonialism.
The first was commerce or economic gain.
Second was crown or the quest for world dominance.
The third was civilization or the quest to create the non western world in the western image and the fourth was Christianization or the quest to save the lost souls of the non western world.

Now, while the 1st 2 of Commerce and Crown, pejoratively known as the twin evils of greed and power, explain the evil behind colonialism, the last two, civilization and Christianization, speak to why even good people participated in it.

Why, even to good Christian people that it seemed OK to claim already occupied lands, to raze to the ground peaceful high functioning villages, destroy well established family structures, take away people's names, enslave and torture millions, kill the uncooperative, decimate entire populations and make extinct whole cultures?
Why were these things OK for even good people?
Of particular interest to us, of course, is the role that the Church played in colonization.

Missions with an S contributed to the colonial project in a number of ways.
1. It tempered the cruelty of conquest.
Many missionaries, despite not challenging the Christianization narrative itself, advocated for the humane treatment of the native populations.

2. Missions contributed to the worldwide spread of the Gospel despite the evil vehicle of colonialism, thus in time paving the way for Christianity to break away from Euro and Americentric cultural captivity. The development of indigenous churches around the world can't be understood apart from missionary efforts, even colonial missionary efforts.

3. Missions unfortunately contributed to the colonial project by subduing the native population, domesticating people by means of preaching and teaching in ways that rationalize the way of the colonizers.
Education was often put in the hands of the church and it did well.
The church did well to educate the masses in the colonial era.
Education was not a means of self actualization, liberation or opening up opportunities for making a living, but rather a means of assimilation, killing the native out of the natives and reshaping them in the image of their colonizers.
This task, to its shame, was the responsibility of the church.

To say the world has entered a post colonial era should come across as extremely good news. A post colonial perspective decries the domination, the violence, the ethnocentrism, the racism, paternalism and cultural genocide of the colonial past. And this includes an honest critique of the role that missions played in it.  If the Church takes post colonialism seriously, and it should, then it needs to forge a new way of doing mission. It needs to formulate what we can call a post colonial way of mission.

Some say that we should do away with mission altogether, given its history. But the Church's inherent missional call to bear witness to the gospel of the Kingdom in the world compels us to reimagine, not abandon, mission. So how should postcolonial sensibilities reshape the Church's global mission?

The main implications are:

1. Truth-telling. Mission today must be honest about the underside of its colonial legacy so that we can repent of it and make reparations where possible.  This may include formal and public confession.

Gone should be the days where missionaries come with disrespect, condescension, paternalism, and a sense of superiority. Humility should define the posture of missionaries who come from formerly colonizing nations.
I call this requirement of post colonial missiology… Repentance as mission

 

2.  Reject Racism.
Racism was invented by colonialism. Now, that might be an overstatement, but according to sociologist Peter Cavisto, the impetus for racial divisions revolved around the question of what kinds of policies Europeans ought to enact in establishing relations with the indigenous peoples they encountered.
To the extent that that's true, racism needs to be dismantled by post colonialism.
Positively speaking, mission today should promote racial righteousness as core to what it does in a post colonial world.  Racism must be confronted.

3. Let Good News be Good News! Post colonialism compels the global church in mission to be mindful of the obvious that the gospel of the Kingdom. The ever changing gospel of the Kingdom should be good news. If any people experience it as bad news, such as during the colonial period, then it's not the gospel of the Kingdom of God. No person should ever again be victimized by the Great Commission.
Post colonial Mission must make every effort to retain the goodness of the good news.

4. Be Led by people of the host church
The host culture should lead the way of Gospel, church and mission with missionaries serving in support roles. It's the indigenous leaders who know what's going on in their culture and society.

Why then shouldn't they be the ones to set the vision and direction of ministry with missionaries partnering alongside them?  Mission today must acknowledge the leadership of the hosts.

Post-Christendom world.
Christianity and Christendom are not the same thing.

About 1700 years ago, by way of imperial decree, position, privilege, and power were added to the pure water of the church, forever changing its properties. Given the fact that up to that point the church had only experienced marginalization and persecution in the Roman Empire, I suspect that the additives of position, privilege, and power tasted incredibly sweet, like kool-aid.

So what is Christendom? If it's not Christianity, what is it?
We have to understand this in order to understand post Christendom.

Addison Hodges Heart explains that Christendom is that historical merging of the church with the government of a state, the alignment of religion with politics, and the alliance of clergy with ruling powers to share in those powers.
Few would disagree that the then 300 year old persecuted and marginalized community of Jesus people morphed into something different, would have accepted the political privileges of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the 4th century. For the Church, the alliance was sweet rescue from persecution and for the state, religious legitimation for the building up of the empire.

But make no mistake, in Hearts succinct words, Christendom was not and is not Christianity.
It's more accurate to understand it as a descriptor of Western civilization after Constantine. The church side of Christendom can be defined as a mixed spiritual secular institution whose identity depends as much on its theology as it does on the state of the Union, and whose Pledge of Allegiance, whether consciously or not, is both to the cross and the flag.
As such, it differs fundamentally from the Church of the first 3 centuries.

Many scholars would say that Christianity over the last two millennia minus the 1st 300 years was and is actually Christendom as we've defined it here.

Characteristics of Christendom based missions past and present include the following.

Characteristic 1.  the notion that our nation is somehow especially chosen by God, like the Israel of old, to accomplish God's will on earth.
The English Puritans, for example, who first began to settle in the New World of North America, were possessed by a vision of a new promised land that they were to occupy.
Religious studies professor Richard Hughes writes that New England Puritans typically understood themselves as God's new Israel, a people God had chosen for himself and had LED out of Egyptian ******* England, across the Red Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and into the Promised Land, the American wilderness.

Characteristic 2. manifest destiny empowered by a sense of chosenness.
Christendom based mission bears that characteristic the responsibility to make the rest of the world Christian.
Spiritually and geographically, the growth of the Church was perfectly aligned with territorial expansion in North American history.
We call this drive to expand coast to coast Manifest Destiny.This vision, of course, resulted in the decimation of millions of what we insultingly lumped together today by the label Native American.
Moreover, the expansion did not stop at the continental coastlines as Manifest Destiny inspired the colonization of Puerto Rico on the east, Hawaii, Guam, and my homeland of the Philippines to the West.

Characteristic 3.  territorial protection

Lands then were claimed by Christendom based nations had to be protected.
So another mark of a Christendom based mission is to support government efforts to keep all non Christian and Pagan religions which foreigners allegedly bring with them out of Christian lands.
So if you can imagine keep out signs at the borders, then you'll see this particular characteristic.

Characteristic 4.  Alliance with the military forces of the nation.

How else can expansion and protection of what is Christian be enforced against any aggression that the enemies of church and state may attempt if it didn't rely on the military?

 

So wherever these 4 characteristics are in operation, Christendom based missions is advancing.
The good news is that Christendom is dying.

Historians, theologians and sociologists alike have rightly discerned that a shift has occurred or is occurring that is threatening the foundations of Christendom. The power and position that come with the church's collusion with the state are more often than not at odds with the power of Christ and the Spirit.

Many bellieve that with the demise of Christendom, the possibility of something more closely resembling authentic, Jesus centered, spirit empowered faith can emerge and flourish.

Now, there are at least two ways that Post Christendom helps shape the church's mission today.

First, as Post Christendom society has pushed the church out of the center, the church has an opportunity to discover or rediscover its true identity in Christ, and with that, the prophetic dimension of its witness in society.

It's hard to critique or prophecy against the powers that be if in fact you are among the powers that be.

But as the church has found itself on the margins, it has the opportunity to live into the call to speak truth to power.

Now of course, when I've spoken about the decentered church, I've referred to the church that has enjoyed the center in the past.
But it's important to note that there have always been churches that have been on the margins.
Immigrant and non white churches have had a different experience with Christendom.

Marginalized by race and culture, these churches have never enjoyed the center and have therefore been spared the experience of being decentered.

So as the once dominant churches get relegated to the margins, they have found non dominant churches that have always been there, here and therefore.

And here's the second implication for mission.

Today is an opportunity for the church to be the whole church in all its diverse glory, to bear witness to the authentic gospel.

Together this will require the decentered churches to give way to the leadership of the churches that have always been there in the margins because they know who they've been all this time and what to do in terms of ministry in a post Christendom age.

There is much more to say about post colonialism and post Christendom and how these global realities impact the Church's mission today, but I trust that we've covered enough in our first session to have whetted your appetites for more.

 

In our next session, we will explore the ministry of reconciliation in the broadest sense.

To the extent that we understand and practice it to the fullest, the Church bears witness to the Gospel meaningfully and powerfully in our post colonial, post Christendom world.
Building on a theology of holistic or integral mission, the Global Ministry of Reconciliation becomes the new whole and holistic mission.