International Review of Mission最新文献

This article outlines some key steps and motifs for developing a decolonial relational ethics that will be vital not just to the work of decolonization but also to the practice of the ecumenical movement if it is to both add its weight to the calls for decolonization and itself be decolonized. The author interrogates key dimensions of her own field of study in Christian ethics and engagement in the ecumenical movement. She highlights some of the key spaces and often marginalized communities and persons who can shape the ecumenical movement's further engagement in decolonization. It offers a critique and a vision rooted in the author's lived experience and the scholarship of decolonization while seeking application in methodologies for colonial systems, relationships and mindsets to be challenged and reset.

Martyr is the title given to someone who has died for the sake of their faith. However, the dead cannot speak about their own death. Judgments on behalf of the dead are inevitably done by the living, posthumously. In this sense, martyr-making is the politics of the death operated by the living. Taking this perspective of martyr-making, this paper seeks to reassess the martyr-making process in the Protestant Church in Korea (PCK), focusing on the case of Rev. R. J. Thomas's death in Korea in 1866. Some argue that Thomas, with his original desire to be a missionary and his contribution in providing the Bible to native Koreans, is the first Protestant martyr in Korea. However, others contend, with the viewpoint of decolonization, that his approach, which appeared invasive, cannot be justified, even though he himself identified as a missionary. Even the ambiguity of his death prevents him from being called a martyr. Given that the process of martyr-making or unmaking inevitably involves potential politicization by specific living authorities who interpret and designate individuals as martyrs, this paper explores the trends of martyr-making in the PCK, where political and religious ideologies are deeply intertwined.

The article explores how pivotal the kingdom of God has been and still is to the identity of the ecumenical movement. The discussion of the biblical vision of the kingdom, which is coming and yet is also present, offers a motif which not only forms the life of the church and gives it hope but also forms the life of the oikoumene, giving hope to all of life. The ensuing discussion shows how, historically, the ecumenical movement has practised its calling of unity and mission as one which offers salvation to all life and to all aspects of life and goes on to outline how the kingdom continues to inspire ecumenical engagement today. Fundamental to this is the realization that the kingdom lays claim not on the church but on the whole world. This turns the ecumenical movement away from self-service so that the life of the world is shifted, challenged, and transformed through the work and witness of the ecumenical movement. This is especially and urgently needed where the powers, systems, and structures of our world cause injustice, inequity, and catastrophe. In this mission ecumenism reaches its fullest unity, in which all are saved.

This paper discusses the impact of colonization on Christian mission encounters and activities. It utilizes the decolonial epistemic framework to analyze the limitations of approaches that advocate “dialogue,” “revelation,” and “mutual growth.” The paper argues that focusing on these three approaches overlooks the asymmetrical power dynamics inherent in the history of Western Christian missions. Conversely, a focus on a deeper experience of the divine highlights the existing epistemic and spiritual knowledge of individuals and communities who have become “othered” within a colonial framework. The paper begins by defining the terms that describe the power dynamics of colonization. Following is a discussion of the impact of colonization on Christian missions. Next, the paper explores the limits of dialogue, revelation, and mutual growth, and finally, it argues the importance of focusing on a more profound experience of the divine.

This article explores the role and contribution of women in the church with a specific focus on Reverend Boiketlo T. Ngwako of the Revelation Blessed Peace Church in Botswana (RBPC). The paper examines the contribution and experiences of Reverend Ngwako in a male-dominated church in Botswana. Data was collected through personal observations and by attending church services, listening to the testimonies, preaching, singing, and prayers of members of the RBPC as led by Reverend Ngwako. Reverend Ngwako, the key participant, was interviewed to understand her role and contribution in the life of the church and to collect data on her views on a wide range of issues, such as politics. Content analysis of the data allowed the mapping of different themes of Ngwako's development as a minister of religion in the context of a male-dominated Christian leadership and cultural environment. The results suggest that the cultural environment and the biblical doctrines of the church have an impact on the development and ministry of a pastor. The study concludes that biblical doctrine is interpreted and understood in the light of Tswana cultural contexts, which continue to have an impact on her ministry, gender relations, and leadership style.

Drawing on the framework and pluriversalist vision of decoloniality, this article offers a conceptual mapping of theoretical debates and trends in recent discourse on the decolonization of theology in the Southern African context with a view to outlining key missiological implications of such debates. It posits a view of African decolonial theology as the foregrounding of local, indigenous, contextual knowledge in discourse and as the praxis of faith rooted in contextual analysis of historical realities. This contribution articulates the notion of “mission from the margins,” derived from Together towards Life, as a decolonial mode of mission that gestures toward an epistemological shift in missional thinking. An initial version of this paper was presented at the seminar on decolonization organized by the World Council of Churches’ Commission on World Mission and Evangelism that was held in Lisbon, Portugal, in June 2023.

This contribution arose from the CWME's “decolonizing seminar” (5–9 June 2023), held in Lisbon on the theme “Making the last first.” Paying particular attention to mission archives and inherited missional-theological deposits, this essay makes a case for decolonizing mission as both habit and method to create systemic change. Decolonizing of mission as a process is for the whole of the oikos and ecumenical family and is not only a Western Europe and former colonies matter, as coloniality and empires transcend periods, events, and locations.

The literary narrative Kiss of the Fur Queen, by Indigenous author Tomson Highway, calls for applying a decolonial framework that brings together different disciplinary systems to investigate responses to the stigma associated with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Approaching the narrative as testimony in which Highway foregrounds Indigenous knowledges, the text allows for a reframing of stigma as working within much larger systemic violences and operations of power than can be anticipated within a politics of recognition, indexed to the expository logic of Eve Sedgwick's paranoid position. Locating HIV-related stigma as emerging within the context of intergenerational collective trauma rooted in colonial violence makes possible the kind of reparative work that Sedgwick envisions, as well as allowing for an engagement with the infinite possibilities of encounter as an ethical response to this socially polarizing behavioural phenomenon that has proven so difficult to dislodge. Attentive to specific racialized and minoritized colonial histories, Highway's narrative unravels the entanglement of events and conditions surrounding HIV in a watershed moment when decolonial work collides with ongoing histories of colonial violence. Such a decolonial lens offers a non-positivist framework to potentially unsettle the stasis of stigma reduction.

From 1958 to 1965, J. E. Lesslie Newbigin worked for the International Missionary Council and then the World Council of Churches, specifically leading the integration of the organizations. Newbigin had a profound impact on the importance and role of mission within the ecumenical movement during the early transition of decolonialism around the globe. This article will reflect upon the history, contribution, and legacy of Newbigin in the conversation of mission in the ecumenical movement, specifically the World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission and Evangelism and the International Review of Mission. This reflection comes at the 25-year mark since Newbigin's death and addresses part of Newbigin's legacy that recent books, The Church and Its Vocation and Becoming a Missionary Church, could only briefly discuss.