International Review of Mission最新文献

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.

How can someone born without a privileged language and not educated in a privileged educational institution engage in decolonization? This is a very relevant question for most people who live in the context of the global South. This paper proposes a constructive imagination to decolonize ableist pedagogy through feminist disability analysis. I argue that colonial pedagogy is inherently ableist. This paper is situated in an anti-ableist and anti-patriarchal framework, unveiling the normate culture and patriarchal-colonial logic. However, the main source of analysis and epistemological tool is my body and experience as an Indonesian woman living with a disability. In trying to decolonize pedagogy, the experience of the body becomes more important than forming a new abstract theory of decoloniality. This paper proposes decolonizing ableist pedagogy as a communal work which requires examining colonial language and the binary thinking of body and mind through delinking the colonial space and crippling the colonial time. Based on this awareness, the decolonialization of ableist pedagogy is as imperative as the decolonialization of church mission.

This article offers a discussion of the Assembly Message, ‘A Call to Act Together', which unpacks, reframes, critiques and amplifies some key texts and concepts and explores their missiological relevance from an Indian and indigeneous perspective. The Assembly Message highlights love as the moving force for mission, but the article questions if the Ecumenical movement has the boldness and inclusiveness required by love rooted in Christ. The call for reconcilitation is unpacked through reflections on the Ao Naga practice of Aksü, which is a tradition and custom for enabling reconciliation and peacemaking. The article offers Aksü as an illustration of the practices that could ground the Message's claim for reconciliation and names dimensions of the spirituality needed to sustain the Ecumenical movement's future direction. Love and reconciliation point to interrelationship, which the article insists must be inclusive of commonality and difference, but also move forward against the systems of marginalisation.

This is the text of the message issued by the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches, meeting in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 31 August to 8 September 2022. In their message, delegates stated that all are called by Christ's love to repentance, reconciliation, and justice in the face of war, inequality, and sins against creation.