What Is Whiter Than Missiology?

I Can Not Think Of Anything.

Welcome to my newsletter, “Global Witness, Globally Reimagined.”

I dream here about mission in a postcolonial world. Every week, I share one thought that has spoken to me, two resources I trust will be helpful to you, and three quotes about mission.

I pray one of these will energise you this week.

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1. Thought I Can’t Shake Off

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Andrew Walls once wrote about the concerning situation where academic theology (and missiology) continues to be white while the majority of Christians in the world are black and brown. “Western theological [read “missiological”] leadership of a predominantly non-Western church is an incongruity.”¹ He had earlier lamented what he called the “untroubled rule of palefaces” in [mission studies].² Several decades after Walls wrote this, we are seeing the beginnings of a global, multi-ethnic, multicultural, and polycentric missionary movement. This movement will need global voices of mission thinkers and practitioners talking to one another and to God about what God is doing in the world. It will open up spaces for theological and missiological cross-pollination of stories of God's work around the world. Such stories will decenter (and not dismiss) Western missiology and push it to engage with new voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, many of which are still wrestling with colonial legacy of the past 200 years of mission. Unfortunately, missiology is a whiter world than theology (though theology is also a white-dominated field). Of course, the critique of mission’s connection to colonialism (both political and ideological) is only beginning now. The future of both mission and missiology is multi-ethnic, not white. Eventually, those who want to keep mission white will lose out because to be properly missiologically-informed in the 21st century, your reading lists must engage mission scholars and practitioners from around the world. Some of them will be uncomfortable, but you need to hear them out. If everything you know about mission has come from Western books, you are grossly under-informed, and your missiology is not fit for the 21st century.

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2. Resources I am Enjoying

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• Book: Mekdes A. Haddis, A Just Mission: Laying Down Power and Embracing Mutuality. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2022.

This week, I have enjoyed Mekdes Haddis’ book, A Just Mission, for the second time. It is so truth-telling that it has been called “the most dangerous book in mission in a generation.” The prophetic edge that earns it such a badge of honour — it hits some nerves — is exactly why I believe it belongs among the most important books in mission in our generation.

The shifts going on in global mission must, of necessity, interrogate the colonial history of mission. There is no moving forward until there is reckoning around this issue. Mekdes helps us understand why this is an issue. Using her life experiences as an Ethiopian woman working in white Evangelical spaces in America, she is able to pinpoint where the problems are located. She uses numerous relatable examples. Most readers will find her easy to follow. Her desire is not to discredit Western mission, but to help mission itself self-correct for a world where the old models are becoming difficult to justify.

If you want to know what needs to change in mission in the world today, you need to read Mekdes Haddis. Her book, A Just Mission, is certainly among the best books in the discourse today.

Understandably, the critique that Haddis makes in A Just Mission articulates the disruption facing parts of the Christian mission industrial complex that depends on Western supremacy and colonialism to spread the gospel. Its argument will ruffle some feathers; prophetic speech should sometimes make us uncomfortable. Her critique of whiteness in mission, (both historical and contemporary), her plea that Western missionaries learn to listen and treat other cultures with dignity, and her challenge against white saviourism will be appreciated by most readers. Writing as a long-term Ethiopian migrant to the USA, she is both an insider and outsider to her American audience, and this position affects the argument of the book. She can challenge her American readers (at a time of difficult racial tensions) like an insider, but as an outsider even to the African American population, she runs the risk of both misunderstanding her context and being misunderstood by the very people she wants to engage.

There are two key things that I wished were different about the book. First, it takes on a lot of issues and does not engage many of them to a great depth. Second, a lot of these issues require a nuanced conversation, and because she was not writing for depth, she could not do this sufficiently. This leaves her vulnerable to misunderstanding and unjust critique. Of course, if she had done all this, the book would be a lot larger than it is.

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• Podcast: Mission Shift: Mission Without Empire (A Conversation with Many Leaders)

This crucial conversation between Carita Chen and Josh Irby, hosts of Mission Shift podcast, and Adrian de Visser (Sri Lanka), Lazarus Phiri (Zambia), Dela Adadevoh (Ghana), Marek Wryzykowski (Poland), Paul Borthwick (USA), Carlos Abarca (Costa Rica), and Derek Seipp (USA), explores the subject of missions and the entanglement of Empire. Given the demographic shift of Christianity’s centre of gravity from the global North to the South over the last century, but without a corresponding movement of intellectual, economic, or political advantage in the same direction, the contributors reflect on what missions should look like today. Thus, the themes of power, privilege, wealth and other related concepts feature in this discourse. The conversation is insightful for anyone interested in discerning and participating in God’s mission today.

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3. Quotes I am Pondering

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It is … crucial that the Church becomes attuned to the signs of the times in order to creatively respond to changed situations with new understandings and attitudes about the mission mandate. — Philomena Mwaura

A natural effect of the missionary outlook of modern times was a certain tendency to confuse their institutionalized Christianity with Christ, to make the former the bestower of salvation. By fastening so intently on the 'sheer paganism' and awfulness of African 'heathen superstitions,’ Western missionaries were considerably less conscious of the 'heathen' as men with their utterly human fears and joys, hopes and disappointments, and yearnings for salvation. — Kwame Bediako

When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible. — Jomo Kenyatta

Thank you, and I pray you have a missionally fruitful week.

1. Andrew F. Walls, “Christian Scholarship in Africa in the Twenty-First Century,” Transformation 19, no. 4 (2002): 221.

2. Andrew F. Walls, “Structural Problems in Mission Studies,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 15, no. 4 (1991): 152.