Book Review: Postcolonial Practice of Ministry: Leadership, Liturgy, and Interfaith Engagement

Abstract

Postcolonial Practice of Ministry: Liturgy, and Engagement. Edited by Kwok Pui-lan and Stephen Bums. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2016. vii + 232 pp. $90.00 (cloth).One need only peruse this book to realize what a profound loss the Episcopal Church and the academy will experience with the upcoming closure of the Episcopal Divinity School's graduate coursework and faculty layoffs. This book grew out of a set of presentations given at a 2014 EDS conference titled Challenging the Church: Postcolonial Practice of Ministiy. The insights offered by these thirteen articles and the accompanying introduction and epilogue indeed challenge the church to dare to imagine and live into a twenty-first-century future. While introducing those less familiar with postcolonial thought through Stephen Burns's introduction and Emmanuel Lartey s first essay, the book also provides the opportunity for those who have explored postcolonial theological and biblical thought to move on to practical applications for a postcolonial hermeneutic in religious fife.The book is divided into three main sections: Leadership, Liturgical Celebration, and Interfaith Collaboration. With essays written by religious thinkers from across the globe, it offers a wealth of insights to stretch and challenge Christian understandings of how to address our future in relation to fluidly understood issues of race, sex, gender, and sexuality-as well as and in complement to acknowledging the profound impact colonial practices have had upon our own representations of the nature of Christian worship, ministry, and dialogue. Quoting R. S. Sugirtharajah in his introduction, Stephen Bums writes that exposing and resisting 'historical, political, and economic domination' are central to the postcolonial agenda, along with tackling 'the more damaging' legacy of'psychological, intellectual, and cultural colonization' (p. 2). This book sets out to expose and resist colonial ideas deeply inscribed in Euro-centered Western Christian cultures. It invites the church into a religious initiative that is more diverse, more fluid, less binary, and less rigid in its definitions and structures. Listening deeply is key to this enterprise, as Melinda McGarrah Sharp explains in her essay, Literacies of Listening: Postcolonial Pastoral Leadership in Practice. As we attend to these voices of African, African American, South American, Womanist, Asian, LGBT, and Euro-American scholars, we are taught how to see with new eyes, eyes that do not assume the categories of existence or truth that have so constrained our contemporary religious landscape. …