Special Report on “Decolonizing Churches”

Abstract

“Decolonizing Churches” was the theme of the fourteenth international gathering of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network, which met June 22–25, 2022, in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The conference was hosted and cosponsored by Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico on its Metro campus in Cupey, San Juan. El Seminario Evangélico de Puerto Rico joined as a cosponsor as well, along with several other academic and ecclesial bodies. The conference was held in a hybrid format. Approximately fifty people participated in person during the course of the three days, while another forty registered to participate at a distance.The decision to hold the conference in Puerto Rico was deliberate. Participants were repeatedly reminded of José Trías Monge’s assertion that Puerto Rico is the oldest continuous colony in the world today.1 But the scope of the conference was much wider. Scholars and practitioners from around the world participated in the gathering, making the case the decolonizing churches and decolonizing religion is a major task that still confronts world Christianity.A number of papers from the conference are now being gathered and edited, and are expected to appear as one or more volumes in the Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue series published by Palgrave Macmillan. Other papers from the conference will no doubt find their way into other publications. But papers by themselves do not always tell the full story of a conference. In order to capture something of the broader academic significance of the gathering as a whole, and to provide an immediate response to the collective work, the conference planning team invited three participants to serve as conference “listeners” and to share their reflections as a panel at the final plenary session: Sandra Arenas, dean of the faculty of religious sciences and philosophy in the Catholic University of Temuco, Chile; David D. Daniels III, the Henry Winters Luce Professor of World Christianity at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois, USA; and Aaron Hollander, associate director of Graymoor Ecumenical and Interreligious Institute, associate editor of Ecumenical Trends, and adjunct faculty member in theology at Fordham University in New York, New York, USA.The editors of the Journal of World Christianity invited these three to share their reflections, which are published here in the following pages.2 Taken together, these reflections constitute not only a report on the conference but a substantial contribution to the wider conversation that is now taking place around the world concerning decolonizing churches and decolonizing Christian theology.