Toward Epistemic Decolonial Turn in Missio-Formation in African Christianity

Abstract

Abstract This article is framed with the World Council of Churches' (WCC) mission statement Together towards Life: and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes, which seems to be reviving academic interests in missio-formation as an interdisciplinary field study. The mission statement, which is framed in a postcolonial missional discourse, seems to show interest in how missio-formation as academic discipline can expose the intersectionality of questions of power, politics, and culture in Africa. The matters of agency, subjectivity, pedagogy, and rhetoric are perceived as central to the envisaged public missio-formation discourse. Hence, this article argues that the nature of the mission statement must also be comprehended as means for decolonizing missio-formation paradigm in Africa within a decolonial framework which gives critical attention to how missions have functioned as a colonialist mechanism for colonialifing African Christian minds and subjectivity. Introduction The World Council of Churches' (WCC) mission statement Together Towards Life: and Evangelism in Changing Landscapes (TTL), unanimously approved by the central committee as official position statement on mission on 5 September 2012 and officially launched at the 2013 WCC Busan assembly, represents a watershed in mapping the changing landscape in world Christianity. Rather than being conceived as a static force, mission theory is perceived as mutating and is subjected to ongoing changes and interpretations in different epochs and cultural contexts. TTL acknowledges that since the last WCC mission statement, Mission and Evangelism: An Ecumenical Affirmation, was approved in 1982, the fast pace of social, economic, political, technological, and military changes over the past 30 years has resulted in Christianity experiencing a profound paradigm shift in the understanding of the church's missional identity, vocation, and witness in the world. TTL takes seriously the issue of marginality experienced as a central component in developing a theory of missio-formation. (1) It interrogates the misuse of power and use of the wrong kind of power in mission and in the church (2) and argues for a new missional order that empowers the powerless and challenges the powerful. The TTL missional model proposes mission as struggle and resistance in the quest for justice and inclusivity, healing and wholeness. (3) By doing so, TTL raises critical awareness of the devastating effects of the colonialist and imperialist legacies and the contemporary global technocratic forces on mission theory, seeing such awareness as indispensable for theorizing mission paradigms in today's world. It raises explicitly the issues of coloniality's matrix of power, as expressed in the following statement: [O]ur faithfulness to God and God's free gift of Life compels us to confront idolatrous assumptions, unjust systems, politics of domination and exploitation in our current world of economic order. (4) It advocates a united effort on a cooperative journey to articulate meaning as historically and socially constructed. This paper postulated that mission understanding and praxis have been produced and reproduced, written and rewritten within imperialist and colonialist ideological and material legacies. Therefore, coloniality is proposed as the appropriate lens through which to theorize modern missio-formation with its use of hierarchical dichotomies and categorical logic. In this logic, African thought--relations, values, ecological, economic, and spiritual practices--was reduced, ridiculed, and dismissed to pre-modern margins of irrelevance. According to Alison Hodge, who engaged in research work on missionary discourse in Africa, Eurocentric thought relegated Africans to the bottom rung on a metamorphic ladder of human development. (5) Chammah Kaunda has summarized three different standpoints on the aim of missionary work in Africa. (6) The first was assimilation, which meant to transform African people and their culture into sub-Europeans. …