Rethinking Mission In The Postcolony

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This is a progressive Christian approach to soteriology and missiology in a global, postcolonial context. Much of the history of mission has been interlaced with imperial structures. Often the colonial and economic impulses of the colonial powers overshadow some of the counter-imperial tendencies of biblical texts and ecclesial communities.

Evangelical missionary theologies have led to cultural genocide. These missionary practices have been heavily critiqued in the last few decades. Christian progressives have been in the forefront of the critique of mission, but have often responded in ways that reject the of mission of the word, instead highlighting a mission focused on developmental concerns that obscures the Christian content but continues to push Western capitalist structures into 'developing' postcolonial societies.

Instead, this book proposes an integration of gospel and culture. It aims to steer a third course towards an integration of the knowledge and treasures, the losses and laments of Christianities forged in colonizing and colonized societies. Proposing that these Christianities are more alike than different, and in need of each other for reconciliation of communities facing the ecological and economic collapse at the limits of what the planet can carry.

Review: 'What an unpredictable adventure into the far places and pressing questions of the Postcolony ! The theology that unfolds along its itineraries - carrying the trickster sprit and transdisciplinary rigor of Grau's first book - has an alternately exciting and erudite, tragic and hilarious energy.

Brilliant in its critical compassion for the complex ambiguities of Christian mission, this work of salvific subversion and entangled reciprocity offers the first monographic test-case of a new and unapologetically polydox theology.' - Catherine Keller, Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew University, USA.

Author of Face of the Deep: a theology of becoming and On the Mystery.--Sanford Lakoff