Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations

“Christianity today is facing tremendous challenges and opportunities tied to often-overlooked flows of power in our postcolonial world. What role does faith play as suffering persists and lives are lost? The contributors to this volume join a broader theological debate, making major contributions as they reclaim the robust witness of the evangelical heritage for the common good with creativity and courage.”

Joerg Rieger

“This pioneering book charts a new direction in evangelical theology. It employs postcolonial theory to examine the evangelical legacy and offers rich insights in the reconstruction of mission and theology. Forward-looking and provocative, the book will no doubt stimulate debates in the evangelical church and beyond.”

Kwok Pui-lan

“The contributors to Evangelical Postcolonial Conversations remind us that there is no view from nowhere. More importantly, they help western evangelicals realize how often we have confused our finite and fallible human responses to God's self-disclosure with the Word of God itself—how often we have confined God's Word to our words. What I enjoyed most about this book is the way it invited me, the reader, into an ongoing conversation that itself models how self-identifying evangelicals can better listen to the voices of those in the Majority World and on the margins in a manner that engenders humility, repentance and even our ongoing conversion to something that more closely resembles God's reign on earth as it is in heaven.”

Dennis Okholm

“The various 'isms' usually start outside evangelicalism. They arrive in nonevangelical packaging and may provoke questioning and anxiety, but then they may get thought through within an evangelical framework and become fruitful within evangelicalthinking and commitments in a way that can be instructive for the whole church. It can take time to navigate the sequence, even though evangelicalism is related to Protestantism, and postcolonialism (as one of the contributors notes) is a protest movement. This collection is the marvelous fruit of the work of those who have reflected deeply on postcolonialism. It's neat that so many of the chapters are cowritten. And whereas terms like empire can sound as if they apply chiefly to the empire against which the American colonies rebelled, it's encouraging for a Brit to be able to note how much attention is paid to the colonial nature of thinking and action within the Americas.”

John Goldingay

“This collection is a solid, sharp contribution to the juncture of Christian studies and postcolonial studies. I have noted with delight how in recent years evangelical theology has addressed the major crises and issues of our times. This has certainly been the case with regard to migration and economics. This venture into the discourse of imperial-colonial formations and relations is thus much needed and much welcomed. I look forward to dialogue and recommend the volume highly. A job well done!”

Fernando Segovia

“I feel like Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep and woke up in a changed world. The ways of doing missions have undergone a paradigm shift, and these writers helped me understand it.”

Tony Campolo

“This volume presents a groundbreaking endeavor toward evangelical postcolonial theology, articulating the intersection between evangelical and postcolonial discourse. It challenges the theological roundtable under the dominion of the Western metanarrative of Enlightenment that keeps the colonial project and its civilizing mission intact, undertaking a constructive task for evangelical-postcolonial relevance and praxis in the face of the empire driven by globalization. This is an important contribution toward postcolonial imagination, which deepens and reinterprets evangelical theological discourse and praxis.”

Paul S. Chung