Kwiyani, Harvey. 2025. Decolonizing Mission

The Malawian theologian Harvey Kwiyani has worked for 20 years in mission in the West (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and the UK), and from his perspective between countries that used to colonialize others and countries that used to be colonized by others, he states the need to decolonize mission.He writes in the introduction to his book: "The global context of the twenty-first century requires us to think afresh about God's mission in the world -what it is and how to participate in it.We cannot continue to depend on twentieth-century thinking to shape our twenty-firstcentury missiology, [because] that missiology falls short in the current postcolonial post-Christendom world of the twenty-first century" (27-28).But there is also a theological need for a decolonized approach to mission: "In a generation or two, it will be black and brown Christians taking the gospel to the ends of the earth.In other words, God's mission decolonizes" (36).Kwiyani shows the tight, complex, and highly ambivalent interdependencies between mission and colonization by means of the history of Malawi and its colonization by the British (chapter 1).He introduces a wide range of people with various perspectives on colonialism and slave trade, like David, Agnes, and William J. Livingstone, John Chilembwe, and Joseph Booth.He resumes: "That David Livingstone's mission station became his daughter's colonial estate whose managers persecuted local Christians, burning their houses and schools, and forcing them to work on the estate for free, shows the challenges of attaching the mission of God to the mission of empires" (63).Kwiyani then (chapter 2) takes a close look at the historical and geopolitical situation of Jesus' life and states: "We cannot effectively begin to understand Jesus or appreciate the movement that he started without paying attention to the overbearing image of the Roman Empire that was the backdrop to everything he did" (81).Kwiyani shows how omnipresent the Roman rule was in the life of Jesus, his disciples, his country, and his time, and how rarely Jesus referred to Rome and the emperor.Kwiyani interprets the whole ministry of Jesus as an attempt to subvert the colonial