Decolonizing Preaching:
The Pulpit as Postcolonial Space
By Sarah Travis, Cascade Books
This is a book about humility. That’s genuine humility, which preachers in our part of the world often lack. We talk about humility and then demonstrate that we’re not prepared to attend to voices other than our own, or to the Bible as others may read it. Sarah Travis invites Western preachers to risk participating in postcolonial conversations. She offers a challenge to recognize and value, even to privilege for our good, the voices and experiences of those who have been the objects of Western political, economic and theological imperialism.
In the first section, “The Omnipresence of Empire,” Travis discusses the history of the Western church and its relationship with colonizing imperial forces. Readers who lean leftward will find her refusal to paint the history of missions in black and white unsatisfactory. She looks through a lens those more conservative in theology and politics will find hard to accept. Travis insists that any reduction of complexity to either – or duality is characteristic of colonizing forces.
She is also quick to identify her own position as a privileged, educated, white Canadian who presumes to critique and pose an alternative to a way of using power in the world that she benefits from. Most preachers who will read this book share Travis’ social location. How dare we speak of and to a world of others from whom we take much more than we will ever give?
In the second section Travis proposes a way in which her readers can preach. Travis offers a response to empire grounded in a theology of the Social Trinity. “The life of God – in – Trinity provides a theological foundation both for a constructive reimagining of human relationships damaged by colonizing discourse and for the deconstruction of colonizing discourse.” The relationship of the three within the Trinity, as described by Jürgen Moltmann and others, sets a pattern for human relationships. Creator, Son and Spirit are distinct and unique, yet difference does not result in separation or entail hierarchy. A Christian’s view of the world can reflect the diversity within unity that is the nature of God. Yet the way we read texts, the way we describe the world and people, and the basic vocabulary of our preaching may reflect ways of understanding that perpetuate what the father of postcolonial thought, Edward Said, called “othering.”
Kenosis, the self – emptying of God in the incarnation, and perichoresis, the engaging and embracing energy within the Trinity, are two key theological concepts. “True love and power originate within the context of Trinity, and all other powers that claim totality are revealed to be idols. The empire’s story is not the whole story, and there is room for the voice of the subjugated other.”
Travis offers preachers an introduction to postcolonial theory. This brief chapter will be especially helpful to preachers who may not be familiar with the concepts of “hybridity” and “Third Space.” Third Space is a spatial term to describe the experience of meeting at the borders that mark differing cultures or contexts. In Third Space, difference can be recognized “without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”
In the third section of the book, Travis offers “A Toolbox for Decolonizing Preaching.”
“To decolonize preaching is to imagine a human community shaped by discourses of love and freedom, rather than dominance and captivity.” Preachers can learn to read the Bible and preach with “postcolonial imagination” and suggests disciplines that can help shape imagination. She offers readings of several familiar texts, including the story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:24 – 30). These readings challenge the default position of many Western preachers, who believe there can only be one correct interpretation of a text.
In the final chapter Travis brings together the idea of Third Space and the concept of the inner life of the Trinity as Perichoretic Space, “a living space, a space made within God’s own self for the created order.” The goal of decolonizing preaching is not to further flatten the world. It is to preach in ways that invite all into an experience of Third Space. This is possible, even in the whitest, most homogeneous Presbyterian congregation in Canada.
All preaching calls us toward Third Space but we don’t always recognize or respond to that call. Preachers and congregations often retreat into the familiar and the comfortable. Can we really encounter the Word and be transformed by it if we won’t step over the boundaries of our expectations and embedded beliefs? Travis calls Western preachers to a new humility grounded not only in a new openness to those we actively and implicitly “other,” but also to a deeper exploration of the Trinity.
Last summer I landed in India for the first time. I stepped cautiously beyond the borders of my assumptions as I met Indian teachers and theological students. We were all Christians. But we were not all the same. As I listened, shared, and learned I entered Third Space and discovered those I met were already there. A Christian in India is already in a borderland of hybridized identity. The onus was on me to enter the space ready to be changed. This is why I believe this book is essential reading for North American preachers. The walls of Christendom have crumbled. The world of the other is the only world we have to live in.
