Abstract
Randy Woodley has been and continues to be an important Indigenous voice in theological and church spaces. He writes widely at both the popular and academic level. The audience for the current work is, in my estimation, wide. It will be useful not only for those interested in the study of missiology but also for readers who are reckoning with the colonial history of the church.
Woodley begins by framing the discussion in terms of his own lived experience in the preface and first chapter, a thread that continues through the book. The preface also locates the author, showing that the scope of his discussion is primarily the First Nations of Turtle Island. In this first part, Woodley narrates his work among Indigenous peoples as a missionary oppressor and identifies key terms for the rest of the discussion.
A recurring theme throughout the chapters is a fundamental difference between the western worldview and Indigenous worldviews. These differences have consequently framed theological discourse, church practice, and missional efforts. The result is that, while English may be the common tongue, missionaries were at the meta-level speaking different languages from the Indigenous peoples they were preaching to. Woodley offers stories and personal narratives that illuminate these differences. Of course, the encounter with Christian missionaries extended beyond differing worldviews and difficulties in understanding one another. Woodley unpacks the cultural hegemony that was (and is) baked into the Christian encounters with Indigenous people on Turtle Island and the resulting missional pedagogy that was enacted.
With part 1 of the book diagnosing the problem, part 2 begins to offer chapter-by-chapter alternative constructs and paradigms for reforming Christian theology and missiology. Woodley begins by surveying the rapidly changed and still changing demographic of the church, which at the same time still must wrestle with the construct of whiteness. This prepares the reader to learn about Indigenous worldviews and theological perspectives in the next chapter. Woodley introduces the four sources of wisdom and revelation in the Indigenous worldview and then moves on to discuss how Indigenous peoples separate spirituality from religion. In chapter 8, Woodley concisely addresses many standard Christian constructs and reframes them from an Indigenous perspective. Chapter 9 looks at shalom values, the content of which will be familiar to those who have read Woodley’s (2012) important work Shalom and the Community of Creation. The final chapter brings much of the material together to describe afresh what the gospel is and what it ought to look like.
The short conclusion addresses the non-Indigenous reader, inviting them to creatively think about appropriate responses beyond the “fix-it” default of the white saviour complex. This is followed by a couple of key bibliographic recommendations in a “narrative bibliography,” a list of Woodley’s other books, and the bibliography. Each chapter concludes with questions for discussion, making this a good text for class and small group work.