Obedience to God Requires Decolonization Reflections of a Practitioner

Abstract

On January 17, 2024, the Accord Research Alliance Faculty Group organized a webinar to provide a space for discussion on the Christian Relief, Development, and Advocacy (CRDA) journal’s special issue on decolonization published a few months before in November 2023. The webinar was moderated by Nina Kurlberg, one of two co-editors of the special issue, and started with remarks by two main discussants. The first response comes from Mafer Madriz, director of Compassion International’s partnership efforts focused on mobilizing and strengthening the capacity of local church partners. Madriz argues that the fact that everyone is created equal before God and bears the imago deo requires decolonization. Moreover, decolonization requires action at the local level, including efforts toward accompaniment and localized design, as described in several articles in CRDA’s special issue. But it must also include reorganization in global organizational offices and institutional structures, where a greater diversity of voices must be heard and respected, and where constructive change becomes increasingly determined by all participants, especially those from the majority world.

The full recording of the webinar is found at https://vimeo.com/903813593?share=copy,

and further online discussion on the topic can be accessed at https://groups.google.com/g/ara-faculty-group-forum. The special issue of the journal with all the articles is located at https://crdajournal.org/index.php/crda/issue/view/69.