Dear Editor,
Christianity has been present in Indigenous communities in Guyana for long time, which resulted in the majority of us becoming ‘Christian’. Editor, I know that these churches are engaged in ‘wonderful works’ assisting the first people in Guyana which should be commended. However, out of great respect to the missionaries I also implore them to take some time to reflect and think about their evangelical approach to Indigenous people in Guyana. Or in other words the Christian institutions should try a bit harder to promote inculturation in their evangelization approach. Perhaps this can be done with the tool of Indigenous Peoples theology, which is the Indigenous Peoples’ perception of the supreme being from the context of their culture and world view ‒ ie, those that practise animism, (including those that don’t submit to Western church indoctrination or who maintain independent beliefs as agnostics).
In this context, theology is the understanding and experience of the divine that takes place within the history and culture of each nation. The Bible gives examples of inculturation, especially in the early Church. In so doing various nations were converted to Christianity, taking with them their native languages and traditions to the Church.
Editor, it should be the same today for Christianity when it inculturates people who have different traditions and values, and who have belief enough for them to practise. Unfortunately, up to the present, the evangelization of the Indigenous Peoples of Latin America and other continents is an imposition of Western culture from the Graeco-Roman world, formulated by European and then American theologians over many centuries. These theologies suffocate the fundamental values and traditions of Indigenous peoples; they converted them and at the same time displaced from their historical and cultural context. They also made them be superficially labelled as adhering to superstition and paganism, which were destroyed during the colonial period and continues to be destroyed by the conventional wisdom of Western religion. In general, it denied that Indigenous religious cultures can contribute to the understanding of the Christian God, nature, and the relationship to man.
However, today, as some of the churches rediscover these religious and cultural traditions in Indigenous peoples with their approach to inculturation and Indigenous Peoples’ theology, they should not repeat the mistakes of the past when evangelization was often confused with Westernization.
In the Guyanese context, besides the two earliest churches, the Roman Catholic and Anglican that helped in ‘shaping’ most of the Indigenous people in their villages over the years, our villagers from then onwards have been witnessing another wave of different Christian churches in their communities all having the common objective to save souls through the Western lens of God. The entry of these modern day envangelizers in traditional communities has brought a new transformation into most of the villages by way of their successes and simultaneous failures.
I don’t have anything against other churches coming to tell our people about God. I admire the great ‘service’ that some do for our people. I know that there are a few which have revised their evangelical approach by incorporating our peoples’ languages and traditions in their worship, but there are still others which need to do the same for Indigenous people. With great regard I hail the presence of all the churches in indigenous communities as a blessing because they represent God’s mission to the world.
On this note, one little reminder to the missionaries that come generously to evangelize our passive and materially poor people, is that they should try to nurture the Indigenous world view of the creator, and not the other way around in the name of conversion, etc, because such an approach suffocates the traditional understanding of the supreme being, and results in us becoming passive believers of the Judeo-Christian conventional wisdom that downplays the perception of the deity from the perspective of our culture.
In concluding, on the principle of inculturation in this new age of evangelization, modern-day missionaries must not forget that perhaps an Indigenous theology would be good to promote for our people, but not imposed outside the context of Indigenous culture, but rather discovered and nurtured in the context of their cultures, promoting them in one voice to thank and praise the Indigenous ancestral fathers and their belief in the supreme being.
Happy Amerindian Heritage Month celebrations to all our Amerindian Christians, Agnostics, and Shamans!
Yours faithfully,
Medino Abraham
