Untangling the Legacies of Slavery: Deconstructing Mission Christianity for our Contemporary Kerygma

ABSTRACT This paper arises from a pilot project of the Council for World Mission (CWM) that is seeking to explore the Legacies of Slavery via the archives of the London Missionary Society, the forerunners of CWM. Arguments around the justification of European Christian Mission often focus on the efficacy and utilitarianism of missionary activity, in terms of education, medicine or the removal unethical indigenous religio-cultural practices. This paper seeks to move beyond these justifications to focus on the representational damage imposed on the descendants of enslaved Africans that have traduced Black bodies to “less than” in the body politic of many Western nations in the global North. The denigration of Black bodies has continued beyond the epoch of slavery and finds expression in the absurdity of Black people needing to assert that “Black Lives Matter”.