Bringing Indigenous ideas into Christian theology

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This article was published 21/05/2022 (1536 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The announcement that Pope Francis is coming to Canada July 24-29 to formally apologize to Indigenous people has excited Roman Catholics and many other Canadians.

For Terry LeBlanc, a Mi’kmaq-Acadian from Prince Edward Island, that apology is welcome.

“The papal apology was a long time in coming,” he said. “Many people are glad for it, not just Catholics. It’s an opportunity to once again tell the story of the schools, to make sure it doesn’t just fade into the background.”

In late April, LeBlanc received a Pax Award from Canadian Mennonite University. The award, given to acknowledge and honour people who lead exemplary lives of service, leadership, and reconciliation in church and society, was given to LeBlanc for his work to indigenize Christian theology through the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies, also known as NAIITS.

Through NAIITS, LeBlanc and his wife, Bev, have dedicated energy and effort to introduce Indigenous ideas into the way Christians view mission and theology.

Their particular focus has been on evangelicals, a group that might not feel a need to apologize to Indigenous people since they weren’t involved in operating residential schools.

That would be a erroneous view, said LeBlanc, noting some Methodists, Baptists and Mennonites were involved with a few Indigenous schools in Manitoba, the Yukon and Ontario.

Even if they were only involved in a small number of schools, they “can’t divest themselves from them as Canadians and Christians,” he said, adding that tragic history is everyone’s issue in Canada today.

And even if they didn’t run the schools, “there is no record of evangelicals speaking up against the schools and their abuses at the time,” LeBlanc said. “I can’t find any evangelical voices who spoke up against them.”

Evangelicals should also pay attention, LeBlanc suggests, because of the ways in which their mission work also harmed people in Indigenous communities.

This started with how many missionaries viewed them only as people who needed to be converted to the missionary’s way of thinking.

“There was no idea they had anything positive to contribute,” LeBlanc said, adding Indigenous people were often convinced to drop their traditional ways and follow western ways of practising the Christian faith.

Another tragic consequence of that evangelistic work was how Indigenous communities and families were fractured into different churches and denominations.

“Indigenous people are about community and family, but this divided them,” he said, noting a community of 200-300 people could have five or six different churches.

“This caused significant religious and social division, isolating people from each other,” he said.

Through NAIITS LeBlanc is actively trying to help non-Indigenous Christians think of new ways to relate to Indigenous people by decolonizing their theology — not seeing the western way of being a Christian as the only way.

When missionaries and evangelists came to Indigenous people, LeBlanc said, they brought a prescribed set of behaviours rooted in western Christianity that suggested they had to “look like, walk like, talk like, act like, think like, pray like, sing like us” in order to be authentic Christians, he said.

But LeBlanc doesn’t only want to help Indigenous Christians see the faith from their own perspective; he also wants to help non-Indigenous Christians learn what the faith might look like from an Indigenous point of view.

For him that means shifting away from a “dualistic” view of Christianity that sees everything as black or white or either/or.

Life for Indigenous people is not so easily “captured in simple binaries and either/or arguments still so comfortably situated within western thought,” he said, but is more a “both/and” way of viewing the world.

The either/or view of life has resulted in divisions between the sacred and secular and the natural and supernatural for Christians, he said.

“For most of us in the Indigenous world, everything expresses the sacred, for it all proceeds from the sacred, from God,” he said.

This carries over into how Christians read the Bible, he said, noting some view it through a western binary lens of things being seen as either true or false.

“Something doesn’t need to be real to be true,” he said, noting the Bible is a collection of narratives that are similar to the stories Indigenous people tell about their origins and the Creator’s activity among them.

At a minimum, non-Indigenous Christians “need to accept they don’t have all the answers,” he said, and that they can learn something from how Indigenous people practise the faith or read the Bible.

This, he added, can help all Christians to “live life in a good way in their context, not to have to import someone else’s way of living the Christian faith,” a way “that can help us all be better human beings.”

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