Rescuing the Gospel from the Cowboys: A Native American Expression of the Jesus Way

by Richard Twiss

For years missiologists have said a truly Indigenous church would be like a three-legged stool—self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating—not just a Western missions church attended by Indigenous people.64 William A. Smalley debunks the notion of the three-legged stool, calling it a false diagnosis and axiomatic in much missionary thinking.65 Kraft agrees with this westernized notion of the Indigenous church: “The mere fact of self-government, self-support, and self-propagation does not ensure that the church in question is ‘Indigenous.’ The indigeneity (if present at all) lies in the manner in which such selfhood is expressed.” This selfhood speaks of the ability of the local Indigenous members and leaders to move away from Euro-American cultural expectations and begin defining faith within their spiritual and cosmic world. This especially means to begin interpreting the biblical text and creating their hermeneutical community process. Kraft notes that more often than not—which is true of the majority of reservation churches—when the missionary is long gone, and there may be a Native pastor in charge, what they essentially do is “maintain the foreign forms, imposing them on new generations.” They end up with little regard for the fact that the forms they impose convey very different meanings to the new generations.66 Smalley, going further, explains and emphasizes this perspective: I very strongly suspect that the three “selfs” are really projections of our Amer...