The missionaries came promising Jesus. But Christianity was so entangled in Western culture that the missionaries imposed Western civilization on people in the name of Jesus rather than vulnerably bearing witness to the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus in word and deed and then letting the Holy Spirit do its work. It seems that it was not Jesus’ body at the center of Western Christian life and imagination. Instead, as Willie James Jennings has put it, “The body of another has remained at the center of our relational imagination, the body of a powerful, white, Western man, the
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