The blog makes the argument. This study is for letting it settle into how you actually read your Bible and sit in your church. The goal is not to win a debate about decolonization. It is to learn the difference between the gift and the wrapping it came in, and to keep the gift.
You can work it alone with a journal, or out loud in a group. Take it slow. This is heart work, not just head work.
Know it: what we are actually saying
Catechesis starts with getting the thing clear before you feel anything about it. So say it back in your own words first.
Theological colonization is not a claim about the Bible. It is a claim about what people added to the Bible on the way down to you, and then called normal. Dr. Vince Bantu gives the cleanest handle on why you can separate the two: God's revelation is transcendent and universal, but every theology, every form of worship, every human response to God is cultural. The Western reading is a cultural reading too. It just got treated as the default.
Write, in two or three sentences, the difference between the gospel itself and a theology built on top of it. If you cannot yet, that is fine. That gap is exactly what this study is for.
See it in Scripture: the faith was global from page one
Decolonizing is not importing a new idea into the Bible. It is removing a filter so you can see what was always there. Read each passage slowly. After each one, write one line: what was I trained to notice here, and what was I trained to skip?
Read Acts 8:26-40. The Ethiopian official is a high court figure from a powerful African kingdom, reading Isaiah on his way home. Philip does not ask him to become someone else first. He baptizes him as he is. Jerkins found that both conservative and liberal readers have minimized this man's Blackness for opposite reasons. Read it and ask what your own training did with him.
Read Jeremiah 13:23. 'Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots?' The verse assumes the audience knows exactly what an Ethiopian looks like. The point is not that dark skin is a problem. The point is that it is fixed and known. The Bible is fully aware of Black-skinned people, and that awareness runs through the whole canon.
Read Revelation 7:9. Every nation, tribe, people, and language stands before the throne. Notice that the end of the story does not melt everyone into one cultural sameness. It gathers them in their particularity. A theology that flattens cultural difference is not aiming at that picture.
Read Galatians 3:28. Neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free. Read it inside the whole letter, not as a slogan. Paul is not saying your ethnicity vanishes in Christ. He is saying it no longer decides your standing before God. Theological colonization often twists this verse to mean culture should be invisible in the church. Ask what Paul is actually doing in the argument.
Examine it: a heart check on your own defaults
This is the discernment turn. Catechesis is not just learning facts. It is letting the truth examine you. Uwan warns that the easiest idol to keep is the one that looks like you and never confronts you. The same goes for a theology that only ever agrees with your tribe.
- Where did you receive your faith, and from whom? Name one assumption that came bundled with it that you have never tested against Scripture.
- Uwan says to divorce yourself from internalized white supremacy before you read, or your reading is already bent. Where might your default reading be bent before you even open the page?
- Honest question: are you tempted to swing from one camp to another and call it freedom? Bantu says the conservative-versus-progressive grid is itself a Western import. If both poles came from the same place, what would it look like to step off the grid instead of switching sides?
The trap to avoid: disentangle, do not demolish
Uwan prefers the word disentangle over deconstruct, and the difference matters for your soul. Disentangling keeps the faith and removes the overlay. Deconstruction can end with nothing left.
She and Jerkins both name the danger: people get hurt by racist theology, swing hard, and end up building a Christianity on their own private terms, which is, ironically, a very Western and individualist move. The reaction becomes a new captivity.
Sit with this. Is there a place where your reaction to bad theology has quietly become its own authority, where you have started trusting your instincts more than the text and the saints? Write it down. Name it honestly. This is not a reason to stop the work. It is the reason to do it in community.
A practice for this week: read on its own terms
Pick one passage you know well, one you could almost recite. Each day this week, read it once and ask a single question you have never asked it:
- Monday: Who is actually in the room? Name every person and where they are from.
- Tuesday: Where on the map is this happening? What did that place mean to the first readers?
- Wednesday: Who wrote this, to whom, and what were they worried about?
- Thursday: What did this passage assume its first hearers already knew that I do not?
- Friday: What have I been taught to skip here, and why might that be?
You are not deconstructing anything this week. You are learning to see what is already on the page. That is where decolonizing starts: not with tearing down, but with reading more honestly. Jerkins calls it exegeting your way through, going back to the text, figuring out what it said in its own context, and building from there.
Discussion questions that build
- What cultural assumptions came with the faith you received? How would you even tell a biblical norm apart from a cultural one you grew up calling biblical?
- Harris describes the hush harbors, where enslaved people fashioned a Christian practice genuinely their own out of sight of the slave master, as an early model of decolonized faith. What does it tell you about the resilience of the gospel that this happened? What does it tell you about the Black church?
- Have you ever encountered an image or representation in church that made you feel either included or excluded? What did it communicate to you about your worth and your belonging?
- The panel insists this work cannot be done alone. It needs intergenerational community and submission to people with more years in the faith. Who in your life has that kind of wisdom? If the honest answer is no one, what would it take to change that?
- Where is the line, for you, between disentangling the faith and deconstructing it? How would you know if you had crossed it?
Leader notes
Expect strong feelings in this study, especially around white Jesus and church hurt. Your job is not to defend a camp. It is to keep the group anchored to the text and to each other. If someone is carrying real injury from racist theology, do not rush them to a conclusion. The panel is clear that trauma often has to be dealt with before the disentangling work can be done well. Let the room be safe enough for honesty, and patient enough that no one feels pushed to either pretend or to walk away.
Watch for the lateral move, the temptation to just adopt the opposite camp's posture. Gently bring it back to Scripture and to Bantu's point that both poles are imports. The win is not a new position. It is a group of people reading the Bible more honestly, together, across generations.
If anyone in your group is in real distress, point them toward pastoral care and, if they are in crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988). Make room for the soul, not just the syllabus.
A charge to close
You did not inherit a clean faith. Nobody does. It came wrapped in someone's culture, and some of that wrapping was holy and some of it was not yours to keep.
The work is not to throw out the gift because you do not like the box. The work is to open your hands, learn the difference, and hold on to Jesus.
Read the Book. Read it in its own world. Do it with the saints, the old ones especially. And trust that the God who was already in Africa, already in Asia, already on every page, is big enough to be known outside the frame somebody handed you. Keep the gift. Let the wrapping go.