Monday, September 30th was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, where we remember those Indigenous children and families who were victims of and affected by Canada’s Indian Residential School system. This year, there were orange shirts around that weekend, as September 30th is also called “Orange Shirt Day.”
As Lutherans, we are a church body whose origins are European; we carry with us a connection to the history of colonialism. Yet, as ELCIC Lutherans in Canada, we also carry with us a history distinct from that of other White-European churches, such as the Anglican, Roman Catholics and United Churches. While Lutherans have had a presence in parts of North America since the 16th Century, they were mostly in the US’s original thirteen colonies. Martin Luther came onto the scene decades after Columbus sailed the ocean blue, meaning there weren’t enough Lutherans to start spreading around until the 1600s.
In the case of most churches and congregations that belong to the ELCIC, our oldest congregations are relatively young, started by our grandparents or great-grandparents in the last one hundred to one hundred fifty years. In the case of Canada’s residential school period, most Lutherans were considered immigrants and outsiders by the church bodies (Anglican, Roman Catholic, United) that were running the schools.
So what is our connection to colonialism? We were not necessarily part of the institutions that were the core of the colonial project in Canada (the British and French empires), but we are part of the White European ethos by proxy. In the height of the colonial era (the late 1700s through 1800s), Europeans were colonizing all over the world, bringing their ways of life, culture and beliefs to nearly every corner of the globe. Europeans engaged in colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, North and South America during this time. This was the time when that saying, “the sun never sets on the British Empire” came into being.
At the core, colonialism was based on the idea that White European ways of life, culture and spirituality were the right and best ways for humans to live. This idea continues to propagate itself even as we now try to reconcile our colonial history.
Colonialism is why Canada had “Indian Residential Schools” to ostensibly “remove the savage from the child.” It is why we forced our religious practices and culture on indigenous peoples and often declared that other ways of living, other cultures, and other ways of believing in God were inferior and wrong.
As Lutherans in Canada, we have kind of sneaked into the back door of colonialism, going from being seen as immigrants considered outsiders for a lot of the last century and a half to trying to lump ourselves in with other White European descent church bodies at precisely at the wrong time. We didn’t have an institutional stake in colonialism, yet we are somewhat a part of the group that colonialism declared to be the right way – as long as we seemed, in Canada’s case, European, White and Christian enough.
In this week’s gospel, the disciples are worried about others who are healing in Jesus’ name. They are worried that these “others” are not doing things the right way. Jesus reminds them that the work of the Kingdom of God happens in so many more ways than they can imagine.
Unfortunately, that message didn’t get through to colonial empires. But, as we seek to dismantle and reconcile the structures and worldviews of colonialism that still exist in our world today, we can remember this message: God might be at work in places and ways we have not conceived of yet. We are called as people of faith to the important work of truth and reconciliation, even from our unusual position as Lutherans in Canada.
The Millennial Pastor 