Migration, diaspora & mission -postcolonial & missiological reflections on the displacement of peoples

Migration, Diaspora

& Mission

- Postcolonial & Missiological

Reflections on the

Displacement of Peoples

Andrew D. Kingston-Smith

“People on the Move…Migration, Diaspora & Mission”

Andrew D. Kingston-Smith Page 2 of 30

“Refugee:

You are unsettled, uprooted. You have been translated. Who translated you?

Who broke your links with the land? You have been forcibly moved off, or you

have fled war or famine. You are mobile, mobilized, stumbling along your line

of flight. But nothing flows. Moving, your life has come to a halt. Your life has

been fractured, your family fragmented. The lovely dull familiar stabilities of

ordinary everyday life and local social existence that you have known have

passed. Compressed into a brief moment, you have experienced the violent

disruptions of capitalism, the end of the comforts of the commonplace. You

have become an emblem of everything that people are experiencing in cold

modernity across different times. You encounter a new world, a new culture to

which you have to adapt while trying to preserve your own recognizable forms

of identity. Putting the two together is an experience of pain. Perhaps one day

you, or your children, will see it as a form of liberation, but not now. Life has

become too fragile, too uncertain. You can count on nothing. You have become

an object in the eyes of the world. Who is interested in your experiences now,

in what you think or feel? Politicians of the world rush to legislate to prevent

you from entry into their countries.

Asylum Seeker:

Barred. You are the intruder. You are untimely, you are out of place. A refugee

tearing yourself from your own land, carrying your body, beliefs, your

language and your desires, your habits and your affections, across to the

strange subliminal spaces of unrecognized worlds. Everything that happens in

this raw, painful experience of disruption, dislocation, and dis-remembering

paradoxically fuels the cruel but creative crucible of the postcolonial

Robert J.C Young – “Postcolonialism; A Very Short Introduction” (p. 11-13)



Contents:-

1. Introduction .................................................................................................... 4

1.1 The Anguish of the ‘Displaced’ ............................................................... 4

1.2 Setting the Global Scene – Shifts, Shuffles and Shocks .......................... 4

2. Migration - Global Movements and the Identity Crisis ................................. 6

2.1 Uncertain Times – ‘Liquidity’ & ‘Elasticity’ .......................................... 6

2.2 The Context of the Postcolonial, Globalised World ................................ 7

2.3 “Who am I and where is my Home?” ...................................................... 8

2.4 “Alive, but nowhere to lay my Head” ...................................................... 9

3. Postcolonial Interpretations ......................................................................... 12

3.1 Postcolonial Literature – Reinterpreting the Script ............................... 12

3.2 Diasporic Hermeneutics – Perspectives from the ‘Underside’ .............. 16

4. Repercussions of Diaspora and Migrant Phenomena .................................. 20

5. Missiological Perspectives of a Postcolonial & Globalised World ............. 22

5.1 ‘Third Culture Christians’ – The hybridisation of the ‘Boundary-

Crosser’ and the ‘Cross-bearer’ ................................................................... 22

5.2 ‘A Third Way’ – Kingdom Perspectives ............................................... 23

6. Conclusion ................................................................................................... 25

Bibliography .................................................................................................... 27



1. Introduction

1.1 The Anguish of the ‘Displaced’

Pain. Anguish. Rejection. Confusion. Insecurity. Fragility. Voicelessness.

These adjectives illustrate the upheaval of leaving your loved ones and

familiar security ties, ‘the world as we know it’, with the stark reality that the

‘new world’ of promise, hope and longed-for dreams so often fails to satisfy

the yearning for meaning and a better future for the Migrant? The allure of the

‘fresh green grass of pastures new’ so often gives way to the harsh reality that

not only is the ‘new world’ no better, but actually the cumulative effects of

anticipation and hope, makes it a greater disappointment? What if after years

in the ‘new world’, the ‘old one’ returns to mind as some imagining of a

distant splendour, seen through newly-acquired rose-tinted spectacles? The

physical pain of movement and change may be clear; however, what mind-

games does this phenomenon cause? What is the psychological effect of

‘acquiring’ citizenship of ‘no-man’s land’ on the Displaced; that band of

invisible, fluid, unofficial, unstable, ‘no-name’ and ‘no-face’ vulnerable

assembly of migrants, refugees and diasporic communities criss-crossing the

globe? What is our role as Christian citizens of the world, to show compassion,

to relate with and support them? How are we to prepare cross-culturally to

serve ‘nobodies’ in ‘no-man’s’ land?

1.2 Setting the Global Scene – Shifts, Shuffles and Shocks

Never before have there been such global movements of people. The

phenomenon is not new, but the scale and speed of the process has accelerated

in recent decades. Even in the Christian context, the shift in ‘location’ and



‘identity’ of the global Christian family illustrates this dynamic. By the

inception of the 21st Century, the majority of Christians (60 %+) were to be

found in the ‘South’ (Africa, Asia & Latin America), rather than the Europe &

North America of the ‘North’ (Nazir-Ali 1990, 208-209).

The shift from ‘South’ to ‘North’ is mirrored by the shift from ‘rural’ to

‘urban’. Bakke sketches a bewildering array of global movements; Africans in

South London, Asians in East London, Algerians in Paris, a million Japanese

in Sao Paulo alone, eighty million Chinese resident outside China; the list is

almost endless, yet a common factor remains. In the shift from ‘rural’ to

‘urban’ (Bakke 2002, 30-31), many dangers lurk. Global cities are highly

impersonal places, where one can ‘disappear’ into an endless flow of

‘information-overload’ and profit-making enterprise, leading to crises of the

‘self’, and where human beings “in the multiple space of places, made of

locales increasingly segregated and disconnected from each other” (Castells

2000, 507), become progressively dehumanized, psychologically vulnerable

and socially marginalised; the shock that awaits the Migrant on arrival in the

‘Promised Land’, a fate reserved for the “global poor…evicted from their land

and forced to seek survival in the fast swelling slums of the…megalopolis”

(Bauman 2007, 28), provides the Christian Church with an opportunity to

minister grace, mercy and love into a situation of extreme volatility. A

sensitive ‘shuffling’ towards the spiritually receptive ‘alien’, helps re-align the

pedagogically-dominant colonial approach of which we have been guilty in the

past. Our Biblical Mandate must be exercised incarnationally, as exemplified

by Christ, into the postcolonial experience of the Global poor.



2. Migration - Global Movements and the Identity

Crisis

2.1 Uncertain Times – ‘Liquidity’ & ‘Elasticity’

We live in extraordinary times; the steady, progressive and linear worldview of

the Enlightenment era has given way to more random, circular, and uncertain

experiential ebbs and flows of life. We might see our present existence as the

midpoint of an elastic band, stretched and contracted in opposite and

competing ways, or the liquidity of our subsistence about as ‘solid’ as water

dripping through the fingers of the post-modern clasp, or visions of our future

as clearly grasped as a slippery bar of soap in the hands of untrustworthy

policymakers. This may just encapsulate the Migrants’ reality, where their

usefulness in the global workplace and the threat of “’assignment’ to ‘waste’

becomes…the potential prospect – one of the two poles between

which…present and future social standing oscillates” (Bauman 2007, 32).

Issues of identity, purpose, meaning and, ultimately, ‘reality’ are never far

from postcolonial discourse and the polarised dichotomy of the pain of

present-day experience with the ‘virtuality’ of the sanitised computer-

generated ‘dream-world’ of the future. It is an ideological smorgasbord of

notions, flowing across boundaries, and subject to the flows of the ‘switch-

holders’ (Castells 2000), administered outside the domain and control of the

personal experience of the disempowered Migrant. Power is “diffused in

global networks of wealth…information, and images, which circulate and

transmute in a system of variable geometry and dematerialised geography”

(Castells 2004, 424), and the Migrants are not afforded equal access to that

network. Castells summarises the “new social order, the Network Society”

(Castells 2000, 508), as “an automated, random sequence of events, derived



from the uncontrollable logic of markets, technology, geopolitical order…”

(Castells 2000, 508), and it is those on the margins of such society, who

experience the moments when the ‘elastic’ of their identity snaps or the

‘liquidity’ of their worth drains away.

2.2 The Context of the Postcolonial, Globalised World

The concept of ‘Migrant’ covers a wide range of people in a multiple variety

of situations. Koser’s study seeks to understand the causes of migrancy, as

well as address the situation of when a migrant may shed that label; when

returning home or becoming a citizen of ‘the new country’, (Koser 2007, 16).

In addition, he considers the historical colonial process which led to the

displacement of people, and the contemporary study of the effects of

globalisation, where “new ‘types’ of migrants with new characteristics” (Koser

2007, 16) have emerged, as members of diasporas or transnational

communities.

Colonial pressures and political conflicts have forced many to leave their

homelands creating innumerable displaced refugees. Neo-colonial political and

ethnically-driven forces today (e.g. the situation in Darfur) are clear examples

of this phenomenon. However, the largest category of Migrant is the social or

economic ‘voluntary’ migrant. Shortage of labour opportunities and the desire

for better work conditions has encouraged the movement of millions (Koser

2007, 17). Thus, such movements are a direct result of a plethora of economic,

political and social reasons. This complex situation cannot, however mask the

clear fact that colonial and globalisation forces are largely responsible for

fuelling this phenomenon and it is the task of the postcolonial discourse to



highlight the Migrant’s story, to render authentic their experience, to pressurise

governmental and other political agencies into action over the Migrants’

plight; to unburden their pain and confusion.

2.3 “Who am I and where is my Home?”

We shall consider issues of identity later, but for now it is important to

recognise the postcolonial discourse on ‘homelessness’ or ‘rootlessness’. It is,

as a result of the colonising process, whether that is 19th

Century Imperialism

or contemporary forces of 21st Century ‘democratic’ warmongering waged by

Western powers (‘mandated’ by UN sanctions stuffed full of ‘principled’

rhetoric yet ineffective in avoiding catastrophic human fallout, as in the

situations in Iraq and Afghanistan), that displacement of people becomes a

natural consequence of fundamentalist muscle-flexing. Bauman reflects that

“the part of the population that decides to flee the battlefield and manages to

escape finds itself in another type of lawlessness, that of the global frontier-

land.” (Bauman 2007, 37). He explains that this ‘no-man’s’ land type of

situation is representative of the refugee status, where they fall outside the

protection of the State to the extent that “their statelessness is raised to an

entirely new level by the non-existence or mere ghost-like presence of a state

authority to which their statehood could be referred” (Bauman 2007, 37).

However, this physical symptom merely masks other realities of the

postcolonial experience; psychological and emotional detachment from ones

culture, history and roots; in short, welcome to the increasingly-alienated

voiceless, victimised subaltern who is “never free from a gnawing sense of the

transience, indefiniteness and provisional nature of any settlement” (Bauman

2007, 38), the one who is the missing statistic in refugee registers, and an



invisible inhabitant of “the no-where land of non-humanity” (Bauman 2007,

39)!

From a sense of physical rootlessness to identity doubt, or loss, is unlikely to

constitute a quantum leap. Moreover, the above phenomena are not the

exclusive domain of those who cross international borders. A similar

psychological effect faces the ‘internally-excluded’ or ‘underclass’ which

Garland notes are the victims of the new colonial mentality. This is evidenced

by the shift in the UK from a ‘social state’ to a ‘penal’ one, where the

“offenders…are now less likely to be represented in official discourse as

socially deprived citizens in need of support [but] are depicted instead as

culpable, undeserving and somewhat dangerous individuals” (Garland 2001,

175). They have shifted from recipients of sympathy to victims of antagonism,

so the displacement is a ‘live’ factor, even for those who do not appear to have

crossed any physical borders.

2.4 “Alive, but nowhere to lay my Head”

Jesus’ words that "Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son

of Man has no place to lay his head." (Luke 9:58), may easily form a central

tenet of the postcolonial discourse, for the landless are also displaced and

vulnerable to migratory forces. The Brazilian Movimento Sem Terra

(Movement of Landless Rural Workers, “the MST”) is a political response to

the huge inequalities existent in the world’s 9th

largest economy, Brazil

(Young 2003, 45). Where 60% of the land lies idle and, conversely, millions

live in the squalid condition of the favela, postcolonialism, rightly, has an issue

to address. The legacy of Portuguese colonial policy is now a nation of



extremes, where two-thirds of the cultivated land is owned by 3% of the

population, statistics comparable with many other regions of Latin America,

which have been the subject of past colonial rule, both Portuguese and more

predominantly, Spanish. In Brazil, vast latitude (estates), have been held by a

tiny minority of wealthy landowners (Young 2003, 45). The MST, “one of the

largest grassroots organizations in the world” (Young 2003, 46), has assisted

250,000 families in winning land titles to over 15 million acres of land. There

is no doubt, that the numerous indigenous Amazonian tribes have a valid

contribution to make in this debate; the ‘protected’, yet geographically-

limiting, reserves are cruel compensation for traditionally nomadic ways of

life, inequitable gestures towards the original landowners. This same scenario

is continuously repeated and provides headline news in many scenarios around

the world.

As Christians we are so often told that politics and Christianity should not be

mixed. Is that because the warnings come from the politically advantaged,

wary of their privileged status quo being upset? postcolonial theology, as

noted below, reminds us that such separation is artificial, and that theology

from the ‘underside’ is formed and sharpened by this reality. The words of

American Catholic nun Dorothy Stang, ‘The Angel of the trans-Amazon’,

murdered defending the land-rights of the disenfranchised in the Brazilian

Amazon, are a stark reminder;

“It is not my safety but that of the people that really

matters, all of the Sisters of Notre Dame working in Brazil

work very closely with our people and want to be a sign of



hope. It is wonderful to be a part of this struggle and this is

the contribution of Notre Dame.” (Environmental News

Service, Brasilia 2005).



3. Postcolonial Interpretations

3.1 Postcolonial Literature – Reinterpreting the Script

The historical script has often been one, manufactured, produced, marketed

and, ultimately, owned by Western power. This, inevitably, runs the risk of

projecting a one-sided version of events. One of the principal tasks of the

postcolonial discourse is to re-address this imbalance. The ‘underside’ of

history must, surely, have its own tale to tell.

The disjunction between past and present experience (McLeod 2000, 211) is

taken up by Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands) when speaking of Indian

migrants;

“our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means

that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing

that was lost; we will…create fictions, not actual cities or

villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the

mind” (Rushdie 1991 in McLeod 2000, 211).

This theme of ‘imaginings’ is powerful, connecting with the issue of

‘borders’. Whilst migrants pass through the physical and political borders of

the world, these borders will not be the last ones they face. The psychological

and cultural borders of the Nation-state will present migrants with challenges,

just as taxing; it is here that the culture of the ‘new home’ may forever be used

to “exclude migrants from being accommodated inside the imaginative

borders of the nation” (McLeod 2000, 212-213). Gilroy (The Black Atlantic)

articulates the theme of restless sojourning in the concept of ‘roots’ and



‘routes’. The Migrant does “not have secure roots which fix him into place, in

a nation or an ethnic group” (Gilroy 1993 in McLeod 2000, 215), but rather is

orientated by “itinerant cultural routes which take him, imaginatively as well

as physically, to many places and into contact with many different peoples”

(Gilroy 1993 in McLeod 2000, 215). This nomadic restlessness and cultural

interaction through routes heightens the rootlessness of the migrants’ physical

and psychological state.

Bhabha and Kureishi contribute to the discourse in considering the shadowy

existence of the ‘in-between’ state. Kureishi’s tale of confused relationships

straddling his British and Pakistani identities, (My Beautiful Launderette)

demonstrates that the ‘in-between world’ of the Migrant becomes the ‘reality’

also for subsequent generations of migrants. The differentness of skin colour

runs more than skin-deep; it may be an indelible mark that can never be

erased, a permanent reminder of not belonging to either world, but somewhere

in between. Whilst, there is the advantage of being able to ‘relate’ to either or

both (to some degree), the discrimination of the imaginative borders precludes

the Migrant, and descendants, from establishing roots; it places the Migrants’

sense of belonging into the ‘hybrid community of the in-betweens’; the

postcolonial identity (Bhabha 1994 in McLeod, 2000, 217).

Bhabha expounds the theme of ‘borders’ (The Location of Culture). He

critiques the broad sweep of time within which those who live ‘border lives’,

find themselves, as mere dots on the long line of history;



“Our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of

survival, living on the ‘border line’ of the ‘present’, for which

there seems to be no proper name other than the current and

controversial shiftiness of the prefix ‘post’: postmodernism,

postcolonialism, postfeminism…” (Bhabha, 1994, 1)

This raises an important premise. Do our present times suggest that we all

might identify with this sense of insecurity, of not quite knowing what is next?

We have moved, Bhabha seems to suggest, from a ‘post-‘era into something

‘beyond’, perhaps a new ‘pre-‘or ‘neo-‘era. Have migratory mindsets now

become universal and not merely owned by the more obviously displaced?

Internal displacement, characteristic of the post-modern suspicion of the grand

meta-narrative leads us to deconstruct all that we had previously built up, the

unchanging fixed ‘truths’ of the modernist agenda. Have we now entered a

time of abandoning external reference points and taken on a more illusory

undefined notion, that which lies on the new horizon of the ‘beyond’?

“…we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and

time cross to produce complex figures of difference and

identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and

exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance

of direction, in the ‘beyond’” (Bhabha 1994, 2).

If Bhabha is correct in interpreting the present predicament, does this not

provide a platform from which the upside-down values of the Kingdom may

get not only a fresh hearing, but serious consideration as a narrative to be

taken into account with the many other pseudo-ideological and religious



narratives competing for the attentions of the deconstructionally-sensitised

reader? Do we have enough confidence that the Good News of the Christian

narrative is sufficiently captivating by itself, without requiring the marketing

machinations of imperialist programmes?

Bhabha’s ‘border’ is the place of transitory crossing, the ‘interstitial’ or

‘liminal’ state (McLeod 2000, 217), where polarity and binary opposites give

way to “shifting complex forms of representation that deny binary patterning”

(McLeod 2000, 217), where past and present “commingle and conflict”

(McLeod 2000, 217), so that “imaginative border-crossings are as much a

consequence of migration as the physical crossing of borders” (McLeod 2000,

217). If we continue our premise that the postmodern hermeneutic is a

present-day reality, might we surmise that an inherent internal displacement is

also a symptom of an increasingly Globalised existence? Are Postcolonial re-

interpretations of the world becoming subsumed by new global hermeneutics

of ‘contradiction’ and ‘open-endedness’, as alluded to by Bhabha in the

‘beyond’?

Loomba provides a wise warning against over-generalising the Migrant’s

plight;

“The experiences and traumas generated by the single

largest population shift in history – the division of India

and Pakistan – are quite different from another enormous

movement, that of immigrants from once colonised nations

to Europe or America” (Loomba 1998, 180).



What we may say, with certainty, is that the Migrants’ identity, resulting from

global paradoxical experiences, is concretely uncertain.

3.2 Diasporic Hermeneutics – Perspectives from the ‘Underside’

“By the rivers of foreign countries we sat down as refugees

There we wept when we remembered the land of our birth

We stopped singing our beloved songs of liberation…

Remember Lord what the oppressors did

The Day they turned us into refugees

Remember how they kept saying “Let us destroy them

completely.””

(Namibia Writer, Zephania Kameeta’s updated version of Psalm

137) (Jenkins 2006, 82)

Postcolonial re-interpretations of theology must be equally valid. One cannot

maintain postcolonial attitudes towards the present and hang on to past

colonial renditions of theology and missiology. What do postcolonial

hermeneutics bring into traditional, conservative Western theologies?

Traditionally, the term Diaspora has referred to the Jewish exile, although

Koser notes the increased assimilation of the word in African communities in

London (Koser 2007, 26), for inter alia, reasons of identification and solidarity

with the victimisation of the dispersed Jews and African slaves. There appears

to be a close relationship between the concepts of ‘migration’ and

‘displacement’, although in Diaspora situations there may be a stronger sense

of ‘settledness’ in the new home, whilst retaining significant connections with



previous homelands. It is out from the postcolonial world that the concept of

Global Christianity has spawned, evidenced in the explosion of African

churches in London, as Segovia notes when analysing Wall’s historical treatise

(Segovia 2000, 20-22).

Having acknowledged the tremendous demographic shifts, Segovia poses the

question; what does this mean for Biblical criticism, for the “angle of vision

afforded by such a web of diasporic experiences will be increasingly applied,

to both modernist and postmodernist readings of the original Biblical texts

(Segovia 2000, 23). His own experience, growing up in Cuba, and emigrating

to the US, of both belonging and ‘otherness’, has led him to construct a

diasporic hermeneutic (Segovia 2000, 30) from his position of ‘disaggregated’

identity (Segovia 2000, 32).

A point of connection with Bhabha’s ‘beyond’ is the concept that the

postcolonial discourse on displacement, assimilated in Liberation theology,

finds a home in the “identity of instability and geographical conflict” (Althaus-

Reid in Segovia 2000, 37). It is through the reality of ‘struggle’ that the

biblical text acquires fresh meaning, a point of reference, for those whose lives

are defined by such struggle and for whom stability and absence of threat are

foreign concepts. Althaus-Reid argues that postcolonial theologies go further

than liberationist ones, “because their quest is to dehegemonize multiple

bodies” (Althaus-Reid in Segovia 2000, 41), such as bodies of knowledge, in

both cultural and economic respects; the hegemonization of the global world is

to be fiercely resisted by the postcolonial theologian, she argues. Another role

of the postcolonial theologian is to unmask “the fact that Western theological



discourse works by simulation” (Althaus-Reid in Segovia 2000, 41), illustrated

by the simulation of spiritual and Western reality that accentuates a hegemonic

agenda (Althaus-Reid in Segovia 2000, 41).

Segovia considers anti-hierarchical and anti-competitive hermeneutical

constructs as an important part of the postcolonial theologian’s role (Segovia

2000, 65). It is this ‘reading-across’ approach which characterises the new

diasporic hermeneutic, in addition to anti-empiricist and anti-objectivist

readings (Segovia 2000, 65). The Liberationist or postcolonial theologian

develops the authenticity of their theology by forming and re-forming it in the

dusty, bloody arena of the gladiatorial crucible, and not in the sanitised study

of a University room in Boston.

It is for these reasons that theological voices from the margins, from Diasporic

communities, must be welcomed, heard and considered thoughtfully and

seriously. On a more practical note, it helps the ‘displaced’ to identify more

closely with the desert sojourn of the OT Hebrew people, the earlier stories of

Abraham and Joseph, and the later exilic discourse of the Babylonian

experience. When one consciously applies this perspective to Scripture, we see

the obvious parallels with the experience of God’s people through both the

OT, and the Diasporic communities that Paul interacted with. Such a

comparison brings comfort to the ‘displaced’; that of having a God intimately

acquainted with the struggles of rootlessness, identity, struggle and

persecution, so characteristic of the postcolonial discourse. Therein lie clues as

to Kingdom values to be pursued and lessons of solidarity to be imbibed.



Then, and only then, may we relate to our brothers and sisters who are

struggling with such issues more acutely than us in the West.

However, Sugirtharajah cautions that there is a “hermeneutic fatigue, a feeling

that we have heard these things before”, referring to more messianic narratives

supplanting, what she refers to as an exhausted indigenization or

contextualisation model. She acknowledges the close relationship between

postcolonialism and Globalisation as we engage in an “ever wider and more

complex web of cultural negotiation and interaction”. Postcoloniality indicates

that we assume fractured, hyphenated, double, or in some cases, multiple

identities” (Sugirtharajah 2003, 124). Irarrazaval adds his final salutary

warning;

“Latin Americans are subjected to contradictory Christian

messages…many people are targeted for mission conquest.

Methods abound for setting up opposition based on fear (“us”

and “them”, salvation or eternal condemnation) by

conservative sects and churches. Sectarian and unecumenical

attitudes and authoritarian models are often presented as

features of the gospel, when they are actually devices for

social, cultural, and spiritual control” (Irarrazaval 2000, 58-

59).



4. Repercussions of Diaspora and Migrant Phenomena

A growing area of economic significance is that of remittances, moneys sent

home by migrants living abroad. These vary from the high charges imposed

through the formal banking system, to the low commission rates of the Cuban

mulas, and the trade-based hawilaad system utilised in Somalia (Koser 2007,

42). Recent World Bank statistics demonstrate a 50% increase in total revenue

over the last 5 years, which now accounts for the second largest transfer of any

legal commodity worldwide, after oil, a trend Koser attributes to the impact of

Globalisation (Koser 2007, 42-43). To illustrate the significance of this, 37%

of the proportion of Tongan GDP is made up of remittance receipts, and 27%

and 23% in Lesotho and Jordan, respectively. According to Koser, there

appears to be a real prospect of the poverty of large numbers of people being

alleviated through these means; in Lesotho remittances are now a staggering

80% of the income of rural households.

Koser also considers a number of other positive features of diasporic

communities. Organisations have emerged bringing migrant doctors, lawyers

or teachers together, as well as the formation of ‘interest groups’ (e.g. Mexican

“Home Town Associations “ in the US, which manage the construction of

public infrastructure, donation of equipment and promotion of education

(Koser 2007, 48). The negative flip-side is the ‘brain drain’ phenomenon,

which can result in exacerbating difficult national economic conditions and

undermines the fight against poverty. Analysis of this is outside the scope of

this work, but the implications of the loss of home-grown talent can be

catastrophic on poorer nations, and colonial ties of the past have assisted,

perhaps unwittingly, this process. Colonial networks (trade, language, social



ties) do perpetuate this one-way traffic, which benefits the old colonial power

and further disadvantages the newly-independent state. The postcolonial

discourse must react and articulate its’ disaffect with the economic rape of the

colonised entity.

The postcolonial discourse seeks to give ‘voice’ to the marginalised. Two

categories of the marginalised we have yet to mention are women and

children. They are a significant part of this debate, not least because their

plight is often extreme. Women who migrate to marry, or seek work

domestically, in the entertainment or sex industries are particularly vulnerable

to exploitation and social isolation (Koser 2007, 122). Often patriarchal and

chauvinistic societies have de-skilled women, who are discriminated against,

suffer from a lack of integration into social networks and face insurmountable

challenges (language and economic barriers), through their isolation in the

home. Violence and abuse of children and the generational and gender tensions

that migration can create (Koser 2007, 122) also disadvantage them,

disproportionately. We have already considered the ‘identity’ issues above,

noting the very personal contributions that Rushdie, Kureishi and Bhabha have

made to postcolonial literature through their own personal experiences of

growing up in foreign lands. Children, “can experience a sense of alienation

and uncertainties about their own identity and allegiances, especially if they

encounter discrimination and xenophobia” (Koser 2007, 122-123). The

postcolonial discourse has much to contribute in reflecting on the difficult

experiences of such women and children, especially when those conscious

decisions to migrate have usually omitted them from the consultation and

decision-making process; they have become the ‘hangers-on’.



5. Missiological Perspectives of a Postcolonial &

Globalised World

5.1 ‘Third Culture Christians’ – The hybridisation of the

‘Boundary-Crosser’ and the ‘Cross-bearer’

Any culturally-sensitive and enquiring missiologist should be able to

appreciate, at least in part, some of the issues postcolonialism sheds on issues

of displacement, identity and hybridity. A number have been exposed through

this work, but others require further consideration.

The ‘Displacement’ discourse provides us with a unique point of contact with

those who are, similarly, ‘aliens in the land’. In Christ we are able to draw

analogous strands, as he experienced a number of similar displacement issues

in 1st Century Palestine. He endured a migratory journey to Egypt, and back,

grew up in an occupied land, lived with the paradox of the divine and the

human in one and the tension of ‘being in the world, but not of it’. He “was

despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.

Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed

him not” (Isaiah 53:3, NIV).

Our sojourn through this life prevents us from rooting too deeply into

familiarity and security. Instead we are called to humbly incarnate the presence

and love of Christ in whatever culture we find ourselves in, and to

communicate that love across great divides, where our differentness becomes

just that little less acute and prevents us from engaging in ‘mixophobia’

(Bauman 2007). This is an important point, since we are called to live in

community, not as islands, and this living in community will, increasingly,

mean mixing with those who may be radically different, racially, socially and



economically. Our ‘hybrid’ identity, whilst manifesting clear external features,

must more seriously result from circumcision of the heart; we are to avoid

being “individuals seeking individual satisfaction and individual escape from

individually suffered discomforts” (Bauman 2007, 103).

In ministering to the Displaced we are to live out Matthew’s instruction

(Matthew 25:35-36) for, as summarised by Jesus, “whatever you did for one of

the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40, NIV).

Ingleby reminds us of our compassionate duty of hospitality to those who

arrive in our midst; to encourage mutually healthy integration and share our

faith in a contextually meaningful way (Ingleby 2007, 3).

5.2 ‘A Third Way’ – Kingdom Perspectives

Ethics of the Kingdom should subvert the temptation to react aggressively or

passively in the heated cauldron of ‘Displacement’, so a third approach is

necessary.

Our resolve must be to reject any existing Kingdom theologies which have

“readily been seduced by the radical individualism of the modern era” (Grenz

2000, 23), and embrace what living in community should be about, where we

seek the welfare of others above our own. Jesus stirs us to this selfless vision

of the ‘self’ (Matthew 16:25). Our priority must be the proper struggle of the

universal Body of Christ in this Age, above our own needs, wants, desires,

ambitions and dreams for “Kingdom life means doing God’s thing together”

(Kraybill 1990, 267), and “it is the essence of that Kingdom that its joy is the

joy of communion” (Newbigin 2003, 23), observed in the Trinity, expressed

through the Body and received by the marginalised.



Mission limited to the sphere of activity and influence of the Church is an

incomplete praxis for mission. Equally, we might say that the activity of the

Church needs to be expanded, so as to encompass more of the mission of the

Kingdom, as Gnanakan contends:-

“The church in its mission today must break out of its own

small horizon and discover the implications of God’s kingdom

horizons. Only then will the reality of the kingdom of God

become the dynamic of mission.” (Gnanakan 1993, 131).

Colonialist language of ““spreading”, “building”, and “establishing” God’s

kingdom, all of which is alien to biblical theology” (Keck 1995, 293), should

be distasteful to the postmodern, post-Christendom Christian. It is in our

weakness that we best minister to the global weak, especially those whose

new-found freedoms from the foreign coloniser have been tragically

undermined by neo-colonial attitudes of ‘national elites’, or those who remain

‘disempowered’ by the clout and power of the globally-networked.



6. Conclusion

The postcolonial discourse persuades us to think long and hard about our

Biblical hermeneutic and our mission praxis. Ekland summarises the

prioritisation of our ‘first allegiance’, when we enter into engagement with the

‘underside’ of humanity;

“Reading Paul with undocumented immigrants and inmates

invites us to a radical reorientation away from total allegiance

to the state, denominations, and other principalities with their

laws and doctrines, toward a 100 percent following after the

One crucified outside the camp.” (Ekblad 2005, 196).

There is good news amidst the pain, as Sanneh notes;

The new Christians are…finding all the dreams of a worldly

utopia shattered by betrayal, war, vanity, anarchy, poverty,

epidemics, and endemic hostility. They are seeking refuge in

the justification of the righteous kingdom, flocking to the

churches because the old fences of what used to be home have

crumbled” (Sanneh & Carpenter 2005, 222).

Our identification with Christ must ensure that radical re-interpretations of our

theology are undertaken, that our compassion for the displaced of the world is

articulated in word as well as in deed, and that Rayan’s observation becomes a

guiding principle for our lives;



“Decolonizing theology and building authentic Third World

theologies thus means helping theology spring from the

underside, letting faith articulations arise from the search of the

marginalized for relevance; being faithful to the theological

method of the primacy of praxis over theory…so that theology

ceases to be colonized…” (Rayan in Fabella & Sugirtharajah

2003, 66).



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Migration, diaspora & mission -postcolonial & missiological reflections on the displacement of peoples

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