Returning to our roots: Mission Sunday 2016

2016, 5 pp

God at work in spite of the Doctrine of Discovery

November is mission month. Help us celebrate what God is doing in the world and how God calls us to share the good news with others. Here are some tools to plan a Mission Sunday celebration. We hope you’ll find them helpful.

What is the Doctrine of Discovery?

God is doing amazing things in our world! Look around you; God is at work in our neighbourhoods around the world. Despite the tragedies of the past and present, God is in both the suffering and the life-giving moments.

This Mission Sunday, we’ll explore how God works in spite of the Doctrine of Discovery, and more broadly, hatred in the name of Christ. Join us as we repent of past and present violence, and celebrate the diversity of God’s kingdom.

It started with the early explorers. They were accompanied by priests with the goal of bringing Christianity to the New World from Spain in 1492. The Papal Bull “Inter Caetera,” issued by Pope Alexander VI a year later, played a central role in the Spanish conquest of this New World. The document supported Spain’s strategy to ensure its exclusive right to the lands “discovered” by Columbus. This philosophy has become the primary world view of colonization, domination, exploitation, and Christianization of the world by people of Western European origins for the past 500 years. At its core is the claim that all land not settled by European Christians is available for their development and settlement, and that those people currently living on and using the land have no claim of ownership or rights of use.

Even as late as 1823, this “Papal Bull,” called the Doctrine of Discovery, was affirmed by the United States Supreme Court in a series of decisions. Chief Justice John Marshall justified the way in which colonial powers laid claim to lands belonging to foreign sovereign nations. The doctrine has been primarily used to support decisions invalidating or ignoring indigenous and aboriginal possession of land in favour of colonial or post-colonial governments into the present.

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