World Vision "May We Be One" Course Advocates Pagan Syncretism For Native Americans

In Session 7 of World Vision's "May We Be One," Dr. Randy Woodley goes beyond saying Christian missionaries mistreated indigenous people with violence and Judaizer-style conformity (which did occur). He also says they wrongly told Native tribes to repent from pagan spirituality.

—TRANSCRIPT HIGHLIGHTS—

One of the things we need to understand about the theology that was planted in this soil, if you will, by the early settlers is that they did not deem the Native people as having anything spiritually worthy of keeping.

...

All the early charters that were sent from England over here...all said that they had a mission to, and they would say, like, "the savages" or "the heathen," things like that. So the assumption was already that God is not here, that God is only present with us, and so what we need to do, then, is teach them our religion and get rid of any sort of cultural baggage or spiritual beliefs. In fact, they would even say, even missionaries would often say that they follow the devil.

...

As Native people heard this, they were already very spiritual. They were people who understood that God is powerful, that God is love. That they have personal experiences and even covenants with God. There were ceremonies based on those covenants, there were stories built around those. And in particular, we all have our covenant story of the land that was given to us so long ago.

It's sort of like that verse in Acts 17:26-27 that says: From one man he created every ethnos or nation, so that they might reach out and find God. And so those places, God placed our different Native peoples in.

And yet the people who came saying, no, they are the ones that are believing in the real God, destroyed our relationship with those places by removing us, by taking away those stories, by taking away those songs and those ceremonies, and the very foundation of what it meant to follow God here already.

And so we were very close. And as my adopted [inaudible] mother used to say, when the missionaries came, we were very close to the message. We only didn't understand how much God loved us because we didn't know the story of Jesus.

But you look at Acts 17...Paul quotes Epimenides, one of the Greek philosophers' poets. He knows their stuff, right? So this is not a lazy guy. This is a guy who understands the people he's talking to and the worldview and their culture...And Paul just simply said, "Let me explain who this unknown god is."

[TEXT CHECK: In vv. 29-31, Paul does not merely "explain" who God is but commands his audience to repent from the false beliefs they hold. “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”]

Source videos:
https://vimeo.com/526266848
https://vimeo.com/526329183
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