Decolonizing Diakonia

Hyuk Cho / JungHee Park †

Decolonizing Diakonia

From Servanthood to Companionship

Berlin · Bruxelles · Chennai · Lausanne · New York · Oxford

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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Cover Illustration: Tapestry Blanket, River Ripples by Debra Sparrow

(Musqueam master weaver, artist and knowledge keeper)

Dimensions: 127 cm × 178 cm

Photo Credit: Richard Topping

ISSN 0170-9240

ISBN 978-3-631-93729-7 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-631-93791-4 (E-PDF)

ISBN 978-3-631-93792-1 (E-PUB)

DOI 10.3726/b22904

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne (Switzerland)

Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin (Germany)

info@peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

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In loving memory of JungHee,
who showed me the beauty of true companionship.
Your spirit lives on in these pages.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I
Retrieving Diakonia in the Context of Mission

Chapter 1 The Biblical Understanding of Diakonia

Chapter 2 Diakonia in the Context of Mission

Part II
Diakonia as Servanthood: Feminist Critiques of the Dominant Model

Chapter 3 Biblical Women’s Diakonia

Chapter 4 The Historical Development of Diakonia

Chapter 5 Women Missionaries’ Diakonia

Part III
Diakonia as Companionship: Katharine B. Hockin’s Missiology

Chapter 6 Hockin’s Life and Work in Context: Philosophical, Historical, and Personal

Chapter 7 Hockin’s Developing Missiology and Its Influence

Chapter 8 Hockin’s Missiology of Companionship for Diakonia

Part IV
Decolonizing Diakonia: A Postcolonial Theological Engagement

Chapter 9 Unbinding Colonial Desire

Chapter 10 Toward Decolonizing Diakonia as Companionship: Hockin’s Intercultural and Postcolonial Hermeneutics of Mission

Conclusion

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Whenever the minister of the Presbyterian Church visited us, my grandmother and mother were busy preparing food to treat him well. As I remember, he had a very good appetite. Before the big meal, there was always a worship service, during which he would pray for our family. When he blessed the children, he called each of us by name, including me. He would call my sisters’ names first, from the oldest to the youngest, and then mine, asking for God’s blessing to help us become like Sarah, the mother of nations. Then, he called my younger brother’s name and blessed him to become a great servant of God, his strong and confident voice emphasizing every syllable. In Korean, “servant” and “church bell” are homonyms, so whenever I heard his prayer, I imagined a big church bell. How could my brother possibly become a church bell? However, neither I nor my sisters ever received the same blessing to be a servant or a church bell in his prayers.

JungHee

At the worship service marking JungHee’s graduation in 2005 from the Centre for Christian Studies in Winnipeg, MB, where she had prepared for the diaconal ministry of The United Church of Canada (UCC), a towel was given to her as a symbol of servant ministry. This symbol originates from the story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet in John 13:1–17. Education for diaconal ministry involved critical analysis of social power relations and the ministry of journeying with people. Yet, JungHee was commissioned to a kind of divestment of power called “service” along with education and pastoral care. She found that the dominant theology of servanthood—the notion that God comes to serve us with sacrificial love and self-emptying of power, imagined in the patriarchal and hierarchical times of the Bible—is problematic for the practice of diaconal ministry of “accompaniment with” people as partners or companions. Is the theological language of servanthood still an appropriate defining concept of diaconal ministry for the present and the future? If not, it needs to be examined and reinterpreted to discover language, images, and consequent practices of diakonia in keeping with postcolonial contexts, which call for just, respectful, and compassionate relations among those participating in God’s mission today.

Diakonia has been an essential dimension of Christian mission¹ since the early church days but was marginalized in the historical discourse of mission until the early 1950s.² Rediscovering diakonia as an important aspect of mission is closely related to the paradigm shift in missiological thinking of the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the longstanding history of involvement of the United Church which called for a shift from an ecclesia-centric approach to missio Dei in terms of God’s primary concern for the world.³ The major concern for the church became how to serve the world. This is expressed in the WCC’s reports of The Church for Others and The Church for the World (1967), which portrayed a model of the “servant church.”⁴ Ecumenical study documents and reports on the meaning and nature of diakonia include The Role of the Diakonia of the Church in Contemporary Society (1966), Diakonia 2000: Called to Be Neighbours (1987), “Colombo: The Theological Perspectives on Diakonia in the Twenty-First Century (2012)” and more recently Called to Transformation — Ecumenical Diakonia (2022).⁵ These references reflect the changing mission context at that time and contribute to widening the church’s understanding of diakonia.

In the 1966 document, the concept of diakonia expands to include not only service but also social action to promote social justice.⁶ In the documents of the 1980s, diakonia is recognized as essential for the life and well-being of the church, interpreted in the context of the structural and political dimensions of the day and understood as working with those who struggle for a more just society beyond church structures. According to Carlos Ham, the theological perspective of the 2012 Colombo statement on the diakonia broadens the church’s horizon as it reimagines diakonia from the vantage point of vulnerable and marginalized communities, those who have been traditionally considered recipients or objects of the church’s diakonia.⁷ Recently, Called to Transformation — Ecumenical Diakonia by the WCC and ACT Alliance (2022) suggests the concept of diakonia as a bridge-building ministry and go-between services in the world. Once a marginalized frame for mission, the understanding of diakonia has broadened and expanded according to changing contexts to become a primary expression of the church’s participation in God’s ongoing mission.⁸

Despite this necessary broadening, it is problematic that diakonia continues to be interpreted through the traditional theological lens of servanthood or service, based on the universalized sacrificial notions of Eurocentric white male theologians. What do “service” or “servanthood” mean today to those who were once recipients and objects of mission but now understand themselves as subjects of mission, that is, as agents of mission? Do such spiritualized images of “service” or “servanthood” not assume that the subjects of mission have relinquished any power they had? What about those who had no power to give up in the first place? And what is meant by “power” in such contexts? Does the continued use of the traditional language of servanthood deny or exclude marginalized people’s participation in God’s mission? Moreover, does “service” or “servanthood” imply that those on the margins of society are always in a passive position, willing and waiting to be served? Is the theological conception of diakonia as “servanthood” helpful in a postcolonial world where the aim is the mutual transformation of both the historically colonized and the colonizer? There is a need for a more thorough examination of what the Greek word diakonia meant in biblical times and contexts and how it can be reimagined through postcolonial perspectives today with a more substantive analysis of power.