Alumni Link

Updates, Events, and Publications

Published Date: September 1, 2022

CHECK OUT YOUTH BECOMING LEADERS (A PROGRAM THROUGH ASBURY UNIVERSITY)!

YBL is a program for committed high school-age Christians who are also strong Christians, community leaders, and academically gifted. God’s direction for their lives. Its goal is to help these student leaders develop and discern their calling to the church. These students learn about the Old and New Testaments, theology, and culture from ministers from both ATS and AU. Mentorship is also a key part of their two weeks in Wilmore each summer.

If you’re passionate about helping form the next generation of of Christian leaders and want to get involved in this wonderful program, please contact jenna.brock@asbury.edu.

ATS ALUM RANDY WOODLEY (PH.D IN INTERCULTURAL STUDIES, ’10) PUBLISHES 3 NEW BOOKS IN 2022

Dr. Woodley has been busy! See below for descriptions and links for each book.

Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview

This volume by a Cherokee teacher, former pastor, missiologist, and historian brings Indigenous theology into conversation with Western approaches to history and theology.

Written in an accessible, conversational style that incorporates numerous stories and questions, this book exposes the weaknesses of a Western worldview through a personal engagement with Indigenous theology. Randy Woodley critiques the worldview that undergirds the North American church by dismantling assumptions regarding early North American histories and civilizations, offering a comparative analysis of worldviews, and demonstrating a decolonized approach to Christian theology.

Woodley explains that Western theology has settled for a particular view of God and has perpetuated that basic view for hundreds of years, but Indigenous theology originates from a completely different DNA. Instead of beginning with God-created humanity, it begins with God-created place. Instead of emphasizing individualism, it emphasizes a corporateness that encompasses the whole community of creation. And instead of being about the next world, it is about the tangibility of our lived experiences in this present world. The book encourages readers to reject the many problematic aspects of the Western worldview and to convert to a worldview that is closer to that of both Indigenous traditions and Jesus.

Becoming Rooted

What does it mean to become rooted in the land? How can we become better relatives to our greatest teacher, the Earth? Becoming Rooted invites us to live out a deeply spiritual relationship with the whole community of creation and with Creator.

Through meditations and ideas for reflection and action, Randy Woodley, an activist, author, scholar, and Cherokee descendant, recognized by the Keetoowah Band, guides us on a one-hundred-day journey to reconnect with the Earth. Woodley invites us to come away from the American dream–otherwise known as an Indigenous nightmare–and get in touch with the water, land, plants, and creatures around us, with the people who lived on that land for thousands of years prior to Europeans’ arrival, and with ourselves. In walking toward the harmony way, we honor balance, wholeness, and connection.

Creation is always teaching us. Our task is to look, and to listen, and to live well. She is teaching us now.

Mission and the Cultural Other

Mission and the Cultural Other is a decolonial critique of a too often failed missionary enterprise. Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley, a former missionary and missiologist, writes both as an insider and an outsider. As an Indigenous person, a missionary among Native Americans, and a decolonial theologian with over thirty years of experience in various missionary movements, he has seen the best and worst that American mission has to offer. Before change can be made in a guarded system such as Christian mission, the critique must be pervasive and cut to the core of the problem. To truly understand the weakness of modern mission, we need to hear from those who have been its casualties.

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