HuffPo has a good one on some of the huge mistakes missionaries made with American Natives.
Even today, most mission-sending agencies don’t deal with cultural distinctions well. Often, everything that does not fit into Euro-American ideas of “Christian culture” is seen as suspect, or even branded “demonic.” This confusion was passed on to our Indian people and as a result, most Indigenous churches simply began to mimic the Euro-American cultural standard. It was a poor imitation of a bad model.
As I noted elsewhere, the overlap between Native American culture and Ancient Hebrew culture is much larger than most Western Christians want to hear, because it points out how utterly alien both are to Western culture.
Hat tip to Jason Franklin.
