# 2026-05-23 Thomas — Decolonizing 'The Great Commission' Fr. Joash P. Thomas argues "The Great Commission" is a modern Western colonial framing, not ancient doctrine — a Bible subheading added in the colonial era. Matthew 28 addressed the apostles; reading it as a mandate for today, he writes, legitimized empire. Decolonized mission recovers pre-colonial indigenous Christianity. ## Bibliographic - **Author.** Fr. Joash P. Thomas (St. Thomas / Mar Thoma Christian heritage). - **Publication.** Substack (joashpthomas.substack.com), published 2026-05-23. - **Source URL.** https://joashpthomas.substack.com/p/decolonizing-the-great-commission - **Reader engagement.** Partial read, ~57% progress (doc `01ksjkdkr1qyhpz2t8xkffd9rx`). ## Core thesis The category "The Great Commission" is a post-Reformation, colonial-era construction, not a 1,700-year Christian doctrine. Thomas argues the phrase was added as a scriptural subheading during Western colonial expansion and does not appear in the Greek text, and that reading Jesus' words in Matthew 28 as a universal mandate for present-day Western Christians misreads an address given to the apostles. ## Key arguments 1. **Late vocabulary.** The phrase "Great Commission" was absent from church vocabulary for roughly 17 centuries before colonialism; it emerged in post-Reformation circles coinciding with colonial expansion. 2. **Audience of Matthew 28.** The commission was spoken to the apostles. Direct quote: "To assume that Jesus was speaking to us or Bob from Waco, Texas in the 21st Century west... is ignorant at best and narcissistic at worst." 3. **Missionary as colonial agent.** Missionaries functioned alongside merchants and mercenaries as one of three colonial agents, supplying moral cover for conquest. Thomas names William Carey and Hudson Taylor, whose evangelization ran alongside imperial resource extraction. 4. **Imposed orthodoxy.** The Synod of Diamper (1599) saw Portuguese Catholic missionaries burn St. Thomas Indian church documents and brand ancient indigenous Christian doctrine "heresy" to impose empire-shaped theology. 5. **Transformation vs. transaction.** Western Christianity reduced faith to verbal proclamation and mental assent, severed from physical liberation and justice; Thomas illustrates the harm with Homalco First Nation testimony (disease, forced cultural erasure, residential schools, resource theft under Christian auspices). ## Decolonized vision Thomas positions decolonized Christianity as recovering ancient, ecumenical, interfaith-hospitable practice — the approach his St. Thomas Christian ancestors lived for ~1,500 years before Western missionaries arrived. Mission as accompaniment and justice, not conquest and verbal mandate. ## Connections to existing wiki - Sits opposite the conquest-theology scaffold in [[dominionism]] and [[seven-mountain-mandate|Seven Mountain Mandate]]: where those map a Christian-dominion mandate, this source supplies the decolonial critique of the same mission impulse. - Critique-side companion for any mission-theology concept page (none yet — candidate to seed). ## Open threads - A `mission-theology` concept page could anchor this against the dominionist reading. - Primary historical sources (Synod of Diamper records, Carey/Taylor biographies) remain unread in the wiki.