By Dr. Dora Muhammad
A circle expands forever. It covers all who wish to hold hands. Its size depends on each other. It is a vision of solidarity. It turns outward to interact with the outside and inward for self-critique. It is a vision of accountability. It grows as the other is moved to grow. A circle must have a center, but a single dot does not make a circle. A circle—a vision for cooperation, mutuality, and care does not harbor exclusiveness. And that is why we have gone on to name ourselves, “The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians.” – Mercy Amba Oduyoye
I was profoundly inspired by video reports prepared to share the work of the missionaries on the ground across the 20 AME districts during the 2026 Women’s Missionary Society Executive Board meeting convened in Baltimore, January 28-31. The work was incredibly affirming of the lives touched and communities impacted and told in a language and from a spirit diametrically opposite to the historic, destructive nature of Christian missionaries that were arms of conquest, genocide, and conversion. That history causes many to avoid affiliation with the WMS or reject Christianity as a whole.
After each international delegation completed its report, instead of heading to the back of the room to take a group picture like the others, they remained by the bottom of the stage steps, listening to subsequent reports. When I shared with Bishop Jeffrey Leath how moving that was to witness, he told me that they have always done this because the delegations are small. That was understandable, considering the cost, time, and coordination of overseas travel for a five-day conference.
But as the gathering quietly and humbly expanded, it revealed a deepe,r unseen, but irrevocable truth. The solidarity was evident, but they exuded an intuitive spiritual connectivity that colonization has not broken. They embodied the transformative nature and power of AME missions as a contemporary reference and reclamation of the practice of Christian faith outside of imperialist American and Western frameworks.
It is akin to the societal spiritual life of Hindus that existed centuries before contact with European exclusionary culture introduced the caste system and tainted their sacred texts. Early followers of Jesus spread west into Europe, east into Asia, and south into Africa. Christianity was practiced in sub-Saharan Africa for more than 1,000 years before European missionaries of the 14th and 15th centuries arrived.
The first African church, dated to the 4th century, was unearthed in Ethiopia—the only African country never to have been colonized. The Christian faith is as indigenous in its inception there as the language of the Ethiopian Bible before it was translated into Greek in the 5th century. Today, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, also known as the Abyssinian Church, is roughly twice as large as England’s Anglican Church, four times the size of the SBC, and five times the size of the UMC.
In my witness of the African and Caribbean missionaries standing as one in front of us, I felt the spiritual strength of a rooted body of Christian believers who existed before the toes of European missionaries touched African soil, and that has endured well beyond. More than post-colonial theology and decolonized Christianity, the formation of African Methodism answered a call to reach into this ancestral grounding of unity. We are prepared, planted, and present.
Dora is the principal of Creative Grace, LLC and founder of The AWARE Project (Advocacy for Women’s Activism, Rights & Empowerment). She is the Ambassador to Women for the Institute of Caribbean Studies and Theologies of CARE consultant at Faith in Public Life.
