Mennonite World Conference (MWC)

Mennonite World Conference (MWC) held its most recent Assembly in Indonesia, 5-10 July 2022. One way in which the Doopsgezind Seminarium (DS) and the ACRPJ participated in the Assembly was through a workshop titled “A Post-colonial Perspective on Dutch Mennonites in Indonesia”. Having in mind the colonial history that connects The Netherlands and Indonesia, this workshop was intended to be a space to create the dialogue around the legacies of colonialism. The goals of the workshops were: (1) to offer a glimpse about how different disciplines within the seminary are integrating postcolonial and decolonial approaches in research and in teaching; and (2) to engage with different voices and perspective in and from Indonesia.

The session began by presenting a video made by two students, Ezra Manullang and Eline van der Kaaden, of the Master program “Peace, Trauma and Religion”. In the video, the students shared their experiences and reflections after visiting the exhibition “Revolusi” (on the Indonesian struggle for Independence between 1945-1949) in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Both students—one of them Indonesian and the other Dutch—stressed how significant it was to visit such an exposition and to look critically at history in the presence of the other. The participants of the workshop (which included people from different regions of the world, and from youth to elderly) had different takes on the video, the ways in which the colonial past shall be addressed, and the role that looking at the future has in these explorations. The existence of different (even conflicting) voices showed the importance and need to create spaces for dialogue and mutual discernment regarding whether and how to engage with the colonial past and its legacy today.

Written by: Dr. Andrés Pacheco, post-doc researcher at ACRPJ