An Incarnational Mission of Mercy

Abstract

Uganda’s fragmented ethnic reality comprises the reconstruction of ethnic identities into rival categories of difference and otherness. From a historical perspective, under the ‘divide and rule’ British colonial policy, colonial anthropology, political, and economic systems polarized and mobilized native nations into oppositional and competing configurations of embodied otherness. The resultant antagonistic social ethos, ingrained in the consciousness of persons and groups, foments a legacy of sociopolitical oppression and economic alienation and instigates religious and spiritual fragmentation within the body of Christ. From a Christian perspective, this project proposes an incarnational mission of mercy centered on the event of encounter as a hermeneutical and praxis-based criterion toward social reconciliation. It offers a way of interpreting conflicted reality by transforming ethnic attitudes, social structures, practices, and new habits of relation among persons of different ethnic groups and institutions. Based on Christian values, human agency, and God’s grace, it envisions transformed human relations and the establishment of a renewed social fabric. Christian faith, hope, and love lived out in a concrete praxis of mercy inspire this proposed new way of being, relation, and practice so that Uganda may become a reconciling society that anticipates an eschatological communion in God’s Kingdom.