Includes bibliography and indexes.

pt. 1. Colonial mission and the Great Commission: re-membering the past. Colonial mission and the Great Commission in Africa / Beatrice Okyere-Manu -- Examining the promulgation and impact of the Great Commission in the Caribbean, 1492-1970: a historical analysis / Dave Gosse -- US colonial missions to African slaves: catechizing black souls, traumatizing the black psychē / Mitzi J. Smith -- pt. 2. Womanist, feminist, and postcolonial criticisms and the Great Commission. The Great Commission: a postcolonial Dalit feminist inquiry / Jayachitra Lalitha -- Privilege but no power: women in the gospel of Matthew and nineteenth-century African American women missionaries through a postcolonial lens / Lynne St. Clair Darden -- 'Knowing more than is good for one': a womanist interrogation of the Matthean Great Commission / Mitzi J. Smith -- pt. 3. Theology, art, and the Great Commission. Images of Jesus in advancing the Great Commission / Sheila F. Winborne -- The Great Commission in the face of suffering as minjung / Michelle Sungshin Lim -- Children's agency and Edinburgh 2010: the Great Commission or a greater omission? / Rohan P. Gideon -- pt. 4. The Great Commission and Christian education: rethinking our pedagogy. Interrogating the Matthean Great Commission for US Christian education: reclaiming Jesus' kingdom of God message for the church / Karen D. Crozier -- Beginning again: rethinking Christian education in light of the Great Commission / Anthony G. Reddie -- Christian moral education and the Great Commission in an African context / Lord Elorm-Donkor -- pt. 5. Interrogating the Commission from beyond the academy. A United States inner-city oriented Great Commission / MarShondra Scott Lawrence -- The Great Commission's impact on a short-term missionary and lay leader in the Church of God in Christ / June C. Rivers.

That Christian missionary efforts have long gone hand-in-hand with European colonization and American imperialist expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries is well recognized. The linchpin role played in those efforts by the "Great Commission"--The risen Christ's command to "go into all the world" and "teach all nations"--has more often been observed than analyzed, however. With the rise of European colonialism, the Great Commission was suddenly taken up with an eschatological urgency, often explicit in the founding statements of missionary societies; the differentiation of "teachers" and "nations" waiting to be "taught" proved a ready-made sacred sanction for the racialized and androcentric logics of conquest and "civilization."