In Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada, 56-57. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.

George Tinker (Osage/Cherokee) is associate professor of cross-cultural ministries at Iliff School of Theology and pastor of Living Waters Indian Church in Denver, Colorado.  He is the author of Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Fortress, 1993) and numerous essays and articles.  Tinker is an ordained Lutheran minister and during the early 1980s founded the Bay Area Native American Ministry (BANAM), a community-based program now funded by both Lutheran and Presbyterian denominations.  In 1985 he was succeeded as director of BANAM by Paul Schultz (Ojibwe), an educational administrator and community activist from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota.  Schultz was a founding member of the National Indian Lutheran Board in 1970 and served as its chair 1978-84.  This essay is excerpted from Rivers of Life: Native Spirituality for Native Churches (Augsburg, 1988), an educational resource written for a series on multicultural issues produced by the Lutheran Church in America.  Rivers of Life is the product of a collaborative process; Schultz and Tinker co-authored this work on behalf of a National Indian Lutheran Board committee, which reviewed and edited the entire manuscript.  This excerpt includes chapters three, four and five of the nine-chapter publication, the core of its theological argument.  Like many other native Christians, Schultz and Tinker make the act of creation their theological starting point, then move to a discussion of Jesus in light of native religious traditions and the missionization process.  They offer a reinterpretation of the doctrine of justification based on the importance of community among native people, which suggests that native Christian identity is not something to be worked out strictly on individualistic terms.  Schultz and Tinker wrote Rivers of Life in an effort to promote spiritual healing in native communities, though today they both believe that this reconciliation is a more difficult and complex process than they envisioned in 1988.

© 2008 by James Treat