«It’s Time To Lead the Way» – Postcolonial Memory at Work in Two Dutch Protestant Churches.

Much like in other former colonial metropoles, The Netherlands has in recent decades seen the emergence of significant societal and academic debates about the nature and legacy of the country’s colonial, and specifically slavery, past. More and more mainstream institutions – from museums to municipal governments – have in recent years started programs to examine and acknowledge ‹their› historical involvement with the transatlantic slave trade, or in other ways have moved towards critical examinations of the ways in which traces of this past permeate the present. This article explores how two Dutch church communities, namely the Evangelical Lutheran Church Amsterdam and the Evangelical Brotherhood Amsterdam City and Flevoland, are currently actively taking part in this shift and engaging with the history and legacy of the slavery past. It does so through an analysis of a publication initiated by both congregations and published in 2020, which details the program of a working group these two communities jointly installed and includes texts from an essay competition, symposium and sermons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]