Insights from a former missionary to West Africa
I’m reading Andrew Walls’ The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Orbis, 1996) right now. Walls is a Scottish missiologist who spent several years teaching church history in Sierra Leone, became a student of African Christian history while he was there, and has thought deeply about the process of communicating the gospel cross-culturally. He’s been helping me as I think about some of the challenges the three of us will face next year in the classroom, chapel, and church sanctuary in Cameroon.
One of Walls’ main points, reiterated throughout the book, is that African Christianity finds itself at a similar point as the largely Gentile Christian church did in the second century A.D. as it parted ways with---and eventually eclipsed---Jewish Christianity. This is an amazing and very stimulating thought for me! If Walls is right, then being part of the church in Cameroon for a year will place Tommy, Charlie, and me in an environment much the same as that of some of the earliest forms of Christianity, when questions of faith and practice were being worked out for the first time in a cultural context different from that of the original Christian communities.
Here are some provocative quotes from Walls. Be stimulated!
--Wesley, for the team
I still remember the force with which one day [while I was in Sierra Leone] the realization struck me that I, while happily pontificating on that patchwork quilt of diverse fragments that constitutes second-century Christian literature, was actually living in a second-century church. The life, worship and understanding of a community in its second century of Christian allegiance was going on all around me [in African churches]. (xiii)
The exponential growth of the Christian in the African continent in the past century or so seems to me to raise the question whether this massive encounter with a new body of thought and network of relationships may not be as determinative of the future shape of Christianity as was the [initial early Christian] encounter with the Greek world. (xviii)
[In the second century, the Greek] system of thought apparently so assured and final, had to go to school again with Christ. The process altered the expression of the Christian faith completely; for the word of Christ had now to be introduced into areas of thinking, and brought to bear upon ideas that Peter and John and James the Just never dreamed of and that Paul himself barely glimpsed.
It was impossible either to ignore the previous system of ideas, or to abandon it, or to leave it as it was. It had to be penetrated, invaded, brought into relation with the word about Christ and the Scriptures which contained it. The process meant a new agenda for Christianity. Matters which had never troubled the heads of the apostles and elders of Jerusalem became matters of life and death as the word about Christ encountered the established metaphysic of the Hellenistic world, while many things which were vital to the first generation of Christians in Jerusalem just dropped out of sight….
In our own day there are signs that African theologians are at a similar point in the application of the word about Christ to another vast complex of thought, action, and relationships to that which Greek Christian thinkers reached when they faced the problems posed by their cultural identity. Christian Africa is now having to grapple with the meaning of the African past, and with what God was doing in it…. (53)
While some of the features of the evangelical religion that originated the missionary movement---certainly the high place given to Scripture and the recognition of immediacy in personal experience---have been regular features of African Christianity, it is important to note that the fruit of the work of evangelical missionaries has not simply been a replication of Western evangelicalism. The Christian message that they set loose in Africa has its own dynamic, as it comes into creative and critical encounter with African life with its needs and its hurts…. Africans have responded to the gospel from where they were, not from where the missionaries were; they have responded to the Christian message as they heard it, not to the missionaries’ experience of the message. (100-101)
One of Walls’ main points, reiterated throughout the book, is that African Christianity finds itself at a similar point as the largely Gentile Christian church did in the second century A.D. as it parted ways with---and eventually eclipsed---Jewish Christianity. This is an amazing and very stimulating thought for me! If Walls is right, then being part of the church in Cameroon for a year will place Tommy, Charlie, and me in an environment much the same as that of some of the earliest forms of Christianity, when questions of faith and practice were being worked out for the first time in a cultural context different from that of the original Christian communities.
Here are some provocative quotes from Walls. Be stimulated!
--Wesley, for the team
I still remember the force with which one day [while I was in Sierra Leone] the realization struck me that I, while happily pontificating on that patchwork quilt of diverse fragments that constitutes second-century Christian literature, was actually living in a second-century church. The life, worship and understanding of a community in its second century of Christian allegiance was going on all around me [in African churches]. (xiii)
The exponential growth of the Christian in the African continent in the past century or so seems to me to raise the question whether this massive encounter with a new body of thought and network of relationships may not be as determinative of the future shape of Christianity as was the [initial early Christian] encounter with the Greek world. (xviii)
[In the second century, the Greek] system of thought apparently so assured and final, had to go to school again with Christ. The process altered the expression of the Christian faith completely; for the word of Christ had now to be introduced into areas of thinking, and brought to bear upon ideas that Peter and John and James the Just never dreamed of and that Paul himself barely glimpsed.
It was impossible either to ignore the previous system of ideas, or to abandon it, or to leave it as it was. It had to be penetrated, invaded, brought into relation with the word about Christ and the Scriptures which contained it. The process meant a new agenda for Christianity. Matters which had never troubled the heads of the apostles and elders of Jerusalem became matters of life and death as the word about Christ encountered the established metaphysic of the Hellenistic world, while many things which were vital to the first generation of Christians in Jerusalem just dropped out of sight….
In our own day there are signs that African theologians are at a similar point in the application of the word about Christ to another vast complex of thought, action, and relationships to that which Greek Christian thinkers reached when they faced the problems posed by their cultural identity. Christian Africa is now having to grapple with the meaning of the African past, and with what God was doing in it…. (53)
While some of the features of the evangelical religion that originated the missionary movement---certainly the high place given to Scripture and the recognition of immediacy in personal experience---have been regular features of African Christianity, it is important to note that the fruit of the work of evangelical missionaries has not simply been a replication of Western evangelicalism. The Christian message that they set loose in Africa has its own dynamic, as it comes into creative and critical encounter with African life with its needs and its hurts…. Africans have responded to the gospel from where they were, not from where the missionaries were; they have responded to the Christian message as they heard it, not to the missionaries’ experience of the message. (100-101)
posted by Charlie, Tommy, and Wesley | 3:44 PM
2 Comments:
Wes -
Are you aware of any missiological texts written by non-Westerners? Are there any examples from the book you cited that you can pass along? jscottalexander@gmail.com
Thanks!
hey scott, great question. the name john mbiti keeps coming up in my recent reading about christianity in west africa. he's more of a theologian than a missiologist, i think, but i'm sure his writing would be worth your time. also, bolaji idowu has written on african traditional religions. and kwame bediako has a book that looks really good and provocative called "theology and identity: the impact of culture upon christian thought in the second century and in modern africa."
grace, bro
-wes
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