CHALLENGES FACING AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY IN THE POST MODERN WORLD

CHALLENGES FACING AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY IN THE POST MODERN WORLD


INTRODUCTION

Christianity is the outcome of the response of faith of the early church to the saving presence of God in the God-man, Jesus Christ. That saving presence was radiated through the life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God. “The Word became a human being and lived among us. We saw his glory, full of grace and truth. This was the glory which he received as the Father’s only Son”. (John 1:14)
Any authentic theology must start ever anew from the focal point of faith, which is the confession of the Lord Jesus Christ who died and raised for us; and it must be built or rebuilt in a way which is both faithful to the inner thrust of the Christian revelation and also in harmony with the mentality of the person who formulates it.1

Since Christianity must be culturally continuous we must retrieve, and interpret these fundamental religious values in the African traditional religion and how these values provide a way of understanding the gospel, that is, God’s revelation in Christ. The revelation of God in Christ is forever available to people of all generations and cultures. This eternal availability of God’s saving presence in Christ is rooted in the historical incarnation. However, the very fact of historical incarnation suggests that the presence of Christ is not always effectively mediated to one culture.2 There is always a search for living and relevant symbols that mediate the saving presence of God in Jesus Christ. The basic question now is; “Does God have something to say to the African People through cultural ideas of faith?” Does African traditional religion provide clues to name this “More” of God?
This exercise of rediscovering and naming this “More” of God in African traditional thought has become necessary because the early missionaries did not recognise the potency of the religious value in the African worldview and how they could be used to interpret Christianity in Africa. The superficiality of the average African commitment to Christ is the result of the failure of early missionaries to take African culture seriously.
Historically, Christianity was brought to Sub-Saharan Africa after it had taken definite form in the West. “The framework of the theology brought from the West to Africa however, was set, forged in the interaction between the original Jewish world view and that of the Greeks and later Europeans.”3 After over a thousand years of its existence in the West, Christianity was introduced to Africa with little or no attempt at local cultural integration. Christianity was equated in the minds of Africans with Western Christianity, education and civilisation; it was a foreign religion, which had been transplanted to a foreign soil and which had not taken root. The early missionaries thought that their understanding of God as revealed in Christ had an identical application in all situations irrespective of different worldviews and self-understandings. The African may not come to a full understanding of Christ unless Christ is presented to him or her from the perspective of his or her worldview. According to Bediako, “…the African who has become a disciple in the kingdom is called to bring his ‘Africanness’ into that kingdom to enrich it and to contribute to its varieties of beauty.1 Mbiti also makes the point that “Christianity must become ‘native’ in tropical Africa just as it is ‘native’ in Europe and America. It must therefore deepen its roots in the context of our community life, the soil where the gospel is being planted”2
The challenges facing Christianity in Africa include the following:
1.Christianity and African Traditional Culture
2.African Christianity and the Concept of Time and History
3.African Christianity and Religious Pluralism
4.African Christianity and Afrikania Movement