African context

William Black, who is an American lecturer teaching at Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology , writes as part of a recent blog post, quoting Joseph Healey [pictured at right], a Maryknoll priest, narrative theologian and expert in African proverbs:

[African] contextual theologizing does not go over well with many in North America in particular (Europeans, he said, seem to do a better job of comprehending the theological scene in Africa). ‘They just don’t get it,’ he said. Many seem to equate their theology with the truth. Contextualization for them means simply translating their right theology into the language of the unreached, or the theologically uneducated. We seem to think if we can transfer our understanding of salvation, and our understanding of discipleship, and our understanding of missions, and our understanding of church into this new context, then we have brought the gospel to these people.

and

We think our inherited systems are the best, even the only theology. But in doing so we miss the point. Theology is not about engaging with ideas and who can build the best scaffolding (assuming that theology even at its best is not the reality). Theology is what God the Son did – it’s incarnational. Theology is God becoming accessible. For those human societies that do systems, then theological systems will undoubtedly work really well for them, so long as it is remembered that the system itself is not God (otherwise it becomes an idol). But for the vast majority of the world’s societies, where system and Enlightenment structures and organization are not valued and irrelevant, theology must take a different form. The goal of theology, of course, remains the same – to facilitate our knowing God the Holy Trinity and loving him with all our heart and loving our neighbor. But how the Spirit calls that reality out of us may be very different from context to context.

Anyway, given the condition of Western Christianity, one wonders why anyone would want to export their issues to the rest of the world. But that doesn’t seem to be a thought that troubles anybody, except of course the rest of the world.

Christianity Rediscovered

When I worked as manager of OC Books in Dunedin, I frequently sold copies of Christianity Rediscovered, by Vincent Donovan. However, it's only in these holidays that I've finally got round to reading it (!)

In my opinion, it's a book every minister should read (as well as every Christian who isn't an ordained minister!). It's written from a Catholic viewpoint - Donovan was a Spiritan priest (that is, a member of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, or the Holy Ghost Fathers) - so it needs to be read with this in mind. Nevertheless, his views on the Church establishment are applicable to most denominations.

Donovan was a missionary to the Masai people in Africa from 1955 to 1973. As a result of his work amongst them he changed his views on what being a missionary meant, on what the priesthood is or should be, and on the way in which culture affects mission work- and whether Christianity is 'different' within each individual culture.

He was successful in his work, but his work wasn't always appreciated by those in authority, and not everything he established has been maintained over the years since his departure from Africa. Nevertheless the book that he wrote as a result of his work has had a huge impact on missionary thinking ever since - though hasn't as often been followed through in practice.

This, along with the even earlier book by Roland Allen: Missionary Methods - St Paul's or Ours? (which influenced Donovan) should be on every Christian's shelves, especially on the shelves of those in 'official' ministry.

The Global Church

The third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization will occur in Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2010. There will be over 4,000 leaders from more than 200 countries—the largest, most diverse gathering of Christian leaders in history. And for the first time more than half of the delegates will be from the Majority World.

Here (courtesy of the Skye Jethani) are some interesting stats relating to the way Christianity has changed colour in the last hundred or so years.

• Today there are more missionaries from Brazil engaged in cross-cultural ministry than from Britain or Canada.
• There are over 10,000 foreign Christian workers serving in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy—and more than 35,000 in the U.S. Most of the missionaries in Britain are from Africa and Asia.
• "This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called 'Christian Europe.'"
• "This past Sunday more Presbyterians were in church in Ghana than in Scotland."
• "Today, the largest Christian congregation in Europe is in Kiev, and it is pastored by a Nigerian of Pentecostal background."
• "More than half of all Christian adherents in the whole history of the church have been alive in the last one hundred years. Close to half of Christian believers who have ever lived are alive right now."
• In 1900, over 80 percent of the Christian population was Caucasian and over 70 percent lived in Europe. Now, according to historian Dana Robert, "The typical late twentieth-century Christian was no longer a European man but a Latin American or African Woman."

Despite having more resources and education than any other Christians in history, the Western church has been overseeing a significant contraction while Africans, South Asians, and Latin Americans - often under resourced - are watching the church expand beyond belief.
Maybe we don't have church/mission figured out.

It's Church, Jim, but not as we know it.

Some stats from Mark Brown's paper, The Bible in the Digital Space:

In just a short period of time the net has grown to around 35 billion pages with some 1.6 billion people using it.
There are around 55 trillion links between all the web pages in the world.
Every day there are some 100 billion mouse clicks made.
Every second, 2 million emails are sent.
Every two seconds in terms of data size, the equivalent of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world, is moving across the web.
The internet is massive and growing at an extraordinary rate. It’s predicted that this year more information will be created on the Web than in all previous years combined.

And this phenomenal growth it isn’t simply limited to western nations, with Africa as an example, experiencing more than 1,000% growth in net users in the past 8 years. There is also a big push happening at the moment to make available internet access for all people, including those in the two-thirds world, with such projects as the Google backed O3B network (The Other 3 Billion).

Mark asks: What if we were to move into this digital space and offer an experience of church, of the Bible in the language and the culture of the digital environment?

Like it or lump it, this is a huge harvest field....to paraphrase: It's Church, Jim, but not as we know it.

God is Back (!)

God is Back: how the global revival of faith is changing the world, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge.

These two authors, both journalists for The Economist, (one is a Catholic and one an atheist) have written several books together about trends on the global level. This latest one focuses on the (surprising) increase and revival of religion in the world, at a time when it was widely believed that secularism would predominate. And the intriguing thing is that the people who are embracing religion are not just the poor and uneducated, but the ‘technologically sophisticated, upwardly mobile, urban, well-educated, middle class – in a word, thoroughly modern – people.’
While the authors focus extensively on the way in which the American First Amendment ‘simultaneously forbids the state to manipulate religion for its own ends by creating an established church while guaranteeing citizens the right to participate in public life on the basis of their religious convictions’ and thus creates a vitality that Europe lacks, they by no means focus exclusively on Western religions. Islam of course receives due attention, but so does the uprise of religion in many third world countries, as well as Africa and South America.
The book is well-researched, written in an often witty and lively style, and essential reading for anyone who wants to get a global perspective. A much more extensive review (by New Zealander Chris Marshall - pictured at right) can be found in the June 2009 On the Road Journal.

Thinking outside the Web

We often think that the Internet is pretty much a Western/Asian system, but in fact there are huge opportunities for digital ministry in the non-western world. 1.5 billion people now use the Web, and 4 billion own a mobile phone, the majority of them outside the West (apparently there are more mobile phone users in Africa than in the US). And with mobile phones becoming increasingly an adjunct of the Net, the potential is enormous.
A relatively new blog called Digital Evangelism Issues (DEI, for short - get it?) has appeared on the scene, with its emphasis being on exactly what the name implies. It's run by a group whose focus is Internet Evangelism Day (IED, for those who missed the mirror image) and their site focuses on encouraging people to use the Internet for evangelism. It helpfully supplies an abundance of material.

I noted on another blog a couple of days ago that there's an increasing assumption that everyone has access to the Net - businesses offer specials online, cheap air fares only appear in many cases online, online banking is being regarded by many banks as the 'norm,' and so on. However, in a Passing Notes opinion piece in the Otago Daily Times last Saturday, it was pointed out that many people in the Saga Generation (those over 55 - my description, not his) don't regularly have access to the Net, and to a degree are becoming cut off from the Internet-based trend. We need to avoid assuming that everyone is Wired.

An atheist looks at Africa

Here's an interesting title for an article:
As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God. The subheading is: Missionaries, not aid money, are the solution to Africa's biggest problem - the crushing passivity of the people's mindset.
This intriguing article comes from Matthew Pariss, someone who knows Africa well, and who has had a longstanding relationship with it. His article, which appeared in The Times Online on the 27th December, begins:

Before Christmas I returned, after 45 years, to the country that as a boy I knew as Nyasaland. Today it's Malawi, and The Times Christmas Appeal includes a small British charity working there. Pump Aid helps rural communities to install a simple pump, letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work.

It inspired me, renewing my flagging faith in development charities. But travelling in Malawi refreshed another belief, too: one I've been trying to banish all my life, but an observation I've been unable to avoid since my African childhood. It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God.

Read the rest of the article here.