Taking the Bread of Life Out of its Plastic Bag
“When the colonizers left Africa, they took the shackles off or our hands and feet and put them in our minds.”
“When the Missionaries came, they brough us the Bread of Life in the plastic bag of western culture. We ate it in the bag, never really tasted it, and now we are constipated.”
- Dennis Malepa (Elder, Preacher, and Teacher from Gaborone, Botswana)
I was privileged to spend 8 days toward the end of March and early April in South Africa with three African American preachers as part of a new ministry we are calling the Atlantic Bridge Initiative. I’ll have more to share about this effort in the future, but right now I’m still glowing with excitement about what we learned and the joy we experienced as kingdom leaders from both sides of the Atlantic, long separated by the legacy of slavery. Being able to reconnect and discuss the Kingdom of God together was a rich and rewarding experience.
As part of our trip, we invited Brother Dennis Malepa from Botswana to join us for our time in South Africa, since schedules and COVID protocols made it difficult for us to make a trip to a second country. He stayed in the same place as our group and traveled with us everywhere we went, dropping spiritual gems right and left in every conversation. He also presented a powerful paper on “Contextualization of African Theology” in a Saturday master class for leaders at the Seeiso Street Church of Christ in Atteridgeville. It was both insightful and inciteful and I will be reading it repeatedly and unpacking it for some time.
Brother Malepa is one of the more respected leaders among Churches of Christ in his region of Africa. He has always been something of a maverick because he has been an advocate for Africans living into their freedom in Christ. Dennis has an education from the West, which enables him to understand both our strengths and weaknesses. Despite his appreciation for what he has received from the west, he is deeply committed to decolonizing the gospel for Africa[1] and allowing Africans to read and interpret the Bible with African eyes. He insists that Africans must contextualize[2] the Kingdom of God for Africans. This is exactly what is needed now on the continent of Africa if Christianity is to remain vibrant and continue to expand as Africans grow beyond western domination.
To illustrate in just one area, Christians from the West have typically been excessively rationalistic. We view the Christian faith as mostly mental. It is about right thinking. We don’t really reflect much about how the body fits into the service of God, except to prohibit sexual misbehavior. White Westerners tend to be uncomfortable with our bodies. Moving or clapping in worship seems awkward and inappropriate to many of us. While this is less the case in the USA now, western missionaries in the past often prohibited clapping, moving the body, or engaging in expressive forms for worship which are natural parts of African cultures (and many other global cultures). It is odd for most Africans to stand or sit still when they worship and they won’t do so unless they are told this is the only appropriate worship. Even then, it goes against the grain of their cultures. They naturally love the Lord their God with their whole heart, soul, and strength, not just their minds. On top of this, to this day, many of the songs sung in African churches were written in Europe or North American, with western melodies, harmonies, and rhythms. Even when translated into African languages the result is a worship that feels very foreign to Africans.
In the past, Africans looked up to the west and were more willing to adopt western forms of worship. Today, younger people in Africa are increasingly well educated and proud of their local culture. They are not as willing to adapt culturally and often see western forms of church as extensions of colonization or expressions of western cultural imperialism. They don’t hate the west, in most cases, but they want to be free to be themselves and decide for themselves what it means to obey the scriptures and follow Jesus in their context.
Currently, Africa has the highest percentage of Jesus followers of any continent in the world. But if they are going to continue to see their churches grow and the kingdom expand, they need to embrace their African-ness. We need to support them in doing so and reposition ourselves as learners who seek to be taught by them. The African church is more dynamic and impactful than the western church. The global church needs Africans to lead the way for us in many respects. But to do that, they must continue to discover the freedom they have in Christ and differentiate the gospel from the western forms in which it came to Africa during the colonial era.
Brother Malepa, like most mature African church leaders, is deeply appreciative of the western missionaries who came to Africa with Bibles and ministries of evangelism, church planting, and compassion. He loves his pale skinned brothers from the west and is nothing but gracious and kind toward us. But, again like most mature African church leaders, he also sees much that we tend to miss. To be specific, he can see how we unknowingly combined our culture with the gospel and passed it off as biblical while simultaneously stripping out anything from African cultures as syncretism. He sees the double standard we usually miss.
Western missionaries meant well, but they often failed to discriminate between traditional cultures and traditional religions. Granted, they overlapped significantly, and it was easier to just forbid it all. However, this failure of patience and nuance resulted in Africans being shamed for embracing their culture and were told to jettison many aspects of their heritage - in no way in conflict with the Bible or gospel - while being force-fed a gospel syncretized with western culture. In their efforts to throw out the bathwater of traditional animistic religions, western missionaries encouraged (or forced!) new African Christians to toss out the baby of created-by-God-to-honor-Him African culture.
For the churches in Africa to be healthy, dynamic, and continue their expansion, they must contextualize the gospel for themselves. Those of us from the west need to encourage them to do so and open ourselves up to their critique. They can help us see how we have been engaging in syncretism and they can help us rediscover aspects of the gospel and insight into scripture that we have missed. Remember, the Bible is not a western book and Jesus was not European nor American. In many ways, the cultures of Africa are closer to the culture of Israel in biblical times than are the cultures of the west.
Just one matter of clarification, Africa is huge and home to thousands of people groups with many diverse cultures. African cultures have intertwined with each other and been impacted by western and eastern cultures today. There are massive differences among the various regions of Africa and between the urban vs. rural areas. There is no such thing as African culture or an African perspective. There are thousands of African cultures and millions of African perspectives.
One of the best things we can do as western leaders is sit at the feet of wise global leaders to learn from them and encourage them to lead the way, not only in kingdom work in their region, but in taking the gospel to all the world. We are all in this together and we need the wisdom and leadership of our entire global family as we seek to be disciples of Jesus who are faithful to his mission in a world in rapid transformation.
[1] By this I mean removing the cultural elements from the West that have nothing to do with the Christian faith, but which got mixed in because of missionaries’ failure to recognize how they were importing their home culture along with the gospel. This can also refer to all the ways western missionaries and churches set up systems of dependency for funding and operational models. Decolonizing refers to removing the foreign things that inhibit the effectiveness of the gospel in a non-western country.
[2] Contextualization is the positive opposite of decolonization. This is the creative work of allowing the gospel to take on local forms and cultural elements which are a good fit with the gospel. For example: Local dress, language, food, metaphors, gathering places, music forms, times for meeting, styles of communication and conflict resolution, etc.