A MISSIONARY CHALLENGE: AFRICAN-RITE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES

Abstract

To understand the Christian churches of African origin one has to be familiar with the reality from which they spring. This area of church life is so fluctuating that it defies an ethnological approach. The latter is reductive, and tends to look for -- and to find -- symbols of ancient ancestral cultural practices behind a Western veneer, where in fact there is a genuine will to serve Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. The problem is that the worship of Jesus carries a Western identity and seems likely to do so for a long time to come leaving no room for different forms of expression. It is as though the West claimed the Christian religion as its own property. This Western identity attaching to Christian life constitutes both its richness and, in my view, its poverty. -- It represents its richness in that the principles of Western culture have been the vehicle of the Christian faith all over the world in the past centuries, and Christianity itself has been one of the corner-stones of Western civilization. Secularism in its different forms has sought to reduce the active influence of Christianity, but it would surely be suicidal for Western society to try to dispense altogether with the reference to Christianity, if only for its social usefulness. In fact, Christianity has nurtured and even moulded what is now generally called Western society. -- But it represents its poverty because the, in some ways, almost incestuous relationship between Christianity and Western civilization has enclosed the wealth of the Christian religion in a kind of monoculture, which has impoverished it. On the other hand, living on pillaged resources and the will to dominate christianized countries, the Western countries have used the Christian faith as a weapon to subjugate the world. So the erring ways of Western civilization have become one of the chief factors poisoning the development of faith in Jesus Christ in the nations formerly colonized by the West, where the Christian faith has become synonymous with colonization and exploitation. To get round this dilemma, the Holy Spirit ignored the hypothesis that Western culture is indispensable to the life of faith in Jesus Christ and its development. One might say that the Spirit has done things in the Spirit's own way, enabling the men, women and children of different cultures to experience this faith differently and to share it in terms of their own identity -- and so much the better. we lose sight of this background, we will get no further. The story of the church called the.Oasis d'Amour (Oasis of love) is typical of the evolution of these churches, of which there are more than a hundred (with more than a hundred members) in France. The case of Madame A.S. [1] from Cameroon is instructive. She and her husband accepted the inspiration which allowed this church to be set up and to thrive. An examination of this church will show us the pathology which produces these churches. The Oasis Church has a history: Analysis of a Split This is the testimony of Madame A.S.: [much less than]After gaining a diploma as a computer and office systems technician, I was looking unsuccessfully for a job. But my heart told me that what I really should do was open a shop selling tropical foodstuffs since there was nothing like that in the district at that time. But I was shy and I didn't like the idea of keeping a shop. I wanted only one thing -- to find a job in my own field and support God's works. One day I heard a voice inside me saying: If you can't sell food that everyone buys without any fuss, how can you hope to sell the gospel? But, Lord, we don't sell the gospel! was my reply. The next day I was going to visit a friend, Marianne, together with Susanne. In our friend's house, a demonstrator was vaunting the merits of a new vacuum cleaner and as I listened to her, the voice inside me commented: Look at her, see how she sells her wares. …