Christianity Appropriated: Conversion and the Intercultural Process

Abstract

When he completed graduate work in patristics at Oxford in the 1950s, Andrew Walls tells us, he shared the conventional wisdom of the day. Church history was about lessons be imparted the younger churches from the wisdom of the older ones, was it not? Then in 1958, at age thirty, Walls started seminary teaching in Sierra Leone. But while teaching about the patchwork quilt of second-century Christianity, he realized that he was actually living in the midst of a second-century church. I began, Walls comments, to understand the second-century material in the light of all the religious events going on around me-not the reverse (xiii). Later, taking a post in a newly established department of religion in Nigeria, Walls wondered why there were 331 churches in a five-mile radius of one small town. Even more the