Abstract
This article describes the first cross-cultural outreach of the Reformed Church in Zambia (RCZ) to a non-Shona speaking group. This Church founded preaching posts and, eventually, a congregation among the Tonga people living in the Binga area on the southern side of the Zambezi River / Kariba Lake. These people, of a unique culture, were displaced from their land, causing great suffering, when the dam was built and the lake formed. They received very little compensation – if any. Other tribes looked down on the Tonga people. In the nineties, University students initiated an “evangelism outreach.” This article describes the events, relates something about the Tonga people, and deals with the RCZ’s discovery that they were defaulting to the missionary methods of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) that founded their Church more than a hundred years earlier. This realization led to the question how they should go about reaching out to different cultural groups of people.
Highlights
The main purpose of this article is to contribute towards developing a communal and contextual missional framework that will encourage the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe’s (RCZ) faith community’s reflective involvement in the Mission of God
This article critically described the work of the Reformed Church in Zambia (RCZ) among the Tonga people
A realistic fear exists that the problems that the RCZ experiences with its own members by reverting back to traditional religious practices and witchcraft, are not addressed in the Binga outreach
Summary
The main purpose of this article is to contribute towards developing a communal and contextual missional framework that will encourage the Reformed Church in Zimbabwe’s (RCZ) faith community’s reflective involvement in the Mission of God. The RCZ, uncritically and conservatively, still cling to the traditional missionary model inherited from the European missionaries This does not conform well to Zimbabwe’s present and quite different socio-cultural circumstances. The researcher’s personal involvement in the RCZ outreach motivated this study His interest sprang from the observation that this mission of the RCZ needed to be well equipped to address the present-day challenges and questions that the people were facing in their contexts. A better understanding of the latter’s mission is possible if related to, and placed in, various contexts of the European people’s history (Saayman 2007:2, Munikwa 2011:34-65) This Church’s missionary enterprise started during the colonial period. The paradigms of the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment profoundly influenced the missionary understanding and practice of the DRC who was involved in cross-cultural ministry in many countries in Africa, including Zimbabwe.. The RCZ members, as disciples of Jesus Christ involved in Christian mission, must acknowledge and recognise their own context’s influence on their perception and practice
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