THE TOUGH, ZEALOUS FACE OF AFRICA’S CHRISTIANITY

Polygamy. Female circumcision. Poverty. Social injustice. The African church grapples with daunting problems. Yet, believers draw great joy from following Jesus in an African context. Sheila Rowe, a freelance writer, visited Kenya in March and penned the following reflections on African Christianity from some of her experiences here:

On Sunday, when Oscar Muriu stands in the pulpit at Nairobi Chapel, he wears traditional African dress: one senior pastor’s outward expression of a profound inner reality. One stake in the ground. One claim to ethnic identity too long lost.
“To become a Christian, 50 years ago, was to stop being African,” Muriu says bluntly.

“You can’t to that. Culture is too deeply ingrained to make a clean break like that.”

Muriu’s ‘Africanness’ goes well beyond what he pulls from his closet. On the day we meet, he is in western dress, but it quickly becomes Western standards are not his measuring stick.
“The Western expression of faith has been the standard of what it means to be a Christian,” asserts Muriu.

“As a result of our colonial history and the way the gospel came to us… Africa lost its soul. If you talk to many Africans now, they don’t know what it means to be African.”

While Christian Africa traces its modern roots to Western missionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries, a reaction against the Western church has provoked changes.

“We see the West as struggling with liberalism and secularism,” says Muriu. “African is not comfortable with some of the expressions – supposedly of faith – coming out of the West. The church in the Northern Hemisphere is dying. We need to step aside and be very clear on who we are and how we express our faith. I think we are beginning to find our soul again.”

To understand the soul of African Christianity is to suspend one’s Western worldview, to see with eyes that esteem community over individuality, to feel a spiritual tradition that had no saviour, yet worshiped a creator and keeper. To understand the context of polygamy, to arrest for a moment one’s horror over female circumcision, to dance to a different beat – simply to dance.

It is not altogether comfortable. Penn State Prof. Philip Jenkins’ book, The Next Christendom, describes a massive shift I the center of gravity of Christianity to the Southern Hemisphere.
“When cultural assimilation reaches a certain point,” writes Jenkins, “Western observers complain that what is being transformed is not merely the trappings, but the core of the faith.
“What is being practiced, it appears, is not inculturation but syncretism, the blatant adulteration of Christianity by elements of other religions.”

To understand the soul of African Christianity is to suspend one’s Western worldview

There is joy in African worship. The same joy is apparent in Josiah Ole Kirisuah, displayed in the colourful wristbands that mark him as a proud Maasai elder. Every couple of weeks, Ole Kirisuah goes home to his village, where he happily sheds city clothes for sandals and shukas, his people’s colourful robes. On ceremonial occasions, he threads beaded earrings through the small holes at the top of his ears.

He is a living example of modern, indigenous African Christianity. His faith is absolutely foundational to his life. So, too, is his Maasai heritage. “I think it is extremely possible to be 100 per cent Maasai and 100 per cent Christian. We are living it! We can jump high to the roof in the Maasai dance, singing to the Lord. We can sing, we can dance the way we always did!”

Ole Kirisuah is a full-time Christian worker with Kenya’s Bible Translation and Literacy. His own conversation came 23 years ago, after reading Billy Graham’s World Aflame. But, far from renouncing his past, he embraces his upbringing in a polygamous household among an illiterate people.

“I can tell you, it was wonderful growing up as a Maasai child in the village and to have all those mothers,” Ole Kirisuah says.

He was the first Christian in his village. Many of his extended family – including his 90-year-old father and four mothers – have since converted.
“I still consider them my mothers.”

Running contrary to his culture, Ole Kirisuah has only one wife, Sarah. Perhaps even more controversial is the couple’s adamant refusal to have their four daughters initiated into adulthood with the deeply ingrained tradition of female circumcision – what is commonly called female genital mutilation of FGM in the West.

“It is not right to initiate girls that way,” asserts Ole Kirisuah. His extended family was “extremely upset” by that decision. But with patience, Josiah and his family remain close to their roots. “Because we are always present with them, they have kind of excused us…(a few) have already indicated that they are not going to initiate their daughters that way either, because we have taken this stand.”

Change can’t come too quickly. Two years ago, while he was away, Ole Kirisuah’s 15-year-old niece, Kikenua, bled to death following circumcision. She was well and healthy in the morning, but dead by 9 pm.
“It was terrible’” he says softly. “You can use this in your article, it might help people there pray better for us and appreciate the challenges we face as pioneers in our Maasai community.”

Prof. James Kombo is an ordained minister and lecturer in Bible Theology at Nairobi’s Daystar University. “The Christian faith comes with things that are non-negotiable…like the lordship of Christ’” he says.

“This is a universal thing, but when it comes to expressing or understanding or getting out what this lordship of Christ means, we retreat to our intellectual conscience…
“There is always the balance between what is universal in the Christian faith and what is local. That balance must always be sought.”

A balanced wasn’t always sought. While Kombo quickly acknowledges the “fantastic work” earlier missionaries did in planting churches, Pastor Muriu believes their European worldview overrode that of Africans who received the gospel. Finding an authentic African Christianity, he believes, requires recognizing and appreciating traditional elements once discarded.

Muriu argues, “Africans live in a world where they do not differentiate or dichotomize between the sacred and the secular… there is no spiritual and mundane; it is all part of the same.

“We can see the world of Jesus that way. There is something about the old Jewish communities that is very close to home. You read the Old Testament and you have the same sense of immediacy and the same sense of a world where the unseen world interacts with the seen world on an ongoing basis.”

Prof. Philomena Mwaura, a Catholic lecturer in Religious Studies at Kenyatta University, calls the African way simply “holistic spiritually.”

“Western missionaries came out of the Enlightenment with preconceived ideas about the African people being primitive,” Mwaura contends. “Some came with the idea that Africans had no concept of God.” By 1920, a backlash had begun in Africa. Indigenous churches emerged. Collectively, they became known as African independent churches. Today, some are called “spirit churches” or “nationalist churches.”

Prof. Kombo says the new churches appealed to Africans who needed “something more African.”

For many, “something more African” was relatively benign: indigenous music and dance, African idioms, reflections of the African worldview.

But Mwaura cites some darker marks of the African church. “I have seen practices totally incompatible with Christian belief,” she says. “For example, the idea of sacrificing to ancestors. There are some churches that allow that to continue.”

Kombo says the challenges of inculturation are nothing new. “Africa is going through what the church went through in the early Hellenistic world It had to content with a lot. Moving from one world to another, you meet all kinds of things.”

Of all the other things, polygamy is one where the lines between Western and African worldviews are most clearly drawn. While it arose historically for economic and procreation reasons, “The church has not addressed the issue of polygamy. It still skirts around it,” says Mwaura.

The Catholic theologian cites the case of a polygamist member of the Kenyan parliament who recently died.

“Usually the church will not officiate at the burial of such a person, but (he) was taken to the Catholic basilica. The archbishop was the overseer of the mass… It makes us wonder if there are two types of rules in the church; one for the affluent and important people and one for the poor people.”

Mwaura says the African independent churches have simply accepted polygamy.

“As long as one is taking care of their family, they don’t see anything wrong with that. They focus more on the Old Testament. They draw from the Old Testament patriarchs who are in good relationship with God, and they were polygamists. But don’t ask me why they don’t read the New Testament.”

Kombo agrees. “Polygamy is still a very hot issue. It is still being debated all over the place. As we speak, most of the churches in Africa have come to a position where they wont ordain polygamous people, but accept them into the church.”

If polygamy defines what is controversial in the new African Christianity, music embodies its joy. Pastor Muriu cuts to the essence of native African worship: “If it doesn’t make you dance, it’s not good music.”

“Every tribe has sounds that to an untrained European ear are noise. But to an African ear, it’s part of music.”

Western standards of excellence, he says, are less that irrelevant. Drawing from an oral culture, he says, African worship “needs to be sung in a way that you don’t need a hymn book… It is very dynamic; it’s created during the event. There’s no right and wrong way with where you go with this thing.”

African music, rooted in collective expression, has almost no soloists nor fine instruments.”
“Africans complement their music with tonal sounds,” says Muriu. “Every tribe has sounds that to an untrained European ear are noise. But to an African ear, it’s part of music.”

On Sunday morning, the effect is palpable. While cosmopolitan services in Kenya include English choruses, it’s Swahili that rocks the rafters.

“Any time they burst into the authentic African hymnology, there is always a dance movement,” enthuses Muriu. “It’s not choreographed, but…people are aware, even intuitively, what they are to do.”

Contextualization is a must. As Christianity wends its way to the ends of the earth, it must represent universal truth within the real context of people’s lives. Part of that context is culture, difficult issues like female circumcision, easier ones like music. There is the social and political backdrop against which faith unfolds.

The social context of Africa is unavoidable: poverty, tyranny, tribal warfare, the ever-present cloud of AIDS. Yet far from weakening the faith, these very things galvanize those charged with transmitting the Christian gospel.

“If the gospel doesn’t get dirty in the center of life itself, then it is a worthless gospel,” says pastor Muriu. “if this gospel doesn’t speak about how I feed my child today, or how, having raped by the police, I find not just healing but deal with this injustice, then it is a worthless gospel.”

Muriu’s mandate “is much wider than just preaching the gospel. It’s relating God to life, the whole of life. It’s a very exiting time (for) the change that needs to take pace in Africa.”

Daystar University’s Kombo believes the appeal of Christianity goes beyond answers to social problems. “Poverty is not the reason or basis for people to come to the Christian faith. People have accepted Christ and said yes to Him, because that makes sense… They have realized that they can find (fulfillment) only in Christ, proclaimed in the Bible.

Poverty is not the reason or basis for people to come to the Christian faith

The afternoon sun cuts beautiful shafts through the open, glassless window of the large, stone chapel. A dozen rural Kenyan pastors have come, some from miles away, to discuss “mother tongue” Bible translation. On a hot day, it’s a relatively cool place. One of their number stands and struggles valiantly to bridge the language gap that yawns between us.

“When they sing music, it makes them be drawn to God’” he says of his flock.

“When we preach in our language and sing, something seems complete. Jesus is a personal saviour.”

As an indigenous expression find s its footing, something new emerges, a vision well beyond the local. Muriu has an ambitious vision for his Nairobi Chapel: to plant 300 churches by 2020 in Kenya, East Africa, and even beyond abroad.

He speaks of the vast resource of African youth ready, willing, and uniquely equipped to evangelize the Middle East and Asia.

“When Africans go to Asia, they’re not looked suspiciously like Christians from Northern Hemisphere. “You are seen to be there to proselytize and convert…but they don’t need to be of an African.”

Kombo agrees: “As much as we are local and seek to address issues that are local, it is important we also raise our eyes to embrace the universal body of Christ….how the African people respond to the Christian faith should, in fact, be helpful to the entire Christian fraternity.”

Kombo cites the shift of Christian faith from the First to the Third World as a development that will naturally, inevitably shape its future.

“If theology has always been something done by or for the majority that embraced the Christian faith,’ he suggests, “then the theology that will become determinative in this century will come from Africa.

“As we speak, Africa has always much more Christians than any other continent in the world.”

This article was first published in “The Calgary Herald.”