In summary, the books and papers develop and interpret the content and meaning of the Edinburgh statement and show its significance for contemporary and future theory and practice of mission. They also prove that the Edinburgh event and statement reflect a reality as fruit of processes of dialogue and common search for authentic Christian witness among the various sectors of contemporary Christianity.
Jacques Matthey My sense is that it stands as reference library for mission in our day, at the end of a century of mission that began with a grandiose dream, was lived out with many struggles, and ended with humble yet realistic hope.
The Edinburgh Centenary Series is a landmark collection and one of the most important achievements of missiology in our two-decade-old twenty-first century. It is about global concerns—migration, children, interfaith dialogue, social justice, reconciliation, secularism, and globalization itself. It has contributions from every part of our world, across denominations, women and men. It is sold at a global price—free downloads for personal use. It is the fruit of global collaboration.
I think the editors of the various volumes come from every continent, and from every Christian church or denomination. I appreciated the fact that Pentecostals, Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox had their own volumes. I appreciated the fact that some of the topics covered in the volumes were focused on cutting-edge issues in missiological thinking and practice today: the volume on Theology, Mission, and Child; the volume on Mission and Postmodernities, the volume on migration, the volume on Mission and Spirituality, and the volume on Mission At and From the Margins.
Let me tell you why I think is has. First, probably uniquely, this series gathers together in one place a snapshot of understanding of mission today from right across the world church spectrum. I am not aware of anywhere else where that is so. In years to come, people will.
Just as was a point in a developing history, not the setting in concrete for all of the future, so this series records current beliefs and describes current praxis. Second, many of the volumes contain voices from many different traditions, reflecting on the same topic.
Those voices are also wonderfully international, and illustrate powerfully how we are all shaped by context, our cultures and our history. Third, there are sadly too few places that provide a setting where we can explore our differences and distinctives, and do it in a respectful manner.
I think this series provides such a place. I am grateful for that. Rose Dowsett if there is a unifying theological momentum to a series that ranges far and wide it would be in the pneumatological turn of Missio Dei thinking. The last half-century saw Missio Dei, the mission of God, become established as the key to understanding Christian mission. The distinctive deepening of this understanding brought to expression in the Edinburgh literature is to see the action of the Holy Spirit as the way the mission of God takes effect.
Kenneth R Ross Downloads The full texts of all volumes are being made available for free download for study and research purposes. Libraries For special library standing order offer, regular updates and to subscribe to our libraries publication list, please email regnum ocms. Ordering Please visit www. This provides the easiest way to order, and offers significant discounts on the list prices. You will receive the current volumes now and all future volumes. Authors Kapya Kaoma.
Files Download Download Full Text 2. Description As the world comes to terms with the human-caused destruction of God's sacred creation, whether Global Christianity will celebrate a bi-centennial Edinburgh becomes a real question. Keywords mission, case studies, pneumatology, missio dei, green theology, creation, environmental theology.
Disciplines Missions and World Christianity. Recommended Citation Kaoma, Kapya. Included in Missions and World Christianity Commons. Digital Commons. At the same time and from a sociological perspective , vision can be seen as an individual or collective construction of a future or desired state of society that is different from the current state.
In both senses of the word, a vision is something that moves people to action. I understand marginality in two ways that are intrinsically related: 1 being on the sidelines of dominant movements and activities in society due to social status i.
It usually results in the rejection of the missioner by the sections of society and the institutions that have given themselves the power to define acceptable models of mission.
Whatever your social status is, these received values will push you to the sidelines as someone or a community of people who have erred. From their foundation, this has been their experience of the AICs and many of the Pentecostal churches — and continues to be so to the present day. It is this second category of marginality which the Holy Spirit uses to breakdown the wall between the resource-poor and the resource-rich.
Characteristics of African Instituted Churches In the OAIC we have been engaging with the concept and reality of the founding vision for the last 13 years. The OAIC defines the founding vision as what the people of faith hear God telling them to do often through the leadership and guidance of a prophet or preacher , what they believe about the world around them, and how they understand their call to live out their faith in the particular society to which they belong.
It was a period when African Christians were faced with a three dimensional challenge of what they considered to be cultural domination, political domination and spiritual domination. Colonialism was taking root, and its impact was being increasingly felt in every aspect of life.
The gospel of Jesus Christ was being spread — churches, hospitals, and schools were being built. At the same time people were beginning to read the Bible for themselves, in their own mother tongues. They found Jesus Christ the healer, and the Holy Spirit who dwells in their midst, who can reveal the future, who guides and gives power to overcome evil. The African worldview understands reality in terms of both the spiritual and the physical.
Blessings, misfortunes, sickness, success and failure are deemed to emanate partly or fully from the unseen spiritual world. Therefore the AICs sought and seek to act in both physical and spiritual realms in order to deal with the challenges that faced them.
The missionary churches had not put adequate emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in the lives of individuals and communities. Healing was confined to the medical clinics, yet people were struggling with their understanding of reality that looked at causes of illness or suffering in ways which went beyond the terms in which they are defined by modern medicine.
Prayers for the removal of the colonialists were said continuously throughout this early period, and prophecies confirmed their impending departure. Symbols were developed which were spiritual but also carried political messages. For example, in western Kenya the churches carried flags identifying their own denominations.
Prophecy from the margins, overcoming fear, inspires people to speak to power. Even in local cultures where women are not allowed to be in leadership, they bring their contribution through prophecy, visions and dreams. In the AICs it is not uncommon for a young girl to stand in the midst of the congregation and to deliver a message of rebuke to church leaders for their sins.
Through these means women gain the courage to speak to power in their local environments. The AICs thus carried out both a priestly and a prophetic role in the community. They identified evils in the present, and prospected for the future, hunting for resources in the scriptures, and in their own society occasionally, too, borrowing from colonialist social structures such as schools and churches , with which they could begin to build their alternative vision of society.
Even if there were specific individuals who were recognized leaders in the AICs during the founding period, members in these movements value and operate on the principle of the priesthood of all believers. This is what empowers groups of women, men and young people to propagate the gospel of Jesus Christ in their workplaces and neighborhoods.
It is out of this understanding of mission that common people or people who are of low status in society can hold senior positions in their churches.
What matters is the calling and the evidence of the Spirit of God and the commitment to live out the values of a specific community of missioners.
People in the AIC movement regularly get visions or dreams and warn their communities about what is going wrong. The congregations and fellowships also spend a lot of time praying and fasting over the issues that have been predicted that might have an adverse impact on the community. Prayer is a major part of the mission at the grassroots. Collective prayer is also a process of collective reflection.
It leads to a collective or common understanding of the issues at hand and agreement on possible actions that arise out of that understanding. In the early twentieth century the AICs were building alternative communities.
The Spirit of God enabled them to critique and reject the individualism and secularism which was coming with modernity. In the founding vision AIC members linked these alien values to colonialism and to the presence of the missionaries. Together, these new alien forces were introducing Africa to the pressure of the market. AICs understood that it was the attraction of new consumer items that made colonial rule acceptable to many, and as a result in some instances refused to buy the newly imported goods.
It is this resourcefulness in community-building that the OAIC develops today to enable the member churches to support people living with HIV and AIDS, children in need, and people struggling with unemployment to mention a few. People develop their understanding of mission through listening to the voice of the Spirit and reading the scriptures in the situations in which they are placed. This is done both individually and collectively in fellowships. For example, the women in Nyamarimba congregation of Africa Israel Nineveh Church started praying over the issue of the increasing number of orphans in their community.
To date they have formed an organization which is caring for 1, orphans and other children in need in Kisumu District in Kenya. AICs carry out training through informal processes.
Training and nurturing takes place in the context of small groups where there is mutual encouragement, rebuke and peer advice. This mode of training is used to mobilize and train missioners in their own environments. The training continually focuses on the realities in which the churches operate. This enables the emerging leaders to appreciate the challenges in their mission field even before they are ordained or given bigger responsibilities. This mode of training can also be adopted and used to increase the number of theologically trained ministers in informal urban settlements and rural areas where church workers cannot easily take up full time training schedules.
This process of informal training creates a critical mass — which is needed to move people from reflection and dreaming to action and to advocacy. Books, seminars and conferences, radio and TV are also sources of knowledge for this process. Learning how to understand these sources of information is made easier by the fact that the information is read ideologically — that is, from the position of a counter-culture.
Critique of AICs Movements on the margins continue to grapple with the inability of powerful theologies to understand popular Christian movements. To many they are simply not respectable. The accepted methods of engaging with civic issues are always outside the spirituality of the AICs. So they have to take on the dominant model of civic education which hardly recognizes the motivation of the Holy Spirit to speak to power. The received models of civic education weaken the conscientization process that takes place through the reading of the word, prayer and listening to the voice of the Spirit individually and communally.
Doing Mission at the Margins of Society 33 The fact that the visions are passed on through oral processes i. It also hinders some of the churches from dealing with some of the issues that act as barriers to abundant life in the lives of individuals and communities.
It is also expected that a young man can start a church but not a young woman. So women are mainly found in the social ministries Miller and Yamaori. There are inadequacies which come with an attempt to use methods in mission which were relevant for a different era but are no longer relevant.
Restraining the younger generation from dreaming, visioning and acting in relation to the demands on mission in their era leads to frustration and departure of young people. Protecting the founding vision in some cases is used to entrench values which marginalize those who are weak i.
Many churches which emphasize the role of the Holy Spirit slide back into local cultural restrictions and prejudices when they come face to face with present day issues like HIV and AIDS, and the rights and well-being of women, children and young people.
Some may turn simply to a call for repentance and others understand it as a problem caused by demons such that if expelled from a person, healing will come. This has not been giving the missioners the results they want. Many of the ministers and missioners in these churches are challenged by the enormous problems in the environment in which they are operating.
Their ideological base is confronted by problems whose causes they do not understand fully. The reality of HIV and AIDS is rooted in the spiritual, social, political and economic realities of Africa and in the unequal relationships between the rich and poor countries. As a result we are baffled. We do not know what to do next. Even where theological training is taking place, in most cases it is not linked to the values and principles found in the founding visions of the churches.
Frequently the theology is borrowed from evangelical or ecumenical sources, and little attempt is made to integrate it into the popular theology of the AICs at the grassroots.
This is a significant constraint on contemporary AIC mission. The use of the prophetic gift in AICs in most cases is focused on local evils — at family levels, in the local church, the denomination and communities where people live.
It leaves out the national and the global issues unless they are interpreted in the local sense. There is an unconscious attempt to build a local community that reflects the kingdom of God where all are well and this wellness is achieved through the resolution of the spiritual problems and the physical, spiritual and social needs of the community members. This is necessary but it is only part of the solution. I had to tell my church that we have been wrong and ignorant in the way we were alienating ourselves from the people we are supposed to minister to.
We stopped using such statements and now we can get out and work with others as we deal with issues of HIV and AIDS, vulnerable children and food security.
There they have founded many flourishing churches. But how can AICs in these contexts move beyond ethnic divides and still work towards establishing a place in which Africans can feel at home? While many African missioners from Pentecostal and Spiritual churches are beginning to reach out to their local host communities, many are still building congregations where they operate on levels of organization where doctrinal differences and ethnic exigencies do not serve as the most vital reference points.
More important is the fact that these churches are simply places to 5 John M. The shortcoming of this type of community-building is that it excludes the host populations from benefiting from the enormous spiritual resources which the African migrants carry with them. We need their way of worship but most of them are keeping it to themselves. This is necessary, but by itself it prevents the church from reaching out to other social classes. Engaging this Spirituality in Holistic Mission In order to facilitate AICs to be more effective in mission, OAIC needs to undertake a long-term programme of engaging positively with the spirituality of its member churches.
This programme will include the following activities. Documenting the founding visions, and tracking the changes in the visions that have taken place in the various eras through which the AICs have passed. Without documentation the founding visions will be lost or will be changed imperceptibly over time as the churches absorb influences from the surrounding environment. It is clear that the historical founding visions were created to deal with the challenges of their day.
Many AIC missioners have continued with values which were developed in resistance to the dominant model of development and church that was brought by the colonialists and missionaries.
Some of the symbols and practices were relevant to this specific era but in a radically different environment, are no longer so. For example, the original resistance was directed to foreigners. The contemporary situation may require AICs to challenge their fellow Africans. This requires creating space for the present day missioners to dream and see visions in their own generation.
It requires a process of training and remobilizing and enabling the missioners to read the word, listen to the Holy Spirit and scan the environment they are operating in. Solidarity requires commitment to a particular community, and to its faith or ideological stance, and is often costly. Using Participatory Learning and Action PLA tools which have been created to illuminate the social realities of grassroots communities, links can be made with the scriptures. James, a grassroots development facilitator from Uganda, tells this story: I used to go to the churches to train them in development but people were not enthusiastic at all because they felt that we were bringing worldly things to the church.
I went back and studied the scriptures. I got the relevant scriptures and used them alongside the participatory learning and action tools. Out of the discussions generated in this process Christians who were at the beginning opposed to development training realized that they were practicing their faith against the scriptures they believe in.
We also as facilitators learnt that we need to recognize the place of the Bible in social transformation. This resulted in the transformation of their understanding of the link between their faith and development. It is about people and communities being well and not focusing on amassing wealth.
Through processes like this, access to reality is illuminated by using sociological tools which have been developed over a period by development scholars and practitioners.
Another example is the use of the access and control tools on resources by gender and age groups. The author has used these tools which reveal the great disparity in access to resources and power between women and men, and elders and young people.
This usually leads to a more informed debate in the church on these issues after congregations have been taken through the process of analyzing the causative factors of the unwanted situations in the lives of individuals, families and communities. It is this process that brings the people in the church and the rest of the community to work together to transform their lives for the better.
This empowerment leads to action which may sometimes be disruptive to our accepted models of mission. This chapter presents the lived African Christian Roman Catholic spirituality from a Ghanaian perspective. It draws on the liturgical life of the church by capturing the salient liturgical developments championed by local churches dioceses. The chapter, therefore, addresses how Ghanaian culture gives expression to Catholicism. The BCCs are neither unique to Africa, nor did they originate here.
The difference is steeped in a church that finds itself in diverse socio-political conditions. The BCCs, therefore, form the foundation on which the other liturgical innovations previously referred to will be discussed. The study will draw on examples in the Catholic dioceses of Accra, Kumasi and Ho to show how Catholics articulate the faith in specific contexts, giving authentic Ghanaian expression and comprehension to the Roman Catholic faith.
The liturgy of the Eucharist cannot be celebrated without a priest. It is a literal term to express the act of bringing the infant outdoors for the first time. New pastoral strategies and approaches have, therefore, become necessary. Or, perhaps, even a general re-thinking on a workable model of the church that will be more appropriate in such circumstances. Models are, sociologically speaking, mental constructs with which the reality on the ground can be measured.
Such thinking may well be easier in relation to society; however, the church cannot be visualised in mere sociological terms. Although peopled, members of the church are qualified in the sense that they are the people of God. The church consists of society but transcends it at the same time. Therefore, models of the church must be primarily theological even as they are sociological. But as a community of believers whatever model the church assumes at any one time is coloured by the social context within which the church operates.
In view of this, the complaint about the declining number of clergy, particularly in the western World, sometimes fails to recognise that never in the history of the church have there been adequate numbers of clergy. Even in those regions of Africa and South America that appear to have a boom in vocations the situation is not uniform. Therefore, it is unlikely that there will ever be enough priests anywhere or in the entire church.
The older church in Europe, for example, has been used to certain modus operandi such as having priests mostly resident in single parishes and administering to the people of God in that particular parish. Mission in Ghana When it is suggested that vocations in Africa are in superabundance, it is important to note that many individual African parishes are collections of several towns and villages. A priest in Ghana typically lives in the parish centre, what is called the main station, and strives to serve that station as well as the adjoining outstations.
Some parishes have as many as 20 communities or more. The population of such parishes varies from a few hundred to many thousands of people.
Priests typically serve these churches under trying conditions such as bad roads and lack of adequate transport. In fact, they sometimes have to walk several kilometres to the outstations they serve. They do not have the luxury of the one-station parish model, where priests both live and work, which typifies the church in the west.
However, it is under the trying circumstances described above that the church seems to be thriving, even vibrant in certain places in Africa. Priests have never and cannot single-handedly build parishes or the church. Vital though their position is, their work thrives only in collaboration with the laity. As the church expands, so also is it more difficult for priests to know their flock personally.
What is more, some of the new churches are also beginning to establish institutions such as schools, hospitals and even universities, providing the very services the Catholic Church provides as part of its evangelization strategy. Members participate in the life of this family by meeting frequently to break the word, sometimes bread Eucharist as well, thereby administering to each other and to themselves. The family of God subsists in the unity of God.
Each individual family, each family of the Christian community in an outstation, a parish, a chaplaincy, a diocese, a nation, indeed in the entire the world, finds meaning and gives expression to itself through its rootedness in this family of God.
Love, compassion and sharing are characteristic of this family. The important point about inculturation regarding this model is that it takes its clue from the proverbial African family.
It paints an ideal picture of the family that, steeped in the liturgy of the Eucharist, shares a life of unity and solidarity in society. It is not to say that the ideal family exists anywhere.
It exists, neither in Africa, which is plagued by wars, ethnic conflicts, greed, bad governance and disease, nor in the west, which is devoured by greed, materialism and relativism.
Modernization and the secularization of the African society are also beginning to take their toll on the Christian family. But shortcomings constitute precisely the reason for the existence of the church, a family that should bring hope to a people even on the verge of brokenness.
Consequently, the pastoral work cannot depend on priests and religious alone. Priests and religious together with the numerous catechists and laity who offer themselves in unpaid service to the church in Africa are responsible for its growth.
In normal human families the work of family members, which sustains these families, is unquantifiable and cannot be paid for. The challenge today, however, is that to renew the church, families have to be renewed.
It is not enough to be running around saying mass. Catechesis should be a notable part of the work of the priests, religious and catechists, while these pastoral agents, particularly priests, visit the homes of their faithful to share in their lives as family members, sometimes bringing several members together.
Concretely then, the BCC concept proves adequate to sustain the lived religion in our parishes; however, it is not widely entrenched in Ghana. In the Accra archdiocese, the concept is widespread in Tema. The church in the university consists of a chaplaincy for students and a parish for workers. When in the Parish Pastoral Council recognized that members of the parish merely attended mass Sunday after Sunday without really participating in a life in common not a family , it initiated the BCCs, dividing the parish community into small families according to proximity.
This was in recognition of the fact that the students have been operating this model for a long time, what they refer to as Cells. Members begin to know each other better, thereby reaching those who would otherwise be left on the fringes. Hence, when any members are sick, bereaved or have an occasion to celebrate, this comes to the notice of the entire church the bigger family through the smaller family of the BCC.
They visit the various BCCs to participate in their meetings, celebrate the liturgy of the Eucharist with them, thereby getting to know their members better. The entire pastoral strategy is built on the principle of winning people by love.
People want to feel wanted. Where this is lacking, they leave the church for some novel religious group that seems to fulfil this need. Thanks to pastoral adaptation the African family, in both its nuclear and extended forms, gives impetus to the lived religion of the church in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. Such a pastoral strategy has been made possible through Vatican II in view of the conscious awareness about inculturation the Council has awoken in the church in Africa.
Consequently, unlike the pre- conciliar attitude of missionaries frowning upon inculcating indigenous cultural practices into the church, the post-conciliar spirit is one of encouraging dialogue with the same indigenous cultures and religions.
It is this novel spirit that makes it possible for the Asante Diocese Kumasi archdiocese , for example, which Obeng studies in great detail, to embark upon the indigenization of the faith. Inculturation, then, becomes naturally understood as the intention of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, to be incarnate in every human culture whose authors he came to save. Such understanding would empower the Kumasi Archdiocese, led by Archbishop Sarpong, to launch into a project of inculturation aimed at making the Catholic faith more intelligible to its adherents.
Kumasi is not the only local church that is engaged in this initiative. One of the main means by which Vatican II makes this possible is the move away from Latin as the only language of the mass to the use of the vernacular.
So in Kumasi, not only is the liturgy celebrated in Twi a variant of the Akan language in Ghana , the liturgy is replete with numerous attempts at inculturation. Corpus Christi is the feast of the body and blood of Christ commemorating the Eucharist.
Traditionally it falls on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday, although in some regions of the church it is translated to the following Sunday. On that day the body of Christ, tucked in a monstrance, is carried in procession after the liturgy of the Eucharist. By this means the Lord Jesus is adored in the full view of the public at a number of altars erected for the purpose.
In this way Catholics show Jesus Christ to the world as their priest, prophet and king. In Kumasi the kingship of Christ appears to receive a rather nuanced impetus in view of the position occupied by the Asantehene king of Asante and other chiefs in that society. One of the significant rites it has produced, among others, is that of the naming ceremony of children.
The naming ceremony is quite widespread in Ghana, with many ethnic groups celebrating the occasion on the eighth day after the birth of a child. Emergence from the room would signify leaving darkness into light. The elder in the family who will perform the rite raises the child with its face upwards to see the light of day that the child may learn to tell the difference between darkness and light, evil and good. A number of other symbols are used including splashing water unto the roof of the house in front of which the assembly is gathered that it may drip on the child.
This action means the child should learn the difference between fair weather and rain. Peter Sarpong outlines some other symbols employed by the Asante, some specifically when naming a girl, others when naming a boy. Thus, the rite is an amalgamation of the traditional naming ceremony and the Catholic rite of infant baptism. The priest may administer baptism to the child at the same time or leave it for a future date in church.
Where baptism is 11 Obeng, Asante Catholicism, ix. Doing Mission at the Margins of Society 45 performed, the water that is used as a symbol of cleansing and new life in the Christian rite reinforces the traditional virtue of honesty required by traditional culture. More Post-Concliliar documents continue to entrench the position of the Council. One of the main preoccupations of Evangelii Nuntiandi is to address the methods and approaches that should be employed in preaching the gospel to make it more effective in our times.
This is the task, which the Council and its Post-Conciliar exhortations set local churches dioceses within the Universal Catholic Church. In fulfilling this goal, however, individual churches should be united to the Universal Church even as the former seek to inculturate the gospel. Consequently, Catholics from different cultural backgrounds visiting the dioceses of Accra, Kumasi and Ho would be able to participate in the parochial parish family life and recognize the inculturated liturgical celebration of Corpus Christi and the reception of children into the family of the church without these rites being radically different from those of the same celebrations in their own local churches.
Conclusion As the Ghanaian examples of attempts at inculturation illustrated in this chapter show, the dialogue with indigenous cultures and other religions, which Vatican II promotes, has the potential of enriching the Catholic Church.
The process of inculturation may be arduous, involving 15 Flannery, More Post-Conciliar Documents, By promoting the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, Vatican II makes human beings and their culture the centre, which the gospel seeks to penetrate.
Human beings can, thus, develop models of the church that best make the gospel more intelligible to them. Hence, as models of the church as Family of God, the BCCs in the University of Ghana Catholic Chaplaincy, for example, present members with homes in which they can share common anxieties, hope and love.
A model presents an ideal with which reality is to be measured. What a model seems to say is that it is possible to achieve this ideal. Individuals and groups are urged to look to the ideal and implement it in their lives, taking their respective circumstances into account. So a model can enhance reality and raise reality to a lofty level. The cultural reality, in which Ghanaian Catholics live, therefore, can be a means of their rendering the Catholic faith meaningful to themselves.
The various attempts at inculcuration then, such as those spelt out in this chapter, are essentially an encounter with Christ who is incarnate in these cultures. Surely he intends the subjects of these cultures to live their religion in them and propagate it to others. For almost a hundred years, the Roman Catholic Church and the mainline Protestant denominations, offshoot of the western missionary endeavours, largely dominated the religious scene.
However, this monopoly was broken with the emergence of the African Independent Churches from the last decade of the nineteenth century, and this religious independence accelerated in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, the ongoing revitalization of doctrines and practices within Christianity which began with the emergence of the African Independent Churches and progressed substantially from the s with the Charismatic Renewal, has continued to make Christianity a dominant social force in the continent as the lives of millions of Africans continue to revolve around religion, even amidst the deterioration of the quality of life on the continent — largely due to inept governance by many governments.
Concomitantly, other religions, such as Islam and African Traditional Religion, have also witnessed some kind of renewal and have expanded their spaces into the public sphere. By the s, the three major religions were already competing for attention and social relevance. Subsequently, religion began to feature prominently in the public sphere and in popular culture video films, novels, gospel songs, etc. On the political scene, religion became a tool for political negotiation and manipulation, and a marker of ethnic and social identities within the religious pluralistic environment.
In fact, despite the inclusion of clauses s on the de-establishment of religion in the constitutions of many African nations, various governments continue to promote religion in various ways, and some political leaders continue to project their religious faith into the performance of their official functions.
Nonetheless, Africans have taken the presence of religion in the public sphere as normal and desirable. Although this public image of Christianity looked encouraging in the post-independence era from the s, it was obvious that there is a concern about the quality of the spirituality of Christians in modern Africa. It was this same spirituality that triumphed over the evil forests where early African Christians were consigned to build their churches, and also displaced the political dominance of Islam in some places.
This same spirituality was further reflected in the emergence of the African Independent Churches as a revivalist movement and in the divine call of their leaders as prophet- healers.
This African Christian spirituality was built on prayer, visions and dreams, power manifestation and the immediate experience of the supernatural as a transforming power. However, by the s this spirituality has been unable to offer any meaningful social and religious discourse to address the deteriorating economic and political life of many countries.
Indeed, one can draw a preliminary conclusion that contemporary African Christian spirituality in the twenty-first century lacked creativity and was unable to present any redemptive option that would engage substantially and critically with the state and governance in Africa.
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