ABSTRACT
This chapter explores “ecumenism” in African Christianity, especially as it has been manifested in the main Protestant churches. The chapter is a phenomenological and historical analysis of the various mission agencies, movements, denominations and ecumenical initiatives in the broad African context with multi-faceted aspects – local, national, international, regional, and global. Africa is a microcosm of the whole world, hosting people from all nations, religions, cultures and ideologies. At the same time, Africa retains its own peculiarities and particularities. African religiosity is vibrant, and this vibrancy is manifest in the various ways and means by which Africans have been responding to the Christian faith. Ecumenical initiatives in Africa illustrate the various ways and means by which converging and competing claims to the Christian faith endeavor to convince Africans how to become “Joyfully Christian” while remaining “Truly African.” What does it mean to be “local church” as part of the “Universal Church”? And what does the “Universal Church” mean in the context of a local Christian community? To what extent are Christians in a rural congregation in Tropical Africa aware of the universal significance of the Gospel? Ecumenical studies focus on such questions, which hardly ever arise in theological discourse in African Christian congregations. Yet these questions are the core of contextual theological discourse. It was in the quest for answers to such questions that the Great Ecumenical councils were convened. The European Reformation was justified as a movement responding to the contextual application of the Christian faith among the various peoples under the Roman Empire. The outcome was national churches, which symbolized national identities. African Christianity is expressed in a very wide range of worship expressions –
loudly, silently, individually, communally, singing, dancing, dramatizing – using both African and foreign instruments, with great musical and choreographic originality. Its social ecologies include rural and urban expressions; gender and
age; class and status; wealth and poverty. In the Third Millennium, Africa is re-exporting Christianity back to those Western cultures that are losing it under the pressures of secularism, having shaped their social consciousness in earlier centuries, through the appropriation of biblical texts for national self-definition. Yet African Christianity is like a laboratory for testing various national ideologies: Christianity transcending the state; for the state; against the state; with the state; parallel to the state; subservient to the state; above the state. There is no doctrinal formula to arrive at a convincing ideology. All options are in tension and competition, while Africans are “participant observers.” The history of Christianity has been most pivotal whenever and wherever local churches contextually responded to such ideological questions, ignoring, affirming, confirming or confronting the reigning ideology. Africa remains a continent where the relationship between religion (Christianity)
and culture is not yet definitive. All possibilities are tested, and remain in creative tension from region to region, nation to nation: Christianity for local culture; against local culture; above local culture; independent of local culture; identifying with local culture; transcending local culture; outside local culture – operating as a cult.Most possible polities for the institutionalization of Christianity have presence in Africa: centralized hierarchy; centralized assembly; decentralized hierarchies; de-centralized assemblies; individualized entities. Africa is a market-place for Christian doctrines derived from: historical creedal formulae; biblical precepts; views of founders; views of preachers; views of theologians. Africa is also a marketplace for various theologies, derived from: scriptures; Councils; theologians; preachers. From the outside, African Christianity seems superficial, but from within it is very complex and phenomenal.
