God In Africa & You
We once thought that Christianity was brought by colonialism to the people of Africa. That idea brings conflicting feelings for Christians. It is wonderful when more people find that Jesus is the savior of their soul – their entire person – but it is an abomination for Christianity to be spread through force or violence. It is literally against the way of Jesus. Sometimes when this happened in history it was led by some misguided church officials, but more often than not when Christianity was spread through force and violence the faith was being used as a tool to consolidate power in the hands of a ruler or ruling class.
Thankfully today, we can now see that Christianity wasn’t brought to the people of Africa BY colonization, but WITH it. When African countries started gaining their independence after World War 2, Christianity in Africa didn’t decline and disappear along with colonialism. It exploded. It should come as no surprise that the activities of the colonial powers were actually obscuring and damaging the witness of Jesus to the people of Africa. With the colonial influences removed, people could more easily see the life and hope in the message of Jesus.
Today, so many Africans are giving their life to Jesus at such an incredible rate that churches cannot be built and pastors trained fast enough to keep up.
One of the many beautiful things to come out of this are African Creeds. A creed is a statement of beliefs. The earliest and most lasting Christian creeds – the Nicene Creed and the Apostle’s Creed – come out of the eastern Mediterranean world of the early church, but many other creeds, many other statements of Christian belief have been developed over the years. It is a way of unique people groups expressing the Christian faith in their own words and in the imagery of their own context.
Here is a uniquely African expression of the Christian faith that I think is beautiful:
We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth. We have known this High God in darkness, and now we know him in the light. God promised in the book of his word, the bible, that he would save the world and all the nations and tribes.
We believe that God made good his promise by sending his son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left his home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, he rose from the grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.
We believe that all our sins are forgiven through him. All who have faith in him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love, to announce the good news to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.
Besides hearing something beautiful and encouraging, what does God’s activity in African have to do with you today? It begs many questions. What is competing with and obscuring the Good News of God’s rescue in our context? What would need to change for so many of our people to want Jesus that the churches and seminaries struggle to keep up? Maybe even more practically for us, how would you write out your creed? How would you or the group that you are in express God’s rescue through Jesus in your own common language and the imagery of your context?
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