THE CHURCH IN AFRICA: WHAT OF THE FUTURE?

This is a subject on which I have few qualifications to speak. Perhaps nobody has many, unless there are any fortune-tellers present. I am going to say a little about the present; something of the challenges extending into the future; them a little about one particular aspect – the ministry of the next decade.

You must forgive me if most of the facts I quote relate to the Catholic and Anglican churches, which for me are better documented than others. The views expressed apply however to most of the churches in Malawi.

A church of the people of the land.

Let us go back to 1899. Bishop Hine was one of the least known but most far-seeing of the Anglican bishops of Malawi. He was a doctor of medicine and served for 25 years in Zanzibar, Malawi and Zambia. Then he retired, wrecked by blackwater fever, but still full of imagination. The last thing he did was to arrange a conference of all the missions in Zambia. Out of that conference grew the ecumenical ministry on the Copper Belt 30 years later, and out of that came Nindolo Training Centre which provided the inspiration for the Ecumenical Training Centre in Malawi Ekwendeni, Chilema and Nkhotakota. From Bishop Hine’s charge to the Synod of 1899 on Likoma Island:

“For this country it is the days of the Early Church. What we have always professed to aim at is the building-up of the Church of the people of the land, irrespective of European influence, adapting itself to the special circumstances of the race and country in which it exists”

That was what one church was trying to do 75 years ago. The vision faded a little in the next 50 years, but not altogether. The questions we are asking ourselves tonight are: how far has it ecome the church of the people of the land? And what are the next steps?

African leadership

To be a church of the people of the land there must be African leadership. In the year 1960 there were in the Catholic church three African bishops in Tanzania, one in Uganda, one in Kenya and one in Malawi. By 1969 Tanzania had a majority of Africans in its Episcopal Conference. Other countries followed in 1970 and 1971; Nigeria and Malawi were two of the last to achieve an African majority in 1972.

In the Anglican church the change came even more swiftly. In 1960 there were in Uganda three African bishops, appointed in that year; none in Malawi, none in Zambia, none in Kenya and none in the Sudan. Today out of 57 Anglican bishops in independent Africa, three are expatriates. Take a good look: perhaps you will be able to tell your grandchildren that you once saw one when you were young.

The African ordained ministry has been well documented by Dr. Pachai in “Malawi: the History of the Nation”. To do a little foolish boasting: the Anglican church in 1911 had 10 ordained ministers. The Presbyterians ordained their first two ministers in the same year; the Roman Catholic church ordained in 1937 their first priest, Cornelius Chitsulo, to become later the first Malawian bishop.

The Christian community

Any figures of the total Christian community are guess-work. Here are my guesses. Of the 375 million people who live in Africa, something like 15% would describe themselves as members of the Catholic church. The Anglican figure could be 4%. Other churches, including the may African independent churches, might be 20% or 25%. That leaves 55% or 60% as Moslem or belonging to African traditional religion.

Africa has suddenly become a very important part of world Christianity. I can quote figures for the Anglican communion only; they show that about 37% of its active members live in Africa. The total number of confirmations each year in Britain, Australia and Canada put together is about equal in Africa. This is a dramatic change in the centre of gravity from what it was 20 years ago.

A Western religion

Now for the problems the church faces. First and obviously, the extreme westerness of the form in which Christianity reached countries such as Malawi. Most of our hymn tunes, for example, come from Europe or America. They are not very good; they lack rhythm: they do not fit traditional scales and so they are sung badly.

Go into a church where hymns are sung which do belong to the people and hear the difference. One of my great moments in Malawi was showing Livingstonia Church to some visitors, pushing open the door and them a great Ngoni hymn came welling out – the choir was practising at an unexpected time. We should honour the Presbyterian missionaries of Livingstonia Synod who in the 1890s were collecting Tumbuka folk-music and using it for the worship of God, and the early African ministers of that synod who wrote new music in the same tradition.

African liturgy

It is the same with our liturgy. Our forms of prayers are often 300 years old or more, and sometimes bear little relation to the needs of Africa. If they are in English, then we use a kind of language that is no longer used even by English people. But these things are now changing fast. The Anglican church in South Africa is just about to publish a new order for the Eucharist. It contains a litany written in Xhose by a group from Eastern Cape, and translated into English, the first time that this has happened in Anglican history. There is nothing revolutionary about it, but I find it very beautiful and Africans to whom I have showed it say, yes, that is on out wave-length. Here are some extracts:

You were rich, yet for our sake you became poor;

Move those who have wealth to share generously with who are poor.

Lord, hear us

You were unjustly condemned by Pontius Pilage;

Strengthen our brothers who are suffering injustice and persecution.

Lord, here us.

You lived as an exile in Egypt;

Be with all migrant workers and protect their families.

Lord, here us.

You open and none can shut;

Open the gates of your kingdom to those who have died without hearing the gospel.

Lord, hear us.

Much more imaginative experiments are going forward in places like Likulezi Catechetical training centre under the inspiration of Dr. Schoffeleers. For example, Africans are re- expressing Christian initiation in language and actions that have meaning in Malawi because these are the ways in which generations past are forefathers were initiated. There is no reason why Christian symbols should always derive from Jewish traditions; God can make equally good use of the ways of our African past.

Theology: I should not say this sort of thing at a University, but the older I get the less I find theology as taught in university has much to do with life or God or people. Twenty years ago I used to be the examiner in doctrine for a theological college in South Africa. Wanting to see how far the students could apply what they had learned to the contest in which they were going to work, I set them this question;

You are talking to an old man who is a follower of traditional religion.

Explain to him why Christians believe in god, and what they believe in him.

One answer read; “ I would say to him there are five arguments for the existence of god; the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument and the argument ex consensus gentium” I would have loved to see the old man’s face. We spend much time answering questions raised by Greek sophists in the fourth century A.D. which nobody asks today in Africa.

Organizationalism; You are in a cleft stick. To do things properly you have to have money; to get money you have to follow the ways of those who have money in the West. If you are not good at filling in forms and investing money your church will be despised because its hospitals are out-of-date. I do not know the answer. The church in Africa lives in this tension between being an organisational church and being the church of the people of Africa, a people who do not think form-filling to be a very important activity.

Legalism: A frightening total of Christians in Africa are excommunicated for one reason or another. This applies to the whole spectrum of Christian churches. There are countries such as Malawi, where labour migration has been a way of life, and where there are thousands of Christian women whose husbands went of to look for work twenty years ago and have never returned. Rules devised by the churches in centuries that knew nothing of migrant labour say that if such a woman takes a second husband, because there is no other way by which her children can be educated, she must be excommunicated. Instead of asking God the Holy Spirit what his will is, we enmesh our people in these cat’s cradles of regulations. Often the woman has done nothing which theology regards as sin, nor is there any way in which she as an individual can escape.

We know that millions of years ago the earth was populated by giant reptiles, and that they faded out because they could not adapt to a changing environment. Has the church in Africa the power to adapt? Churches everywhere are conservative; rural African churches more so than elsewhere. People in this frighteningly changing world cling to the form in which this precious thing came to them many years ago.

The urban challenge

In towns this situation is most acute. Here people are meeting problems totally unlike those which they faced in their country village. It is said, I do not know whether accurate or not, that the urban population of Africa is growing at the rate of three million a year. Here people are living in a world quite different from that for which our rural ministers were trained. There are also practical problems such as finance. In a country village you cut down a few trees, mould a few bricks and build your church. Try to do that in Elantyre and you will quickly tangle with the city architect. Here are some more things the churches must do to meet the challenge of the cities.

First of all we have to shed our party differences. In the village, probably everyone belongs to the same church. Ina factory, the workers represent twenty different churches. If their Christianity is going to be relevant to the problems they meet at work ( and this is the only kind that is of any use ) it is no good picking out the Anglican, three catholic and two Presbyterians, and dealing with them separately; we must deal with a Christian as a Christian. Our ecumenism is still very thin and tenuous. We do a few things together like building hospitals. When it comes to living out beliefs, talking about what God and Christ means to us, we have hardly begun to speak the same language. This is one of the preconditions of our work in towns.

Secondly, the church of the town has got to be the church of the laity, In the country villages one minister or priest can go round on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on his bicycle and deal with a number of different communities by himself. When he tries to do this in town, he finds everyone away at work. The church has to be lay – centred, its gospel preached by lay men and lay women, taking it’s shape from secular needs. It has got to be mobile, oriented to the present, and (what many older clergy find it hard to manage) replacing monologue with dialogue.

Another pitfall for the church is that of elitism. I quote from canon Burgess Carr the Secretary of the All Africa Conference of Churches;

“ There are only two tribes in Africa; the elites and the masses.”

I speak about this feelingly because elitism has been the besetting sin of Anglicans. It is said in America that when the pioneers moved out into the middle west, the Baptists went with them in the covered wagons. A little later when the railroads were laid down came the Methodists and the Roman Catholics. The Episcopalians waited until the highways were built and then came in their motor cars. In England too, our strength has been among the middle classes and not the factory workers. There is a danger of this becoming true in Africa also. This could be a danger for other churches as well. Our clergy for the most part have been well trained in English by foreigners to deal in a western way with problems that arise in the west. We are in danger of turning Christianity into an expatriate, middle class religion that does not speak to the needs of workers who are and always will be the core of the community.

The third problem is that of finance. No church is permanently dependant on foreign funds can have much claim to be the church of Africa. The figures are hard to come by. About K3,000,000 reaches the Anglican church each year from other continents. Catholic researchers have suggested a figure twenty times as large for their own church. The total for all churches cannot be less than a hundred mission kwacha, and t hat is a lot of money. I quote again from the All African Conference of Churches:

“We saw that before we can achieve for Africa what is expected of us, before we can become a society which lives wholly and exclusively for others, we must call upon the churches in Africa to allow Christ to set them free –

• from selfishness in sharing with one another our resources of manpower, skills, time and finance, so that we may re-discover our missionary role;
• from easy dependence upon foreign money and men, without making the effort to educate ourselves for self-reliance”.

This is not an easy question because different demands in this confusing age contradict one another. In one breath we say that we wish the African clergy of the future to be better educated than those of the past, that we want men capable of speaking to the students and graduates of this University. At the same time we want a church supported by the people of the land. These two things conflict; you cannot have both. A rural community practising a subsistence economy cannot support a graduate priest. This is a dilemma which faces every church.

Ministry

The remainder of this paper relates to these problems of the ministry. The first one is the sheer rate of growth in Africa. In many places this is around 10% per annum. In the Anglican Communion in Africa the ratio of clergy to church members varies from one per thousand in Malawi, to one per five thousand in Uganda. No one man can possibly know 5,000 people intimately. The relationship ceases to be a human one of person to person and the church becomes an organisation. The minister, instead of being a shepherd, friend and father, becomes the manager, the organiser, the man who writes your name down in a book of excommunicates you without really knowing you or why you did what you did.

The second problem is one of age. Rural communities all over the world respect age and Africa is no different. The result is that most clergy in most churches are men of over 50, and men in their 50s and 60s do not find it easy to adapt to an age where we have rushed through a century of development in a single decade. Students, when they go back to their villages, cannot find anyone who understands their problems. They are given no answers to the conflicts they find between the simplistic view of the bible that they were given by their village pastor and what the physics teacher says to them in school.

Then there is the special problem in the Catholic church of how to provide an indigenous ministry. Of 13,000 Catholic priests in independent Africa, 9,500 are expatriates. A sudden swing in politics could have expatriates banned within a year or two in half a dozen countries. Indeed in Zaire and Uganda the writing is already on the wall. Nobody knows better than the leaders of the Catholic church how precarious the situation is.

Next comes the problem of the level at which the ministry is to be trained. We can distinguish three different answers to this problem. The Catholic church has from the beginning taken the line that the African ministry should be trained at the same level as the expatriate missionaries. They have had a course beginning at ‘O’ levels, going on for 6 or 7 years. This has made it easy t find well-trained candidates for positions of leadership. It has also brought about the problem just mentioned, that three-quarters of he clergy of Africa are not Africans. Presbyterians and Anglicans have taken a mid-position. Hitherto we have trained men as JC level, more recently stepping up admission ‘O’ level. Other churches, like the Churches of Christ, have said that the acknowledged leader of the community, even though he does not have a great deal of schooling, is the right man to be its ordained minister. Each of these policies produces complications; one leads to having too few men trained from positions of leadership, the other leads to not having enough clergy to go round. My solution is that we need a multiform ministry: we need to be training men at all these levels. It makes a complicated picture; there is the danger of disrupting the unity of the priesthood, but I cannot see any other way.

Tent making

I end by asking that we give serious thought to the ‘tent making’ ministry. You will remember that Paul was a tent-maker, and that his method of supporting himself in days when there were no missionary societies was to set up on the local market as a tent-maker and to talk to his customers about the (gospel). The tent-making ministry good news consists therefore of men who continue to earn their living in their secular employment, while functioning as fully ordained ministers. The concept, first introduced in Latin America, has spread to all continents. One of the first worker-priests in the Anglican Bishop in Lourenco Marques, formerly a lawyer in Portugal imprisoned by the Salazar regime. Most churches in Africa have until now rejected the idea. I think we have to consider again whether it meets our needs or not.

Going with it is a method of theological education known to the trade as TEE – Theological Education Extension – which covers various methods of training men while they continue in their secular employment.

There are obvious advantages. It is economical in the use of skilled trainers. A student is ale to support his family while he is in training. His family learns with him. What he learns is learned in the context of life and not in the artificial community of a college.

His Saturday’s reading can be incorporated into his sermon on Sunday and debated on the factory floor or at the village market on Monday. Most of all it destroys one of the greatest curses of Christianity – the artificial barrier between a clergical clergy and the layman, a barrier which grew up with the development of the institutional church. It was not there in the church of the New Testament – you have to think to remember whether Paul or Peter wee priests or laymen. Today it is all too obvious, as the two speak different languages.

There are deeper levels also. The tent-making ministry is something that makes an instinctive appeal to the African sense of history, because this is the way the church began. It makes it possible to accept mature students for the ministry. These are men who have an established position in life and who have already given ten or twenty years’ voluntary service to the church as laymen. It reflects the African sense of the unity of life, and erases the false split between sacred and secular, between soul and body that has confused Christianity since the days of the Manichees and St Augustine. It is relevant. It helps a community to grow and to be responsible for throwing up its own leaders. It encourages the kind of ministry that is truly ministering-service, and not ruling. Dr von Sicard, whose thoughts I am borrowing here, mentions that an Africa leader unconsciously practises many oft he insights of group dynamics, listening before he speaks, making sure that everybody has their say, in contrast to our impatient European way of trying to impose our view of the truth on others.

In Malawi this kind of ministry was developed a good many years ago by the Churches of Christ. Fundamental to their life is the New Testament practice of weekly Eucharist and this is impossible unless there is an ordained minister in each congregation. The Anglican dioceses have already some twenty men in the voluntary ministry, coming from many different walks of life. Among those already ordained or in training are a laboratory technician, a factory foreman, a forester, a judge, a market master, a policeman, the manager of a tea estate, the heads of a primary school, a secondary school, a teacher training college and an agricultural institute and , I am glad to say, a lecturer at this University.

The heart of the matter

I have come to the end of what I have to say without really touching the heart of the matter. We have looked briefly as some of the developments necessary if the church is to be relevant to the needs of Africa in the coming twenty years. We have barely touched on the winds of change blowing through the world church of which the two most significant are the re-discovery of he Holy Spirit and of the importance of the small cell as his means of leading us forward.

In the past there has been a false division between the churches that have stressed the conversion of the individual, and those that have emphasised the corporate side, the church as the family of God. The truth I believe, lies half way between. The Spirit does speak to individuals, and he does speak to thousands, but his voice is heard most clearly and his influence is most compelling where two or three meet together. It is the small cells of committed Christians, in factories and villages, homes and colleges, and their willingness to be led by the Spirit that will determine whether Christianity will be the creative force in the Africa of the future that it has been in the past half century.