What Missionaries Were Missing

Scott Sunquist (Understanding Christian Mission, 127-8) asks why African Christianity so often developed into independent churches rather than as mission plants from Western churches. He enumerates a number of causes, all of them revealing.

One, unsurprisingly, was the “authoritarianism” of Western missionaries: “There were many well-educated and strong Christian leaders among Africans by the twentieth century, yet missionaries continued to exercise control over Africans at almost every level.” Another, again unsurprisingly, was the Africans’ desire to retain their African traditions: “Many missionary church services looked and sounded like European (or North American) worship services that had been transported to African soil.”

Finally, missionary churches were too influenced by an “Enlightenment (closed-universe) framework” that had little room for belief in spiritual powers and in the spontaneous guidance of the Spirit of God. “Africans were expectant – they lived in a world in which mediums manipulated the spirits and ancestors were present. Thus, African indigenous movements mark a recovery of spiritual power to confront evil.

OK, so mission churches were too modern.

Other causes are more unexpected. Missionary churches, Sunquist says, were too low church, “with only limited or understated practice of ritual.” Independent churches “retained or recovered the central importance of ritual from indigenous, African practices.” Missionary churches were too centered on the New Testament: African churches longed “for a greater emphasis on the Old Testament. Ritual, family, tribal identity, and other themes were very strong in the Old Testament and resonated strongly with most Africans. This was their world, and it was a world where there was no division between secular and sacred.”

Protestant missionaries thought of their opposition to ritualism as a strength, and touted their credentials as “New Testament Churches.” For the Africans, the missionaries were too Evangelical.