Richard Gray was a pioneer in the study of African history. In his last years he worked on a comprehensive study of the papacy and Africa. Originally he assumed that the critical initiatives in the implantation of Christianity in Africa came from within Catholic Europe or its missionaries. He soon discovered, however, that the initiatives came from African Christians: from Ethiopia, from Kongo, from appeals to Rome by African Catholics, and finally from slaves of African origin from the New World who were protesting against the appalling discrepancy between Christian principles and the practice of slave traders and owners. With Gray's final work left unfinished, Lamin Sanneh has assembled these published essays. The result is an enduring contribution to the study of Africa, mission, and World Christianity. Book jacket.
Thomas C. Oden surveys the decisive role of African Christians and theologians in shaping the doctrines and practices of the church of the first five centuries, and makes an impassioned plea for the rediscovery of that heritage. Christians throughout the world will benefit from this reclaiming of an important heritage.
In the continent where Christianity is experiencing its most rapid growth, a great deal of this expansion is taking place in churches founded by Africans for Africans. These churches are often referred to as 'independent' or 'indigenous' churches, to distinguish them from the 'historic' or 'mission-founded' churches planted during the colonial period by evangelists from Europe and North America. Diverse as they are, the attractiveness of these African Initiatives in Christianity (AICs) stems from the serious attempt they make to express and live out their faith in genuinely African cultural forms and styles. In this new book, two African theologians and church leaders -- one from an historic church, one from an AIC -- offer an insightful introduction into this phenomenon. While their main focus is on what the growth of African Initiatives in Christianity implies for the future of the ecumenical movement in Africa and around the world, they also examine some key teachings of the AICs and trace their roots in African church history since the first century.
The Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa offers a multi-disciplinary analysis of the Christian tradition across the African continent and throughout a long historical span. The volume offers historical and thematic essays tracing the introduction of Christianity in Africa, as well as its growth, developments, and effects, including the lived experience of African Christians. Individual chapters address the themes of Christianity and gender, the development of African-initiated churches, the growth of Pentecostalism, and the influence of Christianity on issues of sexuality, music, and public health. This comprehensive volume will serve as a valuable overview and reference work for students and researchers worldwide.
The active agents in the multiethnic, multicultural East African Revival are African leaders who forge a new, distinctly African Christian spirituality that precipitates the moral and spiritual transformation of countless individuals throughout the region.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Christianity has taken shape and established roots in all areas of African reality. It has come to stay. Therefore, we welcome Christianity afresh in Africa, where it has arrived to continue the ancient and vibrant Christianity in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. It is appropriate that the Anthology of African Christianity presents, in valuable detail, this new reality that describes its African landscape in totality.
This volume brings together seven empirically grounded contributions by African social scientists of different disciplinary backgrounds. The authors explore the social impact of religious innovation and competition in present day Africa. They represent a selection from an interdisciplinary initiative that made 23 research grants for theologians and social scientists to study Christianity and social change in contemporary Africa. These contributions focus on a variety of dynamics in contemporary African religion (mostly Christianity), including gender, health and healing, social media, entrepreneurship, and inter-religious borrowing and accommodation. The volume seeks to enhance understanding of religions vital presence and power in contemporary Africa. It reveals problems as well as possibilities, notably some ethical concerns and psychological maladies that arise in some of these new movements, notably neo-Pentecostal and militant fundamentalist groups. Yet the contributions do not fixate on African problems and victimization. Instead, they explore sources of African creativity, resiliency and agency. The book calls on scholars of religion and religiosity in Africa to invest new conceptual and methodological energy in understanding what it means to be actively religious in Africa today.