Freedom's Distant Shores: American Protestants and Post-Colonial Alliances with Africa

Chapter 10 The Changing Nature of Christianity and the Challenge of U.S.-Africa Mission Partnerships

191 The Changing Nature of Christianity and the Challenge of U.S.-Africa Mission Partnerships Introduction The growth in mission, postmodernity, ethnic, and postcolonial studies within academia, as well as numerous ecclesiastical dialogues and exchanges related to contemporary existential and mission praxis, afford opportunities for churches in Africa and the United States to articulate the need for more mutually satisfying relations on every level of involvement: denominational connections, ecumenical movements, and religious studies activities sponsored by universities and by mission organizations and agencies. In this essay a vast array of themes, debates, and illustrations are referenced to represent the diversity of denominational and ecumenical partnerships that serve as evidence of the challenges facing Africa and U.S. churches in mission. Included are the following: the All Africa Council of Churches, Seventh Assembly in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (1977); the Africa and U.S. Christian contingency that sponsored and supported the meeting of the Parliament of World Religions, Cape Town, South Africa (1999); the final report on the Dialogue Between the African Independent or Instituted Churches and the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (2003); the approach of the AME Church (U.S.) toward key leadership issues facing the AME Church in Africa Marsha Snulligan Haney Chapter 10 192 The Changing Nature of Christianity (2004); the meeting of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, Accra, Ghana (2004); and, the provocative keynote address of African leaders to the U.S. Committee of World Council of Churches (Atlanta, October 2004). The relationship that has existed between African and U.S. churches has been dynamic, though one not always appreciated from one generation to another of ecclesiastical or public sector leaders. Because of the western mindset and tendency to sharply separate secular and religious life, the dynamic character of global mission relations has often been illusive, particularly the political implications of religious partnerships. With the phenomenal late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, U.S. churches—sometimes freely, sometimes grudgingly—have found themselves redefining, reevaluating, reassessing, and restructuring their relationship to churches, beliefs and traditions within these contexts, including, and perhaps especially, in African contexts. Christian unity between African and U.S. churches—in the midst of evolving sensibilities and sensitivities globally about acceptable and unacceptable ways to approach issues of culture, ethnicity, gender, economics, linguistics, and sociological and political dynamics; and against the backdrop of varying mission histories—remains illusive, not in theory, but in practice.1 Without a doubt, African and U.S. church relations stand at a critical historical juncture. As it has been observed: Africa clearly has a distinctive and growing place in Christian history, yet many parts of the African Christian story are too little known, not least within Africa itself. Furthermore, in Western Christian consciousness, the continent continues to be regarded as a forbidding and dangerous mass, known chiefly for its capacity to generate the stuff of which newspaper profits are assured: rampant corruption, political dysfunction, recurring family and genocidal civil wars. A parallel and more significant reality, which features a richly diverse and thriving range of Christian congregations whose churches serve as centers of human normalcy, integrity, and hope, escapes notice.2 Just as the churches clearly need to assume the posture of mutual respect and partnership, the question must be raised as to whether the U.S. church is capable of responding to this challenge. As the late missiologist David Bosch has mused, “Is it not because it [Western Christianity] has not looked at these and related issues from a missiological viewpoint that the Western church still is . . . a nineteenth-century middle-class church struggling to come to terms with the twentieth century on the eve of the twenty-first?”3 The twentieth-century belief that Protestant missions was an integral part of the cultural expansion of Euro-American peoples continues to have a negative impact on both U.S. and African churches, even to the point that “empire” and “empire religion” have become newly designated terms used to describe how some African and other global churches perceive and experience U.S. Protestant churches in mission partnership. Marsha Snulligan Haney 193 As attention turns to the matter of the need for mutual respect and equality in global mission relationships, the inextricability of missiological belief and practice is emphasized in the following discussion, with the first emphasis on mission as history. Second, because practices...