Emerging Africa

Reclaiming the Mission: Why is the Emergent/Missional Church So White?:The lack of diversity in the Missional Church (and for that matter the Emerging Church) is a main topic at this year’s Missional Learning Commons coming up here the first week of January in Ft. Wayne.

That blog post is well worth reading, and I think it could lead to some discussion here, if we ask how true it is of Southern Africa, and what it means in this part of the world.

So here's my comment on that post - what do others think?

Indeed most sociologists (see Peter Berger’s article here) would agree that the great majority of the spreading church in Asia, Latin America and Africa is driven by some version of prosperity gospel and charismatic experiential Christianity. It is a version of Christianity that I would argue is indisputably tied to the Western values of individualism, consumerism and materialism.

That certainly puts a finger on one part of the problem. I don’t know about evangelicalism, and I haven’t read Rah’s book, but one of the things that has struck me is that the overwhelming majority of those here in South Africa who are interested in the emerging/missional church movement are white. And for the most part they seem dissatisfied with two things — some are looking for an alternative to the neopentecostal/megachurch/prosperity gospel that has dominated the white Protestant scene for the last 20 years or so. Others are in the Dutch Reformed Churches, which, having backed the wrong horse in the apartheid era, are looking for a new direction and some are hoping to find it in the emerging/missional church movement (and some of them also seem to have had a brief flirtation with the megachurch scene as well).

Blacks seem to be largely absent from the emerging/missional church scene, but there is great concern among people in the traditional Zionist/Apostolic African Independent Churches (analogous to your native American ones?) about the growth of the Neopentecostal/megachurch/prosperity movement, some of it home grown (Frederick Modise and Grace Bible Church in Soweto) and some imported from West Africa (Winners Chapel) and South America (The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God).

Missiologists like to talk about “contextualisation”, but have often failed to note that these movements have brilliantly contextualised the gospel to fit the aspirations of yuppies and wannabe yuppies. Since the Reagan-Thatcher years the gospel of neoliberalism has been sold in the West, and these churches are now working to spread it throughout the world. Marxist historians claim that the main aim of 19th century missionaries from the West was to spread the gospel of capitalism; I think that they would have an even better case for saying that 21st century missionaries from West Africa to Southern Africa are doing the same thing.

Comments?