Father Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, provincial of the East African Jesuit province, argues that Africa is a continent of hope. When he was here, Jenny Cafiso, director of Canadian Jesuits International, shared one of Orobator’s books with me, Theology Brewed in an African Pot.
I was interested in the book because it
deals with the themes discussed in the Easter Monday episode of The
Agenda with Steve Paikin, “Christianity Goes Global.” That program,
embedded below, looked at how Christianity’s demographic shift from the
global north to the global south could change the faith (according to Pew Forum, in 1910, 82.2 per cent of Christians lived in the global north, but by 2010 that number fell to only 39.2 per cent).
Christianity’s demographic shift to the global south is most obvious in Africa. As journalist and author John Allen, Jr. wrote in The Future Church,
“During the twentieth century, the Catholic population of sub-Saharan
Africa went from 1.9 million to more than 130 million — a staggering
growth rate of 6,708 percent.”
Pew reports that one in four Christians
now live in Africa. Thus, how Africans practice Christianity will affect
how the faith is practiced globally. As professor and author Philip Jenkins argued in The Next Christendom,
Christianity’s character changes over time and place (Christianity as a
sect of Judaism was different than the Christianity of Mediterranean
gentiles in, say, the fourth century C.E.). In theology, this idea is
called inculturation. Orobator describes this with an African proverb,
“a person can see the sun from many different places.”
How does African Christianity differ from Western Christianity? In Theology Brewed in an African Pot,
Orobator picks out many differences, but I think the differing
conceptions of God’s role in everyday life is most interesting. Orobator
writes:
As hinted above, African spirituality is a very practical kind of spirituality: experience is more important than theory. Religion in Africa takes place as a daily and public affair. In some other parts of the world, such as North America, it is a matter of constitutional provision to confine religion to the domestic and private realm. This is hardly the case in Africa, where a very powerful sense of the divine permeates the lives of Africans. African spirituality recognizes the presence of God even in the most basic events and experiences of everyday life. For Africans, God is a God who sees all, is present in all, and acts in all circumstances of life. When we eat in Africa, we believe that we eat with God… As Africans, whatever we do, be it work, travel, or celebrations of marriage, success, human achievement, or even death, we always believe that God is part of it. God is not introduced into this ordinary or extraordinary experience as a stranger. God makes it possible; we encounter God in it.
Can people of European and African
descent reconcile these differing understandings of the appropriate
place of faith in everyday life, but also in the public sphere? It will
be interesting to see as Africans migrate to North America and Europe.
