Special Forum • Visiting Scholar 17

The exhibition uniquely tells the African church story thematically within the social realities of each historical period. By including the oldest Christian tradition in Africa, Ethiopian Christianity and its extant literature, including unique manuscripts in Ge’ez, the most ancient literature in Africa, the exhibition provides testimony of many aspects of African Christianity that remain a field of fertile study. Evidence of the progression of African Christianity is shown by the interaction of Africa and the missionary movement from the West, which introduced to Africa Western forms of education and medical work that the African church has continued to develop and grow.

As Kwame Bediako has noted, though, Christianity has become “African religion.”1 It is no longer about Western missionary work, but rather a faith maintained and sustained by the Africans themselves. The methodologies of passing on the faith have also been indigenous as different groups seek to serve God the best way they understand God’s mission through Jesus Christ. Western Christianity was denominational, and African Christianity has not only maintained the inheritated denominations but also created new ones with different names.

The exhibition takes note of African Instituted Churches and shows the different forms of a movement towards a church that enriches the body of the church in Africa through diverse realities of languages, liturgies, and activities. One of the key features of African Christianity was the creation of the African Instituted Churches (AIC), movements out of Protestant and Roman Catholic mission churches established in different parts of Africa.2 Known by different names, most of these were founded by men and women who interpreted the Christian faith using African lenses. Some of the reasons for the founding of AICs were the racism in mainline (mission) churches, the negative responses to African culture and worldview, and the missionary paternalism at the time. The characteristics of the African Instituted Churches include a more holistic approach to faith and life, their use and application of the Bible, especially the Old Testament with references to the people of Israel, purity laws, etc., and their identification with the Early Church. Another feature is their positive outlook towards African culture and an African worldview, including the emphasis on community and the acknowledgement of the spiritual world. The exhibition highlights the work of the earliest of the AICs, the Kimbanguist Church. The Kimbanguist Church exhibits the ways of being church in a particular context but also how a church participates in the world church. Students of indigenization of the faith in Africa would always benefit from the ways in which the Kimbanguist Church engaged with the societal issues of its time and how it has developed to be one of the member churches of the World Council of Churches. The Kimbanguist Church is an example of what it meant to be church and what it still means to be church today.

The Kimbanguist Church serves as a representative of the African Instituted Churches across the continent, as they tried to integrate African spirituality and realities of their period with the mission-founded churches of the time. African Instituted Churches responded to the needs and questions of the converts of the time in a creative and imaginative manner. The issues with which the African Instituted Churches dealt were of spirit and matter, and they responded to them in whole without partitioning the body and the spirit, as it appeared to be in the mission-founded churches. As well as responding to the questions of Africans, some of these churches were open to the ecumenical movement both on the continent and in world ecumenical gatherings. The call for ecumenism in Africa was earlier than it was in the world ecumenical movements. In Kenya, for instance, as early as 1905, different mission agencies began questioning the import of European denominationalism for Africa. By 1913, different mission agencies agreed to collaborate, particulary with the training of church leaders. The formation of ecumenical theological institutions was a departure from denominational colleges,

1 See, for example, Kwame Bediako, “The Roots of African Theology,” International Bulletin of Mission Research 13 (1989): 58-62, 64-65.

2 See Afe Adogame and Lizo Jafta, “Zionist, Aladura and Roho: African Instituted Churches,” in African Christianity: An African Story, ed. Ogbu Kalu, vol. 3, Perspectives of Christianity Series 5 (Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2005), 310–13.