CHAPTER25AFreshLookatEvangelisminAfricaJ.N.K..docx

CHAPTER 25
A Fresh Lookat Evangelism in Africa
J. N. K. Mugambi
Introduction
My intention in this essay is to review the
relationship between gospel and cultures in the
process of evangelization in contemporary Africa,
discerning the achievements and the
shortcomings of the missionary enterprise in this
process, and anticipating the future of the
Christian faith in Africa within a challenging
context characterized by rapidsocial change.1
The essay suggests that in general, the modern
missionary enterprise, despite great
achievements in translation of the Bible and
liturgical literature into African languages, has
been insensitive to the cultural integrity of
African peoples, and that this attitude of
insensitivity should change to one of appreciation
and sensitivity if African Christians are to
regain their dignity and integrity within the
Church universal, and within the family of
nations.2 The bibliographical index of the
International Review of Mission can serve as
one
indicator of missionary attitudes toward the African
cultural and religious heritage: thereis
no index for African religion, African culture, or

African religious heritage. The predominant
attitude has been that African peoples have no culture
or religion worth indexing — except as
primal worldviews which could as well apply
to the peoples of othercultures.3
The invasion of Africa’s living rooms and villages
by the mass media from the affluent
nations of Europe and North America makes it
difficult for the people of Africa, both young
and old, to affirm their cultural integrity. Newspapers,
radio, television, and Internet — these
media are, generally speaking, driven by one theme
alone: profit. In these media, culture is
useful only if it promotes consumerism.
Advertisements are the driving force of
the media,
no matter how committed the owners might
be to educate, inform, and entertain their
respective audiences. The days when culture was
the manifestation of a people’s integrity are
gone. Today, culture is what the transnational
corporations say it is: buying and selling
goods
and services in the name of progress and
civilization. Christian evangelism is caught up
in
this web of consumerism. Evangelists find it
difficult to avoid the temptation to sell
the gospel
the way business enterprises do — through
aggressive marketing. If the gospel is a
commodity for sale — like cars, or colortelevision,
or the Internet — what is the role of the
Holy Spirit?

Church membership is rapidly growing in those
countries and regions (especially in
Africa) which are becoming more and more
pauperized, as affluence becomes chronic in
Europe and North America. Through tourism, African
culture has become a commodity for
curiotradeand exhibition, alongside wild flora and fauna.
Evangelism in Africa has become a
Chilcote, P. W., & Warner, L. C. (Eds.). (2008). The study of
evangelism : Exploring a missional practice of the church. Wm.
B. Eerdmans Publishing Co..
Created from amridge on 2022-11-03 02:16:11.
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form of Christian tourism, in which itinerant
preachers come for seasonal crusades,
combining their preaching with tourism and sunbathing.
Missionary Christianity has yet to
present African culture as the way of life of a

people created in the image of God. In
Catholic
circles, inculturation has became a dominant theme
in African missiology, just as liberation
has been the dominant theme in Latin America.
African expressions of Christianity have yet
to penetrate the core of Christian worship in Europe
and North America. To be theologically
consistent, inculturation has to be reciprocal
within the global Christian community. If
inculturation is another word for cultural liberation,
then evangelization in Africa must be
culturally liberating in order to be consistent
with the gospel. The fact that “inculturation”
became one of the themes of the 1994 African
Synod at the Vatican indicates that cultural
insensitivity in Christian missiology continues to
be a thorny challenge.4 How can we, as
Christians, evangelize the people of other
cultures without denigrating their cultural and
religious integrity? Jesus proclaims that he has come
to fulfill, not to destroy. St. Paul follows
this principle in his missionary work, and fulfills
Greco-Roman culture by showing the
relevance of the Christian faith for the Romans,
Corinthians, Galatians, Thessalonians,
Ephesians, Colossians, and so on.5
Cultural Insensitivity and the Modern Missionary
Enterprise
Cultural depreciation and insensitivity in the modern
missionary enterprise has arisen from
an erroneous theology of mission, which
presupposes that the acceptance of Christianity
necessarily demands total rejection of the

African cultural and religious heritage and
adoption of the culture of the missionary without
question or criticism. The consequence of
this missiological error has been a superficial
acceptance of Christianity, which is
displayed in
formal, ecclesial settings, and suspended in the normal,
daily life of the majority of African
Christians. For this type of Christianity, J. V.
Taylor used the phrase “classroom
religion.”
Reflecting on Christianity in Uganda in 1963,
Taylor wrote:
For forty years and more the advance of the
Christian Church in tropical Africa has
depended more upon her virtual
monopoly on Western education than upon any otherfactor.
Today secular governments are taking that
monopoly from
her and it is a bitter irony that the factor
which seemed to be Christianity’s greatest
strength in Africa threatens to prove
its heaviest liability. For to a greatextent it
has become a classroom religion.6
Taylor’s observation is as relevant today as it
was half a century ago, Leopold Sedar
Senghor in Senegal,7 and Okot p’Bitek8 in
Uganda, poetically commented on the
superficiality of African Christianity, highlighting
the popular impression which the modern
missionary enterprise created, that Christianity is a
Euro-American religion which Africans
can adopt only after they have become “civilized.”
The complaint against the superimposition

of Christianity over the African cultural and
religious heritage has been partly the result of
the close association of “evangelization” with
“Europeanization,” to the point where both
terms have become interchangeable. Taylor
continues:
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It is bad enough that religious pictures, films,
and film-strips should have almost universally
shown a white Christ, child
of a white mother, master of white
disciples; that he should be worshipped almost
exclusively with European music set to
translations of European hymns, sung by clergy

and people wearing European dressin buildings of
an archaic European
style; that the form of worship should bear almost
no relation to traditional African ritual
nor the content of the prayers
to contemporary African life; that the organizational
structure of the Church and its method of
reaching decisions should
be modeled ever more closely on Western concepts
rather than deviating from them. But in the
last resort theseare all
merely outward forms that could quite easily
give place to others. They are serious because
they are symptoms. They
persist because they are the school uniform of a
classroom religion reflecting a worldview
that is fundamentally
European.9
The consolidation of “world confessional families,”
which incorporate the “younger
churches” but control them from metropolises in
Europe or North America, has not made
the cultural emancipation of African Christianity
possible. Whereas the European
Reformation emancipated European Protestantism from
the cultural domination of Rome,
such a Reformation has yet to bear fruit in Africa
— even though the signsof it are evident in
the African Instituted Churches.10 Within the
churches of the missionary enterprise,
especially in the Roman Catholic Church, thereis
much talk about “inculturation,” but this
talk is largely one-way.11 In practice,
“inculturation” refers to the appropriation in African
Christianity of established doctrinal and ecclesial

teachings and practices, as transmitted
through the modern North Atlantic missionary
enterprise. It does not reciprocally include
the appropriation of African theological insights
into the core of doctrinal and ecclesial
teachings and practices of Euro-American Christianity.12
The missiological error mentioned
above could be summarized under the
following presuppositions:
a) Unsuitability of African heritage for mediation of
the gospel: The modern missionary
enterprise has presupposed that the African cultural
and religious heritage is an unsuitable
vessel with which to receive the gospel (2
Cor. 4:7). To use another metaphor, the modern
missionary enterprise has presupposed that the African
cultural and religious heritage is an
unsuitablerootstock on which to graft the gospel
(Rom. 11:17-21). Thus the African has been
considered a cultural blank on which
anything could be written. Hence the competition
among many missionary agencies for the African
soul.
b) Cultural superiority of sending churches and
agencies: It has been taken for granted that
the missioner (bearer of the good news) is always
culturally superior and fulfilled, while the
African convert (recipient of the good news) is
always culturally inferior and depraved. This
attitude of cultural superiority is oftenechoed
not only in evangelistic campaigns, but also in
sermons throughout the continent. This pharisaical
attitude alienates many Africans who
would otherwise be willing to join the pilgrimage

to discover more of the joys of Christian
discipleship.
c) Novelty as good news: It is also taken
for granted, especially in missionary circles,
that
the missioner (evangelizer) is always the welcome
bearer of good news, and the role of the
convert is to accept this good news with gratitude
and without criticism. When prospective
converts reject the offer of conversion, it is
rare for the missioners to review their
missionary
methods and try a different approach. Good news is
such that it cannot be concealed. When
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missionaries are expelled, as has happened in some
countries in Africa and Asia, the fault is
always traced to the regimes in power rather
than to the failure of missionaries to
communicate effectively in the countries where
they are guests. Unfortunately, some of the
message that has reached Africa in the name of
Christianity has been culturally so alienating
as to become terribly bad news. When a
young person is taught that everything
his parents
and ancestors have taught him is wrong, how is
he expected to consolidate his personal
identity? In his study of the British missionary
enterprise in Kenya, A. J. Temu writes:
Almost all Protestant missionaries to Kenya viewed
all native customs and traditions with abhorrence.
They saw nothing
good in African dances, music, or in such
important African traditions as circumcision and
initiation ceremonies. They
lumped them together as heathen and immoral
without trying to understand them, what
they were for and what
significance they had in the life of the people to
whom they had come to teach Christianity.
No African, according to the
missionaries, could become Christian before giving
up his old, treasured customs. Invariablythey used
moral reasons for
political ends.13
There is hardly anything that is “Christian”

about the Greek and Latin classics which
have
formed the foundation of European “Christian”
education.14 Should African “Christian”
education be founded on Greco-Roman classics or on
African cultural and religious heritage?
That this question should be raised indicates the
degree of cultural alienation the missionary
enterprise has achieved in its good work of
schooling in Africa.15 It is clear that cultural
alienation was the preferred strategy of the modern
missionary enterprise in Africa. This
strategy suited the colonial regimes, because it
facilitated the convergence between the
projects of “evangelization” and “civilization.”16
d) Hermeneutic authority of the missionary: The
modern missionary enterprise has
presupposed that the teaching of the missionary is
always consistent with biblical teaching. In
general, the modern missionary enterprise has
presupposed a literal interpretation of the
Bible.17 Africans have taken great interest in
the Christian Scriptures. When they read the
Bible for themselves, they find othertexts which
are of greater relevance.The clashof literal
interpretations has led to the rise of thousands of
independent churches — more than
anywhere else in the world.
e) Paternalism and condescension: It has been
taken for granted that the missioner
(evangelizer) has responsibility over his converts, and
that the converts (as recipients) of
missionary generosity and philanthropy have
hardly anything to offer in return. This

presupposition has been exaggerated by the
financial and material power of the sending
agency, which puts the recipients in a
relationship of dependence. Henry Venn, who
was
CMS general secretary in 1840-72, viewed the
objective of mission as the establishment of
self-supporting, self-propagating, and self-governing
churches. As soon as such communities
came into being, the missionary had a duty to
proceed to a new place, leaving the local
community to growunder inspiration of the
Holy Spirit. In 1912, Roland Allen
published his
famous book, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or
Ours, in which he echoed the principles
articulated by Venn.18 Unfortunately, thesenoble
principles do not seemto have permeated
the missionary community.
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These presuppositions are so prevalent that any
cultural critique of the missionary
enterprise is oftenviewed as ingratitude on the
part of those to whom the gospel has
been
preached. However, as Cecil McGarry has observed,
Jesus of Nazareth is the man of all
cultures who immediately captures the attention of
individuals and communities in every
culture and every occupational situation.19 This
immediate appeal oftenbecomes blurred and
confused by the missionary mediation of the
gospel.20 The challenge,then, is to communicate
the gospel in such a way that missionary
interpretations do not hinder the convert’s
response
to it. Translating the Bible and making it
available to the people is the best way to
meet this
challenge.However, the appropriation of the Bible in
particular cultural contexts, without
missionary mediation, oftenyields forms of
Christianity with which missionary agencies
are
uncomfortable, because they do not fit the cultural
mold of the missionary establishment. In
Africa, David Barrett has shown that church
independency is most likely in areaswhere
the
Bible is available in local languages.21

Tropical Africa seems to be the only place
where the Christian missionary enterprise has
destroyed the confidence of people in their
own cultural and religious heritage. In general,
missionary policy with regard to traditional
African religion and culture has been that
African converts should abandon their cultural
and religious heritage in order to become
accepted into the Christian faith. The consequences of
this policy has been cultural
schizophrenia. As John V. Taylor observed, Christianity
has become a Sunday affair, in which
Africans do one thingon Sunday in church, and
for the rest of the weekthey continue with
business as usual. Perhaps this is one way of
explaining the fact that countries which boast
a
majority of membership in Christian denominations
could suffer as much devastation as
Rwanda did in 1994. Christianity proclaims peace
on earthand goodwill among humankind.
In a country that boasts to be 90 percent
Christian, how could its Christian citizens became
so
embroiled in conflict? What went wrong in
the process of evangelizing such countries?
Questions such as thesehave no ready answers, but
they indicate that at the cultural level the
missionary enterprise has not penetrated the African
psyche. Africans have appropriated the
gospel, but verymuch as an appendix to their
cultural and religious identity. This double-
mindedness, which the missionary enterprise
has encouraged, is the root of the crisis in
contemporary African Christianity.22

Conceptual Clarifications
The Christian faith is a missionary faith.
This statement suggests that it is part of the
definition of Christianity, that it is outward bound
to win converts to its fold. Jesus
commands all his followers to go out into all
the world and make disciples of all
humankind.
There is a wide variety of ways of
implementing this command, each of which is
appropriate
in particular circumstances. No method of proclaiming
the Word of God is appropriate for
all situations. Knowledge of the core of the
message, principles of effective communication,
and the cultural context in which the message is
communicated — all these are essential
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requirements for effective evangelization.
Much of evangelical work today involves
persuading — sometimes bribing —
Christians
to leave one denomination and join another. The
missionary or evangelist in such cases
believes that he or she has a fuller
understanding of the gospel than those of other
denominations. Before the tragic war in Rwanda in
1994 there were eight Christian
denominations, of which three were the most
significant. Ninety percent of Rwanda was
Christian. Today thereare more than fifty denominations.
What does “evangelism” mean in
such a country? One of the most scandalous
evangelistic tensions in somecountries, such as
Ethiopia and Russia, arises because missionaries
from the North Atlantic are trying to
“convert” people who are already Christians into
their own denominations. If the aim of
“evangelism” is to convert the world to Christ,
it makes sense to concentrate on
converting
non-Christians. The process of winning Christians
from one denomination to another is
called proselytism, and thereis too much of it
going on today in Africa under the
banner of
evangelism.

Cultural pharisaism is partly responsible for
proselytism. When a person believes that
his
or her culture is superior to all others, and
when this attitude is reinforcedwith the
religious
conviction that this “superior” culture is
ordained by God, the logical outcome of such
bigotry is cultural imperialism. Exposure to other
cultures at an early age may help to
relativize one’s cultural parochialism depending
on the educational process which one
undergoes to internalize that exposure. Young
colonial subjects are exposed to the imperial
culture, but the educational process they undergo
compels them to view their own culture as
inferior and that of their masters as the ideal
to which to aspire. Only through a process
of
liberation do colonial subjects emerge from this
subjugation. This point has been lucidly
elaborated by Paulo Freire.23
Conversely, young imperial citizens are brought up
to believe that their culture is the best,
and that imperial prowess is confirmation of the
dictum that might is right. It matters
very
much whether a person is brought up as a
cultural subject or as a cultural citizen.
This
differentiation is evident in the socialization of St.
Paul,in contrast with that of St. Peterand
the otherapostles. As a Roman citizen St. Paul
could appeal to Caesar, while St. Peter

and the
others, as Roman subjects, could not. Evangelism
is colored very much by these cultural
distinctions. Can evangelism be culturally
liberating? Biblical literalism is often associated
with “evangelical” Christianity. There is a
tendency to avoid the challenges of cultural
diversity by hiding behind biblical literalism.Yet
every Christian must relate the gospel to
his
or her own culture. Conversely, each convert must
approach the gospel from the perspective
of his or her own cultural and religious heritage.
Biblical literalism cannot eradicate the fact
that the Church of Jesus Christ is constituted
by people of diverse cultures, diverse nations,
diverse races, diverse histories. This diversity ought
to be reflected in the life of the church. In
practice, however, one culture tends to be
superimposed upon others, and this
superimposition is dehumanizing.
How can evangelism accommodate cultural diversity?
This question is directly related to
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cross-cultural relations. Christians are at the same time
citizens. They share the attitudes and
prejudices of their fellow citizens. The gospel
should help Christians to rise above cultural
prejudice, but more oftenthan not we, as human beings,
are conformed to the norms of this
world rather than transformed by the gospel.
Challenges
This section outlines some reflections on what
I consider to be urgent challenges for
the
church in tropical Africa on the eve of the
twenty-first century.
a) Prosperityfor a pauperized continent: From an
“evangelical” perspective, thereis much
rejoicing that tropical Africa is increasingly
becoming a “Christian” region. At the same
time,
from an economic perspective the region is
becoming increasingly pauperized almost to
its
total exclusion from participation in world trade

and industry. This region contributes less
than 2 percent of world trade, and less than 1
percent of world industry. Yet the missionary
enterprise is largely responsible for the
“modernization” and “Europeanization” of tropical
Africa. What is the connection between
Africa’s pauperization and Africa’s evangelization?
b) Turning stones into bread: As a region,
tropical Africa has ample fertile land, much
rain, many freshwater lakes, some of the
longest rivers. Yet the region is a net
importer of
basic food. Most of its agricultural activity is
directed toward producing cash crops for the
luxurious consumption of the affluent nations. In
return, the people of tropical Africa are
fed
with relief food from the surpluses stored in
the industrialized countries. Is this situation
irreversible? What does evangelism have to
say about this situation? The sight of
military
cargo planes dropping relief food to
destitute Africans has become familiar on the
world’s
television screens. The impression created by these
pictures is that of a continent that is
abandoned to the mercy of the principalities
and powers of this world. Feeding the hungry
has become the work of non-governmental
agencies and military contingents from the
affluent nations. What is the meaning of
Matthew 25:14-31 in this context?
c) A minority religion in the midst of

cultural and religious pluralism: Numerically,
Christianity is a minority religion in the world.
It may be a significant minority, but it is
a
minority all the same. Although in “evangelical”
circles it is often stated that Africa is
increasingly becoming a “Christian” continent,
the desire to turn Africa into a “Christian”
continent ought to be balanced with the fact that
Africa is culturally and religiously a
pluralisticcontinent. Africans themselves take this fact
for granted.
Throughout Africa, it is common to have in
the same family a Muslim, Catholic,
Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, and
others. Likewise, it is common for one
person to be exposed to a wide range of
religious backgrounds, an exposure which
establishes
a much wider frame of cultural and
religious reference than that of the missionaries
who have
come to Africa. It is important to respect
and appreciate the religious heritage of those
Africans who are not Christians, and of those
African Christians who do not belong to your
denomination or mine. In such a context,
what does evangelism mean? For me, it means
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appreciating that God, in his infinite wisdom, has
left himself with many witnesses,and it is
our responsibility to discern that wisdom from
others before we begin to pour our own
ignorance upon them.
d) Swords into plowshares: The quest for peace
in Africa is the yearning of all people
throughout this continent. In our mission schools
we were taught that Christianity brought
peace in Africa. Yet there have been
many bloody wars arising from
interreligious and
interdenominational conflict. Uganda, Sudan, and Rwanda
are notable examples. How can
evangelism promote harmonious cultural and
religious coexistence, rather than war and
strife?
e) From the cities back to the villages: The

influx of Africa’s population is from rural
areas
toward the towns and cities. Yet theseurban
centers are incapable of providing the facilities
and amenities for a decent livelihood for all
those migrating from their rural homes.
Urbanization in Europe and North America was
sparked by industrialization. In Africa,
urbanization is sparked by the deterioration of
living conditions in the rural areas, but it is
not matched by the industrialization of towns
and cities. The majority of urban populations
in Africa live in shanties and peri-urban
settlements, without basicsanitation, lighting,
and
transport infrastructures. How can evangelism
respond to this situation? The challenge is
how to reverse the influx of population from
urban to rural areas, and retain rural
populations within the rural areas. The church is
well placed to respond to this challenge,but
to do so will require a reorientation of its
ministry.
f) Moral anarchy and political democracy: After
the end of the Cold War, Africa was
bombarded with campaigns for democratization.
Why were the North Atlantic countries
interested in the democratization of Africa only
after the Cold War? Did Africans not need
democracy in the 1960s and 1970s? What
political process was put in place during
the Cold
War? Despite the “democratic” constitutions which
were endorsed in the European capitals
during the process of “decolonization” Africa

was subjected to “autocratization” during the
1960s and 1970s. The Cold War encouraged, and
even staged, coups and counter-coups, as
the superpowers and their allies wrestled for
influence in Africa. The end of the Cold War
has
brought a new situation, during which the
reigning ideology is asserting its hegemony over
the whole continent.
During the late 1980s and early1990s, democracy
was equated with multiparty politics
and parliamentary elections. Compliance with these
two principles did not synchronize
African politics with liberal economics, and
multiparty politics did not yieldpolitical
stability.
Autocratization seems to be condoned again, in
which military rulers, after usurping political
power, convert themselves into politicians and
seek election as civilians. In Africa it appears
that anarchy is confused with democracy. With
military rulers on political thrones the
meaning of democracy in Africa remains an
open question.
What can evangelism mean in these
circumstances? For a while churches have been
involved in “democratization.” Yet the process of
democratization is neither politicallynor
culturally neutral. Africa has yet to experience its
own cultural renaissance, without turning

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for advice to its former colonial masters. Will
evangelism be part of the solution to
Africa’s
quest for cultural identity, or part of the
problem?
g) Economic prosperity and spiritual bankruptcy:
It is often suggested that Africa is
“economically poor” and “spiritually rich,”
whereas the North Atlantic countries are
“spiritually poor” and “economically rich.” From
an evangelical perspective, is this a
situation
to rejoice about? The history of Christian mission
shows that surplus capital is needed to
finance Christian mission. St. Paul was able to spread
the gospel in the Mediterranean region

because he had the financial means to do so.
The modern missionary enterprise from Europe
and North America to otherparts of the world
was possible because of the surplus capital
which the age of empire accumulated. How can
Africa, which now has a significant
Christian
population, participate in the re-evangelization of
post-Christian Europe and North
America? The answer does not lie in donations to
host “reverse missionaries” from Africa.
Rather, the answer is to be found in
revitalizing the African economy, so that surplus
capital
may be accumulated for a new era of Christian
missions from Africa to other parts of
the
world.
h) Industrialization without inventiveness: Two of
the most industrialized African
countries are those which suffered economic and
military sanctions when they were under
institutionalized racism: South Africa and
Zimbabwe. The sanctions forced the people of
thesecountries to rely on their own brains to solve
their own technological problems. When
the moratorium debate erupted in the ecumenical
movement, therewas vehement opposition
to it. How can African churches promote
inventiveness and creativity while instant
formulae,
quick-fix solutions, and fast foods are dumped on
the continent without restriction? How can
unrestricted and uncontrolled liberalization enhance
creativity and inventiveness in Africa,

when the restrictions against African products
are increasingin Europe and North America?
Protectionism is condemned in Africa, but
condoned in the OECD countries. Without
political cloutand economic bargaining power, how
can African countries resist becoming a
dumping ground for garbage and toxicwaste from
the OECD countries?
i) Economics and evangelism: The total
number of European and North American
missionaries operating in Africa runs into hundreds of
thousands. Thus the missionary
enterprise is a significant job market for the
North. If all these missionaries returned
home
immediately, therewould be a significant
increase in unemployment at home. It is
important
to appreciatethis fact so that we do not moralize
evangelism at the expense of Africa’s human
integrity.
j) Missions to post-Christian Europe and North
America: Post-Christian Europe and
North America are as much a mission-field as
pre-Christian Africa. The Church in Africa
should take it as a burden to evangelize
Europe and North America. However, Africa
does
not have the surplus capital needed for a reverse
missionary enterprise. It is ridiculous for
the
post-Christian North to allocate its own surplus
capital for its own re-evangelization. The
challenge lies in enabling Africa to become

economically prosperous, in the hope that its
surplus capital might eventually become
available for the reevangelization of Europe and
North America. In recent years in Africa I
have encountered Christian missionaries from
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South Korea, Japan, and India. This is
possible only because the per capita incomes of
these
countries have recently risen to levels where
surplus capital is available for tourism,
international investment and missionary expansion.
African economies will have to grow
considerably before African churches can send

missionaries abroad at their own expense.
Role of the ElectronicMedia
John Bachman has raised the important question as
to whether, from the perspective of
Christian evangelism, the mass media should be
viewed as “wasteland” or “wonderland.” In
his book Media: Wasteland or Wonderland,
he observes that both views have their
advocates.24 His own view is that mass media need
not be culturally and morally destructive.
He challenges Christians to develop a constructive
attitude toward the mass media, taking
into consideration that the electronic age has penetrated
all aspects of industrial society. In
the African context, manipulation of the electronic
media by owners and sponsors is so
rampant that it is difficult for Africans to discern
truth and value from radio, television, and
film. In a setting where only a small elite
has access to the electronic media, these
channels of
communication have become instruments of
propaganda — for the peddling of particular
ideologies. It is for this reason that the state in
Africa has taken an interest in the
religious
pressand religious broadcasting.
The electronic media are coming to Africa
and are being seen as exciting channels of
communication which amplify, modify, and even
transform the traditional media — oral,
ritual, and symbolic. The excitement evoked
by these electronic media often leads to

emotional responses with dramatic consequences, both
religious and secular. It has become
common for rural congregations to purchase and install
public address systems even in small
sanctuaries which would be much better
off without electronic amplification. Such
installations serve more than a communication
function — they are status symbols, which
indicate that the congregations are entering the
electronic age, even though their utility is
questionable. In urban centers, evangelistic rallies
and campaigns have become
commonplace, more as showbusiness than as missionary
endeavors.
Throughout tropical Africa, evangelistic rallies
are being organized with ever-increasing
frequency in sports fields, theaters, recreation
parks, and on street corners. These rallies
feature American and European missionary-tourists who
visit Africa on holiday for a few
days or weeks before returning to their affluent
countries. They spend only a fraction of their
visit in these evangelistic campaigns, while
the rest of their time is spent watching
wildlife,
collecting African curios, and sunbathing on the
tropical beaches. They preach a message
promising prosperity in the midst of mass poverty,
and oftendemand tithes from the already
pauperized audience whom they hypnotize with
theatrical tactics and musical enticement.
The old image of a foreign missionary
resident at a rural mission station is rapidly
being

replaced by the image of the missionary-tourist
who periodically comes to preach for a
few
afternoons while spending the rest of his
holiday in the game parks and tourist
resorts.
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Between theseperiodic visits, local entertainers are
equipped with public address systems to
preach at street corners, car parks, road
reserves, and other open spaces, advertising
themselves as proclaimers of the good news.
Poverty continues to bite, but thereis no interest
in relating the pauperization of Africa with this

kind of preaching which promises “pie in the
sky when we die, by and by.” Secular
nongovernmental organizations are replacing the
old
missionary societies and their serene mission
stations.
In the past, the foreign missionary would set up
camp in the midst of rural communities,
and expect the rural neighbors to come to him
for “conversion.” If they came, he would
mold
them in his own image. Today, the nongovernmental
organizations perform this function,
and missionary work has been edged from
humanitarian service to spiritual evangelism.
Whether mission is “religious” or “secular,”
Africa as a region continues to recede to
the
abyss of destitution. The secular NGOs, which
are funded to focus on the “alleviation of
poverty” through entrepreneurial projects, leave the
structures of world economy intact, with
the consequence that the poor hardly emerge
from their poverty and the poor countries
become ever poorer, while the affluent countries
become ever more affluent.
The association of evangelism with show-biz
certainly shifts Christian mission from
ecclesiology to the entertainment industry. Here is
an illustration. At Jeevanjee Gardens in
the center of Nairobi, loudspeakers begin blaring
at full volume at about noon every
working
day. They play prerecorded audio cassettes as

the evangelists await the lunch hour. When
people leave their offices for the lunch
break, teams of “evangelical” dancers mount
the
platforms, and the musicians take to their instruments.
The park, which was designed for
quietmeditation and rest, has become a dailymusical
extravaganza, where several so-called
“Christian” bands play simultaneously at full
volume, all preaching the gospel and competing
for audience from the passersby, who seemhelpless in
the midst of the din.
Paul Gifford has documented this phenomenon with a
wide range of research covering
many African countries. In his book, The
Religious Right in Southern Africa, he has
illustrated
the abuse of evangelism for ideological
purposes, particularly in dampening the struggle
against apartheid during the 1980s.25 In 1992
he edited an anthology of research papers
extending this research to the rest of Africa,
published under the title New Dimensions in
African Christianity, under the auspices of the
All Africa Conference of Churches.26 These
works showthat evangelism in contemporary Africa
has tended to hinder Africa’s liberation
rather than support it. If Jesus cameso that
we might have life in abundance, and if he
came
to proclaim liberation to those who are not
free, how can one explain an approach to
evangelism which negates these values? In
every period of church history, the missionary
enterprise has risked becoming engulfed in the

reigning ideology. Evangelism today is not
exempt from this risk.
When Marshall McLuhan declared that radio and
television had reduced literacy to
obsolescence, many of his critics thought he
had exaggerated the negative impact of
electronic media.27 McLuhan had emphasized that the
medium (radio and television) is the
message, in the sense that we understand the
message that is being communicated only
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through the medium that communicates it. In the
context of missiology, we could say, with

McLuhan, that the gospel is understood only
through the medium in which it is conveyed.
The missionary enterprise has packaged the gospel
in a wide variety of brands so that the
recipients understand it onlywithin the framework
of those brands. It is very difficult for
individuals to have the privilege of exposure, to
stand outside the missionary packages and
view the gospel from a wider panorama than the
narrow missionary brands.
The ecumenical movement, in principle,was
established to provide this wide frame of
reference, but it is limited and contradicted by
the self-centeredness of the “world
confessional families,” or Christian World
Communions as they are known today. Pierre
Babin, reflecting on McLuhan’s Theory of
Communication, observes:
1. The message of faith is not first and foremost
information affecting my understanding.
It is the effect produced in me by the whole
complex known as the medium. In the
communication of faith, the message is my
conversion.
2. The message is not first and foremost the
material vehicle of communication. The
message is the whole complex of ministries and
conditions that are required for an effect
to be produced. In the communication of
faith, it is the church, the places of
communication, the face, the gestures, and even
the clothes of the religious educator.
The message is the interrelation of the print media,

the electronic media, the use of live
drama, and the preached word. It is also the
forms of financing, both the marketing and
the administration associated with faith. All this is
part of the medium that is
communicating. All theseconditions lead to faith
development and conversion.
3. The content of the faith message is not
primarily the ideasor the teaching, but rather
the
listeners themselves insofar as they are affected by
the medium. In the communication
of faith, the content is not first and foremost
the teaching of Christ. Rather, it is those
who are being taught, insofar as they are reached
by Christ and his church; again, insofar
as they are affected by the medium.28
The use of mass electronic media for
evangelization in tropical Africa has considerably
changed the content of the evangelistic message.
Radio programs can include only sketchy
information, which leaves the listener to
interpret the programs as he or she chooses.
The live
sermon which is delivered every Sunday by
the parish priest or catechist in a local
church is
very different from the radio or television
sermon. It is different from the theatrically
managed sermon delivered at a cinema theater or
in a soccer stadium. The televangelist is
much more an actor than an orator. The live
preacher in a local church is much
more an

orator than an actor.
In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil
Postman aptlyexplains the crisis to which
the world has been plunged by electronic media.29
He contrasts the works of two critics of
North Atlantic culture, George Orwell and Aldous
Huxley. Orwell wrote 1984 to warn against
the curtailing of freedom by dictatorship, whereas
Huxley wrote Brave New World to warn
against voluntary enslavement under the power of
technology.
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Contrary to common belief even among the

educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy
the same thing. Orwell warns
that we will be overcomeby an externally
imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no
Big Brother is required to
deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and
history. As he saw it, people will come to
love their oppression, to adore
the technologies that undo their capacities to think.30
Electronicmedia have become so pervasive that
ordinary people can hardly escape from
the propaganda perpetrated through radio,
television, newspapers, and the Internet.
Ordinary
people are no longer encouraged to thinkfor
themselves. The owners of the media
determine
what the public should know and what they
should not. Journalists are employed to
implement that policy and if they do not
comply, they are sacked. There are so many
radio
and television channels that the ordinary members of
the public can hardly distinguish truth
from falsehood, facts from propaganda, theology from
ideology. Formal education is shifting
from the classroom and the textbook to the television
and computer screen. The role of the
teacher and the preacher is being reduced to
irrelevance, especially among the rich elite.In a
world where public opinion is shaped by
the electronic media, how can Africans respond to
international opinion which portrays nothing
constructive or positive from their continent?

The fact that Africa is negatively portrayed in
the North Atlantic media is evidence of
the
editorial policy of those media with regard to
this continent. Positive reporting on Africa
would go against the policy to depict Africa
as a continent which does not function.
Any
success stories in Africa are either suppressed
or edited to reflect this policy. North
Atlantic
religious media, in general, is no exception.
The gospel proclaims a message of hope.
Yet the
media, both religious and secular, continues to portray
Africa as a region without a future
and without hope. The media portrays Europe
and North America as the places from where
the salvation of Africa will come, despite the
fact that strangulating bilateral and multilateral
debts are largely responsible for Africa’s
pauperization.
It appears that North Atlantic media rejoice in
“amusing to death” their audiences who
are obsessed by a craving for entertainment.
Postman continues:
What Orwell feared were those who would
ban books. What Huxley feared was that
therewould be no reason to ban a
book, for there would be no one who wanted
to read one. Orwell feared those who would
deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so
much that we would be reduced to

passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the
truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared
the truth would be drowned in a sea of
irrelevance. Orwell feared we
would become a captive of culture. Huxley
feared we would become a trivial culture,
preoccupied with someequivalent
of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the
centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in
Brave New World, the civil
libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the
alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take account
of man’s almost infinite
appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added,
people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave
New World, they are
controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell
feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley
feared that what we love
will ruin us. This book is about the possibility
that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.31
Many European and North American radioand
television channels beam their programs
to African audiences. Some of them have already
established FM stations and contracted to
beam their television news within local channels. There
is no reciprocation of African news in
Europe and North America. The flow of
information should be two-way. If a European or
North American country is allowed a channel in
one African country, there should be a
reciprocal arrangement whereby the African country
also be allowed a channel in Europe and

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North America. If the channel is based in
the capital city, then so should the otherchannel
be
based in the capital city also. This is the only
way to ensure fair coverage and fair reporting.
The church should participate in the negotiations
that make this possible.
Implications
Pierre Babin in his book The New Era in
Religious Communication writes:
… it is only possible to understand a person
of another culture when one begins to

understand oneself. One can begin to
understand God by rousing the dormant aspects of
one’s own personality and by eliminating
the foreign aspects that
keep one closed to othercultures and otherpeoples.
Any deeper encounter with people of other
cultures is a very special
way of knowing God in the twentieth century, a
century of travel and international exchange.32
I remember vividly an insight Professor Kosuke
Koyama shared with me when he visited
Nairobi in the mid-1980s. He expressed
disappointment that, in spite of traveling thousands
of miles from New York to Nairobi, culturally he
had not moved at all. He had expected to
experience somecultural movement, but in the
plane he was served the same meals, hotels
were culturally the same, and the language was
English wherever he went. He raised the
question: How can we talk of cultural diversity in
a world where everyone is expected to
become incorporated into the one North Atlantic
culture? This is a difficult challenge for
Christianity at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. Culture-sensitive evangelism is
possible only if and when those involved in it
are willing and ready to be changed by
those
whom they go to change. This willingness and
readiness grows out of an attitude of
acceptance, appreciation, and respect for the people
of other cultures, to the extent of
becoming empathetically immersed in those cultures.
Empathy has been a rare virtue in the
modern missionary enterprise. Sympathy and

pity, though plentiful, have produced
condescension and ridicule.
Bishop Mvume Dandala of the Methodist Church in
South Africa reminds us:
Spirituality, as I understand it, includes a
satisfying explanation of who we are, where
we come from, where we are going
and how we can get there. In Africa today
we have a very real crisis of spirituality,
and genuine liberation will not come
until Africa is able to define itself and find
joy in itself without seeking the approval of
big brother. One always hurts
inside when non-Africans speak derogatively of
Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s failed ujamaa
experiment; for they are
laughing at Tanzania’s failure to control its
destiny on the basisof its understanding of its
origins and its destiny.
UntilAfrica finds a spirituality with which it
is comfortable, within which it can search
for meaning in life, from
which it will seek to understand creation and its
fellow human beings from beyond Africa,
inculturation will not happen.
If somesuch spiritual base is to be found, it is
essential that African theologians, pastors and
people have the freedom to
explore and search unhindered.
Perhaps the task of those who are now being
called to the leadershipof the church should
be to protect the right of

Africans to do this rather than to preserve the
established conventions of the church and
the Christian faith. For without
this freedom, inculturation of anything religious will be
only another form of playing the same old game,
on the basisof
the same old rules, clothed in the niceties of
accommodation.33
These are useful insights with which to
conclude. Over twenty-five years ago David
Barrett
projected that by the year 2000, Africa would be
the “most Christian continent” in the world.
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Since then, this observation has been echoed
many times.34 It is echoed as a
positive
expectation. At the same time,it is widely
accepted that the modern missionary enterprise in
Africa has been the most significant agent of
social change on this continent. Evangelization
and civilization have been inseparable.
During the past thirty years, the economy of
Africa has deteriorated at the same inverse
proportion as church membership has grown.
The more Christian the continent becomes,
the more pauperized it is increasingly becoming.Is
this a fact for Christians to rejoice about?
If not, it is a challenge which we have to
take seriously. Some of the converts being
won to
Christianity are drawn to the church by
evangelists who preach material prosperity as
the
reward for becoming Christians. At the beginning of
his public ministry, Jesus had to face the
temptation of turning stones into bread to
feed the hungry. This temptation is more real in
Africa today than ever before. “If you are the
son of God, turn thesestones into bread, so
that
thesehungry people may eat.” During the Cold War
therewas much talk in North America
about using food as a political weapon. Will
people “worship” those who feed them in times
of destitution, or will God the Creator sustain
them despite the pauperization they continue
to suffer?

Mostof Africa’s people living beyond ten degrees
north of the Equator are Muslims. This
represents a largepopulation. Africa should be
considered as one whole — a whole
region. It
is important to appreciate that many African
Muslims are not Arabs, and that Islam is as
much at home in Africa as in Arabia
and Indonesia. As the twenty-first century
draws near,
the conflict in Sudan signals the next challenge
that Africa must deal with,after colonialism,
racism, and the Cold War: that is, the challenge of
religious bigotry. If rational discussion of
culture-sensitive evangelism within the ecumenical
movementcan help Africa to resolve this
challenge peacefully, it should be encouraged
and promoted in every church and nation.
May
God help us to remove the huge logs in our own
eyes so that we might be able to see the
tiny
specks in the eyes of our neighbors. This
principle can go a longway towards facilitating
culture-sensitive evangelism.
Equippingfor Culture-Sensitive Evangelism
In view of the foregoing elaboration we can
ask: What should be done to enhance culture-
sensitive evangelism? Among others, the following
are suggestions which can be
implemented at relatively little cost, if thereis the
will to do so:

a) Education for culture-sensitive evangelism: There
is need for Christians to engage in
cross-cultural interaction, especially to correct the
prejudicesperpetrated in the mass media.
To be effective, such education should start in
the seminaries, inculcating the appreciative
attitudes among the younger generation of clergy
in training.
b) Knowledge sharing for culture-sensitive
evangelism: In his recent book Whose Reality
Counts? Robert Chambers has observed that much of
the knowledge that circulates in Europe
and North America about other regions is
obtained and packaged from the North
Atlantic
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perspective.35 Consequently, there is hardly any
cross-cultural exchange of knowledge. It
would be worthwhile sharing African theological
knowledge with the North Atlantic in a
structured way, through facilitation of the flow of
theological literature from Africa to Europe
and North America. As the flow of knowledge
is currently only one-way, a two-way flow
should be developed. The ecumenical movement
could be a useful instrument for this
process.
c) Alternative video and audio media: There
are many success stories in Africa which
never reach the audiences of Europe and
North America. The church could facilitate the
production of documentary audio and video
cassettes which express the experiences of
Africa
and Africans from the perspective of Africans
themselves.
If thesemeasures are carefully coordinated, they may
contribute to a change of attitude in
the North Atlantic toward an appreciation of
Africans and their cultural heritage. As long as
superiority and inferiority complexes clog
relationships between Christians of various
cultures, culture-sensitive evangelism will be
impossible. In Christ all social distinctions,
though, become irrelevant — not because they
are glossed over but because they are taken
seriously. The tragedy of Christian mission is that

converts have been molded not in the
image of Christ but in the image of the
evangelizer. Both the missionary and the
convert
become pilgrims toward the kingdom of God and
the distinction between them vanishes
when the Holy Spirit binds their relationship.
1. This essay builds on the research published in
five of my earlier books: The Biblical Basis
for Evangelization (Nairobi:
Oxford University Press, 1989); The African
Heritage and Contemporary Christianity (Nairobi:
Longman, 1989); African
Christian Theology: An Introduction (Nairobi: Heinemann,
1989); Critiques of Christianity in African
Literature (Nairobi:
East African Educational Publishers, 1992); From
Liberation to Reconstruction: African
Christianity after the Cold War
(Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1995).
It also draws on insights from the
African Christianity Series as
documented in note 22 below.
2. Lamin Sanneh has highlighted the great
achievement of the modern missionary
enterprise in making the Christian
Scriptures available in African languages; see his
Translating the Message (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis, 1989) and Encountering
the West (London: Marshall Pickering,1993). Ironically,
however, this achievement has not yielded
appreciation and respect
of the African cultural and religious heritage in
Europe and North America. Instead, a great

deal of prejudice is still
perpetuated both in the media and in academic
institutions. That African traditional religion is
still described as “animism”
in the media and evangelical literature, shows
that attitudes toward African religion and culture
have not changed much in
the North Atlantic since the nineteenth
century. The prejudice arises largely from the
condescending attitude which
missionaries have portrayed in their ethnographic
monographs of the African peoples.
3. Kwame Bediako, Christianity in Africa: The
Renewal of a Non-Western Religion (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University
Press, 1995), pp. 91-108; J. V. Taylor, The
Primal Vision (London: SCM, 1963); J. B.
Taylor, ed., Primal World Views:
Christian Involvement in Dialogue with Traditional
Thought Forms (Ibadan: Daystar, 1976).
4. On inculturation, see Aylward Shorter, Toward a
Theology of Inculturation (London: Chapman, 1988);
J. M. Waliggo
and others, Inculturation: Its Meaning and Urgency
(Nairobi: St. Paul Publications Africa, 1986).
5. 1 Cor. 9:19-22.
6. Taylor, Primal Vision, p. 12.
7. Leopold Sedar Senghor, cited by Taylor, Primal
Vision, p. 13.
8. Okot p’Bitek, Songof Lowino and Songof Ocol
(Nairobi: East Africa Publishing House, 1981).
9. Taylor, Primal Vision, pp. 13-14.
10. David B. Barrett, Schism and Renewal in

Africa (London: Oxford University Press,
1968). In this book, Barrett viewed
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African Independent Churches as indications of an
African Reformation.
11. Shorter, Theology of Inculturation.
12. Throughout the history of Christian Mission,
very few missionaries could be credited with
following the example of
Paul,to be all things to all people in order
to win as many as possible for the sake of
the gospel (1 Cor. 9:19-22). See Roland
Allen, Missionary Methods: St. Paul’s or Ours,

2nd ed. (London: Lutterworth, 1968). Also,
Vincent Cronin, Wise Man from
the West (London: Rupert Davies, 1955).
13. A. J. Temu, British Protestant Missions
(London: Longman, 1972), p. 155.
14. Lesslie Newbigin,Honest Religion for Secular
Man (London: SCM, 1964), pp. 23-26.
15. I have been directly involved in debate and
dialogue with missionary friends and colleagues
on cultural education
policy and planning in East Africa. Invariably,
cultural insensitivity has been so rampant among
them that on many
occasions we, their hosts, have been made to feel as
strangers in our own cultural home. This policy
dialogue culminated in
revision of the Religious Education Curriculum in
Kenya, whose remarkable innovation was
the introduction of the African
religious heritage as integral part of Christian
teaching — in the same way that the Greco-
Roman classics form the
foundation of Christian theological training in
Europe and North America. To provide a
textbook for the new edition, I
coauthored, with N. Kirima, The African Religious
Heritage (Nairobi: Oxford University Press,
1976).
16. David Livingstone campaigned for the
European support of Christian mission in Africa,
arguing that such support
would promote “Christianity” and “legitimate
commerce.” Legitimacy was, of course,

understood from the perspective of
British mercantilism, not from the interests of
Africans themselves. On this point, see Roland
Oliver, The Missionary Factor
in East Africa, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1970).
17. Norvald Yri, Quest for Authority (Nairobi:
Evangel, 1978).
18. Allen, Missionary Methods.
19. Cecil McGarry, Preface to Inculturation, p. 8.
See also Mugambi, From Liberation to
Reconstruction, pp. 90-106.
20. On the blurring of the gospel by missionary
mediation, see Kosuke Koyama, Water-buffalo
Theology (London: SCM,
1974).
21. Barrett, Schism and Renewal.
22. The crisis in contemporary African Christianity
is documented in the series published by
the Ecumenical Symposium
of Eastern African Theologians, edited by J. N.
K. Mugambi and Carroll Houle: Jesus in
African Christianity (Nairobi: Acton,
1989 and 1998); The Church in African Christianity
(Nairobi: Acton, 1990 and 1998); Moral and
Ethical Issues in African
Christianity (Nairobi: Initiatives, 1992); Mission in
African Christianity (Nairobi: Uzima, 1993);
Pastoral Care in African
Christianity (Nairobi: Acton, 1994); The Bible in
African Christianity (Nairobi: Acton, 1998);
Worship in African Christianity
(Nairobi: Acton, 1998).

23. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
(London: Penguin, 1996).
24. John W. Bachman, Media: Wasteland or
Wonderland (Minneapolis: Augsburg,1984).
25. Paul Gifford, The Religious Right in Southern
Africa (Harare: Baobab, 1988).
26. Paul Gifford, ed., New Dimensions in African
Christianity (Nairobi: AACC, 1992).
27. For a study of McLuhan, see Jonathan
Miller, Marshall McLuhan (London: Collins, 1971);
R. Rosenthal, ed.,
McLuhan Pro and Con (New York: Penguin, 1969).
28. Pierre Babin, The New Era in Religious
Communication (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991),
pp. 6-7.
29. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New
York: Penguin, 1985).
30. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. vii.
31. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, pp. vii-viii.
32. Babin, Religious Communication, p. 16.
33. Bishop Mvume Dandala, Presiding Bishop of
the Methodist Church in South Africa, in
ANITEPAM Newsletter (April
1998): 2.
34. David B. Barrett, ed., World Christian
Encyclopedia (London: Oxford University Press,
1982).
35. Robert Chambers, Whose Reality Counts?
(London: ITDG, 1997).

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Hope dies last
The epic neorealist film Bicycle Thieves by Vittorio De Sica is
a story of many hardships. However, it is first and foremost a
tale of tenacity and optimism, as well as a picture of how far
individuals would go as a result of it. This essay will go more
into the overarching concept of hope and how the protagonist
personifies its ascent and fall. Hope must be generated before it
can be destroyed by anybody or anything. In this instance, the
long-awaited and hard-earned employment creates a feeling of
optimism that is nearly unheard of. After getting through the
first challenges, Ricci even allows himself to daydream about a
brighter future. Since there is still a lot of poverty around the
young family and so many other jobless people, it was difficult

for me to share this attitude. Ricci is determined to hang on to
his newfound feeling of optimism as tightly as he can now that
he has tasted it. Thus, even after his bicycle has been taken, he
manages to maintain an unexpected level of composure and
optimism. However, as the movie progresses, Ricci's irritation
and rage steadily grow as his optimism and mental stamina
eventually wane. As time goes on, Ricci starts to get more and
more desperate, to the point that he even hits his kid, engages in
many simultaneous arguments, and becomes into a robber. I
think he was kept going in part by his extreme despair and the
looming fear of nothingness. There wasn't much more he could
do in his predicament but look for the bicycle. The idea of a
good ending unfortunately persisted thanks to fleeting glimpses
of optimism like Baiocco rounding up some people to search for
the stolen bike or the elderly guy who departed nearly as
quickly as he emerged. It gave Ricci hope that he may
ultimately get his work back and provide his family a better
life. It enabled him to retain the proud guy and fatherly role
model he had been the day before.
During the trips to "The Holy One's" home, the subject of hope
is further presented. The majority of individuals who come
across this woman are prepared to part up a substantial amount
of cash—cash that they often lack—in return for good news,
regardless of the woman's legitimacy or lack thereof. For
instance, the lady irresponsibly creates a fresh feeling of hope
that may be dashed if it is not realized by assuring a mother that
her "son will rise from his bed before the leaves fall". However,
because false hope may sometimes be preferable than having
none at all, individuals don't seem very worried about the
possibility of being taken advantage of. Even Ricci, who at first
calls the woman's line of work "stupid nonsense", ultimately
asks for her assistance in a last-ditch effort to see a miracle that
would enable him to reclaim what he has lost. I believe that the
concept of hope may be represented in cinematic form in a
captivating and distinctive manner. Bicycle Thieves
demonstrates how optimism has turned into a requirement for

survival. There wasn't much else they could cling to other than
hope during these times, what with the post-war Italy crisis, the
extreme poverty, and other (economic) difficulties people were
going through. Numerous storylines in Italian neorealism were
influenced by actual present occurrences. As a result, the loss of
a bicycle by a character on television suggests more than just a
made-up tale of a catastrophe. I could feel the sensation of
helplessness gradually growing inside of me, especially
considering that the on-location filming and favoured use of
long takes. Even if Ricci's condition no longer closely
resembles that of the "ordinary person" in today's society, most
people can nevertheless identify with the general hardships of
the working class and the effects of losing a job. There is one
thing that hasn't changed and never will: hope is a frail idea that
doesn't last on wishful thinking alone.
Last but not least, let's review Bicycle Thieves' conclusion and
consider its meaning in relation to the concept of hope. Ricci
hasn't shed a tear during the whole movie, not even when his
bicycle was stolen or when he lost track of the thief or other
crucial leads. Even when he believed Bruno had drowned, he
remained emotionless. But after two exhausting days replete
with failures, Ricci eventually gave up. It goes without saying
that those tears may just be the product of tiredness, despair, or
perhaps even humiliation. They did, in my opinion, show Ricci's
desperation. Since Ricci and Bruno's future is not conclusively
addressed in the Bicycle Thieves conclusion, it is renowned for
being unresolved. However, I believe there is one resolution to
this complex story: The loss of the false sense of optimism that
had sustained father and son for the previous two days is
symbolized by the closing scene. The emotional climax
impacted me more than I had imagined, even though I knew
there wouldn't be a happy ending. Something about the story's
sad progression and Ricci's frantic yearning for a second
chance, together with the simplicity, is nearly devastating. It
tells the tale of how a person's hopes may be dashed by events
that were not their fault. The movie Bicycle Thieves doesn't

hold back when it comes to portraying reality "how it is."
Work cited
Terkel, Studs.
Hope dies last: Keeping the faith in troubled times. The
New Press, 2004.
CHAPTER 24
Foolishness to the Greeks
Lesslie Newbigin
There is, of course, nothing new in proposing to
discuss the relationship between gospel and
culture. We have Richard Niebuhr’s classic study of
five models of relationship in his book
Christ and Culture. We have had the massive
work of Paul Tillich, who was so much
concerned with what he called, in the title of his
first public lecture, the “theology of culture.”
But this work has mainly been done, as far as I
know, by theologians who had not had the
experience of the cultural frontier, of seeking to
transmit the gospel from one culture to a
radically different one.
On the otherhand, we have had a plethora of
studies by missionaries on the theological
issues raised by cross-cultural missions. As

Western missionaries have shared in the general
weakening of confidence in our modern
Western culture, they have become more aware of
the fact that in their presentation of the gospel
they have often confused culturally
conditioned perceptions with the substance of the
gospel, and thus wrongfully claimed divine
authority for the relatives of one culture.
For someon the liberal wing of Protestantism, such as
W. E. Hocking, Christian missions
were to be almost absorbed into the worldwide
spread of Western culture, and this was quite
explicit. But those on the opposite end of the
spectrum, the conservative evangelicals, were
oftenunaware of the cultural conditioning of their
religion and therefore guilty, as many of
them now recognize, of confusing the gospel
with the values of the American way of life
without realizing what they were doing. In the last
couple of decades therehas been a spateof
missionary writings on the problem of
contextualization. This has been preferred to the
terms
indigenization and adaptation, earlier much used by
Protestants and Catholics respectively.
The weakness of the former was that it tended to
relate the Christian message to the
traditional cultural forms — forms that
belonged to the past and from which young
people
were turning away under the pervasive influence of
“modernization.” The effect was to
identify the gospel with the conservative elements in
society. The weakness of the latter term,
adaptation, was that it implied that what the

missionary brought with him was the pure
gospel, which had to be adapted to the
receptor culture. It tended to obscure the
fact that the
gospel as embodied in the missionary’s preaching
and practice was already an adapted gospel,
shaped by his or her own culture. The value of
the word contextualization is that it suggests
the placing of the gospel in the total context of
a culture at a particular moment, a moment
that is shaped by the past and looks to the
future.
The weakness, however, of this whole mass of
missiological writing is that while it has
sought to explore the problems of contextualization
in all the cultures of humankind from
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China to Peru, it has largely ignored the
culture that is the most widespread, powerful,
and
persuasive among all contemporary cultures —
namely, what I have called the modern
Western culture. Moreover, this neglect is even more
serious because it is this culture that,
more than almost any other, is proving resistant to
the gospel.
Let us begin with some preliminary definitions.
By the word culture we have to
understand the sum total of ways of living
developed by a group of human beings
and handed
on from generation to generation. Central to
culture is language.The language of a people
provides the means by which they express their
way of perceiving things and of coping
with
them. Around that center one would have to
group their visual and musical arts, their
technologies, their law, and their social and political
organization. And one must also include
in culture, and as fundamental to any culture, a
set of beliefs, experiences, and practices that
seek to grasp and express the ultimate nature of
things, that which gives shape and
meaning
to life, that which claims final loyalty. I
am speaking, obviously, about religion.
Religion —

including the Christian religion — is thus part of
culture.
In speaking of “the gospel,” I am, of course,
referring to the announcement that in the
series of events that have their center in
the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus
Christ somethinghas happened that alters the total
human situation and must therefore call
into question every human culture. Now clearly
this announcement is itself culturally
conditioned. It does not come down from
heaven or by the mouth of an angel.
The words
Jesus Christ are the Greek rendering of a
Hebrew name and title, Joshua the Messiah.
They
belong to and are part of the culture of one
part of the world — the eastern
Mediterranean —
at one point in history when Greek was the
most widespread international language in the
lands around the Mediterranean Sea. Neither at
the beginning, nor at any subsequent time,is
thereor can therebe a gospel that is not
embodied in a culturally conditioned form of
words.
The idea that one can or could at any time
separate out by someprocess of distillation a
pure
gospel unadulterated by any cultural accretions is an
illusion. It is, in fact, an abandonment of
the gospel, for the gospel is about the word
made flesh. Every statement of the gospel
in
words is conditioned by the culture of which

those words are a part, and every style of
life
that claims to embody the truth of the gospel
is a culturally conditioned style of life. There
can never be a culture-free gospel. Yet the
gospel, which is from the beginning to the
end
embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into
question all cultures, including the one
in which it was originally embodied.
I begin by looking at what is involved in
the cross-cultural communication of the gospel.
The New Testamentitself, which chroniclesthe
movementof the gospel from its origin in
the
cultural world of Judaism to its articulation in
the language and practice of Greek-speaking
Gentile communities, provides us with the models
from which to begin. As a starting point,
I
find it illuminating to consider Paul’s speech in
the presence of King Agrippa and his court
(Acts 26). The cultural setting is that of the
cosmopolitan Greek-speaking world of the
eastern Roman Empire. Paul is speaking in Greek.
But at the decisive pointof his story he
tells the court that when God spoke to him it
was not in Greek but in Hebrew: “I heard
a
voice speaking to me in the Hebrew language,”
the language of the home and the heart,
the

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mother tongue. Paul is a citizen of that
cosmopolitan Greek-speaking world. But the word
that changed the course of his life was spoken in
Hebrew, the language of his own native
culture.
But — and this is equally important — that word
spoken to his heart, while it accepts
that
language as its vehicle, uses it not to affirm
and approve the life that Saul is living but to
call it
radically into question: “Why do you persecute me?”
It is to show him that his most
passionate and all-conquering conviction is wrong,
that what he thinks is the service of God

in fighting against God, that he is required to
stop in his tracks, turn around, and renounce
the whole direction of his life, to love what he
had hated and to cherish what he had sought
to
destroy.
And — this is my third point— a voice that
makes such a demand can only be the voice
of the sovereign Lord himself. No one but God has
the right and the power to contradict my
devotion to God. “Who are you?” is Paul’s
trembling question. It is the same as
Moses’
question at the burning bush: “What is your
name?” The answer, “I am Jesus,” means
that
from henceforth Saul knows Jesus as simply
and absolutelyLord.
We have here, I suggest, a model of what is
involved in the communication of the gospel
across a cultural frontier. (1) The communication
has to be in the language of the receptor
culture. It has to be such that it accepts, at
least provisionally, the way of understanding
things that is embodied in that language; if it
does not do so, it will simply be an
unmeaning
sound that cannot change anything. (2) However, if
it is truly the communication of the
gospel, it will call radically into question that way of
understanding embodied in the language
it uses. If it is truly revelation, it
will involve contradiction, and call for conversion,
for a

radical metanoia, a U-turn of the mind. (3)
Finally, this radical conversion can never be
the
achievement of any human persuasion, however
eloquent. It can only be the work of God.
True conversion, therefore, which is the proper
end toward which the communication of the
gospel looks, can only be a work of God, a
kind of miracle — not natural, but supernatural.
This pattern is brilliantly exemplified in the
Johannine writings. “John” freely uses the
language and the thought-forms of the religious world
for which he writes. Much of it is
suggestive of the sort of worldview that is
oftenvery imprecisely called “Gnosticism” and
has
obvious affinities with Indian thought. For this reason
the Fourth Gospel was earlysuspected
of Gnostic tendencies and has later been eagerly
welcomed by Hindus as placing Jesus firmly
within a typically Indian worldview. Yet “John”
uses this language and thesethought-forms
in such a way as to confront them with a
fundamental question and indeed a
contradiction.
The logos is no longer an idea in the mind of
the philosopher or the mystic. The logos is
the
man Jesus who went the way from Bethlehem to
Calvary. In my own experience I have found
that Hindus who begin by welcoming the Fourth
Gospel as the one that uses their language
and speaks to their hearts end by being
horrified when they understand what it is
really

saying. And so, logically,we move to the third
point to which “John” gave equal emphasis:
that — as Jesus puts it in the sixth
chapter — “No one can come to me unless
the Father
draws him” (John 6:44). The radical conversion
of the heart, the U-turn of the mind which
the New Testamentcalls metanoia, can never be the
calculable result of correct methods of
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communication. It is somethingmysterious for
which we can only say that our methods of
communication were, at most, among the
occasions for a miracle.

The same threefold pattern is exemplified in
the experience of a missionary who,
nurtured in one culture, seeks to communicate
the gospel among people of another culture
whose world has been shaped by a vision of
the totality of things quitedifferent from that of
the Bible. He must first of all struggle to master
the language. To begin with,he will thinkof
the words he hears simply as the equivalent
of the words he uses in his own tongue
and are
listed in his dictionary as equivalents. But if he
really immerses himself in the talk, the songs
and folktales, and the literature of the people, he
will discover that there are no exact
equivalents. All the words in any language derive
their meaning, their resonance in the minds
of those who use them, from a whole world
of experience and a whole way of
grasping that
experience. So thereare no exact translations.
He has to render the message as best he
can,
drawing as fully as he can upon the tradition of
the people to whom he speaks.
Clearly, he has to find the path between two
dangers. On the one hand, he may simply
fail
to communicate: he uses the words of the
language, but in such a way that he sounds
like a
foreigner; his message is heard as the babblings of
a man who really has nothing to say. Or,
on the other hand, he may so far succeed in

talking the language of his hearers that he is
accepted all too easily as a familiar character
— a moralist calling for greater purity of
conduct or a guru offering a path to the
salvation that all human beings want. His
message is
simply absorbed into the existing worldview and
heard as a call to be more pious or
better
behaved. In the attempt to be “relevant” one
may fall into syncretism, and in the effort to
avoid syncretism one may become irrelevant.
In spite of thesedangers, which so oftenreduce
the effort of the missionary to futility, it
can happen that, in the mysterious providence of
God, a word spoken comes with the kind of
power of the word that was spoken to Saul on
the road to Damascus. Perhaps it is as
sudden
and cataclysmic as that.Or perhaps it is the
last piece that suddenly causes the pattern to
make sense, the last experience of a long
series that tips the scale decisively. However
that
may be, it causes the hearer to stop, turn around,
and go in a new direction, to accept Jesus
as
his Lord, Guide, and Savior.
The Jesus whom he thus accepts will be the
Jesus presented to him by the missionary. It
will be Jesus as the missionary perceives him. It
is only necessary to look at the visual
representation of Jesus in the art of different
people through the past eighteen centuries, or to

read the lives of Jesus written in the past
150 years, to understand that Jesus is always
perceived and can only be perceived through the eyesof
a particular culture. Think of the
Christ of the Byzantine mosaics, a kind of super
Emperor, the Pantocrator; the Christ of the
medieval crucifix, a drooping, defeated victim; the
Christ of liberal Protestantism, an
enlightened, emancipated, successful member of
the bourgeoisie; or the Christ of the
liberation theologians portrayed in the likeness of
Che Guevara. It will inevitably be the
Christ of the missionary to whom, in the
first instance, the new convert turnsand gives
his
allegiance. This may express itself in the
adopting styles of worship, dress, and behavior
copied from the missionary — sometimes to
the embarrassment of the latter.
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But this will be only the first expression of it.
The matter will not stop there, for the new
convert will begin to read the Bible for
himself. As he does so, he will gain a new
standpoint
from which he can look in a new way both at
his own culture and at the message he has
received from the missionary. This will not happen
suddenly. It is only as the fruit of
sustained exposure to the Bible that one begins to
see familiar things in a new light. In
this
light the new convert will both see his own traditional
culture in a new way and also observe
that there are discrepancies between the picture of
Jesus that he (from within his culture)
findsin the New Testamentand the picture that was
communicated by the missionary. From
this point on, there are various possible
developments. The convert, having realized that
much of what he had first accepted from the
missionary was shaped by the latter’s culture
and
not solely by the gospel, may in reaction turn
back to his own culture and seek,in a sort of
hostile reaction to the culture that had invaded
his own under the cloak of the gospel, to
restate the gospel in terms of his traditional
culture. Some of what is called Third
World

theology has primarily this negative orientation, rather
than being primarily directed toward
the communication of the gospel to those
still inhabiting the traditional culture. What
can
also happen is that the missionary, and through
him the church he represents, can become
aware of the element of syncretism in his
own Christianity, of the extent to which
his culture
has been allowed to determine the nature of the
gospel he preaches, instead of being brought
under judgment by that gospel. If this happens,
greatpossibilities for mutual correction open
up. Each side, perceiving Christ through the
spectacle of one culture, can help the otherto
see
how much the vision has been blurred or
distorted. This kind of mutual correction is at
the
very heartof the ecumenical movementwhen it is
true to itself.
But even where this mutual correction does begin to
take place, it is still — in the modern
world — under the shadow of the
overwhelming predominance of modern Western
culture.
All the dialogue is conducted in the languages
of Western Europe, and this in itself
determines its terms. Only those who have
had what is called a modern education
are
equipped are take part in it. That is to say, it is
confined to those who have been more or less
co-opted into the predominant modern Western

culture. Most of the missionary outreach
across cultural boundaries still comes from
churches that are part of this culture. How,
then,
can there be a genuine encounter of the
gospel with this culture, a culture that has itself
sprung from rootsin Western Christendom and with
which the Western churches have lived
in a symbiotic relationship ever since its
first dawning? From whence comes the voice
that
can challenge this culture on its own terms, a
voice that speaks its own language and yet
confronts it with the authentic figure of the
crucified and living Christ so that it is
stopped in
its tracks and turned back from the way of
death? One might think that the vision of
the
mushroom cloud that has haunted the mind of
modern Western people ever since it first
appeared over Hiroshima would be enough. But
we know that fear does not bring
deliverance. From whence can the voice, not of
doom but of deliverance, be spoken so
that
the modern Western world can hear it as the
voice of its Savior and Lord?
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