Mission to Africa - half a story

We are fairly familiar with European mission to Africa, although there are generally two opposing views of the whole enterprise:

the wonderful sacrificial missionaries OR the wicked colonialising missionaries

The reality, as far as one is ever able to apprehend it (!), is almost certainly somewhere in between these two extremes or maybe both extremes in different indiviuals.

  

Jacob Schmidt and Robert Moffat
What most people are NOT familiar with is the early mission to Africa during the first few centuries CE; this was mission from Christians in the Middle East and Asia Minor, often at the express request of rulers and their people who were weary of exhaited and exhaisting religion.  How these ancient churches have survived or failed to survive is a significant learning resource for a church caught in the currents of global secular aggression and resurgent old religions.

 

Ethiopian churches

We are also usually ignorant of the significant role of African Christians in early global-church theology, and even more of the huge battle of the North African church for its own indigenous theology.  The results (positive and negative) of this battle, in particular its affect on the reaction of the church to Muslim colonisation, has useful impications for us (the African church) as we seek to live a truly African theology.

 

ancient North African baptism pools