Saturday, May 18, 2019

Imported Christianity (Not)

I listened today to an address by a past classmate of mine, Prof. Thomas Schirrmacher, the World Evangelical Alliance's Associate Secretary General for Theological Concerns. When one "comes from the same stable", one really feels one at heart. Anyway, one of the most interesting things he said was that many major Churches in Germany (he listed them) were established centuries ago by African evangelists. Even today, the majority of conversions in Germany are happening through African evangelists. He said that these evangelists can do in a tenth of the time what Germans themselves struggle to do. OBSERVATION: This puts a different slant on a popular narrative in Africa: Christianity is an imported religion -- often imported from Germany.

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