The current obsession of theologians and pastors with whatever is new and funky from the West or from US churches, reveal an evident identity crisis. The contextual challenges of these 'foreign' regions are presented as our challenges and so, the answers they've heard from God is gospel to us. Hence our impotence in the face of xehophobia and the humnitarian crisis in the wake of this challenge. Well, this is Africa. This is the real challenges of ministry of being church here in Africa.
And just yesterday I received a message from John Davies, one of the contributors to the Message to the people of South Africa, in which he said:
It showed that South Africa could have a mind of its own in the world of theological discourse, that it was not simply part of a loudspeaker system run by British or American power-base.
At the time the Message to the people of South Africa was being drawn up, I was studying theology in Britain, and had been for two years, and in many ways found the atmosphere stifling, and felt I needed to go and study somewhere else, like South America, or Central Africa, in order to be able to breathe again. I came back to a South Africa in which the "Message" was published, but at places like Rhodes University in Grahamstown people like Basil Moore were still plugging the latest theological trends from the USA (back then it was "God is dead"). So Reggie's comments rang a bell for me. Things havent changed all that much in the last 40 years.
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