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The Lutheran World Federation
Lutheran World Information |
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| 14.10.2004 |
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| Does Healing in African Spirituality Challenge Lutheran Churches in Africa? |
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LWF Seminar Explores Interfaith Dialogue Objectives for African Traditional Practitioners and Christians
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa/GENEVA, 14 October 2004 (LWI) - Representatives from African Traditional Religion (ATR) and Lutheran churches in Africa entered into dialogue at a Lutheran World Federation (LWF) study seminar focusing on “Ancestors and Healing in African Spirituality: Challenge to the Lutheran Churches in Africa.”
In his opening address to participants in the September 27-30 gathering in Johannesburg, South Africa, Rev. Dr Ingo Wulfhorst, study secretary for the Church and People of Other Faiths in the LWF Department for Theology and Studies (DTS), explained the seminar’s objectives. The different perspectives at the meeting were aimed at promoting study, research, reflection and interfaith dialogue on ancestors and healing in the ATR, and probe the implications for interfaith dialogue, and also for African Lutheran identity today.
The ten study papers sent beforehand to the participants and discussed during the seminar included topics such as the concept of ancestors and healing from the African religious perspective. They also focussed on the early missionary encounter with the ATR, the question of ancestors’ role and relevance in the healing ministry, and the implications for African Lutherans today.
In his paper “The Early Missionary Encounter with African Religion,” Rev. John Kenan, a lecturer at the Bronnum Lutheran Seminary in Nigeria, pointed out that the early missionaries tended to underestimate the magnitude of their task. As such, he said, Christianity in Africa was grafted on to a person as an alien faith and exercised only on the surface, while deeper convictions and reactions remained rooted in the ATR.
Other participants argued that this was still true in some cases today. They felt one of the biggest challenges facing any African Christian, was the fact that almost all of African cultures were defined and regulated by traditional religion. Some of the participants observed that this synchronization approach to religion resulted in an identity crisis.
Concern was voiced that the Christian churches did not officially ask non-Christian ATR practitioners for forgiveness for their condemnation of and attempts to eliminate the traditional religion “as a product of the devil.” Consequently, believers in traditional religion were still suspicious of interfaith dialogue, perceiving it as a new attempt by Western Christians to get data that would enable the church to start a new colonization of Africa.
Following these concerns, the DTS study secretary opened up a discussion on the aims of interfaith dialogue between ATR practitioners and Christians.
Dr Nokuzola Mndende, a diviner and healer (sangoma) who presented herself as non-Christian but not anti-Christian, said one of the biggest errors made was the relegation of ancestors to only a cultural and not religious value. The professor of religion and theology at the University of Fort Hare, South Africa, argued that the ancestors’ influence on the entire social and religious life of the African has not been fully grasped. As a result, she noted, many unanswered questions and misunderstandings have limited the true growth of African Christians. “If a person gets healed,” she asked, “does it really matter who did the healing, the Christian God, a sangoma or the ancestors?”
In her paper, Ms Gomang Seratwa Ntloedibe-Kuswani, teaching at the University of Botswana, focused on the dimension of a healer as a sacred power medium. She considered all healing as divine, and saw a healer as one who plays an important role in society.
In his presentation titled “Christ and the Ancestors in African Christian Theology,” Dr Sylvester B. Kahakwa, lecturing in systematic theology at the Tumaini Makumira-University College, Tanzania, spoke of the need to seek an African christological model that could reflect on the meaning and significance of Jesus in an African cultural context, including the ancestors. “It involves an interpretation and understanding of Christ according to the African frame of reference, without betraying the biblical witness of him,” he said. (651 words)
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