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Church: World

The Missionary Heritage and African Theology

One of the reasons that televangelists and prosperity gospellers are so incredibly popular in sub-Saharan Africa is that they are engaging Africans at their point of need. That being the case, I am not advocating changing ‘the gospel’ to make it pleasing to people (which is what these people do on a regular basis). Rather I would challenge us Westerners to realize that what we have for 500 years prized as ‘the gospel’ is not the gospel, in a biblical sense, that is. It may be an aspect of the New Testament good news, but to make it the entirety of our preaching is to distort the actual gospel preached by Christ and his apostles. Sure, our Reformation forebears were pressed by Medieval Roman Catholic abuses to emphasize aspects of New Testament teaching in polemical response. But the polemical response has become sacrosanct, leading to our own list of unintended abuses. (read the whole article)

I’ve raised similar issues in the past, particularly under the heading of the Gospel and Culture, take a look at this post and the related post links it generates. You might also find my video on contextualisation interesting.

Many thanks to Ben for pointing me to Onesimus online, where you can find much challenging thinking along these lines. This is definitely a blog to follow – but not if you don’t want your world to be rocked!

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