Mbiti laments that often “African Christians feel terribly foreign within the doors of the churches to which we belong. Lutheran missionaries have made us more Lutheran than the Germans; Roman Catholic missionaries have made us feel and behave more Roman than the Italians; Anglican missionaries have made us more Anglican than the English.”
He cites a personal experience that brought this point home. He attended worship at a Anglican cathedral in a large African city: “For the service, which was very well attended, we used the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and sang out of the hymn book Hymns Ancient and Modern . Yet the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1928 and the eucharistic liturgy modernized even by England’s standards . . . . As an Anglican priest I love the Anglican liturgy but it felt like a betrayal to find a cathedral in the middle of Africa perpetuating an archaic though once meaningful language of liturgy developed 300 years ago and thousands of kilometres away. Even the birds on the trees outside the cathedral were singing their own local tunes.”
“Must we castrate our local spiritual creativity and become museums of the ancient treasures of christendom?” he asks. Mbiti’s answer, of course, is a resounding No.
Peter Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is President of Theopolis Institute. He is the author of numerous books on theology, literature, and culture, including Theopolitan, Defending Constantine, and Baptized Body.
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