Mission Innovations from African-Americans
A Legacy of Honorby Paul Grant
What legacy have African-American Missionaries left? There are fairly few African-American missionaries serving abroad today, as a percentage either of American missions at large, or of Missionaries of African decent. But the first missionaries from our soil were Black, and the African-American mission to Africa was strong, even during the harshest period of slavery in the United States. Beyond numbers, the African-Americans rediscovered crucial aspects of the gospel that the American church had neglected, and applied these lessons to the mission field.
Today, missionaries are 'discovering' the inextricable union of justice and the gospel. Missiologists, then, are taking initial steps into a realm where Black initiative and innovation have long laid a foundation unnoticed by White Christians. This article is not a detailed history, nor a solid description of the breadth of Black Missions, but rather an attempt to tell a part of Church history typically ignored by Black and White alike.
Ancient Roots
Any discussion of African-American Christianity must start with Acts chapter 2. African Jews were in the crowd that heard Peter's sermon, and brought the message of Jesus to North Africa.
In Acts chapter 8, we find an Ethiopian official who decided to follow Jesus as part of his Biblical research. He brought the gospel into the heartland of Africa. He was returning to the wealthy imperial capital of Meroe, where tradition holds he passed on his faith1. In the fourth century, a man named Frumentius converted many while serving as a slave in the court of the king of Ethiopia. Upon his manumission, he went to Egypt to be appointed a priest, and returned to Ethiopia, where came to be known as Abba Salama, or Father of Peace2. By the sixth century, the Black Christian world was as large as any branch of the faith, and the gospel was preached southward into central Africa.3
In early centuries, the Christian faith was dominated by Africans, including the founders of the "Western" church, St. Augustine, Tertullian and Origen. With the dawn of Islam and the Arab occupation of heavily-Christian Egypt, the church was forced to weather intense waves of persecution that continue to this day. Yet the African Christians did not waver. Partly, their survival is thanks to the intervention of powerful black Christian emperors in Nubia and Ethiopia. In one case, the Nubian king sent an army of 100,000 men downriver to persuade Muslim Egyptian rulers to lay off the persecutions4. In another episode,
Between 1322 and 1327 the Byzantine Emperor and Pope John XXII sent deputations to the Sultan of Egypt to plead the case of the Christians in that country. An appeal of the same character was also dispatched to Egypt by the Ethiopian king Amda Tseyon, warning the sultan that unless the repressive measures being imposed on the Egyptian Christians were revoked, he would institute a similar program of proscriptions against the Muslims in Ethiopia. In addition, the Ethiopian king threatened to divert the course of the Nile, which would have had the effect of transforming much of Egypt into a desert5.
So what is the point? These are stories of the grandeur of African kingdoms, to be sure, but more significantly, we must always remember that Christianity has far more ancient roots in Africa than in Western Europe, and more ancient roots in Africa than Islam. There are millions of believers in Africa today, whose faith is the inheritance not of white missionaries, but of indigenous black missions. Additionally, there are millions of Christians in Egypt today, thanks to the efforts of Black Christians who believed the gospel call to intercede for justice meant real action in the real world.
The slaving period
In one of the darkest chapters of human history, Europeans applied their technology and marketing skills to the ancient trade of human flesh. Organization made possible by innovations in accounting and economics drove a new paradigm: capitalism, and the pursuit of perpetually increased economic growth and efficiency. In the process, millions of Africans were brought to these shores, to build this country. This is certainly not the time or place for an exploration of slave religion, or a history of the black church. There are however, important developments in the Black Christianity of the slaving period that shaped the future of the church's mission.
When they were first delivered to these shores, almost none of the slaves were Christians. White American believers saw a large mass of people who did not know the name of Jesus and felt called to share the good news. In 1701 the England-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (the SPG) inaugurated a mission to the African slaves.6 "Compassionate" preachers and missionaries set out to convert the slaves. They set up churches in rural slaving districts, and had circuit-preaching routes to preach and perform baptisms. As black leaders emerged, some SPG missionaries secured their freedom from the slaveholder, so the young leader could join a mission team. More frequently however, the black pastor would assume leadership of the fledgling church in whatever spare time he could muster, while remaining in captivity.
Usually evangelism took place under the scrutiny of the slaveholder, whose primary concern was the financial state of his plantation. He wanted quality slaves, which meant physically healthy, spiritually docile, morally suitable, and mentally broken. Of course, this is a set of contradictory demands, especially when compared with the Biblical vision of the dignity of humans. Since the slaveholder had the power to shut down any Christian gathering that did not please him, he took on the position of censor, supervising and editing the message that was being preached.
The lion of Judah had to be tamed, lest the slaves got any ideas of liberty. Jesus became an esoteric spiritual being with no claim over the affairs of the world, but who offered salvation on the other side. He made no demands on slaveholders, and offered no temporal hope for those in physical bondage. The slaveholders resisted letting the missionaries preach the gospel uncensored, because they knew the slaves might hear the truth and, as Usry and Keener put it, "understand that Christianity made them their master's equals before God ... The most serious obstacle to the missionary's access to the slaves was the slaveholder' vague awareness that a Christian slave would have some claim to fellowship, a claim that threatened the security of the master-slave hierarchy."7
Carl Ellis tells us that among other things, the gospel was perverted to sanitize those words of Jesus. The founder of our faith had taken an unacceptable prophetic stance against the powers that be and against injustice. Those words had to be glossed over. Instead, sermons focused on verses such as "Slaves obey your masters", and "Do good to those who hurt you." "So, very early in colonial life an intimate and inseparable union between "Christianity" and the institution of slavery was effected8."
But the Holy Spirit would not be quenched. He enlightened Christian slaves despite the intentions of the slaveholders, to see the real gospel behind the lies. In his book Black Religion and Black Radicalism, Gayroud Wilmore explains the process:
What we may call "white Christianity" [i.e. the sanitized gospel of the slaveholders] in Europe and North America has made a deep and lasting impression upon blacks everywhere, including Africa, But blacks have used Christianity not so much as it was delivered to them by racist white churches, but as its truth was authenticated to them in the experience of suffering and struggle, to reinforce an enculturated religious orientation and to provide an indigenous faith that emphasized dignity, freedom, and human welfare.
In 1797, a free black Abolitionist and travelling preacher named Olaudah Equiano, wrote an autobiography that thundered against the spiritual compromises whites made to accommodate slavery:
O, ye nominal Christians! Might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you?9
In other words, when those who bore the gospel preached a pack of lies, the Holy Spirit drew the oppressed slaves to the real gospel. The African-Americans discovered, as Tom Skinner put it at Urbana 70, that "the Christ who leaped out of the pages of the New Testament . . . was a gutsy, contemporary, radical revolutionary, with hair on his chest and dirt under his fingernails."
African-American theology thus grew out of the experience of extreme hardship and the need for a relevant theology with legs on it. In a recent article in Christianity Today, Stephen Carter wrote:
"One of the great powers of African-American theology is precisely that it calls on us to understand the connection between the actual day-to-day experience of our lives and the history of our people on the one hand, and the work God wants to do in the world on the other."10
With time, emancipation and a minimal but sufficient degree of economic security, the black church began to realize the fruit of its toils - on the mission front as well as at home. The amazing thing is that Black Americans got into missions at a very early age. They sent the first American missionaries to Africa in 1792, under the leadership of a freeman named David George. This was a year before William Carey left England for a similar mission in India.11
The Spiritual Legacy
This is neither the time nor the place for a full history, or for a detailed history of African-American Missions. The story continues in the article Overcoming Obstacles by Marilyn Lewis, and in the Abolitionists Abroad (Lamin Sanneh) book review. At this time, let us look ever so briefly at those aspects of the black church that were very useful for missions, and which led to so much success on the mission field.
African-American thinkers brought to the table of American Christianity several ideas and cultural values that were grounded in the Bible, but overlooked in the mainstream white church. One was the need for our faith to stand for real justice in the real world. Those who were fortunate to have their freedom in eighteenth century America were understandably astonished that Christians could so distort the gospels as to participate in the slave trade. They took this passion with them to their African missions, where they stood for justice in the name of Jesus, and in the face of considerable risk of being sold back into bondage by incensed chieftains. But they knew no other gospel than the one they read, and would not walk with a Jesus who loved the status quo. The Jesus they read about preached a future glory and redemption for sin at the same as preaching harsh words for the oppressors of the day.
Secondly, African-American believers saw that Jesus is the God of the poor and weak every bit as the God of the comfortable and well-resourced. The significance of this discovery can hardly be overstated. European colonial missions dating back to the Jesuit mission to China in the 1600s typically targeted the leaders and elites.12 By way of contrast, African-American missionaries in Sierra Leone loved the poor, the insignificant, the outcast and the ugly.13
These ideas are not merely useful tools for maintaining sanity when all else is falling apart: they are part and parcel of the gospel. In the year 2001, justice and holistic missions are buzz words in the world of missions.14 North American evangelicals are rediscovering their heritage in Christ, a heritage they nearly forgot for all the (admirable) efforts to "preach the gospel". We are making amends, but we are by and large on a learning curve. That is why the world of missions needs African-American Christians. Black believers are standing on the shoulders of a great heritage that has preached the gospel for centuries. Black believers know instinctively and fluently, what White believers are struggling to relearn. In the very same way that we need each other for our worship to be complete, we need each other for our obedience to be complete.
Peace
Paul Grant
Notes
1. William Larkin Jr. "Acts: The IVP New Testament Commentary Series" (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), p.132
2. Stephen Neill "A History of Christian Missions, 2nd ed." (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984), p.47
3.ibid.
4. Glenn Usry & Craig Keener "Black Man's Religion: Can Christianity be Afrocentric?" (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), p.37
5. ibid, p.39
6. Gayroud Wilmore "Black Religion and Black Radicalism (3rd ed.)" (Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books, 1998), p.27
7.Usry & Keener, p.99
8.Carl Ellis Jr. "Free at Last? The Gospel in the African-American Experience (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996), p.45
9. Olaudah Equiano, reprinted in the "Norton Anthology of African-American Literature" (Gates & McKay, ed.), p.161
10.Stephen Carter "The Freedom to Resist" Christianity Today, June 12, 2000
11.Lamin Sanneh "Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa" (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.53 William Carey is often considered the founder of modern missions. Not only did David George leave first, but he also did something far more important: He focused his mission on the poor, the weak and the downtrodden, while most white missionaries targeted the rich and powerful. In this strategy, he was naturally applying the spiritual lessons of the African-American church as 'common sense' to him.
12.See "The First Jesuits" by John O'Malley (Harvard University Press, 1995)
13.Sanneh Ch. 2
14.See, for example, two excellent new books: "Good News about Injustice" by Gary Haugen and "Cry of the Urban Poor" by Viv Grigg.
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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