Gospel and Culture workshop

Gospel & Culture - African Experience, Bishop Joel Obetia

Gospel

Culture

➢ Gospel impacts culture
➢ Culture can serve the Gospel

Romans 12:1-2
• “So here is what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life, your sleeping, eating going-to-work, and walking-around life and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You will be changed from inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you”.

2 Timothy 3:16-17
“Every part of Scripture is God-breathed and useful in showing us truth, exposing our rebellion, correcting our mistakes, training us to live Godís way.

Definitions
➢ Culture
➢ A person who is knowledgeable about such things as art, music and philosophy is said to be “cultured.”
➢ Culture may refer to artistic or philosophical expertise or even to good manners and other accoutrements of the upper social classes.
➢ It is also an agricultural term that refers to being totally immersed or ploughed into something.
➢ In Germany, Kultur refers to the total non-biologically transmitted heritage of humankind. Culture is therefore the totality of life of a given people or society.

Humans are immersed in culture
➢ Culture designs the rules of language, courtesy, eating, toilet habits, etc., the make the individual a useful member of the society
➢ Culture offers each member the glasses with which to view the world
➢ Culture organizes human communities into permanent groups
➢ It is the social heritage that human being receive and transmit
➢ Human beings are culture shaped and are culture creating, bearing and transmitting beings.
➢ The chief vehicle/medium of culture is speech or language that is why culture is a form of communication.

The Essence of the Gospel
➢ Human beings are sinful and arrogantly rebellious to God
➢ Forgiveness is granted to all who repent and turn to God through faith in Christ.
➢ There is hope of changes lives and eternal, resurrected life beyond the grave.

The Gospel & African Culture
➢ Lugbara/Madi of North-Western Uganda
➢ Missionaries and African Traditional Religion
➢ Gifts of the Spirit —> 1 Corinthians 12

Tremendous Growth
➢ Phenomenal growth is directly related to the prevalence of the pre-Christian religions.
Two factors of growth
➢ The vernacularization of the scriptures
➢ The translatability of Christianity
Lugbara/Madi society
➢ Aku ñ the family homestead.
➢ Enyati the sub-clan
➢ Suru the tribe

The role of rituals in the community
➢ A good person is one who is in communion with others
➢ A bad person should not share ritually with others or may influence people negatively.
Concept of rebirth
➢ Even a foreigner or person from another tribe can be socialised into the Lugbara/Madi society and become oriíbaórelative/kinsman. This change is termed ofu/opu ñ becoming. It means to suddenly become or metamorphose into something.
Kinship-ori’ba
➢ Ori for God, where kinsmen are Ori ma ëba ñ the people of God or the people who worship the same God.
➢ Ori for seed, where kinsmen are (a)ma ori ma ëba ñ the people of our/my seed or of the same ancestral lineage
➢ Ori for settle, where oriíba are ëba oriíba tualu ñ people who have settled together.
The Human Spirit/Soul
➢ Orindi, like oriíba has two root words: Ori (God) and indi (present).
➢ The other meanings of ori for seed and settlement, as above also apply well.
Orijo ñ House of God
➢ It was not until some Lugbara believed in Jesus and found Jesus to be more powerful than the ancestors to whom they built shrines that land was offered to build churches in the communities free of charge.
Christ as Leader
➢ The Christological challenge for them is not an inquiry into Jesus’ divinity, but his humanity.
The competence of Jesus
➢ The key quest is whether Christ fits the hero image of the Lugbara/Madi elder.
➢ The Lugbara of Maracha expected Jesus to do miracles and heal as in the Bible. They were very disappointed with the missionaries who only talked of Jesus as someone who used to heal and do miracles but did not do a single miracle in their community through the missionaries
The integrality of Jesus
➢ Jesus is one of us, a true son of man, and a kinsman who is a human-seed chosen by God and therefore the Son of God.
The community as Kin-dom rather than Kingdom
➢ The church as oriba ñ societas Dei ñ kin-dom is evident in the rural areas where the church sits at the heart of the clans and tribes.
The Role of the Revival Movement
Young Martyrs
➢ They could not bow to a King who wanted to indulge them into homosexual practices. Their death instead of discouraging people from trusting in Christ fanned the spread of the new faith to the rest of Uganda.
East African Revival
➢ In the 1930s another group of young people had a tremendous experience of the risen Lord and began to confess their sins and restitute for the wrongs they did to others. The movement spread rapidly to Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya and in 1950 it came to West Nile.
East African Revival
Introduced
➢ truly African spiritual songs
➢ hymns
➢ dances
➢ extemporal prayer, personal testimonies, family devotions and fellowships of walking in the light in the church.
Ugandan Identity
➢ Spontaneity in worship is happening across the denominations, thus bridging the gap between the different churches.
Ugandan Christianity Features
➢ It has a narrative theology where space is given for people to give testimonies.
➢ The hermeneutical and theological consequence of the use of oral narratives in worship has led to the development of a theology of the laity.
➢ The strength of the Church in Uganda as elsewhere in Africa has led to the revaluation of theology in the light of an assertive African theology.
➢ A renewed appreciation of divine activity in and through individual leaders and the Christian community at large that can clearly be seen and studied.
➢ A relatively young church that prays hard, sings loud, and dances a lot.

Where we are…
➢ This is not a shout of victory,but an acknowledgement of being on the road to victory!

Category: Gospel and Culture,