By Matthew Krabill, The Sanneh Institute, Academic Programs Coordinator
Dr. Matthew Krabill was born and raised in southern Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa. He obtained a PhD from Fuller Seminary, where his research focused on African migration, religious identity, and ecclesiology within Mennonite Church USA. Dr. Krabill’s dissertation will be published in Brill’s Theology and Mission in World Christianity series under the tentative title, “Migrant Ecumenicities: Polycentric Identity, Ecclesial Hybridity, and the Pluralization of Power.”
Editorial Note: This post is the third in a series of three highlighting the scholarship, structure, and partnerships that are developing around OMSC’s new online certificate program in lived theology and world Christianity. Read part one and part two here. This third post introduces lived theology as an extension of the long-standing work forged by African scholars and theologians like Lamin Sanneh, John Mbiti, and John Azumah. Matthew Krabill ties this legacy to the work of the Sanneh Institute. By partnering with OMSC as a learning hub for OMSC’s online certificate program in lived theology and world Christianity, this legacy finds a new expression.
Two of the most important articles I read during my seminary education were by the late Prof. Andrew Walls and Prof. Lamin Sanneh. The wider context for both articles was the striking demographic changes in world Christianity and the implications of these shifts for the study of religion generally and for Christian scholarship specifically. In “Eusebius Tries Again”, Walls challenges the way the Western church history syllabus has been taught, arguing that it has been informed by assumptions and perspectives solely centered on the European story. A case in point for Walls is that the West has long taught “clan history” under the guise of “church history.” Doing so has not only promoted an impoverished and defective view of the Church for Western Christians, but these perspectives have even been all the more irrelevant for Christians in African and Asian contexts. In response, Walls suggests that “new church history writing must deal with the interaction between a Christianity formulated in relation to Western needs and conditions and a Christianity formulated by a whole series of other cultures with histories of their own.” According to Walls, this will mean a reconception of what it means to be a Christian historian and a reconception of the resources for the task at hand.
In a similar vein as Walls, Lamin Sanneh argues in “World Christianity and the New Historiography” that history has too often been written from the top-down, privileging the perspectives, structures, and initiatives of the powerful and the privileged. In doing so, Christian history has overlooked the faith of ordinary believers such as the farmers, merchants, and peasants, how their faith has been lived out in day-to-day life, and how this lived faith sustained and contributed to the world Christian movement. For Sanneh, this top-down approach to telling the Christian story has obscured the role of indigenous agents and agency and the processes of transmission and translation. In response to this long-held approach, Sanneh argues that the future of missiological and theological education in the non-Western world demands “fresh navigational aids” and “conceptual tools that reject old assurances and attempts at projecting the old ideas of navigation, control, and direction into the future”. New conceptual frameworks, methods, and analytical tools should rather “ask new questions without reference to the old answers”. “This daunting task,” Sanneh notes, “cannot be tackled with a single solution or initiative, but it must be tackled”.[1]
While both Sanneh and Walls are church historians by training, their critique, challenge, and constructive suggestions are directed towards a much broader problem than the discipline of history, namely, the need to revisit all of the disciplines in their theologizing task in light of what we now refer to as the world Christian movement. Since both articles were published 20 years ago, significant contributions have been made to expanding the conceptual categories and methodological approaches in World Christianity. The increasing momentum and discussion surrounding the integration of traditional approaches to theology with qualitative research is but one example. The emerging sub-discipline of Lived Theology is another promising development in this regard.
While the progress has been commendable, it remains lamentable that far too many pastors, missionaries, and lay leaders in educational settings around the world continue to be formed by methodologies and theologies that are far removed and disengaged from the questions and concerns of the communities and societies in which they live and work. In light of the daunting work left to be done in theological education, one can imagine Andrew Walls exhorting his students in 2024 that “while Eusebius certainly tried… that he must try again, and again and again!”
Sanneh was correct in saying that advances in Christian scholarship cannot be tackled with a single solution or initiative. This is one of the many reasons The Sanneh Institute (TSI) was launched in his name. TSI’s Founding Executive Director, Prof. John Azumah, notes that “the longstanding vision of TSI is to establish a center in West Africa that equips Christians and Muslims to engage with each other productively, academically, and constructively”. Prof. Azumah’s vision became a reality when he received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation in 2017 to conduct a feasibility study in West Africa in collaboration with Scholar Leaders. After consultation with West African scholars, it was agreed to name the Institute after Prof. Lamin Sanneh.
The vision of TSI is “Offering scholarship as a tribute to God, with the religious and non-religious other within hearing distance, for the transformation of society.” TSI is dedicated to the equipping and resourcing of religious leaders, scholars, academic institutions and wider African society through advanced inquiry with the goal of raising a new generation of scholars with intellectual curiosity and theological humility.
Raising a new generation of scholars requires pioneering and employing approaches to scholarly inquiry and engagement that serve the church’s mission in new and fresh ways. This is one of the reasons why TSI is excited to partner with OMSC in offering a course in Lived Theology and World Christianity. The Founding Executive Director of The Sanneh Institute (TSI), Prof. John Azumah, notes the following about the importance of doing lived theology in the context of Ghana, West Africa:
“Ghana is intensely religious and religiously plural. There are countless multi-religious families across the country with Muslims and Christians living as members of the same families, celebrating each other’s festivals, marriages, funerals, child-naming ceremonies, etc together. And yet theology in Africa and in Ghana is all too often done in isolation from the multi-religious fabric of society and the interreligious encounters of day-to-day life. Christian theology in Ghana would do particularly well for example to engage constructively with the various faces of Islam in Ghana. This means engaging Islam’s missional face, mystical face, ideological or political face, militant face and its progressive face. Perhaps most important is the fact that each one of these faces also has a human face. It is in and through this human being and this human face that a Muslim’s faith actually lives. Thus, the church must engage the human face of our neighbor’s faith if we want to develop theologies that witness and speak meaningfully to the communities in which we live.”
One of the ironies of these remarks is the fact that lived theology is not new to Africa or to African theology – a reality Prof. Azumah is fully aware of. In fact, African theologians have long argued for a theology that directly and concretely engages the concerns and questions believers face in day-to-day life. Lived theologies emerged in African contexts as African theologians found Western academic theology too abstract, philosophical, and textually dominant. The earliest pioneers of African theology developed theologies that interacted with African cultural and religious heritages and the complexity of contemporary societies. Doing so for African theologians invariably meant interacting with non-traditional sources of theologizing. John Mbiti made the following observation years ago:
There are three main areas of African theology today: written theology, oral theology and symbolic theology. Written African theology is the privilege of a few Christians who have had considerable education and who generally articulate their theological reflections in articles and (so far only a few) books, mainly in English, French, German, or another European language. Oral theology is produced in the fields by the masses through song, sermon, teaching, prayer, conversation, etc. It is theology in the open air, often unrecorded, often heard only by small groups, and generally lost to libraries and seminaries. Symbolic theology is expressed through art, sculpture, drama, symbols, rituals, dance, colors, numbers, etc.[2]
Mbiti’s theology often employed methods of theologizing that engaged the oral and symbolic dimensions he mentions above. In “Some African Concepts of Christology”, Mbiti drew on sermons of the Nigerian Aladura churches to formulate Christological notions that reflected African traditions and worldview. Even though African Independent Churches (AIC) were producing little formal academic theology at that time, a reality still true to this day, Mbiti demonstrated the rich resources that exist in non-traditional sources of theology among the AICs for understanding a Christ authentically African. Similarly, Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako proudly talked about the vernacular songs of Madam Afua Kuma, a midwife and Pentecostal poet who sang the praises of Christ in the exalted language of praise songs to traditional rulers.[3] Bediako referred to the theologizing of Madam Afua Kuma’s songs as “a liberating force for African academic theology and for the academic theologian” as they demonstrated so strongly a “theology from where the faith must live.”[4] Azumah describes this theology as “theology from the pew.”
Thus, OMSC’s online certificate program on Lived Theology and World Christianity builds on the life and work of a generation of pioneers. It aims to provide fresh theological tools and resources to students in the Accra-hub seeking to serve the church’s mission in Ghana and West Africa. TSI is excited to partner with OMSC on this course and this initiative. OMSC has served for many years as an important hub for convening discussions and generating fruitful initiatives that have strengthened the global church. Sanneh also held great affection for OMSC: he had an office in the building at New Haven, and he cherished the conversations and relationships there over the years. Lastly, the partnership with OMSC represents our humble response to Sanneh’s challenge to develop “fresh navigational aids” for the Church in this era of World Christianity.
[1] Lamin Sanneh, “World Christianity and the New Historiography: history and global interconnections”, in Wilbert Wilbert R. Shenk, Enlarging the story : perspectives on writing world Christian history. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 94-114.
[2] John S. Mbiti, Bible and Theology in African Christianity (Nairobi, Kenya: Oxford University Press, 1986), 59.
[3] “Kwame Bediako.” Dictionary of African Christian Biography: https://dacb.org/stories/ghana/bediako-kwame/
[4] Kwame Bediako, Jesus in Africa: The Christian Gospel in African History and Experience (Akropong: Regnum Africa, 2000), 8.
