It is Western Christianity that objectified God, recreated Him-Her as an intellectual idea, and put up a boundary between the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the profane. Is this dichotomy evident in Jesus’ teaching? No.
Secondly, Pope Benedict XVI has recently said that Christianity is not another moral or ideological system, but a transformative encounter with a person, Jesus Christ. Well, Papa, often in Africa we experience Christianity as an encounter not with Jesus but with a bureaucracy.
Western Christianity is obsessively institutional….
Its religious officials are a powerful class of ‘spiritual middlemen’ whose job seems to be to dole out access to the Divine. They keep pushing God further upward and the ordinary Christians further downward. The result, as one African archbishop put it, is that “God has been represented to Africa as distant and inaccessible to ordinary Christians, as if indifferent to them.”
The rise and popularity of evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity in Africa, which emphasizes personal experience of the Divine in every sphere of life, is in part due to its closeness to the traditional African spirituality of God-with-us 24/7.
profound:
“often in Africa we experience Christianity as an encounter not with Jesus but with a bureaucracy.
Western Christianity is obsessively institutional….”
Something well worth reading on this topic is Brother Yun’s book, “Living Water.” Chinese Christianity had to recuperate from institutional, denominational Christianity. They have something to teach us.
It is not significantly different in this country. The institutional church is a cumbersome, ritualized bureaucracy with clergy and lay sanctimonious bureaucrats. They love meetings and committees and chairmanships and elections and position and privilege and conventions and titles. If they had any objectivity or any capacity for sober self-assessment, they would see what a trivial, and almost comic construct they have become. And this self-delusion and pomp keeps the church not only from its mission and essential identity of discipleship; it feeds the need for divisions as many seek positions of preferment in any construct that will promote them or feed their ambitions. This is far removed from the witness and work of bearing witness to the Kingdom of God in our time.
Phillip
True, the Church must constantly reform itself to avoid these problems, but the problem with the old “hierarchy = BAD, freedom = GOOD!” dualistic mentality is that it can and often does lead to another extreme with just as disastrous results.
Chris (#4),
Yes, the desire for an un-institutionalized Christianity is a mirage, an illusion. As long as Christians meet regularly and try to fulfill their divine mission by working together and try to pass on their faith to the next generation it’s inevitable that there will be some sort of institutionalizing of the Christian faith and life.
But that doesn’t mean the institutional elements have to be sacrosanct, as if they were irreformable. Nor does it make them of primary importance. They are MEANS to a higher end, not an end in themselves.
Still, I found this article rather trite and shallow. It’s basic point is true enough, but treated rather simplistically, or so it seems to me.
In contrast, I highly recommend the classic story of how another Roman Catholic missionary found his own faith and life transformed by working among the Masai tribe, the famous nomadic cattle herders of Kenya. See “Christianity Rediscovered.” It’s an eye-opener for us Western, Global North Christians. But it also avoids stereotypes and superficial comparisons.
David Handy+
The Celtic Christians of Ireland in the 4th – 7th Centuries were loosely hierarchial, or at least differently structured from that of Rome in England.
In England, the power was in the cathedral, with the arch-bishop and bishop. In Ireland, it lay in the monastaries, with the Abbot.
In England the towns had the center, in Ireland it was more rural, large towns didn’t exist until the Viking Invasions later on.
There were other differences, more superficial, such as the style of ‘tonsure’ of monks and the dating of Easter. These however, were sufficient to bring the attention of the Church at Rome on Ireland.
At the Synod of Whitby (appx. 664), Rome sent their secret weapon, Augustine of Canterbury, to bring Ireland into conformity with Rome. After a long verbal struggle, Ireland lost their semi-autonomy, and agreed to come in line with Rome.
Good sources of this:
“How the Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill
“Wisdom of the Celtic Saints” by Edward Sellner
“Every Earthly Blessing: Rediscovering the Celtic Tradition” by Esther de Waal
“The Soul of Celtic Spirituality: In the Lives of Its Saints” (aka “Restoring the Woven Cord”) by Michael Mitton
and others.