It is a common misconception that Christianity first came to Africa via white missionaries in the colonial era. In the New Testament, we meet a highly educated African man who became a follower of Jesus centuries before Christianity penetrated Britain or America. In Acts 8, God directs the apostle Philip to the chariot of an Ethiopian eunuch. The man was \u201ca court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure\u201d (Acts 8:27, ESV). Philip hears the Ethiopian reading from the Book of Isaiah and explains that Isaiah was prophesying about Jesus. The Ethiopian immediately embraces Christ and asks to be baptized (Acts 8:26\u201340).<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t know how people responded when the Ethiopian eunuch took the gospel home. But we do know that in the fourth century, two slave brothers precipitated the Christianization of Ethiopia and Eritrea<\/a>, which led to the founding of the second officially Christian state in the world. We also know that Christianity took root in Egypt in the first century and spread by the second century to Tunisia, the Sudan, and other parts of Africa.<\/p>\n Furthermore, Africa spawned several of the early church fathers, including one of the most influential theologians in Christian history: the fourth-century scholar Augustine of Hippo. Likewise, until they were all but decimated by persecution, Iraq was home to one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. And returning to Sengmei\u2019s homeland, far from only being reached in the colonial era, the church in India claims a lineage going back to the first century. While this is impossible to verify, leading scholar Robert Eric Frykenberg concludes, \u201cIt seems certain that there were well-established communities of Christians in South India no later than the third and fourth centuries, and perhaps much earlier.\u201d Thus, Christianity likely took root in India centuries before the Christianization of Britain.<\/p>\n Many of us associate Christianity with white, Western imperialism. There are reasons for this\u2014some quite ugly, regrettable reasons. But most of the world\u2019s Christians are neither white nor Western, and Christianity is getting less white and less Western by the day.<\/p>\n Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Many of us associate Christianity with white, Western imperialism. There are reasons for this\u2014some quite ugly reasons.<\/p>\n But most of the world\u2019s Christians are neither white nor Western, and Christianity is getting less white and less Western by the dayhttps:\/\/t.co\/NTYOFQquZl<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) October 20, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n