This stream is about Seventh-day Adventist belief lived in an African setting. The church’s 28 Fundamental Beliefs are the same in Accra, Nairobi and Maputo as anywhere else. What differs is the life in which they are held: the languages we pray in, the economies we work in, the families and communities we belong to. This stream asks what our shared beliefs mean, and how they are best lived, in those settings.
The questions we want to ask
- How do Adventists keep the Sabbath where markets, farming seasons, exams and public events fall on Saturday?
- What does the Adventist health message offer communities facing both old and new diseases, and how does it fit local diets?
- How is the hope of the Second Coming preached and lived amid poverty, conflict and rapid change?
- How do we read and teach the Bible faithfully in African languages, and what do those languages bring to our understanding of the text?
- What should Adventist worship and music sound like in African congregations while staying true to the church’s beliefs?
What scholars have said
A number of African scholars have shaped how the wider church thinks about Christian faith on the continent. Not all of them are Adventist, and not every conclusion fits Adventist teaching, but Adventist writers can engage them from our own convictions.
Lamin Sanneh, the Gambian historian, showed in Translating the Message (1989) that because the Bible was translated into African languages, Africans could hear the gospel on their own terms. Translation, he argued, made the faith at home in African cultures rather than foreign to them. For a church that puts Scripture first, his point is a strong one.
John Mbiti of Kenya, who translated the New Testament into his own Kikamba language, argued in Bible and Theology in African Christianity (1986) that the Bible is the foundation of African Christian theology, and that ordinary believers reading it in their own languages are already doing theology.
Kwame Bediako of Ghana argued in Christianity in Africa (1995) that African Christians face a question the early church also faced: how to hold the historic faith fully while speaking it in their own idiom. He saw that work as faithfulness, not a departure from it.
Mercy Amba Oduyoye, also from Ghana, insisted that theology must include the experience of women, who make up much of the church in Africa. In 1989 she and other women theologians founded the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians.
What we hope to publish
Essays that start from Scripture and the church’s beliefs, are honest about African realities, and offer a way forward. We welcome pastors, scholars, teachers, students and members who have thought hard about these questions. See Write for us to send an idea.
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