Lessons From Early African Christianity

On the almost always interesting Reformation 21, philosopher Bruce Baugus relays a lesson from Philip Jenkins’ The Lost History of Christianity. In Local, Gritty, and Enduring?, he asks why Christianity in Egypt survived the Muslim invasion while it died in the rest of northern Africa. Whatever the economic and political reasons, Jenkins offers another:

Where the African church failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and not sinking roots into the world of the native peoples. . . . [T]he African church had made next to no progress in taking the faith to the villages and the neighboring tribes, nor, critically, had they tried to evangelize in local languages . . . Christianity in this region remained as much a colonists’ religion as it would be once again during the French Empire of the twentieth century, and, just as in that later period, when the colonists left, so did the religion.

The northern African lesson, Baugus concludes,

reminds us that just because a church exists and may even be thriving in one place or another does not mean it is a church of the people in that place. And if it’s not, it may be ready to disappear from that place altogether, as so many crumbling and re-purposed church buildings seem to silently testify in the city where I presently live.