The women driving African Christianity’s global reach

African Christianity has exploded to reach all countries in the world. From villages to megacities, Harvey Kwiyani outlines the significant role women are playing.

Harvey Kwiyani

Harvey Kwiyani is the CEO of Global Connections and a lecturer in African Christianity at Church Mission Society. He also leads Missio Africanus.

A group of women stand and dance at a celebration in the street, wearing matching skirts..

Igbo women at a celebration in Nigeria.

John Mic on Unsplash.

In the past fifty years, African Christianity has exploded to reach all countries in the world. A Nigerian Pentecostal denomination, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, boasts of having congregations in every country in the world. Another African Pentecostal denomination, the Church of Pentecost (from Ghana), is present in 160 countries around the world. Here in the UK, these two are the largest African denominations with almost 1000 and 200 congregations, respectively. Most of their members are African, and the African woman is at the centre of it all (even though, of course, their leadership structures say otherwise). So, this article sets out to show the particular contribution of women to African Christianity.

“To develop a community, you must educate its women.” This is what we were told several decades ago when African countries like Malawi (where I grew up) wanted to encourage communities to send young girls to school. Of course, this is not untrue. Living standards in communities where women had access to schools were noticeably better than in societies where women had not attained basic education. Educationally empowered women tended to help uplift their communities towards better living. While politicians and activists preached about educating young girls, Christian communities took a similar approach to evangelism, mission, and church growth. “If you want to save a community,” they said, “you must convert the women.” They believed that when women became Christians, the men and children in their communities would also convert. A great deal of the evangelistic campaigns was shaped to appeal to women.

African women themselves took advantage of this and became missionaries and evangelists in their own communities. Looking back at that era, there is no doubt that African women played a very significant role in the remarkable spread of Christianity through the continent over the past century. In part, this is why women and girls make up a majority of Africa’s Christian population. While 52 per cent of Africans are female, women and girls make up well over 55 per cent of Christians in many African countries.

Female African evangelists, many of whom would not even identify as such, took the good news to their communities and spoke about the transforming power of Christian faith with fellow women wherever they gathered—whether fetching water, walking to the maize mill or, indeed, for their regular village women’s meetings. Slowly, one by one, they evangelised their families, friends, and co-workers. These went on to convert their own families, clans, and communities too. Men played a role too, and this is often acknowledged. Women’s work, however, is usually under-appreciated. Christian mothers often taught the basics of the faith to their children, tilting their worldview towards Christianity in their formative years. In most cases, Christian women worked as teachers in early primary education. Their Christian faith and lifestyles were part of their teaching and testimony. In teaching primary school Religious Education, for example, many teachers catered to the curious needs of young inquisitive minds living in a religiously charged atmosphere. Alongside this, because of their profession, most female Christian teachers often ran Sunday school classes in many churches.

Furthermore, women often took on the responsibility of praying for their families and communities. The importance of this work cannot be understated. The people I grew up with in Southern Malawi used to say that behind every successful boy or girl is a praying mother. Indeed, my grandmother, one of the female evangelists in our community, used to say, “Our children’s futures are shaped on the knees of the mothers.” Rightly so, bent and broken on their knees, the women of my community prayed for their children’s educational, social, and spiritual well-being. A female Nigerian pastor told me an adage, “If you have not seen an African woman travailing in prayer, you have not seen prayer yet.” Of course, this is hyperbole, but it was said for a reason.

Today, in the 21st century, African women continue to be the backbone of the Christian faith in the continent as well as in the African diaspora.

While African Christian women can be good teachers and build their communities through prayer, it is their commitment to hospitality that stands out.. Their hospitality provided missionaries and evangelists with a platform that helped their work of preaching Christianity. By opening their homes to house the missionaries, even temporarily, and making sure that those who went out to preach the gospel—and this included numerous female evangelists—were fed, they facilitated a network that helped accelerate the growth of Christianity in Africa.

Today, in the 21st century, African women continue to be the backbone of the Christian faith in the continent as well as in the African diaspora. A Burkinabé female theologian, Ini Dorcas Dah, has discussed the role of African women in both the churches as well as in society in her 2017 book appropriately entitled, Women Do More Work Than Men. She is following in the theological footsteps of the matriarch of African women’s theology, Mercy Amba Oduyoye who, back in the 1980s started questioning the male domination of a majority female church in Africa. Oduyoye would, in 1989, start the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians to enhance the feminist critique of African Christianity. Her book, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy, has grown to become a classic. The Circle continues today as many African female theologians such as Esther Mombo, Telesia Hinga, Isabel Phiri, and Wanjiku Kihuha have picked up the baton and published many books over the past twenty years.

In her master’s research, done in 2018, Modupe Adefala, a Nigerian pastor of Word Fountain Church in Oxford, suggested that African women pioneered a great deal of African origin church ministry work in London. Her biographical sketch of five female Nigerian pioneers in London revealed larger-than-life ministers doing outsized work in the city. Sheila Akomiah-Conteh, a Ghanaian theologian who works for Missio Africanus and teaches at Church Mission Society in Oxford, adds that African women are busy serving God in migrant churches in every city in the country—churches that are usually unseen, making the work of the women serving in them even more hidden from society. They silently do what they need to do, away from the spotlight. Both of them are keen to recognise that a younger generation of female African Christians is emerging that is ready to serve while living right in the spotlight. Modupe’s daughter, Wonuola, carries a good portion of her ministry on Instagram. She is one of many young African women ministering significantly on social media.

To get back to the statement at the beginning of this article, Akomiah-Conteh is concerned that African women have very little access to theological education and ministry training. She is right. Wanjiku Kihuha says that as a female theologian teaching in Nairobi, she is usually the only female in her classes. Another scholar added that for every 15 males in theological education in East Africa, there is only one female. This incongruence, especially in a church context where females significantly outnumber males, is quite troubling. Here in the diaspora, it is not too different. African women theologians are hard to come by, and when one is found, she will most likely be overstretched between family, ministry, and a career. African churches are an increasingly prominent presence in UK cities and towns. For them to have the deep positive impact that they have the potential to bring, we need both to pay attention and to support the women who so often are the backbone of these churches

Missio Africanus, has a commitment to equip and empower African women both through theological education and ministry training. It is convinced that to mature a Christian community, its women must have access to theological education. It welcomes any support we can get for this.

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Loneliness

23 June 2023

6 min read

The curse of loneliness and the hope of kindness

The tend-and-befriend response is present in many species, but it reaches a particular level of genius in ours, explains Roger Bretherton.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

A person stands in a road under misty street lights.

Atharva Tulsi on Unsplash

Loneliness kills. I’ve known that for a while. It dawned on me when, as an undergraduate, I first read the anthropological studies of the so-called ‘voodoo death curse’. An admittedly politically incorrect name for a horrifying phenomenon that has haunted me ever since. The studies, reported in the early twentieth century, attempted to account for the highly effective way in which shaman in tribal cultures were able to pronounce death on aberrant members of their community. Often within days of coming under the curse, the hexed individual was dead. It looked like magic.

Psychologists studying anxiety became interested in this phenomenon as an illustration of the connection between social stress and physical health. On closer examination, they noted that those on the receiving end of a death curse, not only came under the opprobrium of a powerful spiritual authority but were consequently entirely isolated from the community that gave them their identity. The moment the curse was decreed they became a non-person. They ceased to exist in the eyes of the collective. They became a ghoul, a wraith, an abomination to their people. They experienced a social exclusion so absolute and catastrophic that the stress of it killed them. Physical death swiftly followed social death.

When we fall foul of the charismatic leader of a workplace... we may for a moment shiver in the chill breeze of the death curse.

But the death curse is not confined to stone age tribes and agrarian collectives. It is a ubiquitous artefact of human social life. In subtly disguised form it continues to stalk the industrialised societies of the West. We see it in any social situation that terminally frustrates our hardwired biological need to belong. When we are cast out of employment through redundancy, retirement, or sickness. When a social faux pas leaves us persona non grata. When our social media presence is more of a toenail than a footprint. When we fall foul of the charismatic leader of a workplace, a neighbourhood, a family, a church. We may for a moment shiver in the chill breeze of the death curse. We wonder briefly if the silence and the cold shoulders will kill us.

We don’t often think about the all-too evident connection between belonging, stress and health- but we should, because social connectedness is the primary way we as a species have made it this far. Most of us are familiar with the physiological responses to acute stress. There are only a few of them. It’s like a multiple choice test, take your pick: a) fight, b) flight, c) freeze, d) faint, or e) some bespoke combo of all of the above. We probably also have some recognition that those of us living in information economies tend to spend too much time in these stressed states of mind. They are designed for short-term threats (like predators), not long-term projects and serial deadlines. The cortisol coursing through our veins designed to deliver us from danger now stops us sleeping at night, and lurks behind all the major killers of our culture: cancer, heart disease, and depression.

But before we get to all that stressed-out running and punching and standing still like startled rabbits, there is a more common everyday way that human beings deal with stress. Our primary way of navigating a challenging and threatening world is our equally hardwired ability to reach out to others- the social engagement system. This tend-and-befriend response is present in many species, but it reaches a particular level of genius in ours. Our capacity to form groups that can coordinate action through a sense of unified purpose is what allowed our ancestors to take down woolly mammoths and survive ice ages. Our principal strength comes not from our ability to make fists, but to join hands.

To fall out of connection with others is an existential threat.

No wonder then, given our history as an eminently social species, that loneliness- the perceived shortfall between desired and actual social contact- is experienced as a menace to our survival. It once was, and still is. To fall out of connection with others is an existential threat. Clinical research has been reporting for decades that social support, or rather the lack of it, predicts and maintains pretty much every form of psychological distress we can bring to mind. In a small-scale way I repeat that finding with my own students every year. We annually distribute a 19-item well-being survey to several hundred university students. Most of it asks about the good stuff, happiness, quality of relationships, sense of purpose and so on. But one question asks them to rate, simply on a 1-10 scale, how lonely they are. Every time we run it on campus, this single lonely question predicts levels of depression, anxiety and stress, better than any other demographic.

So, it is good that loneliness is back in the news. Only last month the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, issued a report on the devastating health impact of loneliness. It affects a large proportion of the population- he cites 50% in the US, but UK estimates tend to be more conservative. It is apparently as damaging to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and twice as risky as downing six alcoholic drinks daily. Public health officials are partial to measuring mortality in fags and booze. But Vivek Murthy did something very un-like a public health official: he spoke about his own loneliness. How his very success in office had severed ties with friends and family, leaving him isolated, lonely and having to learn to re-connect. He proposes six pillars for addressing the societal scourge of loneliness, but as yet no government funding has been allocated to the initiative.

It is when we give to others that we know we are known- we matter.

When the experts are asked what we can do about loneliness they tend to advocate a multi-level approach. As individuals, we should Get Out. If we are lonely there are things we can do about it. Volunteering, exercise, singing, therapy, reconnecting with old friends, Counter-intuitively, we are more likely to benefit from activities in which we give something, in which we care or contribute. It is when we give to others that we know we are known- we matter.

As groups we should Look Out. Not everybody is able to overcome the barriers to social contact. Some people through physical or mental disability need others to look out for them. I witnessed a heart-warming example of this recently. There is a notorious character who lives locally. He dresses in black, has wild hair, walks with a limp, and speaks in grunts. He’s harmless, but he scares children. I don’t know what trauma or substance reduced him to this state, but he staggers past us twice a day on the way to his allotment. A few weeks ago thieves broke into his shed and stole all his gardening tools. He was pitifully distressed. But within hours the entire neighbourhood had mobilised through social media, and equipped him with every trowel, fork and hoe, that could be spared. I can’t help feeling that there is something in us as people that wants to act kindly like this, and cultivating this instinct gives me hope that we as a society can beat back the spectre of loneliness.

Loneliness it seems may not be just a bug in our software, it may be encoded in our cultural firmware- part of its operating system.

Which leads us to the third level of action, we need to Sort Out the dehumanising trends of our culture that inevitably generate and enable the pandemic of loneliness. As Mother Teresa famously observed, loneliness is the price we pay for wealth in the West, it is our true poverty. There may be something inspiring about the ruggedly individualistic, materialistically motivated, hyper-competitive, ideal of success that presides over our culture. But the studies of psychological wellbeing unanimously conclude that every one of those motivating values leads to misery, distrust and isolation. Loneliness it seems may not be just a bug in our software, it may be encoded in our cultural firmware- part of its operating system. Perhaps that is why most government-led attempts to alleviate the problem (in the UK and US at least) smack of tokenism. As the old organisational mantra goes: our social system is perfectly designed to bring about the outcomes it produces. So, what do we need? Nothing much. Just a completely transformed society. If only there was one of those knocking around, somewhere.