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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Death & life

12 May 2023

6 min read

The really annoying thing about dying

In his first Notes from Solitude, the death of his dad causes Roger Bretherton to reflect on the relationship and the strange emergence of 'father’.

Roger Bretherton

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

A pocket watch rests next to a black and white photograph of a father lying beside a new born baby.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash.

The death of my dad was sudden and unexpected. I don’t know why it is that, from the moment he died, I have had to fight the almost irresistible urge to refer to him as father- a term of address I never used about him or to him during his life.

Perhaps in some psychotherapy session at some point my therapist referred to my ‘father’, and I may have followed suit. And maybe occasionally when socialising with those who seemed a cut above my largely lower-middle class background, I called him father so as to avoid the flat northern vowel sounds that would expose me as an interloper. But that was just to fit in- on all other occasions he was decidedly not father and definitely just good old plain, dad.

At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike.

But for some reason the moment he died, it felt like dad wasn’t enough. I now had to call him father - those were the rules. At death he became a classic, a museum piece, a part of history, not the dad who taught me how to ride a bike by panting and sweating my five-year old self round the block, but the father who taught me to be… a man, or something like that.

The F-word has gravitas, presence, authority. Dads are human, often bewildered, occasionally pissed off, eminently huggable, easily taken for granted - just there. Admittedly, Freud would have lost significant gravitas if oedipal theory had considered common-all-garden dads and not cigar-smoking brandy-swilling fathers. And no doubt the climactic scene of The Empire Strikes Back would have lacked considerable pathos had Darth Vader casually quipped, ‘No Luke, I’m your’re Dad’.

The curse of the martyr, write Albert Camus, was to have other people tell their story. The principle doesn’t just apply to martyrs, it’s true of all those who die. To be dead is to become a character in other people’s anecdotes. That’s the really annoying thing about dying, we become a topic of gossip, people get to talk about us without the courtesy of ever having to talk to us. We become object, no longer subject. I think that’s why I resist calling my late Dad, Father. It objectifies him, makes of him something that he wasn’t. It, most definitely fails to do justice to all that he meant to me.

She simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company.

I say he died suddenly. It was a Sunday morning. I was in church at the time. Actually, worse than that, I was on stage speaking to a church. As a psychologist working in academia, I teach and train all kinds of people in every kind of organisation imaginable, but every now and then I get to speak in churches.

On this occasion I was talking about character, the positive qualities of being – like love, gratitude, hope, wisdom and so on – that make life worth living. When I stepped off the stage my wife was waving to me from the back of the room, which was weird given that we don’t go to that church and she hadn’t come with me. When I wandered to the back of the auditorium wearing my ‘what are you doing here?’ face, she simply said, ‘It’s your Dad’, and held me tight in a hug that lasted longer than usually permitted in polite company. For someone who prides himself on social insight, it shames me to say that it took a while for the penny to drop. We were in the car with the engine running before it finally dawned on me what she meant.

I try not to make too much of divine timings or fate, but there was something odd in the timing of getting that news. In that month I had addressed church congregations three Sundays in a row- which, as someone who is generally lazy and prefers not to work weekends, is an unusually intense frequency. But over three successive Sundays I had reflected aloud with those congregations that there were prayers that had accompanied the various stages of my life. Prayers that I found myself praying, almost as if they were prayed through me, as if they had chosen me rather than I they.

In my twenties I had found myself praying as regularly as a heartbeat, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me, to make me into the person you would like me to be.’ It was a radical invitation for God to put me through whatever was needed to become who I was meant to be. But then the prayer faded. Its visit was over, it had done its work and it moved on. But as I addressed the congregations on those three Sundays I mused aloud that while the prayer of my twenties had departed decades before, I found a new prayer stirring in my forties. Now as the father of teenage boys, my new prayer was, ‘God do whatever you need to do with me to make me the father you would like me to be.’

In the weeks that followed, people asked me whether I had had a good relationship with my dad. The most accurately answer was: we had the best relationship of which we were both capable. We both tried in our own ways to deepen our connection, but we were like the lovers in a romantic comedy; we always managed to miss each other. When he tried with me, I didn’t want to know. For several years, he left a book lying around at home that he wanted me to read. I never saw anyone touch it, but it moved around the house under its own steam. It was by my bedside, in the toilet, on the dining room table… Macavity the Mystery Cat would have been proud. It was called, Things We Wish We Had Said. We may have wished, but we didn’t say. I never read it. Years later, when I tried with him, he was too flustered to respond. Both of us in our own ways lacked the courage to connect any deeper. But I was never in any doubt that he loved me, and I him.

When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious.

He died of a heart attack on a Sunday morning asleep in bed, while my Mum was at church. Almost immediately his absence prompted a profound change of consciousness in me. When he was alive I was most aware of how different we were. I defined myself in opposition to whatever he was. If he was gentle, I was assertive. If he was indecisive, I was ambitious. If he was inexpressive, I was articulate. If he was like that, I was like this. And yet, almost at the very moment of his death, a reversal of awareness occurred. I started to see just how very much like him I was. His gentleness, his uncertainty, his scepticism, his care, his humour, were all mine.

There is a rule in family therapy, that adult children relating to their parents should set their expectations to zero. We never truly see our parents until we stop viewing them through the lens of our own desires; what we wanted from them but never got. Until we do that our lives don’t really work, we sit around waiting for an impossible transformation, a payday that never comes, the moment our parents become exactly how we would like them to be, not as they are. For me, that moment of acceptance for dad only came when he was gone, I accepted him as he was when there was nothing left to accept. I don’t write this with any great sense of guilt or regret at opportunities lost, more with a sense of gratitude for what was given but often taken for granted.

Oddly though, in the shadow of that seismic shift in my interior furniture, I detected the stirrings of an answer to my own prayer to be a better father. No longer compelled to define myself in contrast to what he was, I was freed to be what I was- both like and unlike him, and to be fair, more like him than I cared to admit. At some visceral level I came to appreciate how much of myself originated with him. I came to accept myself as a dad and my dad as a father.