Applying the principles of social action in contemporary Christian mission in Africa

Abstract

This article examined the need to apply the principles of social action in contemporary mission work in Africa. Early missionary enterprises in Africa employed some forms of social action but it is a historical fact that the missionary agents may have failed to adhere to the principles of social action. Thus, they ministered to Africans as masters and not servants, and as leaders and not facilitators which is contrary to the principles of social action. This may be considered as the reason African converts could not learn to do it themselves. The missionaries did not believe that the African people, especially the converts, had any skill, experience, or understanding that they could draw to tackle the problems they faced as a people. They also did not recognize the fact that all people have the right to be heard, to define the issues facing them, and to take action on their behalf. These are pieces of evidence of failure to apply the principles of social action on the part of the earlier missionaries who worked in Africa. This article recommends that for more effective missionary enterprise, contemporary Christian missionaries in Africa should study the interface between mission work and social action and pay strict adherence to the principles of social action in their work. The phenomenological method with ex post facto research design was employed for the research. Data were collected through both primary and secondary sources and qualitative descriptive analysis of the data was accordingly carried out. It was discovered that the need to apply social action principles in contemporary mission work in Africa is superlative.

Keywords

society social action Christianity mission evangelism

Introduction

Social action is all about people coming together to help solve the problems that are important in society. Social action theorists see society as a product of human activity. MacKinnon and David (2010) agrees that social action is people coming together to tackle an issue, support other people, or improve their local area. Social action examines smaller groups within society. Kanagy (1992) comments that it involves people giving their time and other resources for the common good in a range of forms—from volunteering to community-owned services and peer networks to community organizing.

Social action, therefore, refers to practical actions exhibited in the service of others. This service can be rendered by an individual or groups of people who are not mandated in any way nor working for profit. Their certification is the good social change and values the works they render bring to other people, communities, and/or society. Social action can be practiced by anyone with the motive of adding value to human life without necessarily making any kind of profit. It includes all sorts of activities whose primary goal is improving the physical, socioeconomic, and political well-being of people through relief, development, and structural change.

The cardinal interface between social action and Christian mission is that society which refers to a group of organized people is the subject on which social action and mission are enacted with the common objective of bringing about positive social change. Anugwom and Igbo (2001) see society as an organized institution where people come together for mutual benefit, which normally defines the aim or interest that initiates the relationship. Within the context of this grammatical usage, therefore, two positive, life-enhancing activities—social action and Christian mission—are here addressed. Both of them attract voluntary labor in the direction of affecting the lives of people in society positively. Christian missionaries explore the opportunity social action can provide to lure people to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and personal savior. Social action, therefore, is one of the various means Christian missionaries employ to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. This emphasis applauds Ononogbu’s (2011) option that the proper way to distinguish evangelism and social action is in terms of intention. It also reveals that evangelism and social action have a different commission but they are also interdependent.

The employment of social action in preaching the gospel is an ancient practice. Horton (2006) notes that the ministry of Jesus Christ is seasoned with feeding 5000 or 4000 people, healing the sick, opening the eyes of the blind, healing the disabled, influencing Zacchaeus to shun bribery and extortion, and healing the servant of a Centurion. All these miraculous actions brought joy, hope, happiness, and peace to the society. The 38-year-old sick man at the pool of Bethsaida must have walked back home to contribute his quota to the development of his family after he was healed by Jesus Christ. Jesus also taught human empowerment, justice, and peace. He taught a huge crowd of people at various locations, and one such teaching that is most remarkable is the beatitude. In Matt 5:16 Jesus preserved the currency of the Old Testament command to establish justice in the gate (Amos 5:15). He commanded his disciples when he sent them out for mission (Matt 10:8), not only to announce the approaching of the reign of God but also to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons. The disciples of Jesus Christ replicated the same action in the early church in such a way that there were no needy in their midst (Acts 2:43–47). Boer (1976) reports that the medieval church at one point became the hope of the masses. Germany, for instance, has a history of paying taxes to the church for social development. Onyeidu (2004) acknowledges that in the 19th century the missionaries that evangelized Africa also established schools, hospitals, and skill-acquisition centers. He noted that many Africans embraced Christianity because of its economic advantage.

Ironically, however, the church has failed to transform the society as she has been immersed deep in the society. The faith and doctrines of the church are divided within the numerous denominations that are looking for a platform to outwit each other in population and material prosperity. No doubt, the churches are seriously embarking on evangelism. They spend a lot conducting revival programs, open-air crusades, church planting, and other forms of evangelistic ventures. They also practice social action by creating orphanages, NGOs, medical outreaches, monitoring of elections, agricultural investments, and donation of relief materials to displaced persons. However, the motive and approach of the church towards social action are often misdirected, hence the ineffectiveness of the church’s message in most cases. More often than not, the motive behind evangelistic ventures is materialistic and approaching commercial. The ultimate aim, in most cases, is to raise a large crowd in order to harvest the money in their pockets during programs, hence the success of evangelistic programs is often measured on the basis of the amount of money raised instead of the number of souls won for Christ and the number of lives touched.

The root cause of this situation is the failure of the pioneer missionaries in Africa to apply the principles of social action in their work. With the aid of the colonial authorities they simply transplanted Eurocentric Christianity with its attendant capitalist culture into the African soil, hence the foreign gospel seedling could not take root in the soil. It is against this backdrop that one sees the uncompromising need to analyze the concepts and principles of social action so that they can be applied in Christian mission and evangelism in contemporary African society to avoid the error of the mission work of the past which produced Christian converts, many of whom are shallow-rooted and without true commitment to the Christian faith.

Concept of Christian mission

In Christian terminology, mission refers to the process of propagation of the Christian faith. Mission has been defined as “a committed and systematic programme of propagation of the Christian faith among non-Christian people” (Diara, 2009b: 5). This was the main task the Lord Jesus Christ committed to the church from inception. St. Paul, more than any other apostle, took the mandate up soon after his conversion and became the first well-known missionary in the history of Christianity. Apart from his missionary journeys and other legendary missionary ventures attributed to the apostles, unknown missionaries carried the gospel to the limits of the Roman world (Livingstone, 1977).

Etymologically, the term mission was derived from the Latin mitto, meaning “to send.” Missions often involve sending individuals known as missionaries across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries, for the purpose of conversion to the Christian faith, hence a Christian mission is an organized effort to spread Christianity (Encylopedia Britannia online). Agha (1999: 9) corroborates the above point thus: “Christian mission simply means an act of sending Christians out to proclaim the gospel of Christ to the unconverted throughout the world according to the great commission of Christ.”

Mission involves evangelism, which is preaching a set of Christian beliefs for the purpose of conversion. Evangelism is a common word today in Christendom. It is used to explain the Christian activity of preaching to convince people to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and personal savior. Moreau, Netland, and Engen (2000) explain that evangelism was coined from the Greek word euangelion, which literally means “gospelling.” Thus, evangelism refers to an act which has to do with the gospel. Within this context the gospel refers to the teachings, ministry, and life of Jesus Christ. Evangelism is one way Christians fulfill Christ’s call to be witnesses (Acts 1:8). Stalnaker (2002) notes that a witness of Jesus Christ demonstrates Christ’s love by showing love to others, presenting reverence to God as taught by Christ through church worship, showing Christ’s work of salvation through the celebration of the Eucharist, and creating awareness of our relationship with Christ through prayer, fasting, and other Christian religious activities. In this vein, Stalnaker argues that witnessing without preaching the gospel is not evangelism.

Evangelism aims at winning souls for Christ and facilitating the campaign of “let all of entire humankind hear and understand the message of the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ,” hence evangelism also involves social welfare and eco-care. The effectiveness of mission and evangelism to a great extent depends on how positively disposed missionaries are to the welfare of the people to whom they are sent and how well they relate to the natural environment in which they lives with the people. Mission is thus a human and environment-friendly program meant to touch the entire spiritual, physical, and social lives of the people to whom the missionary is sent (Diara, 2009b). The Markan version of the Great Commission authenticates this fact: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), indicating that the gospel is not only meant for human beings.

Mission involves humanitarian work, especially among the poor and disadvantaged (Encyclopedia Britannica online). Missionaries therefore are committed to preaching the Christian faith, and sometimes, to the administration of sacraments, and to provision of humanitarian assistance to improve the lives of the natives of the mission field. Thus, mission does not only entail verbal proclamation of the gospel. In one commissioning of the disciples for the work of evangelism, Christ commanded them not only to preach the gospel but also to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons (Matt 10:8). A very important aspect of mission is, therefore, showing love and care to the people and to all that pertains to them, including their environmental and social factors. Thus, Christian mission uses social action for soul-winning and social transformation.

Weaknesses of pioneer missionary enterprises in Africa

By the pioneer missionary enterprises in Africa here is meant the missionary activities of the European missionaries who planted Christianity in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. The history of Christianity in Africa for many centuries before the 19th was like a trickling stream through the desert. Within this period, missionary activity died in the whole of northern Africa with total extinction of Christianity in Nubia and North Africa, leaving a somewhat inactive presence of Christianity in Egypt and Ethiopia. Carthage, the last Christian stronghold in North Africa, fell to the Arabs in 697 (Baur, 1994: 17). The subsequent reign of the Muslim Arabs in almost all the northern African countries thus brought to a halt any meaningful missionary advance in Africa. The second phase of missionary incursion in Africa came as a result of the Crusade efforts by Christian Portugal in the 15th century. The missionary enterprises of this period were mainly cosmetic and most of the missionary efforts ended in a fiasco. It was in the 19th century that Africa began to experience a resurgence of missionary work.

The history of Christian missions in Africa should thus be divided chronologically into three major phases: the early, the medieval, and the modern. The early phase was the period of the early church’s missionary expansion to the northern part of Africa beginning, most likely, from the 1st century; the medieval phase was the period of the Portuguese missionary enterprises in Africa; while the modern phase was the era of the missionary enterprises which came to the continent as a result of evangelical revival and the abolition of slave trade in the 19th century.

The landmark achievements of the 19th-century missionary agents, notwithstanding their missionary enterprises, were marked with fundamental failures. No doubt, the missionaries succeeded in planting Christianity and introducing formal education and orthodox medicare in Africa. They also made available in Africa some of the useful technical and scientific skills developed in Europe. With the assistance of the colonial authorities, they fought and abolished many age-long inhuman practices in Africa, like the killing of twins, human sacrifice, and the killing of children perceived to be witches, and so on (Diara, 2009a). Due to the fact that the colonial authorities were looking at Africa and Africans from the European perspective, the Christian faith they introduced in Africa could not take root in the African soil. Christianity for the African thus became simply a matter of copying the European style of life. This may have made the missionaries succeed in abolishing Africa’s socioreligious and cultural order, thus producing the brand of Christianity that is essentially alien to the African, namely Eurocentric Christianity.

Rountree (2009) opines that non-European peoples continue to resent the missionaries that evangelized their areas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even later-day European missionaries themselves have come to appreciate this resentment or disapproval. Both sides are therefore agreed that the great achievements of the missionaries are punctuated by a number of weaknesses or failures. According to him, one of the greatest weaknesses of the missionaries is their Eurocentric attitude and shallow understanding of Christian mission which gave them a very myopic outlook on African culture and religion. They saw everything African as bad and unchristian, including the people’s mode of dress.

The pioneer missionaries to Africa thus condemned African culture and religion as heathenism, fetishism, idolatry, juju (devilish) paganism, and animism (Ugwu and Ugwueye, 2004). Conversion for them, therefore, meant changing their converts into being like them in all respects, including values, norms, and ethos. Bourdillon (1973) concluded that they erred by refusing to understand Africans and characterized their religion as either nonexistent or devilish. Bediako (1999) also laments that Western missionaries failed by not regarding African religious beliefs as a foundation for faith in Christ.

African beliefs, contrary to the judgment of the missionaries, are not “dead works” but an inauguration, a foundation and stimulation for the Christian faith. African religious life is not just a scaffold, but it contains ingredients that qualify it to be a foundational religion for the Christian (Bediako, 1999 and Nyirongo, 1997). As Tutu (1978: 366) puts it,

It is reassuring to know that Africans have had a genuine knowledge of God and that they have had their own ways of achieving communion with the deity, ways which meant that they were able to speak authentically and not as pale imitators of others. It means that they can fashion new ways of speaking to and about God and develop new styles of worshipping reliably with invigorated faith.

But in the opinion of the missionaries, Africans have no mental capacity, no history, no experiences, no rights, no skills, and above all, no knowledge of God. So, all about life needed to be founded afresh for them. To worsen matters, the missionaries introduced division into the hitherto peaceful society. They brought in the issue of denominationalism and their conflicting national interests thereby making it impossible for the people to function as a group in every respect, hence their missionary approach ran counter to social action principles.

Principles of social action

Great scholars have over time modified this concept involving both the public and private sector in this act. However, the models as presented by the New Economics Foundation in collaboration with the Office for Civil Society, Department for Culture, Media and Sport (2018) look modern and all-embracing.

Table 1 provides nine models of social action which involve individual collaborators, government support, and community-based support. Every social action falls under one or two of the models and is guided by some clearly defined principles of social action. The principles have been developed over the years on the basis of Max Weber’s (1991) theory of social action and subsequently modified by contemporary sociology scholars:

Table 1

Social action models.

Type	Definition
Formal volunteering	The use of volunteers, through an established framework to enhance and add capacity to public service delivered by a public organization or voluntary and community organization.
Time credits	A time-based currency exchange mechanism that incentivizes and supports people to volunteer in and outside of public services. One time credit is earned for every hour spent contributing and can be spent on receiving support or using a local facility.
Peer support	The mutual and reciprocal exchange of emotional and practical support between peers in and outside of public service.
Advocacy and social movement	People volunteering their time to make the case for changes or improvements to public services. This can be initiated by individuals, communities, charities, unions, or other civil society organizations.
Coproduction	A relationship where professionals and citizens share power to plan and deliver support together, recognizing that both partners have vital contributions to make in order to improve the quality of life for people and communities
Community asset ownership	The legal transfer of a public or private assets (e.g. buildings or parks) to a formalized community group or organization to own and manage for the community benefit.
Cooperatively owned services	Local services that are owned and managed cooperatively by a range of local stakeholders—service users, members of the local community, and public sector workers.
Community organizing	An approach to community empowerment and development that focuses on one-to-one relationship building community capacity, and mobilizing people-power to take action and address social inequality.
Befriending and helping	This informal type of social action can range from doing the shopping for an elderly neighbor to helping a young person with their homework.

1. Social action is committed to social justice. Social action workers strive to challenge inequality and oppression in relation to gender, sexuality, disability, age, class, religion, race, and any other form of social differentiation. Social action is about fighting for fairness, equality, and justice, and this needs to be stated in clear terms. Social action workers recognize that injustice, discrimination, and oppression exist and therefore take a stance against it in all their work.

2. The belief that all people have skills, experience, and understanding on which they can draw to tackle the problems they face. Social action workers understand that people are experts in their own lives and they use this as a starting point for their work. Their work therefore is to help to uncover what is already there, to encourage people to use the insights and knowledge they possess to bring about changes in their own lives.

3. The fact that all people have rights, including the right to be heard, the right to define the issues facing them, and the right to take action on their own behalf. Social action workers believe that people have the right to define themselves and not have negative labels imposed on them. Ordinary people’s right to be involved in the changes that affect them, to have a voice and a stake in the society they live in, is fundamental to social action work. The right to name their world, to define themselves and the world around them, is something social action insists on. Too often people have to fight against labels imposed on them, or the places they live in, for the ease of policymakers and professionals. This is an example of social action.

4. Injustice and oppression are complex issues rooted in social policy, the environment, and the economy. Social action workers understand that people may have problems as individuals but these problems can translate into common concerns. They recognize that there are many different problems in individuals’ lives about which they may feel overwhelmed and daunted or even feel blamed. Social action gives people the opportunity to break free from this negative view, understand their individual problems in a wider, political context, and to do something about organizing to overcome them.

5. People working collectively can be powerful. People who lack the power and influence to challenge injustice and oppression as individuals can gain it through working with other people in a similar situation. Oppression is maintained through isolation and division, though it is experienced by the majority. The job of social action workers is to bring people together so that they can share their experiences and pool their resources and skills together to fight injustice. Finding common cause may give individuals the willpower to tackle complex issues than they might have dared as individuals.

6. Social action work is not leadership but facilitation. Social action workers’ job is to enable people to make decisions for themselves and take ownership of whatever outcome that may ensue. Everybody’s contribution to this process is equally valued and it is vital that none of such contributions is accorded privilege. Social action workers value all skills and knowledge equally, making no distinction between experience and formal qualifications. Their job strategy is to work alongside the group, resisting the temptation either to become a group member or a group leader (Horton, 2006 ).

Applying social action principles in Christian mission

It is necessary to apply social action principles in the work of contemporary Christian mission to avoid the problem of having mission products who will be shallow-rooted in the faith. This can be achieved by aligning mission and evangelism programs with any one or two of the social action models and adhering strictly to the principles of social action in both the planning and implementation of the programs. Fundamentally, such programs must be born out of a burden to affecting people’s lives positively. Social action oriented mission must be based on a burden for soul winning and social enhancement. Matt 25:31–45 portrays the primary motivating factor of mission as a Christlike burden to affecting human life. This burden must be turned into a task which means additional responsibility hence social action mission needs planning, vision, and courage to execute.

The mission is hardly a sole venture because of its broad nature, hence one of the cardinal virtues that facilitates social action mission is the ability of the missionary to share and involve like-minded personalities in the implementation of his visions. Social action mission does not give room for sentiment, prejudice, racism, or nepotism. It functions above political, economic, social, religious, and cultural bias.

One thing that strongly discourages social action evangelism and mission is hostility. When the host community is far from being receptive to the missionaries, social action evangelism becomes a struggle. Basic principles of relationship, like respecting the power that is in the host community early enough in the cause of the mission, are healthy social action attitudes. The part that honesty, sincerity, and integrity in mission play in social action evangelism cannot be overemphasized. Missionaries must be ready to deliver on their evangelism promises. They must be ready to invest time, money, and other resources in the mission. They must also learn to practice what they preach and use everything available to them to showcase unconditional love for the people.

Contemporary missionaries in Africa should be committed to social justice among the people they seeks to evangelize. They should strive to challenge inequality and oppression and to fight for fairness, equality, and justice in society. They should also understand that the people are experts in their own lives and use this understanding as a starting point for their missionary work. It should be their goal to help the people to uncover what is already there among them and to encourage them to use the same to bring about changes in their own lives. They should recognize that the people have rights, including the right to be heard, the right to define the issues facing them, and the right to take action on their own behalf. The right of the people to be involved in the changes that affect them, to have a voice and a stake in the society they live in, is fundamental to the work of mission. Missionaries should help the people to fight against labels imposed on them, or the places they live in for whatever reason.

Contemporary Christian mission should be able to allow the natives to break free from any negative view about themselves, understand their problems in a wider, political context, and to do something positive towards overcoming them. Contemporary missionaries should therefore see it as their God-given duty to bring the oppressed together so that they can share their experiences and pool their resources and skills together to fight any form of oppression and injustice against them. When such people find a common cause to fight for they will possess the willpower to tackle complex issues they might not be able to attempt as individuals. In doing their work the missionaries should not see themselves as leaders but facilitators, making no distinction between their formal qualifications and the people’s experiences. This attitude will create the enabling avenue for the people to identify their potential and to develop their own skills and knowledge which they need to develop themselves not only spiritually but also socially.

Had it been that the earlier European missionaries to Africa applied social action principles to their mission work, their prejudice and sentiments against Africans and everything African would not have surfaced in the course of their work. They would have been able to hide their feelings at least as long as they labored in the African mission field. If it were so they would have been able to discover the very many positive aspects of African culture and religion would have served as the effective starting point for their preaching and teaching. Such rich religious and cultural values as the fear of the gods, communal socioeconomic systems, high moral consciousness, and social solidarity could have been exploited for a more effective and deep-rooted missionary enterprise among Africans.

Recommendations

The practice of employing social action in mission and evangelism in Africa is ancient and modern. However, the missionaries that planted Christianity in Africa failed to employ social action in line with its principles, and consequently, the modern practice of social action among contemporary missionaries and evangelists has been characterized by a high level of materialism and selfishness, hence the following recommendations:

For more effective mission work, contemporary Christian missionaries in Africa should exploit the fundamental importance of doing mission as a typical social action by paying strict adherence to the principles of social action in their work.

Contemporary African churches and Christian ministries should explore alternative viable means of income for the funding of their evangelism/missionary programs other than direct taxing of the people for whose benefit the programs are meant.

There should be a paradigm and attitudinal change by African Christians and churches in order to institute the love of God above materialism, which is the bane of true social action in Africa.

Governments and NGOs in Africa should support and partner with evangelical missions in rural areas of the continent to ensure grassroots development in African countries.

African Christians and churches should engage themselves not only in internal mission within their countries but also in international missions to countries that are less endowed than theirs.

Conclusion

This article discussed the fundamental importance of applying social action principles in contemporary Christian mission in Africa. The pioneer missionaries that planted the Christian church in Africa did not adhere to the principles of social action in their work, hence both they and their converts could not understand the full implication of the Lord’s mandate for the church to preach the gospel to all creation (Mark 16:15). Although the church has not abandoned the business of preaching the gospel and even the provision of social services, there is a need to do so in consonance with the principles of social action. If this is done, the problem of the shallowness of profession of the Christian faith among contemporary African Christians will be tackled as churches and Christian ministries in Africa will make their work of mission and evangelism a practice of assisting individuals and communities towards self-actualization.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Favour Uroko

Author biographies

Benjamin Diara, PhD, is a senior lecturer at the Department of Religion and Cultural Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he teaches Christian history and doctrine, church history, and mission, among other topics.

Favour Uroko is a doctoral student at the Department of Religion and Cultural Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

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