Next Christendom

Mbiti’s vision of the impact of the gospel on culture justifies Philip Jenkins’s description of Southern Hemisphere Christianity as “the next Christendom.” For Mbiti, Christianity is “a total way of life, a world view, a religious ideology (if one may phrase it that way), an existence and a commitment – by individuals, peoples, cultures and nations. It involves reflection and practice; institutions and attitudes; and the creation and adoption of traditions. It means an eventual domestication of the gospel, in its wider sense, within the total milieu of a people. The gospel grows into the people and they grow into it.”

While the statistical growth of African Christianity will inevitably tail off, Mbiti hopes for continuing growth “in the levels of culture, social institutions, theology, liturgy, artistic expressions and ecclesiastical structure.” The end result is “a Christianity arising out of and rooted in African life, a Christianity that frames the normal way of life for the majority of the population in the southern two thirds of Africa.” Already (in 1986), Mbiti was seeing the development of a “folk religion,” in which African traditions transformed and completed by the gospel becomes the culture of African peoples.