ABSTRACT
As a churchman whose mind has since 1960 been engaged with such subjects as the planting, the spread, and the fortunes of Christianity in Africa, it seems to me that today four basic problems constitute a formidable, though not an insuperable, challenge to the Church on the continent. Perhaps the most important of these problems, to which the attention of those genuinely concerned about the Church in Africa has been drawn increasingly in our generation, is how the transplanted churches from Europe and the New World are to be transformed into the Church of God in which African culture can integrate, in which the African can worship uninhibited emotionally or psychologically ‘in spirit and in truth’. Second, there is the problem of how institutionalized Christianity in Africa is to acquire an identity and self-dignity of its own as a unit within the organic whole of the Church Universal, in the manner of the virile ‘historic’ churches in Europe and the New World of which the churches in Africa are the offspring. Third, the Church in Africa has got to contend with the demon of nationalism per se, a veritable obstacle capable of preventing the African Church from acquiring a global outlook through co-operation with other races in the spirit of comradeship and oneness in Christ. Last, but by no means least, the Church in Africa has got to inhale the air of ecumenism, deal the mortal blow to sectarianism, and weld together Christian communities in the direction of unity at regional and continental levels.
