African Christianity Thrived, Long Before White Men Arrived
By Andrew Butterworth, TGC.
Over 685 million people in Africa are associated with Christianity in some way. But amongst this broad acceptance, there’s a murmuring that this ‘religion of the Colonists’ shouldn’t have a place on the continent anymore; that Christianity isn’t African.
Pastoring a church in Johannesburg, South Africa, I hear this complaint periodically. Crudely put, Christianity is the white man’s religion and has no place amongst true Africans. In an era where forming an African identity aside from Colonialism is high on people’s agenda, it’s a compelling argument to some.
Except that it’s not true. For Christianity was present in Africa 1000 years before the first European Colonialists arrived on African shores. Were you aware of that? A whole millennia before any European nation docked their ships, Christianity had been flourishing in Africa—the gospel was already spreading in Africa, by African heralds!
Early African Christianity, Apart from Rome
I am not just talking about the Northern African countries that were part of the Roman Empire and so were Christianised in the first few centuries of Christianity’s spread. No, Christianity initially travelled in three directions from Jerusalem: west into Europe, east into Asia, and south into Africa.
You may be familiar with the strong base for Christianity established in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 1st century. Eusebius even wrote that the Gospel writer, Mark, came to Alexandria as early as 43 AD. But are you aware that in 330 AD, King Ezana of Ethiopia declared Christianity its national religion?
To become the nation’s official religion, it’s likely that Christianity was already established in the country a long time before. For comparison, it took two and a half centuries for Christianity to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. We have some clues to how Ethiopia was reached. Eusebius and Origen, both based in Northern Africa, wrote of Christian preaching occurring in Ethiopia in the 3rd and 4th centuries.
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