www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Does Eastern Christianity exist in Africa?

Friends,

Irish Melkite prompted me to ask a serious question. My patron Saint is St.Athanasios of Alexandria. Father has written an icon of this blessed St., first Doctor of the Church, upon our walls. Before the Muslims came Alexandria was a major Patriarchate of Christianity and was arguably the intellectual center of Christianity. Before the Muslim came and burnt it to the ground the library at Alexandria was the largest in the Western world. For centuries No. Africa formed a major part of the Byzantine Empire.

Neil responded to my post on the French and Muslim combining to overturn elections in the Ivory Coast in part by writing:

"I am having a lot of trouble relating it to Eastern Christianity, Catholic or Orthodox."

Is he correct? Are there no Christians East or West in the Ivory Coast? If there are none should this be a reason why we would not wish to evangelize the area and so discuss it?

As a convert I'm a bit troubled by this. I hope I'm making more out of it than reality justifies. But I've run across this "ghetto" mentality before, several times. Are we to evangelize outside of our prescribed ethnicities or not? Or, are we to keep within the confines of "Greek Catholicism" as our Roman Catholic keepers used to dictate?

Or is the problem that we see ourselves as too small and weak to have any real hope of evangelizing. We are apparently shrinking in the US. What should be our response. Should we simply accept it and die out? Should we see our very existence as a reason to evangelize?

And, for this topic especially, are there really no more Eastern Christians in Africa? I think my medical Dr. would be amused at such a suggestion. He is coptic Christian from Alexandria.

While Annunciation is quite evangelical not only in our community, not only throughout our eparchy, but in the inner city of Chicago, I wish we were more missionary minded. We almost never receive any information from our Christian brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe and never receive any information about missionary work in any other part of the world.

Why?

Dan L

One more thing. There used to be a poster here who called himself "Dr. John". Though we disagreed on some matters I am firmly with him in one area about which he frequently posted. We must be vastly more evangelically minded. I would add, we must be so or we don't deserve to exist. We must be so or we should stop pretending to be a Church.

Where is Dr. John?

Dan L

Dear Dan,

As a Catholic revert from Protestanism, I can relate to the Protestant drive to evangelize. Evangelism and discipleship seem to be the twin pillars of Protestants. Catholics share that, but Catholic evangelization methods differ from Protestants.

There are so many religious orders that are involved in evangelizing around the world I couldn't count them, but I will give you a few examples.

The Holy Ghost Fathers, Franciscans, and Servants of Mary in Africa, Maryknoll Misionaries in many parts of the world. Maryknoll was in China until the Chinese goverment expelled them. The Jesuits and Salesians are in many parts of the worlds with a focus on education.

Catholic Near East Welfare Association is an excellent relief agency for Coptic Catholic and Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Northeast Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and India.

Christian Foundation for Children and aging is a Catholic group that funds misionaries in many countries.

The Catholic Almanac would be a good source to indentfy Catholic organizations that care for the poor and evangelize.

Paul

Dear Dan:

Ivory Coast, having been a former colony of France (gaining her independence in 1960), should have hinted the presence of Christians in that country.

In fact, the fact books indicate that around 30% of the population of 17.2 million are Christian, although Muslims constitute around 40%.

Almost half of the Christians are Catholic, East and West.

The country was first evangelized in the 19th century by the Holy Ghost ("White") Fathers. Native priests were first ordained in 1934. Ivory Coast has the biggest Cathedral in the continent, which was inaugurated by Pope John Paul II in 1990.

There are an estimated 130,000 Lebanese among the populace, which would show the presence of Maronite Catholics. The Lebanese have French as their 2nd or 3rd language, while Ivory Caoast has French as an official language. I don't know if the Orthodox, especially the Coptic, have established missions in the area.

I think the difference between the East and the West is that the Latin Church (and the Protestants for that matter but in an individual sect basis) has a concerted "global" missionary activity, engendered by existing diplomatic relations between the Holy See and 176 countries.

Amado

Dan,

I am sure you will agree that the local church communities can tend to exist in one of either extreme modes: either 'missionary' or 'pastoral.'

Did not Paul's letters to the early church communities reflect a change of mission when it came to preserving the already established communities in Christ?

The problem, I believe, and one in which you may be referring to, is when an existing community begins to decline in numbers (decomposing the Body of Christ) and/or fails to harvest new sheep (building up the Body of Christ).

When a church isn't persecuted or when people fail to value its existence, evangelism is the last thing on the mind. A survival mode is engaged. This is the best time to seriously consider our original co-mission: to BUILD UP THE BODY OF CHRIST. When the ship goes down, we all go down. No preferences. History has shown where and when parts or whole Christian communities have disappeared.

But we can't be 'evangelical' if we don't know WHY we should build up the Body of Christ. If we are convinced that 'church' is nothing but a social institution that can be exchanged on the market of personal needs, then mission never gets outside the plastic wrap.

Another complication is when church leaders opt for the 'Assisted Suicide Model' for ministry. It basically sais that we have given up. This can be due to either laziness and/or ingenuity, lack of funds, having one's hands tied by other churches that have greater power and control, ignorance, and lack of valuation on the part of the youth who were convinced that 'convenience' is the currency of religion.

What churches do in such situations is similar to what business organizations do when trouble hits. A lack of preparedness and a lack of creativity in marketing can ruin a company even if there are inherent cost advantages. In business schools, the 80-20 Rule is taught: 80% of all problems, especially system problems, are the fault of management. 85% of all mergers and acquisitions fail within five years due to competing management cultures. Do we not see the same as evidenced when bigger and more powerful church organizations tend to micro-manage smaller acquisitions?

But church communities can survive despite problems at the home office. I cannot tell you how many times I have witnessed teams of management come and go - often making matters worse than before - but the same employees in the frontlines remain.

The beginning of ANY evangelization is to consider the core business, and that includes the determination of what the main product is. I hate to use 'business' language, but why does church have to be so different if we are dealing with the same people who may act/react the same way in other types of communities?

What IS our core business?

What IS our main product?

Are we excited about it?

I think being a CHRISTian may give us a clue. When we only hear preachers only talk about themselves at the pulpit we are doomed.

Do we know the Scriptures? Do we know what our mission is or is it tucked neatly away in some Metropolitan book of Norms? Can we comprehend what evangelism is or is it something that we only have meetings about?

I think some of our church communities HAVE answered the above questions and ARE doing something about it. Others have not responded. Still, there are others that have but are not getting past the pastor's desk of self-promotion and preservation.

There are many fine examples of our communities growing. They are building up the Body of Christ. We have them to look up to. We need to convey those blessings on other communities so they too can learn how to regroup.

But this is not Africa ...

Joe

The Patriarchates of Alexandria (Coptic AND Greek) has many missions in Africa. As does the Synod in Resistance:

web page [synodinresistance.gr]

web page [synodinresistance.gr]


web page [synodinresistance.gr]

Dear anastasios:

Expanding the question of Dan, I want also to understand the reason why Eastern Christianity, which to me is indigenous to the Middle East and to Northern Africa, is now engulfed within the sea of Islam?

Christianity had the first foothold in these areas but it now appears merely a ghostly shadow of her recent past. Only Ethiopia (and Eritrea) was reached by the Alexandrian Church and stopped there from going Southward and Southwestward.

Is there something in Eastern Christianity that lulls believers into being content with what they have and not sharing it with the "outside" world?

Or, does ethnicity/nationality come into play and, therefore, making it "elitist" or "exclusivist?"

The Catholic Church in Africa is vibrant at around 120 million and is counting on many conversions, with the highest number in vocations among the 5 continents spanned by the Church.

Just wondering.

Amado

Isn't there an Ethiopian Orthodox Church?

Amado,

I don't know why the Eastern Churches have not spread throughout Africa.

Bishop Fulton Sheen said the Church of Africa should be Eastern.

Christ is our peace.

Paul

Yes, it was/is the national Church of Ethiopia and dates from the 5th century. It is non-Chalcedonian like its mother Church of Alexandria.

The Christian population in North Africa (traditionally mostly Coptic) was decimated when Islam conquered. Similar situation as in Asia Minor, the Christians were slaughtered, driven away or (less often) converted to Islam.

Colonial powers brought with them the form of Christianity prevalent in their homelands, hence many RCs and Anglicans in the early colonial days. Later Protestant missionaries arrived. Islam has also mad great inroad in sub-Saharan Africa.

T

There is also a small Ethiopian Catholic Church; I used to attend their liturgies in DC, where they have a seminary....
I have often thought the Ethiopians ought to evangelize the African Americans, who are so often converted to Islam because of its history in Africa. They are unaware of African Christianity, which predates Islam by centuries. There is also a book called "Unbroken Circle", by an African American Orthodox monk [it is hard to tell his jurisdiction from the book] about African Christianity and early African American Christianity.

Dan,

While I certainly think that this thread asks a valid question and is appropriate to the Forum, I stand by the issue that I raised in your other thread , and by my conviction that the original thread had no particular relevance to the Forum as a discussion topic.

Let's put my comment there in context, particularly as you've decided to cite it as somehow having to do with whether or not there are Christians in the Ivory Coast or whether we are or should be evangelizing in Africa, neither of which premises I stated or even suggested, despite you postulating in your reply to me there that

My post at the other thread said:

I stand by that. Your thread was titled "For Those Who Still Think the French and Radical Islam Are Benign". I saw no indication in your cited links, nor any of several news sources, to Islamic involvement in the Ivorian dispute. Additionally, I can find no sources that suggest religion to be a significant factor in the Ivorian elections. Nowhere in your original post, which was pretty much devoid of text and consisted chiefly of the links to a blog, do I see any reference to evangelization. If fact, until you replied to my post above, you never made a single reference to religion except to "pray that the establishment of democratically elected governments in the heart of radical Wahabbist Islam finally breaks the back of world conquests."

I hold to my original point - if you had posted a prayer request for the situation in the Ivory Coast, I'd have been right there with you. As it stands, you took a series of incidents in a single place that resulted in a few tragic deaths to date and used it to promote a political/philosophical agenda that has no relevance to the Forum - and - when called on it, tried to save face by grasping for a relevance that wasn't there in your initial thread or postings to it.

I particularly liked the opening line in your reply to me on the other thread:

Well Dan, I don't know that it has any special relevance, other than suggestions that early Irish monks may have been influenced by their Copt counterparts, but I also don't recollect that I posted anything about Ireland on that thread, nor elsewhere recently. If your reference is to my nick, that I think is none of your business and, in fact, demonstrates the non-ethnicity of my Church, despite your seeming implication in the other thread (and definite one here)

that I support resistence to assimilation and a ghetto mentality, versus evangelization - an implication that I believe most here would find totally at odds with everything I've ever espoused.

Not at all sure where you dredged up that premise. One can list any number of conflicts, anywhere in the world, that are ongoing at any given time, and ask the question - are there any Eastern Christians, Catholic or Orthodox, affected by this? And, much more often than not, the answer will be "yes". Is the situation so significant that it merits being brought to the Forum for discussion? The answer is, generally, "maybe". In the thread you initially created, there was no nexus.

I apologize to my fellow posters for carrying this issue over to this thread, but I find it particularly abhorrent that someone uses my words totally out of context to ascribe a mentality to me that is foreign to everything I have ever promoted. I also have an inherent dislike of being made Dan's excuse for legitimizing a thread that had no rationale in its origins other than to promote his pompous politico-philosophical posturing.

Many years,

Neil

Neil,

I apologize that I stirred up such vitriol in you. I think both of us have better things to do. I do take some offense at your comments here and on the other thread. If you were the forum administrator I know I would take them seriously, but I find them hard to do so from another poster.

Nevertheless, I am thankful that others found my questions valid. And it was Irish Melkite's comments that prompted my question.

Unless the Administrator asks me not to post on the "Town Hall" forum questions about the linkage which seems now to be well established between some European powers and radical Islam I will post what I wish.

Finally, you say that you nick is none of my business. I suppose so. Rather touchy aren't you? My names are none of your business, though I can't imagine why that is so nor what difference it makes one way or another. You aren't a mass murderer in disguise are you?

Dan L

Iconophile,

I have heard there is an Ethiopian Catholic parish here in DC. Can you tell me whereabouts it is? I need to visit it at least once during my studies at CUA.

Thanks
Henry

Henry- It has been a while since I have lived in the DC area; I went back last fall to take my young son, a pandaphile, to see the pandas at the National Zoo. Not only did the traffic drive me crazy [and I once thought nothing of driving crosstown in rush hour], but I got lost more than once. I think the parish/house of studies is on Alabama Ave NE, but I am sure you can confirm that with a phone directory. They also occasionally have liturgies at the National Shrine. I'm sure if you call the shrine they can tell you the times, though it is probably better to visit them at their home. And make sure you visit the Ethiopian restaurants in Adams Morgan for some great spicy finger food, and yeasty flat breads, all washed down with tej , a tasty honey wine.
Neil- good luck reasoning with Dan. He will soon resort to name-calling, I predict, or some other form of insult. It seems clear to me that that other thread was an excuse to bash the French, and strangely, the Muslims.
-Daniel