AKŨRINŨ VERNACULAR THEOLOGY

Abstract

One of the perennial challenges that face Africans is an acute lack of confidence in themselves, their institutions, and anything African. A number of historical happenings have conspired to reduce the African to a pitiable being who looks to the white man as his savior in both socio-political and socio-economic struggles. The conspiracies range from slave trade, the scramble for Africa, the colonial and missionary enterprise, to the post-independent nation-states that replaced the white colonial master with a black one, and the current exploitation of the Africa through the second scramble for her resources in neo-colonial policies. The result has is an African who has lost his identity and self-worth, reduced to a beggar; ever seeking affirmation and authentication from anywhere but Africa. The historical injustices dented the personhood of Africans through “displacement” which came either in the form of alienation from their land and what was familiar (through slavery and eviction from their ancestral land by colonial regime). The insult of her culture as well when the colonialists and missionaries found nothing of value in the African material culture or traditional religions that could have facilitated what the West advocated as the civilization agenda for Africa. In the end Africa has continued to pursue a development and a moral agenda that is incompatible with her ethos, nor her way of life, ever playing catch up. The battle to reclaim the African personhood is pegged on this – to recover her culture as her God-given heritage where she can anchor her morality, religious experience, development agenda, and from where she can recover her identity in the light of the ultimate revelation of God through the Written Word (Bible) and the Living Word (Jesus Christ), in whom all the fullness of the deity lives in bodily form, Col 2: 9, enabled by the Holy Spirit. Any effort that does not seek to recover this lost aspect of human nature is a mirage which can only be trusted to deepen the African woes further. The Akũrinũ church vernacular theology has shown us, even if in a miniature way, that it is possible to build theology upon African Culture: A culture that has given the African a sense of confidence in himself as a worthy creature before her creator God, who longs to reveal Himself to a continent that remains an enigma of wonder and resilience to our world, to create a new community that is able to respond to the African psyche while at the same time being true to the Word of God. In this study we have discussed the Akũrinũ vernacular theology in the context of Emmanuel Katongole’s discourse of discontuity and Kwame Bediako’s continuity of African Tradition Religions, in chapter two. Chapter three traces the founding of the Akũrinũ Church in the context the troubled socio-economic challenges of the Agĩkũyũ as they encountered the missionaries and the colonial regime. Chapter four presents the findings from the field while chapter five suggest the implications of these findings to the glowing search for global theology before drawing a conclusion and recommendations in chapter six.