Africa is putting its own stamp on Christianity while also breathing life into the church here, writes Joe Humphreysin Johannesburg
The first pilgrims will arrive today, dismounting from hired buses and clapped-out cars into the inevitable sunshine. As the day progresses, the numbers will swell until a million voices fill the barren landscape around Moria, in South Africa's northern province of Limpopo.
Each year the ritual is the same. Members of the five-million strong Zionist Christian Church (ZCC) will flock here from across the subcontinent. The men will perform the mkhukhu, a traditional foot-stomping dance that kicks clouds of brown dust into the air. The women will sing gospel tunes, and cook huge pots of food for the travelling hoards.
It is a worshipping marathon - three days of sermons and prayer - conducted in a colourful environment of spiritual healers, Zulu royalty and enterprising hawkers, selling everything from Bibles to roasted mealie (corn) cobs.
Many pilgrims have to save all-year-round to attend the festival, which might not match Mecca's Islamic Hajj for scale but goes down as one of the biggest single Christian pilgrimages in the world.
"Easter is huge - bigger than Christmas - for Africans. It is the amalgamation of our faith," says Kenosi Mofokeng, a prominent figure in South Africa's indigenous church scene. "We believe in the Holy Spirit, and we follow the Holy Spirit wherever it takes us - even if it disrupts our service," she adds, alluding to the local custom of breaking into song during worship.
The Moria pilgrimage is a potent symbol of how Christianity has seized the imagination of Africans. In little more than a century, the continent's Christian population has jumped from fewer than 10 million to more than 400 million. By some estimates, this figure will exceed 600 million by 2025, thus placing Africa ahead of Europe in the size of its Christian congregation.
At the same time, however, Africa is putting its own distinctive stamp on the world's largest faith. The fastest-growing churches on the continent are "African independent" ones - otherwise known as AICs - which have blended Bible teaching with traditional customs.
"We don't want the mainline churches to Africanise, and we don't want to become western either," says Mofokeng, a bishop in the African Progressive Baptist Church, one of a plethora of South Africa-based AICs.
Educated in a Catholic school in Lesotho, she says the perceived arrogance of Western missionaries drove many people away from the "mainline" churches to indigenous ones. "We were taught that Africans are just the devil's children, that dancing was hedonistic, and that our ancestors are in hell because they were not Christians at the time. No, we can't accept these things."
LIKE THE ZCC - the largest African independent church in Southern Africa - and, indeed, most other churches of that ilk, her particular congregation comprises mainly the poor. Preachers or "leaders" are ordinary folk - labourers, domestic workers, and the like. Worship takes place each Sunday at a river or hillside of local significance. Mofokeng preaches in a run-down shed that was once used for breeding rabbits. Her congregation sits on an array of chairs - many of them collected from rubbish dumps - before an "altar" that doubles up as an office desk.
Mofokeng notes that when she meets clergy from other churches they sometimes ask her to convert. "They say, 'You have got an education. Why stay in that mud?' I say, 'That mud is my church!' The indigenous churches are the churches of the poor, and we are happy there."
The growth and proliferation of AICs has caused some worry in the Catholic and "mainline" Protestant communities. As well as battling perceptions of elitism, such European-based churches are finding it harder to recruit people from Africa to the religious life.
In the Catholic Church, seminaries from Nairobi to Cape Town have reported a slump in applications. Fr Roger Hickley, a parish priest of part-Irish heritage in South Africa, says African seminaries were "bursting at the seams" until very recently, but "it may well be a challenge" to find priests in the future.
He says the religious life has traditionally been perceived as a vehicle for "upward mobility". "People want to get a good education and have some power and control, and the priesthood offers an opportunity - not unlike the situation in Ireland 50 or 60 years ago when one member of a family was almost propelled into the priesthood."
Some clergy believe this phenomenon will be less pronounced in Africa as development spreads, and employment opportunities grow. A decline in seminarians, however, may well be matched by an increase in parishioners.
"I don't want to over-generalise," says Fr Hickley, "but I would say that the more educated and the more boringly middle-class people are, the more likely they are to belong to the mainline churches."
TO SOME CATHOLIC and Protestant clergy, AICs are little more than a hotchpotch of superstitions and crude Bible-reading. Even Bishop Mofokeng admits learning could be improved - which is why she helped establish a training institute for indigenous churches a decade ago. The school started with just 35 Rand (€3.50) in the bank. Today, it owns its own retreat centre on the grounds of a former pig farm at Walkerville, 30km south of Johannesburg.
The 1,500-plus "priests" who come through the school each year are taught how to read the Bible so they in turn can instruct people on a range of issues, from the role of animal sacrifices in church to the question of whether condoms should be encouraged to stop the spread of Aids. "We believe in abstinence - not condoms," says Mofokeng. "We are at one with the Catholic Church on that."
In general, indigenous churches are less politically-oriented, focus on the Old Testament rather than the New, and place a heavy emphasis on spiritual - or even physical - healing during worship. Some churches controversially depict Jesus as an "ancestor" - of either African or global origin. This is in keeping with the strong strain of ancestor-worship within African traditions.
Ndumiso Ngada, head of the African Spiritual Churches Association, a representative body for AICs in South Africa, says misunderstandings are commonplace. "When we say 'Jesus is an ancestor' we are not saying 'Jesus is from our lineage,' " says the bearded scholar, who is an archbishop in his own church. "Our ancestors may call you to do good work and heal people. But we don't equate God's power with ancestral power."
Confusion around such issues prompted one group of scholars to try to codify African Christian beliefs. The project involved 70 theologians from across the continent, and took 12 years to complete, culminating last year in the publication of what has been described as the "African Bible" - a one-volume commentary on the Old and New Testaments (see panel). Editor Tokunboh Adeyemo, a Nigerian evangelical, said the initiative stemmed from a recognition among Protestant leaders that "the church in Africa was a mile long in terms of quantity, but only an inch deep in term of quality."
Some African churches, especially those closely allied to Pentecostal and Baptist movements, have begun exporting their brand of Christianity from the continent. One Lagos-based church boasts more than 200 "parishes" in the US alone.
Ireland has not been untouched by this reverse missionary effect. Decades after Irish priests and nuns left for the "dark continent" in their droves, Africans are returning to set up their own churches in immigrant communities. Some Africans are also coming to Ireland to fill vacancies in the Catholic Church, thus fulfilling a prophecy of the late Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, who predicted in the late 1980s that Ireland would be evangelised by African missionaries because of a slump in national vocations.
FR SAMUEL IGBAFE, a curate at St Patrick's, Dundalk, Co Louth, is one of the new arrivals. A Nigerian, he says he has been "pleasantly surprised" by the response of parishioners. "The change was big for the people because many of them had not seen a black priest. But I would say 85 per cent of people have been very positive . . . and I have never had any racist incidents." Like many Catholics in Africa, he is a self-proclaimed "conservative" on the question of integrating indigenous customs with religion.
"You can't eat your cake and have it. Some of our African traditional beliefs are totally in contradiction with Christian faith," he says. "If you are slaughtering animals in the church you are saying Jesus has not done it all, and that you need something to supplement faith."
Ordained a decade ago, he has seen at close-hand the growth of AICs. Asked whether they might threaten the presence of the Catholic Church in Africa, he replies: "Ten years ago I would have been afraid of that but not any more. Many people who went to these churches felt there was no theology or spirituality to hold onto. At the moment, a lot of people are coming back to where they came from."
Whatever about the future of AICs, Catholicism may be altered irrevocably by the spread of Christianity in Africa. African clergy are increasingly taking up positions of power in Rome. While this may not influence core theology, it could change the Vatican's political priorities and perhaps also its cultural focus.
Fr Igbafe, for one, believes the hierarchy should play a much stronger role "speaking out against corruption and bad governance" in Africa. He also thinks Europeans can learn a thing or two from the way Africans worship.
"Life is very communitarian in Africa. But here in Europe people feel the church belongs to the priest. That is not good. I would like to see local people play a more active role in the church, and even to have lay people trained to give homilies."
Fr Igbafe has already begun experimenting with a few African traditions at St Patrick's. Introducing more music in ceremonies, and encouraging married couples to preach at weddings, might not sound like much of a revolution, but it could be the start of a subtle change in mood at parishes across Ireland.
"When I say Mass here I try to sing a couple of times, and people love it," he says. "But I try not to overdo it . . . I would not like to turn Mass into a song and dance club."
