There are more details of the proposal on my other blog, here. Comments and suggestions welcome.

The course was held in an orphanage run by Fr Frumentius Taubata and Matushka Evgenia, and about half the children were from the orphanage, and about half from nearby shanty towns Brazzaville and Siyahlala. We had about 25 children and 25 adults attending for the week. At the end Deacon Nektarius said that if they rememberd a third of what they had been taught in the week, they would know as much as, if not more than, most cradle Orthodox in this country.

Deacon Nektarius teaching at Atteridgeville

If anyone is intereted in knowing more, there are fuller reports on my Khanya blog, with pictures.

They come from various countries, mostly from Africa.

I hope it might be possible to continue the conversation on Usenet or other forums, and perhaps involve a wider group, including people who weren’t able to be there.

Here are three blog posts I’ve posted, covering the conference, and each has links to more:

1. Postcolonialism - http://bit.ly/2puC2s
2. Adriaan Vlok - truth & reconciliation http://bit.ly/110GFC
3. Brian McLaren, Bishop Paul Verryn, xenophobia http://bit.ly/18NG5E

There are also links to places where you can download recordings of papers read, etc.

So if possible read some of these, and share your thoughts, either here, or in the Christianity and Society discussion forum.

Amahoro has largely been supported by people interested in the emerging/missional church movement.

There has been a rapid growth in gated communities in South Africa, and I’ve looked at some of the ways in which they are a missional problem in this post.

Does anyone else see gated communities as a missional problem?

How do you cope with it?

One of the things I have been doing is blogging about and writing this phenomenon, most recently in Neopentecostalism in Africa and abroad.

To put it in a nutshell — the Christianity that is emerging in Africa, and the people in Africa who identify themselves as “the emerging church” are two very different things. There is the emerging chrch on the one hand, and the emerging conversation on the other, and never the twain shall meet. The first is a way of walking, the second is a way of talking.

I became especially aware of this a couple of days ago when I read on another blog about activities of a Nigerian evangelist from the the Redeemed Christian  Church of God (RCCG) in New York.

It sparked my interest because one of my projects is a database of African Independent Churches. The RCCG wasn’t in my database, but it went in pretty quickly because it is pretty much a paradigm case of the kind of Christianity that is emerging in Africa. You could say it is the “emerging church” <I>par excellence</i>.

The RCCG started off as an Aladura church — these are “praise churches” of West Africa, “Spirit-type” (ie pentecostal) African independent churches (AICs) similar to the Zionist-Apostolic churches in South Africa. The founder was baptised Anglican, spent some time in the Cherubim and Seraphim (an Aladura church) and then broke away to form his own denomination. Like many AIC leaders, he was illiterate. When he got old, he looked for someone he could groom as his successor and picked a maths lecturer from the university, who took over when the old man died.

The new leader, who took over in 1981, reinvented and rebranded the Redeemed Christian Church of God as a neopentecostal prosperity church, and it suddenly expanded enormously. The leader has recently been criticised for buying a corporate jet and departing from the simple and rather puritan ideals of the founder, and becoming a jet-set executive for God.

The RCCG has spread throughout Africa. There are some 40 parishes in Zambia, and the leader wows ‘em there. They are said to have branches in South Africa too, and Texas. They are very big in Texas. I think with all that kind of spread a corporate jet can perhaps be justified. In other words, they have been planting churches like you wouldn’t believe.

A lot of traditional Zionist AICs are quite worried by the neopentecostals. They are losing support and influence to the newcomers. But here is a traditional AIC that has reinvented itself as a neopentecostal one, and its growth took off exponentially.

This is the African emerging church. This is the kind of Christianity that is emerging in Africa, like it or not. And there are some things to like about it, and other things not. But as far as I can see the people who are in the “emerging conversation” have very little to do with the emerging church.

I’m not sure how far we got with that, but it was an interesting discussion none the less. I’m not even sure one could call it a “cohort” — surely a cohort must have some cohesion, but in this one every time it meets there are different people there.

Anyway there are a couple of blog posts about it:

• Cobus (who convened the meeting) on So we meet again, but are we emerging?
• Steve on An emerging theology of Tshwane?

And also, having recently asked here on Missional Tribe what a “third place” was, I met Pierre du Plessis, who actually comes from one

Tom Smith has written a very important piece in his blog Soul Gardeners about rich Christians in South Africa who want to have a ministry among poor people, and, from his account, there is an unseemly competition among those who want to do so.

Tom doesn’t go into details about what has been going on, but from his post I can infer that rich Christians are going into poor areas and playing Lady Bountiful with handouts, without forming relationships with the people there. My own church, the Orthodox Archdiocese of Johannesburg and Pretoria, has made the very same mistakes, and people seem to persist in these things, and to be unwilling to learn from mistakes of the past.

I’ve written in a post on my own blog about a mission project where we tried to avoid such mistakes. It is written in the form of a case study, so you can see for yourself, and judge for yourself whether we managed to avoid any of those mistakes. The post is Makhalafukwe, and is about a missional outreach to a shanty town in Zululand called Makhalafukwe (The cries of the cuckoo). It should be read in conjunction with Tom Smith’s post.

Though what the case study describes took place nearly 30 years ago, it seems that the lessons still have not been learned, so perhaps they need to be repeated many times.

It shows Twitter tweets that deal with missiological or missional subjects.

Until I find a more definite purpose for it, I’ll just be posting here sporadically, odd missional notes.

For anyone who may be interested, I post more regularly on the following blogs:

• Khanya
• Notes from underground