Abstract
This new publication on inter-religious dialogue is a missiological text describing a conflict between members of the Assemblies of God churches (EEAD) and the adherents of Vodoun among the Maxi in Benin. This conflict has prevented the understanding and implantation of the Gospel among these people.
The author develops the African Method of Inter-Religious Dialogue (MADIR), a dramaturgical, collective, and incarnational approach, which prioritizes the historical, sociological, and anthropological analysis of the groups before investigating the conflict itself. The people studied were non-literate (verbomoteur), so the analysis required the researcher to master oral and non-verbal communication and the anthropology of the gesture (cf. C20 French anthropologist Marcel Jousse). This required participatory education and initiation into both religious communities.
Ahoga discovers that during the thirty years of EEAD’s engagement with the Maxi people, Christians built evangelical cultural ghettos. They did it through the French language, a disembodied understanding of the person, and the refusal of social presence. Resultantly, they tore the community apart and implied Christianity is only for those who do not fit in.
As a solution, the researcher proposes a process of discipleship through dialogue and the discovery of shared identity and history, all made possible by Christ-like love, following the pattern of Christ’s incarnation. The Christian seeking to reach the Maxi would come empty-handed onto the mission field, identify him- or herself with the people to be evangelized, and live among them. Conversion would cease to be a flight from the society.
We believe that this book would be of interest to those who study inter-religious dialogue as well as missiology, and to those who wonder how ATR affects the African church. It illustrates how social science methodology can equip us to engage in God’s mission. It reveals the dynamism of today’s ATRs and draws lessons from them for a dynamic African Christianity.
If the story is profoundly scientific, faithful to a precise methodology, we admire how it is also autobiographical; it reveals the evolution of the perspective of the author, who himself becomes the embodiment of the MADIR approach to resolving inter-religious conflicts. One concern we have is that the researcher tends to assume that inter-religious conflicts would be non-existent if Christians followed this approach. But there is another assumption, more solid, we feel, from which grows the usefulness of this work, that Christians ought, if possible, inasmuch as it depends on us, “live in peace with everyone” (Rom 12:18).