Abstract
There are few accounts of the theologies of African Independent Churches (AICs), or of how such texts might be developed from what is an essentially oral phenomenon. In consequence, AIC students encounter difficulties in obtaining theological training appropriate for their churches. This article is an interim report on the process of recording such a theology – that of the Holy Spirit Church of East Africa. Based on insights from recent scholars in the fields of African Pentecostal theology, and contextual and local theologies, together with the work of practitioners in the network of the Organization of African Independent Churches, the article proposes a methodology for recording the faith of a predominantly oral church. It then describes a workshop held by the church in 2016, with attention to the ways in which this methodology was worked out in practice. The article explores some of the issues raised by academic engagement with an oral community of faith, and suggests one means by which the lack of dialogue between AIC oral theologies and theologies of the western academic traditions might be addressed.
Introduction
The Organization of African Instituted Churches (OAIC), which is the Africa-wide association of African Independent Churches (AICs), has been concerned for a number of years about the lack of documentation of AIC theologies. This has a negative impact on the AICs’ own theological education programmes (for recent surveys of these, see Gichimu, 2013; Molobi, 2011; Oduro, 2013) as well as on the theological training of the many AIC students in bible colleges and seminaries of denominations belonging to the western theological traditions. An OAIC consultation in 2013 observed that: 1
Some AICs do not see any need for theological education, and indeed detest it.
The only concept of theological education of many theological educators working with AICs is that of westernised structured theological education.
Some AICs resist any new form of theological education that is at variance with what they consider as ‘their founding vision’. (See below for an explanation of this term.)
Many AICs cannot explain what they believe, let alone do so coherently.
The problem lies partly in the lack of any significant dialogue between the traditional ‘owners’ of AIC oral theologies and the theological academies of the western tradition. Whether in AIC or non-AIC programmes, AIC ministerial training in the western tradition at its best can – in the words of an AIC graduate from an Anglican Church Army course – ‘give pastors the tools for negotiating between the two theologies’ 2 – that is, between the implicit, experiential, African and oral form and the explicit, systematic, western and printed form. However, because it is the formal structure which dictates the shape of the academic syllabus, and it is the printed text that is privileged, the result is almost inevitably that the oral tradition of the AIC takes second place in the academic process, and newly graduated students return to minister in their AICs with a two-level theological formation. If the resulting disjuncture between the two theological worlds is severe, this can lead to graduates failing to re-integrate into the AIC and leaving for another denomination. 3
The Workshop Goal
For some years, the OAIC has argued that a key part of the solution to this problem is the articulation of AIC theologies, or to be more specific, the recording, arranging and printing of their already existing oral theologies, or ‘founding visions’ in OAIC terminology. Within East Africa, the Holy Spirit Church of East Africa (HSC) was selected from within the Roho family of churches for piloting this proposal, which was expected to serve three functions.
In the first place, the recorded oral traditions can form a point of reference for the AIC’s own life and ministry. The immediate object of this workshop from the HSC’s point of view was to provide a record of church history, teachings and rites for publication in a handbook. In this printed form they can be used in the HSC’s own training programmes, and support their students in formal theological institutions. Such readily available texts in print or online can diminish the loss of historic teachings in face of media saturation by Pentecostal churches and, within the academy, the contemporary dominance of western printed texts. In the longer term, such a record will permit a secondary process of more formal theological reflection, and possible revision of AIC teaching. This process of reflection is not easy to do when the theologies are in oral form. Secondly, printed texts can assist in dialogue and developing mutual understanding with other churches. As Clifton Clarke (2014: 16) remarks, ‘orality cannot sustain long theological argumentation’.
Thirdly, and underlying the first two functions, is the missional role of such texts. In a rapidly changing world, theologies and the way they are presented and lived out have to be communicated in very different contexts. A current concern of AICs is how to adapt their teaching from what was relevant to a small-scale, face-to-face, largely pre-modern society, to the modernity of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic cities which are themselves undergoing a variety of post-modern cultural transformations due to the rise of information technology. Nairobi, with a multi-ethnic population currently estimated as 4.4 million, 4 and a strongly developed digital economy, is a city of missional concern for the HSC. One assumption behind this workshop is that production of an agreed text will facilitate a secondary process of reflection which will assist the development of a theology better adapted to mission in contemporary society. 5
It needs to be stated that the goal of the workshop was not the historical recovery of the initial founding faith of the church but rather the recording of its contemporary faith. However, the facilitating team had access to my own PhD thesis (Padwick, 2003), which attempts to recover aspects of the church’s faith in its early years, 6 and this thesis was occasionally referred to during the workshop for reference and dating purposes. Moreover, the broad outlines of Roho theology (see below) have been known to academic and ecumenical circles for a number of years (Hoehler-Fatton, 1995; Perrin-Jassy, 1973; Rasmussen, 1996; Wanakacha, 1992). In this respect, the workshop was not seeking to uncover theological teaching unknown to academia, so much as enabling the HSC as a church to articulate its belief in its own words so that it may then formally receive it as an agreed statement. 7 As will be explained, the nature of AICs as oral communities meant a particular methodology had to be used.
African Independent Churches
African Independent Churches are also known as African Instituted, African Indigenous or African Initiated Churches – I shall simply refer to them here as AICs. They are African, and they are Christian, and their origins reflected a fresh start for the church in Africa. AICs are the institutional expressions of a Christian movement that emerged in many sub-Saharan countries in Africa during the early part of the 20th century (see Anderson, 2001; Kalu, 2008, for recent broad surveys). On the one hand, the AIC movement can be seen as a response to the European and North American missionary movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and to the subsequent process of African Christians reading and reflecting on the Christian scriptures in their own mother tongues. Some AICs trace their origins to indigenous initiatives stimulated by specifically African manifestations of the global movement of the Holy Spirit – that is to say, independently of, though often contemporaneously with, events at Azusa Street and the subsequent spread of classical Pentecostalism across the globe. By and large the AICs began as and remain churches of the poor, and the majority are led by people who are at the same economic and educational level as their followers.
There are various ways of classifying AICs – mostly the typologies of those outside the churches themselves. It is sufficient to note that the Holy Spirit Church of East Africa is a member of the group, known as the Spiritual churches. These churches emphasise the gifts of the Holy Spirit, particularly prophecy, prayer and healing ministries. Their response to colonialism and western mission was a reading of the scriptures from within their own cultures and traditional spirituality. The result was the development of (usually small) counter-cultural churches profoundly African and Christian, that were led by the Holy Spirit to challenge the introduction of western value systems, certain western artefacts and technology and also specific aspects of traditional African culture they identified as negative. Such churches were known by their members as Roho (Holy Spirit), Akurinu 8 or Arathi (Prophets) in Kenya, Aladura (Praying) in Nigeria, Spiritual in Ghana and as Zionists or Apostolics in Southern Africa.
The Holy Spirit Church of East Africa
The Roho family of churches of Western Kenya includes both Luo and Luyia speaking churches, with distinct histories but with considerable interaction. The Holy Spirit Church of East Africa is a Luyia church based in Vihiga. From the start of the 20th century, the people of Vihiga were the object of missionary activity from a variety of different Christian missions. 9 It was the preaching of American Friends and Canadian Pentecostal missionaries on the person and gifts of the Holy Spirit that led to the foundation of the Luyia Roho churches. Some of these missionaries and their African colleagues urged Christians to repent fully of their sins, and to expect the Holy Spirit to fall upon them.
The Holy Spirit indeed came in 1926 and 1927, giving those who received him new power, a deep peace of mind and heart and gifts of prophecy, visions and healing. The new Roho Christians preached open confession and repentance of sin – a practice profoundly disturbing to both church and traditional leaders. Conflicts arose, and by 1933 several distinct independent church centres had been established free of mission control. For the next 15 years or so, Roho Christians suffered from harassment from the missionary churches and colonial administration. At least three HSC members are thought to have died as a result of the beatings they received from their enemies during this period.
Such persecutions, and the strong teaching on repentance, caused Roho leaders in the 1930s to withdraw and to spend time in retreat and theological reflection. The Holy Spirit Church of East Africa looks back at such a period of three years as ‘the cultivation of the Spirit’ (in Swahili, kupalilia Roho – lit., ‘the weeding of the Spirit’). During these years, the founders gave themselves to fasting, praying and studying the scriptures. They dwelt on their experiences of joy and oppression, and especially on the recent events in which the Holy Spirit had come. These events seemed to shape and give meaning to their personal histories and to the far-reaching social and economic changes of the previous 20 to 30 years since the colonialists had first arrived.
The Roho churches’ historical origins, then, are to be found in a period in which African traditional society was deeply divided over attitudes to the Christian missionary faith, and to the economic and political transformations demanded by the colonial system. Their newly-found freedom of the Spirit to interpret the Scriptures and lead their own indigenous church communities by themselves has led to the development of a particular form of the Christian faith. Its key theological distinctives may be broadly summarised (in my own words) as follows.
Spiritual and material realities are closely interwoven. Human beings, who are to a large part constituted by their relationality, have mystical powers for good or evil over others in the community. Into this world the Good News enters as the power of Christ to overcome evil, and through the Spirit God calls us to repent of our sins and to turn to Christ. In response he fills us with his Spirit, bringing a deep sense of peace and joy – the ‘life of the Spirit’, which is experienced in the community of the faithful (‘the people of the Spirit’). Through dreams, visions and prophecies and through the Scriptures (the teaching of Christ and the holiness code of Leviticus are particularly significant), the Spirit guides the people of the Spirit in the ways of purity and holiness. The Spirit, who loves to inhabit a pure and clean heart, prompts us to repent whenever we sin intentionally or commit involuntary acts leading to ritual impurity. Both unconfessed sin and acts of impurity inhibit the Spirit’s presence and ministry and contaminate the community of faith. The ministry of prophets within the congregation is in part to uncover such sins, to lead people to repentance and to warn the church of spiritual danger. Historically, because the gospel arrived and spread in Kenya contemporaneously with colonial rule and a capitalist economy, both of which the Roho churches saw as threats to African integrity, the churches developed a counter culture that chose simplicity and egalitarianism over material sophistication and the rise of an educated African elite (Padwick, 2003: 183–203). This latter aspect of Roho faith has however diminished significantly over time.
The Extent of Orality Within the Roho Churches
For many years, the HSC’s theology was entirely oral in form and transmission. The slogan ‘The Spirit alone’ (Roho pekee) implied that spiritual guidance was sufficient, with no need for any formal theological education. However, the HSC has never lacked literate leaders. The contemporary church has graduates and members in middle-level management at the same time as a continuing though small group of increasingly elderly members with minimal if any formal education. The church is clearly a mixed community with people of differing levels of preference for oral and print learning. Moon lists five categories of learning preference in a continuum between ‘primary oral’ and ‘highly print’ (Moon, 2016: 10–16):
Primary oral—exclusively oral, since they cannot read and write. Alternatively, the person has great difficulty, or strongly dislikes, reading. Thinking is shaped in oral patterns. Highly oral—highly values oral learning approaches because of personality, cultural background, life experiences, and so forth. Thinking is still shaped by oral patterns, even though they have some exposure to literacy. Oral tendency—tendency toward oral learning. Secondary oral or digitoral learners often fit in here, as they have the ability to read, but they prefer to receive information and have their lives most transformed by oral methods. Print tendency—tendency toward print thinking and learning. While they may still draw on oral methods at times, they prefer print methods of learning. The literacy process has shaped their thinking in print patterns, but they do not fully interiorize print learning to the extent that highly print learners do. Highly print—a heavy emphasis on literacy has shaped the person’s thinking/learning in print patterns. They prefer to learn using print methods.
My own estimate based on 30 years’ working with the church suggests that a majority of HSC members are located in the first to third categories. It is the members in the last two categories who are seeking most strongly a more logically articulated form and printed form of their faith. But the very fact that they continue to remain members suggests that they also value oral learning and expression as well.
How Oral Theology is Expressed in These Churches
Initial studies on African Pentecostalism tended to focus on historical and sociological analysis of the phenomenon, much of it critical. Recently scholars have analysed its theology and its theologising process, and in so doing have begun to give them academic credibility (Asamoah-Gyadu, 2013, 2015; Clarke, 2014). The approach of these scholars and many of their insights are applicable to the Roho churches and are reflected in this article and the organisation of the workshop.
In these oral communities of faith, the printed scriptures are regarded less as text and more as narratives which in frequent and sustained preaching become part of the oral tradition. ‘The Bible is a reservoir of narratives that allow the text to become part of the reader / hearer’ (GaIlegos, 2014: 53). In the Roho churches, formal preparation for preaching through study of particular passages is discouraged. ‘The Spirit will give the message’. By this is meant that the preacher must become aware of the presence of the Spirit within the congregation. During the course of worship, concrete concerns will emerge – through the telling of dreams, visions and testimonies, and the choice of hymns and choruses initiated by women leaders within the congregation in response to these emerging concerns. The good preacher will therefore seek to engage in interaction with the congregation in a call and response pattern (Clarke, 2014: 28), often choosing for more effective communication to descend from the dais or move away from the leaders’ desk to preach from within the congregation, on their level, in close physical proximity to and in constant dialogue with the members.
‘Founding Visions’: The Function of Oral Traditions of Faith
In order to understand better how the faith traditions of AICs impact their understanding of and engagement with the world around them, OAIC developed the concept of Founding Visions (Imunde, 1996; Padwick and Lubaale, 2011). 10 An OAIC consultation (OAIC, 2009) defined Founding Visions in the following terms:
Founding Visions are visions of: – What people of faith hear God calling them to do – What they believe about the world around them – How they understand their call to live out their faith in the society they belong to – Or, in other words, the life to which God calls humankind, and the way in which he expects Christians to live in witness, mission, and service.
The visions are the result of shared reflection upon the scriptures, guided by the Holy Spirit, in the context of struggles or conflict. Historically founding visions were an aspect of the struggle against colonialism – an attempt by which people sought to regain control over their lives from the pressures of colonial or missionary domination.
The visions are rarely formally articulated or written down, but are transmitted orally through space or from generation to generation through the conduct of services, forms of prayer, traditions of preaching, rites, dance, exorcisms, teachings, etc.
They are essentially local expressions of faith and are often in tension with centralized unified teaching.
For the older AICs founding visions are historical expressions of faith, and they are now in tension with contemporary challenges.
The 2009 consultation saw the founding visions as a basis for AIC theologies, or as pre-articulated AIC theologies. In this article, I take the position that the founding visions are in fact AIC oral theologies.
Positionality of the Facilitators
In the development of ‘local’, contextual or ‘little’ theologies – recognising that all theologies are to a degree both local and contextual – the positionality of external agents is critical. ‘Participatory research … seeks to ensure that the perspective of the research subject is consistently held in constructive tension with that of the researcher and the research process’ (Swinton and Mowatt, 2016: 211). In the facilitation of this workshop, the line between outsider and insider was blurred. Of the four facilitators, three were members of the church (including myself), three were Kenyans, all had worked in facilitation with the church over a period of some 20 years and two spoke the mother tongue of the church (Lulogooli, one of the Luyia group of Bantu languages). Three out of the four had had formal theological training in non-AIC institutions. All four were men (reflecting the current status of the church’s senior leadership). The ecumenical participants were drawn from another Roho and two non-Roho AICs, and from the Anglican and Coptic Orthodox churches.
The role of outsiders in ‘doing’ any ‘local’, contextual or ‘little’ theologies, or in facilitating such a process, has been much discussed (Bevans, 2002: 18–21). Schreiter (2015: 71) makes a useful distinction between insider/outsider and speaker/hearer perspectives in the task of describing cultural texts:
Inner descriptions help a community to find its authentic voice. Outer descriptions help it to deal with change and with cross-cultural communication. Speaker orientated descriptions help it to preserve the integrity of its traditions; hearer-oriented descriptions are necessary to ensure continued intelligibility and liveliness of those traditions.
The object of this workshop was primarily descriptive, a record of the faith of the HSC in church members’ own words and expressions. To that extent, the issues of positionality raised here were perhaps less significant than they are likely to become at the later stage of theological reflection on the texts. 11
Theses on the Methodology and Process of the Workshop
Before the workshop, we proposed 12 guidelines or ‘theses’ (cf. Sedmak, 2002), based on what we already knew of the church and in light of recent work on oral and local theologies. Behind the development of these theses was a statement of Schreiter (2015: 5): ‘Theological procedures … follow to a great extent the patterns of production of meaning within a given cultural context’. In form, in process and in content, AIC theologies need to be based on AIC practice. The theses that proved most useful are italicised below (somewhat revised), and a reflection on how these worked out in practice follows in ordinary text:
1. Roho theology arises from people reflecting on the activity of the Holy Spirit in the history and life of a church in the light of the Scriptures. It assumes that the Spirit’s work in human experience is discernible, and that this can be data for theologising (Swinton and Mowatt, 2016 :6). In this way the history of the AIC becomes part of salvation history. Working with this understanding makes the theological process suddenly relevant to the AICs. 12
We sought many times during the workshop to go back to the narratives of the founding days, especially as told by the older participants. (The oldest died a few weeks after the workshop, aged 93. 13 ) The church’s early years gave the HSC the foundations for its distinct history and teachings. During the workshop, we explored in some depth two events that were crucial in this period: the coming of the Holy Spirit in 1926/1927 and the period of three years of fasting and seeking the Spirit during which many of the church’s distinctive teachings emerged. For the HSC, re-telling these events in the workshop was not just recounting past history but a re-presentation of the origins of the living faith of the church, which aroused strong emotions and controversy at various points.
2. Respect orality.
We tried during the workshop to give proper space to oral genres of communication, especially those regularly used in HSC worship:
story telling (see below)
testimonies
prophecies emerging from the workshop itself as well as famous historical prophecies
the interpretation of dreams and visions recounted in connection with the workshop
dramatic acting out as a form of preaching or story-telling
spontaneous participation and interventions by workshop participants and facilitators in response to the movement of the Spirit
hymns and songs
In addition, we tried to keep the facilitation open to ‘movements of the Spirit’ within the workshop. Although we started with a fairly detailed timetable, this was constantly modified according to what was emerging from the participants. In this way, the printed timetable served as a reminder to the facilitators of areas they needed to cover rather than as a rigid framework. The flow of the workshop was left to the ‘guidance of the Spirit’ – that is to say, to a sensitive and communal discernment of the direction it seemed we were going at any one time. The facilitators experienced this as a rewarding but exhausting process, which could only have been done as a team.
3. Story telling is at the centre of Roho ceremonies – the stories of the founders are told and interpreted at annual memorial services. Reflection on this process can lead to an understanding of theological development and conscious change.
We began and continued with story-telling. One of the most significant moments in the workshop emerged when the facilitator asked one of the bishops to recount the story of his own conversion (this was intended to introduce the theological concept of repentance). 14 The Bishop re-enacted his story dramatically in a way that was very moving. Conscious of the Spirit working among the workshop participants, the church General Secretary led into the singing of a hymn, followed by two others led by participants (all these hymns were part of the shared oral repertoire of the church). During the singing, all participants experienced a deep spiritual blessing (for many this was ‘the gift of tears’).
In contrast to the use of such genres like this that were immediately accessible to church members, when the workshop facilitators introduced abstract concepts (an example was the question ‘what is evil?’), communication broke down. Subsequent reflection suggests that presenting this question in a more concrete form (‘How do you do drive out evil spirits? Tell us about an occasion recently when you did so’, etc.) would have been more fruitful.
4. The process of theologising should respect the life and worship of the church. Much AIC worship is a drama guided by the Spirit, with the Spirit’s real-time intervention in dreams, hymns, visions, messages and the reality of power encounters. The whole worship event may therefore need to be interpreted as a source of theological meaning.
We treated the workshop rather as an act of extended worship – as an event in which we could expect the presence of the Spirit, and which itself was capable of interpretation. (It should be noted here that after many HSC worship services, church members gather for tea in someone’s house for informal discussion, often trying to discern the meaning of the content and process of the service.) When we experienced the Spirit’s presence in power on the third day of the workshop, after taking a break to recover, we created time to analyse and reflect on the experience theologically. In so doing we learnt more about the Holy Spirit Church’s understanding of the role of Christ, which emerged strongly from the hymns sung spontaneously by the participants (all hymns are sung from memory in the HSC), than we could have learnt through direct questioning. In a church context where preaching frequently focuses on the need for repentance from sin in order to receive the Holy Spirit, and has less to say on the means of salvation, the singing of the following hymn introduces the saving power of Christ – and at this workshop was the catalyst for the ‘gift of tears’:
I am Jesus your saviour. I died for you. I want to remove all your sins. Why did I pour out my blood? Because I loved you. Why did I pour out my blood? Because I loved you. The house of God Was my house. I left that home And came down. Why did I leave my home? Because I loved you. Why did I leave my home? Because I loved you. I went through suffering Because of your sins. I want you to repent To come out of misery. Why did I carry your sins? Because I loved you. Why did I carry your sins? Because I loved you.
15
Perhaps the most significant academic learning from the workshop was the wealth of theology within the repertoire of hymns on call within congregational memory, which function as a key theological source for the church. 16 This needs further research, which there was no time to conduct in the workshop. On another level, the manifestation of the Spirit in ‘the gift of tears’ was seen as divine validation of the event of the workshop, and will ensure that the event of the workshop enters the church’s communal memory.
5. The communal ownership of Roho theology is to be respected in method. ‘Theology is a community enterprise’ (Sedmak, 2002: 98). The hermeneutical process is dialogical, involving speaker and response (Clarke, 2014: 27–29), and consensual – ‘the wealth of the theology is in the community of believers’ (Lubaale, n.d.). Church members are their own resources for theology.
One of the differences between the Roho churches and most African Pentecostal churches is that the ownership of the church’s traditions and faith is widely shared among church members, especially among the churches’ elders, both men and women. (The term ‘elders’ here is one of respect for those rich in experience and wisdom, not a specific office in the church, though many of the elders also have official posts.) In our facilitation, we sought in consequence to involve as wide a spectrum of participants as time and resources would allow, including young people and women. Both of these latter groups were frequently critical of traditions that they could not understand and which restricted their roles. Less frequently, they criticised departures from tradition.
Though all can be resources, the task of articulating and interpreting the teaching was undertaken in the first place however by the elders as guardians of tradition and by the contemporary church leaders, though remaining responsive to questions emerging from the participants. The facilitators’ attempts to keep the dialogue open between elders and other groups led to concern among the elders on the second day that some of the church’s key teachings were being undermined. Facilitators therefore took care to remind participants that the workshop’s primary role was not to arbitrate in disputed areas but rather to bring such issues to light so that subsequently the church itself could address them appropriately. Particularly controversial were the church’s traditional teachings concerning application of the laws of purity. These are drawn from Leviticus chapters 11–16 but are also strongly influenced by the traditional religious heritage (Padwick, 2003: 121–132). Controversy focused particularly on the roles of women in the church, and (linked to this) the extent to which leadership roles were open to them. In the context of the HSC, resolving such issues ‘appropriately’ here might mean letting the differing views co-exist within the church for an extended period until the church as a whole reaches a settled position – a process of reception that is understood as the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and is similar to the rather shorter process of choosing a new Archbishop. In the workshop itself, the authority of the current archbishop also helped the facilitators significantly in managing these tensions.
6. An oral theology functions as both process and mediation:
An ongoing process: There is danger in having a fixed theology, or a theology insensitive to the changes of context. It can hinder the communication of the gospel in contemporary society. Oral theology is constantly evolving in response to new challenges.
Oral theology mediates between tradition and modernity, and between stasis (tradition and teaching fixed in form and content) and the undisciplined adoption of alien values and teaching.
Oral theology empowers church members to reflect and act on their continuing marginalisation in society (Imunde, 1996; Padwick and Lubaale, 2011).
Roho theologising needs to be open to these processes. In more strictly theological language, Swinton and Mowatt (2016: 78) state: ‘Theology is assumed to be emergent and dialectic rather than simply revealed and applied’.
This particular thesis needs to be understood as addressing the function of oral traditions and expressions of faith in both empowering faith communities (imparting vision and values) and mediating between tradition and change. This was widely understood as constituting the significance of the workshop, and was specifically addressed in the Archbishop’s unscripted opening speech:
God went to Hosea, and told him that people perish due to lack of knowledge (Hos 4:6). We received the Holy Spirit but God said people need to be taught. Our people perish due to lack of knowledge. As in those days, our people were only moving in the Spirit, but God said they need to be taught so that they can progress. We need to learn from others. The word of God comes in generations. We must know and move with change. We must embrace change through the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Isaiah said: I have posted watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem; they will never be silent day or night. You who call on the Lord, give yourselves no rest, and give him no rest till he establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth. Isaiah 62: 6-7. The HSCEA Headquarters is like Jerusalem. All the leaders and members of the HSCEA must equip themselves to secure Jerusalem [i.e. the HSC HQs]. You must ask what God wants you to know. You are leaders and members from all areas. God has made you watchmen. The women among you are also watchmen of Israel. Don’t let the church be despised. This is where the Holy Spirit sits.
17
This apparently simplistic speech (only the latter part is given here) locates the origins of the church in the events of the 1920s, stresses the role of the Holy Spirit and warns against a hyper-spirituality that rejects the possibility of learning from others, recognises the need to adapt the church to the demands of the contemporary world, locates the responsibility for change within the church members and concludes by asserting the continuing and guiding presence of the Holy Spirit within the church. 18
Getting the balance right between tradition and change was fundamental to the workshop and will be in the next two stages of producing a handbook and subsequent theological reflection. The work has to be collaborative, consensual and to be open to correction by church members and leaders to avoid on the one hand stasis and on the other complete fluidity and openness to change. It recognises that the Gospel must be presented afresh to each new generation and culture. Whether the process we have started on will achieve this is still an open question.
7. Ecumenical participation keeps the local church in touch with the wider church, and encourages mutual self-examination (‘there is no local theology without the larger church’, Schreiter, 2015: 24). The HSC has more than 25 years’ experience in engaging with ecumenism, through OAIC, the National Council of Churches of Kenya and in direct relations with other churches. This experience has been invaluable in enabling HSC members to appreciate other perspectives and to engage with Christians from other churches in a spirit of mutuality. Over the years it has undoubtedly helped the church to move towards a fuller appropriation of biblical teaching. In this workshop, the sensitive engagement of the ecumenical participants in the process added weight and insight.
8. Mission is the purpose of the theologising process – to make the gospel more relevant to contemporary challenges (Swinton and Mowatt, 2016: 26).
This was a key area we did not explore explicitly, although it underlies both the HSC’s and OAIC’s expectation of the results of the workshop.
9. Roho theologising (like all theology) needs to continue to check its statements and its overall balance against the witness of scripture.
At the workshop stage, we were collecting what is now taught (including biblical references used in key rites). Subsequent to the workshop, we recovered some additional printed texts, including a handbook on church rites, which provided further biblical references (Kisali, 2000). 19 These were then incorporated into the draft handbook, and were then discussed and revised in a second workshop that took place in September 2017. Further biblical and theological reflection on the use of these texts will have to wait until after the approval and printing of the handbook.
Practicalities
The practical arrangements are described here – out of what might be considered the natural order – because they were planned to facilitate the workshop methodology explained above.
The workshop was held in the HSC’s HQs church at Bukoyani, in Vihiga County, Western Kenya. Participants and guests stayed with local members of the church in the village.
Including the ecumenical observers, there were 36 participants. These were drawn from across the age range, genders and levels of formal education. The workshop was open – a handful of other church members joined in from time to time, when they had time free from their agricultural or small business occupations.
The workshop was conducted in English, Swahili and Lulogooli (the mother tongue of the church’s founders and the main membership base of the church). From a strictly academic perspective, it might have been thought better for mother tongue to have been used throughout – but the HSC itself is multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, and given that the purpose of the workshop was for the HSC to give an account of its faith to outsiders as well as church members, the mixture of languages was justified.
All facilitators were either HSC leaders or were well known to HSC members because of their previous interaction with the church. All were used to working with each other, trusted each other and were skilled in highly participatory modes of facilitation. Moreover, they understood the specific workshop methodology and goals from previous experience and discussions within the church or OAIC workshops. This was supplemented by a pre-workshop session on methodology, in which the ecumenical observers also participated. As a result, the facilitation was often highly intuitive.
Facilitation was helped greatly by the facilitators’ background knowledge of the HSC and related Roho churches from their own experience, together with access to brief printed material accounts from the church and from my own PhD thesis which dealt substantially with the early history and teachings. Without this, the overall summary of the HSC’s history and teaching which (in general) the workshop achieved would probably have taken much longer than three days to gather.
The workshop proceedings were audio-recorded. Flipchart summaries were made continuously. Two of the ecumenical observers also made their own notes. The flipchart notes were typed up, the audio recordings were transcribed and the observers’ reports have been compiled. This provided a very good basis for the full workshop report and subsequent draft text for the handbook.
The Next Stages
After a draft handbook had been compiled and circulated to facilitators, senior church leaders and the ecumenical team, a second workshop was held in September 2017 (in my absence). The second workshop provided further details of rites and history. In discussing the recent history of the church, a new narrative also emerged that privileges one account of an internal leadership dispute against what had hitherto be considered the ‘official’ narrative. All histories are necessarily partial accounts, but my own understanding (as someone involved in some of the recent historical events) is that the new narrative involves a distortion of facts. 20 The facilitating team will have to find a way of handling this before finalising the handbook for the church’s approval.
Subsequent to this, the perhaps academically more interesting process of reflecting theologically on the handbook materials will take place, identifying key themes, and finding ways to articulate a Roho theology that is both faithful to Scripture and Roho tradition and can be understood beyond the Roho churches themselves. This will require a much smaller workshop and the development and refinement of the methodology described here. In particular, the ‘Four Voices of Theology’ model of the Theological Action Research Network seems likely to prove useful (Cameron et al., 2010: 54).
Conclusion
The methodology proposed and tested in this workshop proved effective in enabling the Holy Spirit Church of East Africa to ‘speak for themselves’ about the history and faith of this largely oral church. Key to its success were the inclusivity and communality of the process, the use of oral genres throughout and openness to ‘the movement of the Spirit’, all in accordance with produced ‘patterns of production of meaning’ among the Roho churches. It has produced a body of texts drawn from oral narrative, testimonies, hymns, discussion of rites, spontaneous contributions, etc. that in the first place will meet the church’s own need for a pastoral handbook, and secondly provide the basis for a subsequent process of theological reflection.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The methodology described here, and the practicalities of the workshop, were both developed in discussion with key actors within the OAIC network (especially Rev. Nicta Lubaale, OAIC General Secretary; Ven John Gichimu, OAIC Theology Programme; Rev. John Mulama Linjidi, African Church of the Holy Spirit; and Richard Oketch, Christ Disciples Ministries, Uganda); and within the Holy Spirit Church of East Africa (especially Archbishop Joseph Zare, General Secretary Rev. Albert Obede, Bishop Emmanuel Simwa and Rev. Kenneth Ambani).
Funding
This research received a grant from the Organization of African Instituted Churches, Nairobi, towards the cost of the workshop.