We think and write and preach one thing, but then do another. This is no surprise of course. If our theology has even a halfway proper view of the foolishness and frailty of man, then this is no surprise. But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about larger groups – churches, and denominations. The leaders say one thing and nearly everyone else agrees but on the ground you find something much different and much messier. Pastors (at least ones who haven’t grown too famous or successful) still know this well. Theologians and anthropologists and other critters from the zoo of the academy, as well as occasionally even bishops speak about things as if this discrepancy were negligible. Ideals and abstract principals are easier to talk about than a conglomeration of individuals that undermine theories and discourse in a thousand different ways.
This passage from Todd M. Vanden Berg in the collection The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World brings up several good points.
The second assumption that African scholars and theologians make when calling for the Africanization of Christianity is that such Africanization needs to be jump-started by theologians. This, I believe, is a false assumption that shows a lack of understanding of what has happened and continues to happen at the grassroots level of orthodox mission churches. Andre Doogers speaks of the general tendency for religious scholars to concentrate on the hierarchical upper echelons at the expense of the general religious populace when he states that “Students of religion…may develop a blind spot for the practical and the popular in a religion. Their main interest then is to systematize the cerebral side of religion, often presented as the only side or the representative side. The popular side – though majoritarian – is viewed as less interesting deviation from it.
This view would be fine if the cerebral side of things WAS the normal state of things and there were only a handful of deviations from it. In fact, in nearly all contexts, be it America, France, Africa, or China, just the opposite is going to be the case. The cerebral is the deviation. If you attend a church full of seminary students or spend a lot of time reading old books instead of going to BBQs, you can get this flipped upside down in your head.
The commentary continues:
Not only does this side seem less interesting and less important to many theologians but also, it may be a more uncomfortable topic for them to consider because it often is manifested in unexpected ways. At the grounded level, the spirit moves in mysterious ways – apparently too mysterious for some theologians. Not only may theologians’ discomfort reflect the unusual nature and character of the specific areas of integration that occur at a grassroots level but also it may reflect the challenge they may feel on issues of identity, power, and authority with African churches. For the most part, it appears that theologians feel free and comfortable to call for the Africanization of Christianity when such calls are focused on peripheral religious beliefs that do not speak to the core of what it means to be a Christian. Theologians are relatively comfortable in discussing, for example, liturgical forms such as dancing and drumming. But when the topic moves more into core religious beliefs, there is little discussion. Mission theologian Robert Schreiter observes that in discussing the relationship of anthropology to Christian missions, “liturgical accouterments and religious rites may be adjusted in light of anthropological data, but the question of the existence of a spirit world and the need for performing exorcisms may be deftly avoided by those same Christian adapters.”
p.47
I think there is more variance going on that we care to admit. This is why you can have more than a few closet charismatics in a Reformed church that is (on paper) cessationist. You can have parents feeding their kids communion even though they are under the approved age. You can have people attending spending their whole lives under teachers, say, at an Assembly of God church, who articulate a synergist soteriology, and yet they are personally completely at rest in the grace of God and not concerned with backsliding. Plenty of people practice penance of some sort (maybe without even knowing it), even if they’ve been told not too. It’s a deep reaction. And I’m not talking about problems of sin of unbelief here – this is amongst the most faithful.
A very pastoral theology has room for all this discrepancy. It fills in the cracks with love. The other kind has no room for cracks and so eventually no room for people to walk around inside.