Mission as Withness

Spiral mobility or flow is a good metaphor for contemporary global experience. Today's life is precariously shaped by incessant cyclical movement from apocalypse to 'post-apocalypse' and from one post-apocalypse to another. There is no indication of what may be expected of the future. The future is in chaos. It appears that we are living through chaotic end times rather than experiencing mere gestures of the end times. A perpetual apocalypse seems the best way to describe the current reality. Therefore, Covid-19 seems to have been nothing but a mere reminder that we are on a sinking lifeboat. This article argues that in such an ever-wounded God's world, African Pentecostalism has to shift the gear from mission as witness to mission as withness. The withness missiology can help in the process of re-discovering the theological and missiological meaning of life in an ever-wounded world and alternative ways of intercarnating into one another for the sake of common basic good of flourishing. It concludes that God's Church is pneumatologically intended toward God's world.

The need to rethink African “Ideas of Christ” in the search for human flouring in post-Covid-19 era

Abstract This article argues that if the African church is to make a meaningful contribution to human survival, livelihood, and dignity in post-Covid-19, it must reclaim and reconstitute the Christ of the marginalized and excluded who joins them in their suffering, struggles, and hopes for a liberated and emancipated post-Covid-19 Africa. This requires a passionate commitment to rethinking the idea of Christ as a critical resource to mobilize the masses for transformation and bettering their social contexts. The article concludes that the apparent contradiction between Christocapitalist Christian faith and the historical struggles of the masses reveals the underlying contradiction within most churches? conceptions of Christ.

World Christianity as 'Human Universal Making' Activity: The Contribution of African Christian Potential

The study engages Alain Badiou's philosophical concept of 'immanent exception' to establish the special potential embedded in African Christianity for engendering human universal (Umuntu). It argues that African Christian experiences inform their interpretations of Jesus Christ as the answer to all human existential concerns. This approach forces them to 'exceed' in the locations and spaces of their imaginations of suffering by embracing ambivalent localizations (through a constant oscillation between local and un-local) in search to transcend, not escape, in thought and practice their negative realities. Thus, they transcend unitary Christian boundaries and integrates critical elements of African spiritual systems to build human universal within the paradigmatic universal humanity of Jesus. The study underlines that grasping African Christianity through immanent exception could contribute to empowering not only African Christians, but also world Christians to seek new ways of becoming human universal for global struggle against death dealing forces such as COVID-19. The study concludes by calling for the need to engage how World Christianity in its particularities is shaping life today and how local churches are participating in constructing what it means to be part of God's mission to build a human universal in active search for global justice.