I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a Catholic priest from Sierra Leone. He has been serving as a pastor in Saskatchewan for the past 8yrs and we had a long conversation about the vast difference between the thriving African church and the declining North American church. I asked him to diagnose the problem we’re experiencing here, and he said the two major factors were Prosperity and Parenting.
PROSPERITY: The richer a country is, the less dependence there is on God, and vice versa. Sadly, he senses a co-relation between poverty and faith.
PARENTING: In North America, faith is simply not being passed on from one generation to the next. In Africa there was no discussion: the parents went to church and practiced their faith, and right from a young age children are entirely part of that life, and continue in that tradition regardless. This led to healthy, vibrant parishes across Africa where the church is the hub of activity. He described to me his church in Africa as being full morning to night with youth groups, choir practices, picnics, sports, prayer groups—the whole spectrum of social, spiritual and recreational life.
But the problem here revolves around a flawed understanding of autonomy. The parental attitude in North America quite often is, “I’m not going to bring my child to church or raise them in any religion. They can decide for themselves when they get older.”
But this is ludicrous. We make decisions all the time for our kids—that’s the whole point of parenting. We don’t ask our kids if they want to go to school? We don’t say: “If they want to learn to read when they’re adults, then that’s their decision.” Of course not, we make decisions for them that we think will be of benefit. But somehow faith is exempt from this principle.
Many couples seek Baptism for their children, yet they do not attend church at all. It’s as though they do it out of blind tradition. But what’s the point? A wag of a minister once said; “If salvation were simply a matter of sprinkling water over a baby’s head, you think my phone would be ringing off the hook.”
Baptism is an initiation into Christian life, not a one-off. It’s an entrance onto a lifelong path, to be sustained and nurtured at home by the parents, and outside the home by the larger community—which is to say the church itself.
I have a feeling that the health of the church in North America depends on us increasing our notion of community to be truly expansive. Church life must be holistic, or it will be not at all. It must be a place to connect to each other, to help each other, to enjoy the company of each other, and to journey together as God’s people.
And if it’s prosperity that’s holding us back from realizing this, then the African church can be our light and guide, helping us discover that delight in each other and in the Lord is our greatest wealth.
