VULNERABLE MISSION

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<strong>VULNERABLE</strong> <strong>MISSION</strong> IN ANGOLA: AN INTRA-AFRICAN CONVERSATION WITH JIM HARRIES and destruction and then would flee again when war arrived at their new location. In addition, both government and rebel forces pressed any available men or children into military service, taking them to every corner of the country, many never to return home. This intermixing resulted in the breakdown of tribal barriers. In some cases whole tribal societies were broken down by the war, to be replaced with the national identity-shaping experience of civil war. 16 2. Urbanization. In 1960, before the war for independence and the civil war, urbanization in Angola reached 11% as a result of normal push/pull forces. 17 The wars, especially the civil war, created massive internal displacement as villagers fled the war, often being uprooted two or three times before finally “settling” in the relative safety of a provincial city such as Malange, Benguela, or Huambo. 18 But they were not safe even there when the war reached the cities in 1993 and 1994—wave upon wave made their way to Luanda, bloating the capital’s population many times over. 19 The result: by the end of the war well over half of the country’s population lived in urban areas. 20 Contrary to Western assumptions, they would not return “home” to the rural areas. The only “home” they had was the city. Current estimates place Angola’s urban population at 59% of the total population. 21 3. Use of the Portuguese language. The colonizers mandated education in Portuguese, and mission schools across Angola provided the means for the goal. 22 But the war succeeded beyond the colonizers’ dreams. Precisely through the processes of urbanization and intertribal mixing, Portuguese became the only viable means of communicating on a daily basis. In addition, because the UNITA rebels championed the use of Bantu languages, the MPLA (government) forces that controlled the cities outlawed use of indigenous languages, allowing only Portuguese. As a 16 James, xliv, highlights that this destructive trend toward nationwide identity had its deep roots in Portuguese military domination of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: “The Portuguese unknowingly laid the foundations of Angolan nationalism. By dismembering the great kingdoms, the Portuguese allowed the inhabitants to slowly begin to view themselves not as some part of an ethnolinguistic group but as belonging to a greater entity: Angola.” 17 Tony Hodges, Angola: Anatomy of an Oil State, 2nd ed., African Issues (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 22. 18 Filomena Andrade, Paulo de Carvalho, and Gabriela Cohen, “A Life of Improvisation! Displaced People in Malanje and Benguela,” in Communities and Reconstruction in Angola: The Prospects for Reconstruction in Angola from the Community Perspective, ed. Paul Robson, trans. Mark Gimson, Development Workshop Occasional Paper 1 (Guelph, Canada: Development Workshop, 2001), 135. 19 Bob van der Winden, ed., A Family of the Musseque (Oxford: WorldView, 1996), 74, calls this the “third and largest wave” of migrants to Luanda. However, the last and most brutal phase of the war (1998–2002, after his publication) produced many more internal permanent refugees, at least another 1,000,000 (Development Workshop, Centre for Environment & Human Settlements, and One World Action, Terra: Urban Land Reform in Post-War Angola: Research, Advocacy and Policy Development, Development Workshop Occasional Paper 5 [Luanda, Angola: Development Workshop, 2005], 68). 20 Hodges, 22. 21 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, “World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision” (New York: United Nations, 2011), http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Sorting- Tables/tab-sorting_population.htm. In contrast, Kenya is 22% urban. A brief glance at the list of nations reveals that the region of eastern Africa maintains the lowest statistics of urbanization on the continent. Rural Kenya is not “typical” of Africa. 22 Lawrence W. Henderson, The Church in Angola: A River of Many Currents (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1992), 137, 296–99. 137
MISSIO DEI 4.1 (FEBRUARY 2013): 134–153 138 result of this confluence of factors, an entire generation of Angolans that function primarily in Portuguese has reached adulthood. Tony Hodges relates the stunning statistics of a 1996 survey: No less than 42 per cent of children under 9 years of age and 34 per cent of those between 10 and 19 speak Portuguese as their first language. . . . It is now common to find young Angolans, especially in Luanda, who do not speak any African languages at all—a situation which has no parallel elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. The implication is clear: almost half of today’s children are being brought up to speak Portuguese as their first language, and Portuguese seems set to outstrip all the African languages. 23 That was 17 years ago. Those “children under 9 years of age” are now parents of a second generation of Angolans who speak Portuguese as their mother tongue— and often as their only tongue. The war ended abruptly 11 years ago, but its impact remains. Angola today is an urbanized nation where tribal identities have been blurred and a national identity has grown strong, epitomized by the use of the Portuguese language as the language of Angola. Mission in Angola, even Vulnerable Mission, must take account of this reality. In the following section I will share our mission team’s attempt to engage with this bewildering context that is Angola. In the process, the reader will get a glimpse into what these national statistics look like from ground level. INTRODUCTION TO OUR MINISTRY IN ANGOLA In July 2011, our mission team of six adults and four children moved to Angola for the purpose of long-term church-planting ministry. Though we are the first long-term missionaries from the Stone-Campbell Movement to Angola, we did not come with a pioneering mentality. Rather, we took seriously the Christendom context: 95% of Angolans claim to be Christian, 24 and churches are ubiquitous but proverbially shallow in biblical knowledge. Rather than create more division within this “Christian” context, we accepted the invitation to work with the Igreja de Cristo em Angola (ICA), an indigenous Angolan church movement. ICA began as an interdenominational association of Angolan Christians praying for peace in Angola, and in 1974 they adopted the name Igreja de Cristo, meaning “Church of Christ.” In the mid-1980s ICA first learned about “Churches of Christ” in other nations, specifically Brazil and Portugal, and over the next two decades had sporadic interactions with these churches. For the most part, however, ICA continued to make its own way forward, isolated from the world by the same factors that kept Angola as a whole isolated during many years. As a result, the dreaded dependency disease has not afflicted ICA—what they’ve accomplished, they’ve accomplished without outside assistance—and their theology and church practice are characteristically Angolan. When we arrived, ICA comprised about 36 congregations, mostly in Luanda and the northern regions of the country. They asked us to help in Bible teaching, church planting, evangelism, and social outreach ministries. 23 Hodges, 25; emphasis added. 24 David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, 2nd ed., vol. 1, The World by Countries: Religionists, Churches, Ministries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 62. About two-thirds of Christian adherents in Angola are Catholic.
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February 2013 VOLUME 4, ISSUE 1 VUL
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FEBRUARY 2013 EDITORIAL BOARD Execu
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PREFACE TO THE ISSUE Dependency, wh
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MISSIONAL THEOLOGY
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“MISSION IN WEAKNESS AND VULNERAB
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BIBLIOGRAPHY “MISSION IN WEAKNESS
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Economy of Grace: An Early Christia
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ECONOMY OF GRACE understanding is t
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Economy of Grace in Ephesians ECONO
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ECONOMY OF GRACE This instruction b
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ECONOMY OF GRACE discovery and the
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ECONOMY OF GRACE missionaries must
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Unveiling Empire: Ecclesial Resista
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UNVEILING EMPIRE Of course, in this
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UNVEILING EMPIRE interpreting it, a
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UNVEILING EMPIRE tear the skin from
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UNVEILING EMPIRE curity is made to
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UNVEILING EMPIRE have. As Wendell B
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UNVEILING EMPIRE sions. Paul quite
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UNVEILING EMPIRE Howard-Brook, Wes.
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MISSIONAL PRAXIS
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Vulnerable Mission vis-à-vis Mains
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VULNERABLE MISSION

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