VULNERABLE MISSION

MISSIO DEI 4.1 (FEBRUARY 2013): 134–153
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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.