Conflicts between Two Religious Cultures: Achieving Reconciliation

Abstract

Frustration over the delay and misconceptions about the need for promoting African Christianity resulted in two waves of African Independent Church Movements (AICM) within the Protestant Churches in Africa. The first wave resulted in the rise of the Ethiopianist churches, while the second gave rise to the spiritist churches. The first, however, was a protest against failure to indigenize church leadership, while the second was a protest against failure to inculturate the spirituality and liturgy of the church in Africa. In the Catholic circle, discontent over the “Roman Church”, found expression in the book: Les Pretres Noire se Interrogent; Black Priests asked themselves questions
(about the foreignness of their church). The issue if really whether Christianity in the West should continue as it is at present as a culturally manocentric church, churches based exclusively on Graeco-Roman European culture, or a polycentric church. In Africa, life comes from God and is communicated through the ancestors. Thus Jesus as the Christ is our Brother-Ancestor. All this is an effort to insert the Christ in the very
origins of human life in Africa in order to underline in an African way the new kind of life of an African Christians. It is the aim of this paper to unravel the causes of the conflict and to proffer solutions towards reconciliation between the two religious cultures.