African Colonial Churches: Here’s What Comes Next
After centuries of avoiding the obvious, permit me to announce that the missionary era’s church has run its course in Africa. Yes, Africa’s pews may still fill, and its infrastructure may continuously grow, but a spiritual crisis festers beneath the surface. For too long, we’ve clung to a colonial faith—a theology forged not in our soil but in the shadow of pacification. It’s time to speak plainly: the churches that once “saved” us now suffocates our soul.
Let’s be clear—this isn’t about demonizing the white missionaries. They arrived with Bibles and schools, yes, but also with the unspoken baggage of colonialism. Their model, born in the same era as the Western conquest, inherited its DNA: divide, dilute, dominate. Unintentionally, they eroded our cultures, fractured our spirituality, and sold us a heaven so distant it made us numb to the hells on earth.
Today, while we jump up and down in our churches, our streets are filled with demons from the pit of hell. In Goma, they kill without mercy. In South Sudan, they indiscriminately maim and rape, extinguishing the lives of the sons and daughters of mother Africa.
We traded our ancestors’ whispers for a foreigner’s fear.
They taught us to kneel at the altar of “later”—to endure corruption, poverty, and injustice today for paradise tomorrow. But the veil has lifted. Africans no longer tremble at the threat of hellfire; we rage at the hells around us. The Pentecostal movement tried to bridge the gap, blending Holy Ghost fervor with ancestral rhythms, but even its promises now ring hollow. Why? Because it still dances to a colonial tune. Their leaders, even more than their fellows in the mainstream churches are parts of those impoverishing the masses.
Here’s the truth they fear:
The church in Africa sits on a throne of contradictions. We preach liberation while hoarding colonial loot—spiritual and material. Our bishops, priests, pastors, politicians, and “educated” elites are proxy colonial masters, recycling oppression in God’s name. We’ve turned faith into a transaction: tithes for blessings, fear for control. But the people are waking up. They see the rot—the corruption festering in our institutions, the land crying out as ancestors stir in their graves.
Mother Earth is no passive spectator. She watches as leaders loot, as preachers lie, as the marginalized bleed into her soil. And she will act. Her judgment won’t discriminate: the corrupt, the complacent, even the creatures of the wild will answer. This isn’t mysticism—it’s the reckoning of a land pushed to its limits. Mother Africa never sleeps.
So where do we begin?
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- Bury the Pacification Gospel
Colonial theology taught us to pray quietly and obey blindly. We need a faith that storms the streets—one that names corruption as sin, that fights for justice here, and now. A radical faith that knows heaven starts here, and that we are all equal before the Creator.
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- Listen to the Land
Our spirituality is neither in stained-glass windows; nor in big cathedrals, it neither in crusade and pilgrimage grounds nor in the solemn liturgies and miracle arenas. it’s in the soil, the rivers, the ancestors’ wisdom. A faith divorced from African sacredness is a corpse in a cassock. The land is the point of departure of every relevant African theology. We all walk upon it, and thus should first learn to respect its sacredness.
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- So we’ve to dethrone the Colonial God
The Creator isn’t a European diplomat. Until our theology centers on African struggles—the marginalized, the scarred earth, the stolen futures—we worship an idol. Our big monstrances, speaking in tongues and all forms of worship are worthless if they ignore the cry of Mother Earth, who mourns her children who are no more. The storm is here. We all smell it in the air—the youth’s disillusionment, the intellectuals’ silence, the politicians’ greed. When it breaks, it will drown every institution built on colonial lies. The choice is stark: evolve or perish.
This is why African churches must decide
Will it remain a museum of foreign relics? Or will it rise—rooted in ancestral truths, fighting for life today, and unafraid to let the old mission-houses burn? As Saint Eugene de Mazenod once said:
“I do not want any smoldering wicks in the Congregation; let them burn; let them give heat and light or let them leave”.
