The just released PBS’s docu-history series “The Black Church: This is Our Story, This is Our Song” from Henry Louis Gates Jr., traces the 400 year story of the Black Church in America. The series celebrates stories of worship and faith. More significantly, it highlights how African Americans made the christian message their own in a creative reception that mobilised it for the manifest expression of their African spiritual energy to negotiate the disadvantages they had to suffer in the Americas. At the center of the stories is the raw and continually available animating energy of black spirituality. Could this be a throwback challenge for their continental siblings yet grappling with the foundational ambiguities of the christian religion?
The documentary reveals how Black people have worshipped and, through their spiritual journeys, improvised ways to bring their faith traditions from Africa to the New World, while translating them into a form of Christianity that was not only truly their own, but a redemptive force for a nation whose original sin was found in their ancestors’ enslavement across the Middle Passage.
The Challenge to which the African Christianity in continental Africa must embrace:
To generate a form of Christianity that is truly their own and shaped as an effective redemptive force for the African peoples all over the world.
Source: The Black Church
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