Yesterday was the feast day of St. Patrick. When he began in mission in the wild realm of Ireland, his enterprise probably seemed futile. As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography observes,
From the tone of much of the Confession, it can be inferred that one important reason for its composition was that Patrick felt that his mission was misrepresented in Britain. Christians in the late Roman empire did not think in terms of having a missionary duty to take Christianity beyond its frontiers to the ‘barbarians’. Some in Britain (perhaps the educated and aristocratic ecclesiastical hierarchy) were therefore highly dubious about Patrick’s conviction that God had called him to go and preach to their Irish enemies.
Certainly no one anticipated that, within a few generations, pagan Ireland would be a solidly Christian land that would send famous missionaries and teachers to the European continent!
That history sheds light on one of the most remarkable and overlooked religious developments of our time: the tremendous expansion of Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa. As reported in the Daily Telegraph.
If a clergyman’s success is measured by the size of his flock, then Africa’s priests stand to inherit the earth. Their congregations are growing faster than any since the earliest years of Christianity.
The pews of Africa’s churches now hold 390 million worshippers – more than three times the total of 35 years ago. Over the next two decades, Africa’s congregation is likely to grow by another 200 million, causing a huge shift in the character of the Christian faith.
The direction of the shift is indicated by the fact that the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, the leader of what is now the largest member of the Anglican communion, is a staunch traditionalist. That stance makes him persona non grata to modernist clerics. To me it calls to mind how St. Columbanus brought a purified faith from Ireland to Merovingian Gaul.
Though we tend to think of Africa as predominantly Moslem and pagan, Christians in fact are about 53 percent of the Sub-Saharan population (currently estimated at about 730 million). This growth certainly seems providential. The past half century has been a period of catastrophe for the continent, culminating in the AIDS pandemic. On a merely secular level, the propagation of Christian ideals of monogamy and sexual restraint is the best hope for the next generation of Africans. Christian ideals are also potentially, if not always and everywhere actually, a powerful engine for political freedom and economic development. Those secular benefits are not, to be sure, the reasons why Africans turn to Christ, but they will be welcome side effects.
And who knows? Perhaps one day a Columbanus from Africa will spark a spiritual revival in the desiccated, “enlightened” parts of the white Western world.
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