Barrett to Resume African Missionary Work
Diocesan Press Service. March 19, 1969 [75-4]
NEW YORK, N. Y. -- The Rev. David B. Barrett is a visiting lecturer at Columbia University who after one year in the United States will return in October to a field which is his first love -- the Church of the Province of East Africa where he has been an Anglican missionary for the past twelve years.
He is a different kind of missionary, though, devoting a large part of his time doing research into conditions and problems that impede the effective preaching and spread of the Christian Gospel and make difficult the emergence of a truly African Church which will be effective under the changed conditions of a generation from now.
One of the problems is language. Because of unfamiliarity with the native dialects many missionaries, he says, have been ineffective in teaching and preaching the Christian faith.
"There are many cases," he declares, "of missionaries who have not had an opportunity to learn a language. They get hold of an interpreter and they say: 'Will you tell the people that they are all sinners'."
" In the process the message gets distorted in one way or another, not deliberately, but inevitably, because in any two languages there is no exact correspondence between terms. Sin in English means something quite different when you use the Swahili word. Now We're in a position to avoid these distortions through doing research."
He gives an example of the language difficulty from his own experience when he was still preaching to native people, a function he has now relinquished to African clergymen.
"A lot of African languages are tonal -- if you use the same word and change the tone you change its meaning. We have a word in Luo -- the word 'dhok' -- that can mean 'lips' or 'cattle.' I spoke this language about four years before I knew about this distinction.
"My African friends didn't want to tell me I was saying it wrong. So, when I stood up at the beginning of Morning Prayer and said, 'O Lord, open Thou our lips,' what I was actually saying was, 'O Lord, open up the cattle.' They were too polite to tell me, but they knew what I was trying to say.
"It doesn't matter in a case like that, but if you're preaching the Christian faith to people who are not committed Christians you can generate very serious misunderstandings. In fact, we've done this just about everywhere and in many places we haven't communicated the Gospel at all."
The situation is not greatly improved, even when native clergymen are doing the preaching, he says.
"The difficulty I would have as a foreigner in trying to translate Christian concepts into Luo is to some extent the same felt by an African trained at an English-speaking seminary, because he understands what the concepts mean in English, but when he's got to translate this into Luo for a village congregation he has the same problems I have.
" In some languages they don't have sheep, so instead of talking about the Good Shepherd he has to talk about the Good Whatever-it-is that the people would recognize as friendly animals.
"It's much the same way with tribes that don't have bread, so instead of saying, 'Give us this day our daily bread' they say 'fish' or whatever happens to be the staple diet. To me this is an obvious thing, but to an African seminarian or preacher -- unless he has been told this is all right -- how does he know he isn't altering the faith?"
Another language difficulty, according to Father Barrett, arises out of the fact that half of the African nations are French-speaking while the other half is English-speaking. It has led, he says, to a serious fragmentation among Anglican Christians and others.
" From one part of the Church in East Africa to another part of the Church in the Congo, the contact between the two may be non-existent," he asserts. "And even more so between French-speaking Churches in half of Africa and English-speaking Churches in the other half, there is no contact whatever."
He believes the Episcopal Church could be very helpful in helping to finance visits by African Bishops to other parts of the Church for the purposes of preaching, conducting evangelistic campaigns or "simply looking around and having fellowship with fellow Christians."
"This is something the Episcopal Church is very good at, " he says, "and probably could be even better at. "
"Another thing the Episcopal Church could do is to encourage the Anglican Church in Africa to break out of its 'Englishness.' For example, training an African priest to speak French. There are several potential African priests in the country at seminaries. These men already speak pretty good English. If into their two or three years at an American seminary could be built in a course in French, these men would be in great demand when they went back. "
Father Barrett, a quietly humorous and scholarly man, heads a unit for research in the Province of the Church in East Africa and makes his headquarters at Nairobi, in Kenya, where he also has been a pastoral missionary and University chaplain since 1957. He is the author of a book entitled "Schism and Renewal in Africa," published in 1968 by the Oxford University Press.
His salary has been paid by the Church Missionary Society, but much of the research work in which he has been engaged has been financed with yearly grants of $10,000 from the American Episcopal Church through the office of the Deputy for Overseas Relations.
He describes the effort to create an indigenous African Christian Church as one which faces enormous difficulties, and one of his major concerns today is looking toward the future for an idea of what the African Church of A. D. 2000 must be like.
Most of the African Dioceses, he points out, are now under national leadership, an important first step, but a more subtle problem concerns the question of how the whole ethos of the Church can become national too.
"It's very easy, " he says, "for an African Bishop to remain oriented to the United States, the place that will bail him out if he gets into financial trouble."
"It's also possible," he asserts, "for a Church to get too national, in other words to become a kind of tribal Church. Most of the new Dioceses In both the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches in Africa are in fact tribal splits. When you do that you go too far the other way, and the Church ceases to be a universal fellowship for all people and becomes a tribal club. "
He believes that one advantage of having foreign missionaries in Africa is the constant reminder that the Church is greater than the tribe or nation.
He also believes that the traditional Churches, the Anglican and Roman Catholic in particular, are in serious trouble.
"The Roman Catholic Church, " he says, "has calculated that its ministry is going to break down completely in about 20 years in Africa. They just can't cope; they're not getting the recruits. The less recruits they get the worse the situation gets. Everything is so geared to the priest, even in Africa, that you can't have mass, you can't have anything without a priest. The Churches that have relied on this type of ministry and hierarchy -- that's us and the Roman Catholics Sand a few others -- are going to see a total breakdown of the Church. Those which stress autonomy of the local congregations, lay leadership and all those things which we pay lip service to, are going to be all right."
"There are 70 million Christians in Africa today and due to the population explosion this will be 350 million at the end of the century. Quite apart from physical considerations like where they are going to sit on Sunday, and considerations like who is going to take the sacraments to them, there are other things like whether this mass of laity is going to stand still for this type of ministry that we offer them. The answer to this, I'm sure, is 'no'."
He sees the development of a vastly expanded diaconate and the training of many more lay persons as a possible answer to the problems posed by events to come during the next 20 to 30 years.
Other problems exist in efforts toward Church union, which are going on throughout Africa, but which have been held up by differences of opinion among European theologians and among African theologians who have received their training in Western seminaries.
"Laymen are not prepared to wait forever," Father Barrett says, "until the Churches solve this fragmentation problem. The answer is for the time to come when Africans of these Churches are going to take the thing completely in their own hands and say Church union obviously is essential and however we arrive at it we must get to it. And if it means treading on the toes of theologians we'll do it. "
African laymen also have taken the lead in the formation of the East Africa Revival Movement, according to Father Barrett, which began 40 years ago and now numbers more than one million members. It is, he says, a "genuinely African movement" which is non-denominational and led by the laity, although it includes among its membership almost all of the new African Bishops.
The movement centers in East Africa with a three-point program which stresses African-ness, Christian community and evangelism. Annual open-air meetings attract up to more than 15,000 persons. Other similar movements have sprung up in other parts of Africa.
" It's a spontaneous movement, " Father Barrett says, "made up of very large numbers of individual African Christians who become part of the local group in this revival and give everything to it, although they are all also faithful members of their own Churches. "
"It's like the Church ought to be, I suppose, and for example if a man is going to another city to look for work they send a note ahead and when he gets there, there's a job lined up for him. A very closely-knit Christian community. "
"The great thing is that the Europeans were against it for a large part of its history, maybe 20 years, until now we realize that it is a genuine Christian movement. The whole thing is an African achievement, and although lots of Europeans are in it they're very much just ordinary people, and they have no positions of authority. "
A possible pattern for the future of the Christian Church in Africa? The Rev. David B. Barrett has an idea that it is.