By Noel Bryuns
The WCC is intellectually refined and theologically advanced but it is out of touch with
real people. So it should stop quibbling over admitting the Celestial Church of Christ as
a full member because polygamy is not a problem for local churches in Africa.
This was the blunt message from the general secretary of the Zimbabwe Council of Churches
(ZCC), Densen Mafinyani, when asked by Jubilee to comment on the issue of Celestial
Church membership to the WCC.
The 8th assembly on Thursday night roundly rejected the Nigeria-based church’s bid
for membership after delegates expressed concern that the church still has polygamous
clergy.
According to a statement from the Celestial Church, whose founder the Rev SBJ Oshoffa died
in 1986, the church admitted polygamous clergy only until the same year, although clergy
who lived in polygamous unions before that might continue to do so. It did not condone
divorce.
To underline his point, Mafinyani said that the general secretary of
"Fambidzano", an umbrella body of about 100 African Instituted Churches (AIC)
attends the annual general meeting of the ZCC as an associate member. (In some parts of
the continent, they are referred to as African Independent Churches).
"Many of the church leaders are polygamous," he said.
"This is not a problem for the local churches. These leaders are accepted in their
churches, their followers accept the cultural dimension where the tribal headman had more
than one wife. The local churches see nothing wrong with this."
Mafinyani said the WCC is very articulate and professional, intellectually refined and
theologically advanced, very professional — but out of touch with ordinary people.
"The new central committee must form a space where real people can speak.
Otherwise, the WCC is just like the UN — very organised but cannot to relate to
simple people.
"Can the WCC please open a door where the African spirituality can be
rediscovered?" he pleaded.
"We don’t want our Christian faith to be limited by the mindset of Europe, where
it came from, a theology too narrow to accommodate what God has done with Africans long
before the missionaries came — those missionaries who threw out our ancient religious
experiences and sacred beliefs as pagan."
This gave the impression that God does not speak in Africa, but only through Western
theology.
"I, personally and speaking on behalf of the ZCC, appreciate very much what the WCC
has done and is doing, but it must please create more space so that our faith can be
enriched (by African contributions)," Mafinyani said.
He asked assembly delegates the same question which AIC members posed to him when
questioning the WCC criterion of monogamy for membership.
"They ask me: if we who have several wives die and face God, and next to us is a man
who had one wife while he was alive, who of us will be justified?"
They also argued that if they had several wives because they did not want to have loose
relations with other women, "is this not a way to contain the Aids epidemic that is
so prevalent in Africa?"
Mafinyani also questioned whether some of those non-African clergy who condemned African
polygamy were not "polygamists" in a more discreet way — being married to
one wife but seeing other women in secret.
Professor Frans Verstraelen of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of
Zimbabwe, told Jubilee the first pioneering missionaries told those wanting to be
baptised they had to choose one wife and send the rest away.
"This, of course, was unjust. Often a young wife was kept and the first wife and the
older wives were chased away. This was a subject of intense debate in the seventies, and
today many churches are not forcing polygamous marriages to be dissolved if people want to
become Christians.
"Polygamy in the African mindset can reflect status and is not something wrong or
evil. And if the ZCC accepts the AIC, it is probably because it has a better idea of what
is acceptable in the African context than someone from, say, Sweden," Verstraelen
said.
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