Research in Religion and Family – serie

The Missionary Outreach of the West Indian Church is the story of Jamaican Baptists, ex-slaves who, four years after Emancipation (1838), established a witness in the Cameroons (West Africa) in cooperation with their British pastors and with the reluctant aid of the Baptist Missionary Society of London. Professor Russell analyzes the relationship between the undertaking of the mission and the new self-awareness of a freed people. The institutions created to achieve their aims are discussed and their fortunes are followed amid the chaotic ecclesiastical, economic, and political happenings consequent upon the Anglo/Hispanic rivalry at the time. The book is also a study of what happens when a mission-field becomes a mission agency with missionaries of its own.

The advent and approach of colonization and Christianity condemned the African traditional religion and culture as paganistic and backward. This created issues of bi-culturalism and bi-religiousness in personal and religious identity that the church needs to address. For those living in most post-colonial countries, there is the existence of deep psychological and spiritual scars that need healing. The Western Christian rituals in use in most African mainline churches exclude any traditional religious rituals. A new pastoral theology of care and psychodynamic understanding of integrative consciousness is needed in these contexts. A pastoral care-giver with integrative consciousness (possessing an awareness of both the traditional and Western worldview and/or integration thereof) is required to address the psychological and religious identity conflict existing in post-colonial contexts such as Zimbabwe.