Harnessing indigenous cultures as a tool for evangelism

For it was Marcus Mosiah Garvey, the Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, orator and staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, who once said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

It was precisely for this reason that Saints Michael, Raphael and Gabriel Catholic Church, Satellite Town, Lagos recently rolled out the drums to celebrate the richness of Nigeria’s diverse cultures.

Themed ‘Our Culture – A Tool for Evangelization’, the cultural day celebration was aimed at rediscovering and tapping into Nigeria’s rich cultural heritage and leveraging on the aspects that will promote evangelization.

And so it was that on Sunday, April 17, the Catholic faithful in the parish, decked in their various cultural attires, turned out en masse at the Archangels Church ground to showcase the richness of their heritage.

Beginning with a thanksgiving Mass, the event soon snowballed into a full cultural pageantry as the different cultural groupings, organized according to the six geo-political zones of the country, took turns to showcase their rich cuisines, dressings and cultural performances. It was indeed a spectacle to behold, with the priests also decked in the native attires of their people.

In his goodwill message, Rev. Fr. Vincent Ezezue (CSSR), the parish priest, said the auspicious occasion presented a unique opportunity to celebrate Nigeria’s most cherished cultural heritage.

“Today marks a very special day in our lives as we strive as a people to rediscover ourselves and imbibe the unique cultural values in our history to uphold the very salient aspects of them that would promote and enhance our true worship as tools for evangelization,” Fr. Ezezue said.

He said the Church, seeing the need to integrate the people’s culture with the liturgy, both of which are essential for growth and development of the faithful, has exerted efforts, now and in the past, to introduce enculturation (the gradual adaptation of aspects of a people’s culture into the Christian mode of worship) among the people of God.

“The Church likewise is a larger family of our individual families and if the individual families intend to preserve their history, poetry, lifestyles, values, norms, and identify the core human arts and culture, the Church also does likewise to preserve the faith of her faithful,” Fr. Ezezue said.

“Those positive cultures of our people that will enhance peaceful coexistence, love, tolerance, and good neighbourliness should be encouraged as against factors of division, insurgencies, terrorism, violence, hostilities and tribalism. We should imbibe the culture of being our brother’s keeper,” he added.

Fr. Ezezue seized the opportunity to admonish families to go down memory lane and revisit the good old days when parents instilled high level of discipline, decorum and decency in their children, adding that it was incumbent on parents to reprimand their children when they go wrong or fall out of line.

He also urged modern-day young people to shun indecent dressing and inordinate pursuit of material things which exposes them to prostitution, armed robbery, fraud and other related crimes, and avoid bowing to peer pressure.

“Parents are not even helping matters for keeping sealed lips when their children whom they know are not working carry expensive GSM phones – iPads, iPhones, etc – and live expensive lifestyles. This is not our culture. Our dear parents should begin to ask questions on the sources of such wealth,” he said.

Rev. Fr. Callistus Onyeanusi, in a paper entitled ‘Christianity and Quest for Cultural Revival’, noted that for any measure of Christian stability and permanence to be achieved, the Church must reckon with the culture of a given people, adding that it was pertinent for Africa to consider every aspect of Christian doctrine and practice it from her own perspective in order to arrive at a Christianity relevant to the African situation.

“In this light, African Christians should seek to incarnate Christianity in Africa, to make Christianity an African thing. For it is rightly believed that unless Christianity becomes part and parcel of African culture, it will remain a foreign religion in which Africans can only play-act,” he said.

Fr. Onyeanusi said the onus was on African Christians, the clergy and lay people alike, to shun the habit of looking down on their indigenous cultures but to adapt these cultures into their worship of God.

“If there is no serious effort to redeem Christianity from appearing foreign to Africans by encouraging enculturation, the future may be unpromising,” he said.

“What we are celebrating today is the intimate transformation of the authentic African cultural values and integrating them into our core Catholic Christianity,” said Valentine Agwulonu, a Nollywood actor and chairman of the publicity/marketing sub-committee, adding that it was wrong to condemn a people’s culture as fetish since after creation God assessed everything he created and said it was perfect.

Agwulonu said the cultural day celebration was also a means of harnessing Nigeria’s diverse cultures and languages and uniting them as one big, happy family as a step towards achieving national unity.

Speaking to BDSUNDAY ahead of the celebration, Elder Emmanuel Oyibo, chairman of the organising committee, had said the essence of the cultural day was to harness Nigeria’s indigenous cultures as a veritable tool for spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ, build bridges that will bring together the country’s diverse cultures, and bring together the children to learn the language of their people so that they would be able to use the language to glorify God.