PATTERNS OF MISSIONARY AND ECUMENICAL RELATIONSIHPS IN ZIMBABWE

Frans J. Verstraelen

The Saturday edition of The Herald, a daily newspaper published in Harare, regularly contains advertisements of services offered by Christian churches and groups. For instance, The Herald of Saturday October 8, 1994, has on one and the same page advertisements of the Central Baptist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the King's Church, the New Life Centre, the Good Shepherd Baptist Church, the Faith World Ministries, the Anglican Cathedral, the Rhema Church and the Trinity Methodist Church. This is, of course, a rich mix of Christian presence, though not one of Christian unity. Moreover, those different churches and groups are only the top of the ecclesiastical iceberg. In this contribution I intend to investigate the following points: what are the missionary visions and practices of this bewildering Christian multiplicity, and how do its components relate to each other; also, how do they relate to the realities of Zimbabwe and its people, their socio-economic problems and aspirations, their culture, in particular their religious heritage? It is impossible to describe and analyse the hundreds of Christian churches and organizations. This contribution can be no more than an exploratory exercise, a first outline which - at a later stage - could be developed in more detail. It presents: 1. Diversity of the Christian presence in Zimbabwe. 2. Mission visions and programmes. 3.Inter- Christian relationship. 4. Responses to Zimbabwean realities of context and culture. 5. Missio-ecumenical comment.

1. Diversity of the Christian Presence in Zimbabwe

Before embarking on mapping out the diversity of Christianity, I will give some historical data. The people of Zimbabwe had their first contact with Christianity in the mid-sixteenth century. The Portuguese Jesuit Da Silveira reached the court of the Mwene Mutapa in North-East Zimbabwe in 1569, where, after initial success, he was strangled to death. In the beginning of the seventeenth century Jesuits and Dominicans were able to build some churches in Manyika and Mazoe. However, in 1667 missionaries were withdrawn because of the political upheavals. The legacy of these missionaries consisted merely in a few Christian symbols added to the traditional religious expressions of the people. Long after the Jesuits had departed, travellers noted Christian practices mixed with customs of the local people: south of Sena, the Barwe named Maria as their great ancestress in their first-fruits ceremonies (Weller/Linden, 1984:3). Systematic missionizing among the Zimbabwean people started in the mid- nineteenth century. The London Missionary Society (LMS) opened a mission station in 1859 at Inyati situated north of present-day Bulawayo, thereby establishing one of the oldest mission stations in Central Africa. In 1879 an international group of Catholic missionaries, all Jesuit priests and lay brothers, reached the Ndebele court of Lobengula at Old Bulawayo, where they were allowed to stay for some time. The Anglican Bishop of Bloemfontein, George Knight-Bruce, started in 1888 his reconnaissance tour in a great part of present- day Zimbabwe, resulting in Anglican missionary work in the area. It is worth noting that these missionary endeavours started before the European occupation of the Shona and Ndebele territory. The Centenary booklet of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe/Rhodesia in 1979 mentions that on the one hand the missionaries "by their presence in the country before the European occupation made it clear that that presence was not connected with it; they did not come in European bagage" (Rea 1979: 7). On the other hand, Anglican and Catholic missionaries were in the company of the Pioneer Column of the British South Africa Company which in 1890 began with the effective occupation of the country. The missionaries who up till then had made no real impact because of the absolute despotism of the Ndebele King Lobengula prohibiting their work, agreed with Moffat's evaluation that the only solution lay in drastic changes which meant "annexation by a civilized power" (Weller/Linden 1984:22). Whatever the case may have been, the colonial occupation of 1890 fully opened the way for missionary activities in Zimbabwe. The only possible way of giving an impression of the bewildering Christian presence in present-day Zimbabwe is to indicate the main streams as they find a more or less collective expression in clusters, like the Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC), the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops' Conference (ZCBC), the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe (EFZ). Outside these 'established' Christian forms there are the `New Religious Movements' (NRMs) which represent a type of Christianity that needs further scrutiny. In addition to the "three major manifestations of mission" (Spindler 1995: 441), we have, therefore, to consider a fourth manifestation of importance: the New Religious Movements. a. The Zimbabwe Council of Churches (ZCC) founded in 1964 as a fellowship of Christian Churches and Organisations has as its main objectives: 1. to increase mutual understanding and to develop more effective ecumenical witness and action on local, national and international level; 2. to foster closer unity through joint action and service, and by ecumenical studies in faith and order, life and work; 3. to encourage reunion of the denominations; 4. to stimulate and facilitate development of evangelistic and sustainable development programmes (ZCC 1993, 2). I will discuss some of these objectives later, but it can already be stated that there is apparently no room for studies in faith and order (point 2) since, for instance, the BEM-report has not received any attention in the ZCC (Bakare, UZ Chaplain). The present ZCC membership counts twenty churches, seventeen of which belong to Protestant 'establishment' churches (three types of Methodism, four