Witch Accusation (Part 1 of 3)

Witch Accusation (Part 1 of 3)

Report on June 6-8, 2013 Congolese Conf.: The Church Faced With the “Child-Called-Witch” Phenomenon

MulumbaMukundi

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The Importance of Intercultural Skills and Relationships for Successful African Christian Leaders in the Contemporary Interreligious, Interethnic, and Globally Connected World

Steven D. H. Rasmussen

Based on survey results from 8041 African Christians and Christian leaders in three countries, and from interviews with several dozen African Christian leaders, this paper will report on how successful African Christian leaders and organizations use intercultural experiences, skills, and relational networks. Many of the successful leaders have lived away from home for some period. In contexts where people most often trust those who share their ethnic identity, successful leaders use these skills to minister, gain resources, and build trust inter-ethnically, inter-denominationally, and internationally. A few even use such skills to build relationships and minister effectively in Muslim contexts.

Diagnosis Through the Prophetic: Sustaining Worldviews of Witchcraft within Contemporary Christianity in Africa

J KwabenaAsamoah-Gyadu: Baëta-Grau Professor of African Christianity and Pentecostal Theology: Trinity Theological Seminary, Legon, Ghana

The belief in witchcraft with its attendant accusations has remained part of the African religious mindset some two centuries after Christian mission work started. The reference to missionary work is important because witchcraft was often dismissed as a psychological delusion and the figment of human imagination. Witchcraft accusations have not gone away in spite of those denials. Witchcraft has been mainstreamed in African Christianity and many indigenous churches creating the ritual contexts for dealing with it as a reality of human life. This paper examines the phenomena of witchcraft and witchcraft accusations in contemporary Christianity in Africa in an attempt to articulate a missiological response to it.

Witchcraft and Extrajudicial Killings in Africa: Where is the voice of the Church?
John K. Jusu, PhD, Regional Director for Africa, Overseas Council International, Africa International University

When people face strange and unexplainable situations, they create mental categories that will help them make sense of that situation to restore mental stability. Many unexplainable things happen in Africa and the African primal mind makes sense of the unexplainable through attribution to unnatural forces. In the primal mind, there are no natural causes to any phenomenon…how can you explain the death of a child, or a husband growing to love one wife than the other, or the harvest failing in ones farm and not the other, or a widow getting richer than anyone else in the village? Often witchcraft provides an explanation to the unexplainable.
Witchcraft accusations have led to many extrajudicial killings, banishment of people from communities and other gross human violations; the Church has remained tight lipped about this gross abuse of God’s image in people. The Church in Africa has been quick to give a theological response to euthanasia; to abortion, to alternative sexual orientation, to slavery, to membership in esoteric societies, to female circumcision, but have failed to give a robust theological response to the issue of witch and witchcraft accusation. This paper will contribute to building a theological system that will help the Church to accept the full mandate of protecting the widows, orphans and strangers…common victims of witchcraft accusations.

PANEL Discussion

Dr. Samuel Kunhiyop

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