If you’re sitting in the West it’s hard to imagine that we need more theological resources. I mean, do we really need more books and blogs, podcasts or platforms? This isn’t intended as a slight against Christian writers and teachers serving believers in the West. In fact, I’m sort of one of them myself. But the truth is that as a culture—broadly speaking—the West enjoys an abundance of relevant theological resources, all within its much larger and splendidly-stocked repository of literature and thought.
African believers need writing embedded in the historic Christian faith and engaged in their own contextual challenges.
To illustrate this, for the past six years I’ve made a personal study of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Scattered among my bookshelves are seven works exclusively concerned with Nietzsche’s life, writing and influence. Seven. And there would be many more if my wife relaxed our book budget. Just last year saw the publication of Michael McEwan’s outstanding work, The Devil Reads Nietzsche, with the telling subtitle: A Public Theology for the Post-Christian Age. Maybe Africa doesn’t need another book on Nietzsche. And Africa certainly isn’t “post-Christian.” But African believers need assistance in the realm of public theology—Christian writing that is both embedded in the historic Christian faith and engaged in our own contextual challenges. These resources aren’t going to come from the West; we need Africans to write them.
The Gospel Coalition Africa exists to meet those needs, to provide rich and robust theological resources for Africa, by Africans.
Theological Resources by Africans for Africa
To equip Christians and churches in Africa to face the peculiar challenges of both the continent and their contexts, we need theological resources written by Africans. Again, that’s where TGC Africa steps in. We exist to platform African believers with a desire to serve the African church.
The African church is woefully under-resourced.
Contrast with the sheer abundance of theological resources written in, by and for the Western church, the African church is woefully under-resourced. A major reason for this is access. Books are expensive, when available. Physical publishers based on the continent face a host of challenges, particularly in distribution. Added to that, the growing abundance of theological resources written in the West act as a kind of disincentive against writing done here. Publishing online circumvents many of those obstacles, providing uncompromisingly biblical yet carefully contextualised theology for the millions of believers across Africa.
If projections are correct, within a few years Africa will be home to over a third of the world’s youth. Despite the innumerable problems across our continent, there is optimism about the future here. Furthermore, being home to third of the world’s youth by 2030, Africans won’t merely shape their own societies and cultures, home countries and local conversations—but the world’s. All of this makes it imperative that Africans have a trustworthy and growing repository of Christians resources. Help TGC Africa continue to build that repository of freely available theological resources.
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