WHEN THE GOSPEL BECOMES A COLONIAL INHERITANCE: AFRICAN EVANGELICALISM, WESTERN THEOLOGICAL POWER AND THE STRUGGLE FOR AFRICAN AGENCY

Christianity in Africa is neither a recent phenomenon nor simply a European religion transported to a continent without a Christian past. Africa contributed significantly to the formation of early Christianity and produced some of the most influential thinkers in Christian history. Yet the modern expansion of Protestant and evangelical Christianity across much of Sub-Saharan Africa took place within a very different historical setting. European missionary movements arrived not only with the Gospel but also with schools, seminaries, curricula, publishing systems, denominational structures, theological categories and models of ministerial formation. This paper examines the enduring consequences of that institutional inheritance. It argues that one of the unresolved problems within contemporary African evangelicalism is not the authenticity of African Christianity but the continuing dependence of significant sectors of African theological education upon intellectual systems whose centres of production, validation and prestige have historically been located outside Africa. Drawing on scholarship on African Christianity, theological education, colonial mission, decolonisation and accreditation, the paper demonstrates that this dependency is structural rather than merely personal. It can continue even where institutions are African owned, African led and populated entirely by African students and lecturers. The paper examines the historical relationship between mission and education, the persistence of Western curricular dominance, the power exercised through accreditation and global theological networks, and the responsibilities of African Christian leaders themselves in reproducing inherited structures. It concludes that theological decolonisation does not require abandoning Christianity or rejecting scholarship produced outside Africa. It requires the recovery of African theological agency: the ability of African Christians to interpret Scripture rigorously, construct theology from within African realities, produce their own scholarship, build sustainable institutions and participate in global Christianity as producers of theological knowledge rather than permanent consumers of it.