by Neil Elliot
There are some books that you will always remember reading. Somehow they switch on a light in your mind and that light never goes out. I can remember hearing "The Hobbit" read for us by our first grade teacher, which opened the doors of many fantasy worlds. I think of the time my spiritual director recommended I read Mark’s gospel through and the way that I encountered a dynamic Jesus there. Such books are life changing, and "Christianity Rediscovered" is such a book.
I read it whilst I was at seminary and, as much as anything thing else I encountered there, it informed my ministry. In a way that's not surprising. Christianity Rediscovered is the reflections of a young Roman Catholic priest who is sent to the Masai people in East Africa, during the heady days after Vatican II. He realizes that the missionary work he is running is completely ineffectual in enabling the Masai to encounter Christ, and so he starts again from scratch. That's a perfect mix for a young (and slightly iconoclastic) trainee priest to read.
However, Donovan's book has particular substance because what he did was to draw the Christian story out of the culture of the Masai. He finds, or rather helps them to find, their own native concepts for what we call church, the priesthood, and so forth. He tries to divest the Christian message of the accretions of the centuries, and of western culture, and enable the Masai to find God-in-Christ in their own culture. Doing this has a profound affect on Donovan too, for he has to unlearn much of what he has been taught. So the book is not just a record of how the Masai shaped their church, but of the changes in Donovan's understanding.
The message of the book is deliberately shaped for western Christians. It is a call to re-examine — or rediscover — the Christianity we think we know. It is an invitation for us to consider the accretions that we take for granted as "part" of the Gospel and of the Church, and to consider how it might be. This is a fundamental piece of the work that we need to do as our culture moves into a new era of Post modernity. This book is asking us "How do we share the gospel in today's culture?" It will not give us the answers, but it does give some of the questions.
I'll end with the first part of the creed, which the Masai developed (with apologies for the sexist language).
"We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created man and wanted man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the earth. We have known this High God in the darkness and now we know him in the light."
