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Preparing for Amahoro Africa, June 8-15

Posted Jun 5, 10:05 AM | 7 comments | by Editor | Link

By Mike Todd:

I’ve arrived in South Africa in anticipation of the Amahoro Gathering, which starts Monday night. Between now and then I’m hanging out with my friend Tom Smith and his family.

The theme of the Gathering this year is The African Reformation:

The missiologist Andrew Walls has long argued that the West has entered a post-Christendom era and that world Christianity is entering a post-Western era. Many are looking to Africa, the cradle of humanity (and to Asia and South America), for the emergence of a reformed and renewed paradigm in Christian thinking and practice. It is time for emerging Christian leaders in Africa to give voice to what is being birthed — not so much to give answers, craft doctrines, or create structures — but to ask the difficult questions and grapple with the very real challenges of interpreting the gospel in a truly African way and establishing God’s Kingdom in a still fractured continent.

However, in a globalized world where we are only as human as our interdependent bonds with those on other continents, this is not a conversation that can take place in isolation. North and South, East and West, we need each other.

This is most certainly a spiritual calling but it is equally a social, political and economic one. Everything must change.

This is the unique space of dialogue and engagement that Amahoro Africa will once again host at its annual gathering in June 2009 in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Let me try and tell you why I’m here:

• I am here because I love Africa.


• I am here because God’s church needs reformation—at home, in Africa, everywhere.


• I am here because I love the work that Claude, Kelley, and the team at Amahoro are doing on behalf of our African sisters and brothers, our Africa neighbours.


• I am here because I believe that Africa will someday save the west. As a resident of the west I’m here to contribute in any way I can to that eventuality.


• As I said to Tom in the car this morning after he picked me up at the airport, I come to Africa to stay sane. I go home to bang my head against a brick wall.

Photo courtesy of Mike Todd

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Mike Todd and his wife Sue live in community in Delta, British Columbia, where they’re trying to figure out what it means to be an apprentice of Jesus.

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