Hearing Lamin Sanneh speak at a conference in 2006 became a pivotal moment in my life. This Professor of World Christianity – originally from The Gambia in West Africa, but finishing up at Yale University – was used by God to draw me into a fresh awareness and commitment to the global church which contributed to a change in my life’s direction and vocation.

I will be forever grateful to him. So when the news came through in early January that he had died suddenly, I felt shocked and sad. I headed straight for The Book Depository to see if I could honour his influence by reading another of his books. Surprise, surprise. I found an autobiography. What could be better?! Except that a zillion others got there before me and the book was unavailable…

The book did reach me, finally, and I devoured it on a series of flights through the month of April.

Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African.

I know the season of obituaries is over, but I’d like to reflect on aspects of Dr Sanneh’s story with a few posts. It is a book that left me elated, disturbed and confused, often within a few pages of each other. Elated by his lyrical writing and insight. Disturbed by the obstacles he confronted. Confused because I didn’t always understand what he was writing!

Let’s start with something disturbing. Right through his story, Christian communities proved to be inhospitable and unwelcoming to him. It is very sobering to read.

Here is the opening paragraph of the final chapter:

As should be evident by now, the path of Mr. Christian Africa in America was beset with obstacles subtle and obvious, as well as petty and numerous. Accordingly, the journey leading to the Catholic church was a long-delayed and circuitous one. Along the way, I was reduced to cajoling the Methodists into granting me baptism when the Catholics balked; I failed to clear the high bar of cultural vetting for the Anglican church, with or without Methodist resistance; with my family, I tried with mixed results to sneak into the Evangelical Lutheran church; I even went back to the Presbyterian church for several years only to hit the familiar roadblock of upscale cultural norms. When I gamely turned up at a church potluck I was given a wide berth, along with the advice that the church was only for making social contacts. I didn’t make any contacts on that occasion. In another church, an elderly white gentleman bluntly said that white people simply did not know what to do with an educated African. One Sunday, my family and I arrived at our church in Cambridge (MA, in the USA) only to find Swastika graffiti on the exterior wall with the slogan “power to whites.” For its part, evangelical Protestantism was too invested in American ascendancy to make room for Mr Christian Africa. I was forced to conclude that mainline Protestant churches had given up on me as unassimilable (256).


Did you catch that final word?
“unassimilable”
Yikes.

While this paragraph focuses on his struggles to find a church home in the USA when he arrived there as a student, it all started much earlier than this back in The Gambia, a M-majority country. When he first went to Banjul for work he was hosted by a Christian family. However, ‘my early morning prayers and devotions unnerved them, and they asked me to leave … Muslim prayers frightened the family’ (87). It didn’t help matters that he had his food ‘served in the same dish as the one used for the house dog’ (87).

Sanneh was a young man full of questions and curiosity and this left open an opportunity for Jesus to draw him to himself. But when that moment was secured and he wanted to be part of a church, things became difficult: ‘I might be drawn to the church, but as it turned out, the church was not drawn to me. It was as if somebody had been carefully watching my every move and promptly showed up to bar the way as I tried to speed to my desired objective’ (104). He bounced from one denomination to another and nobody welcomed him. Imagine how today’s post-church generation would respond to this experience?! I guess that is why they are called ‘post-church’! ‘My conversion was beginning to feel like managing an ecumenical hedge fund, with the Protestants and Catholics agreeing to share the risks of accepting a convert from Islam but neither being willing to take them on alone’ (108). But Sanneh persisted: ‘even with my growing disappointment in the church, I still felt a deep need to become apart of it’ (112). He did eventually find a minister willing to baptise him – ‘I had wrung it out of him’ (112).

A first visit to Europe added another layer to the story. ‘Postwar Europe was in the midst of stirring from its nightmare’ (115).

I saw evidence of Christian decline all around. On reflection, it was unsettling to be a new Christian surrounded by old crumbling churches and empty, ornate cathedrals. It was hard to evade the fact that the church was in a state of transition from spiritual belief to social action, from truth as revealed reality to relevance as the modern imperative (116).

And this all happened before he moved to the USA. But let’s be fair. He arrived just as the civil rights movement was gaining momentum and within a few months of Kennedy’s assassination. It was a difficult time. But, unfortunately, ‘I discovered that the churches were centers of resistance to integration which surprised and confounded me greatly’ (132). He observed Christian communities caught between ‘an Americanized Christianity’ and ‘a Christianized America’ (132-133), with both leading to a domestication of the faith, ‘with Jesus custom-fitted in generous American proportions as an entrepreneurial avatar’ (133). The story is disturbing.

It felt like I was repeating the frustrations of church-shopping from my earlier conversion days. The Gambia phase of my search had unsettlingly followed me to the New World. Here I was, once the bright new hope of Africa, floundering like a refugee on foreign soil (135).

‘I noticed that being a regular church attendee of several years’ standing did not save me from being treated as a visitor even by people I helped welcome as newcomers’ (242). Towards the end of the book, after all these Protestant rebuffs, he chronicles his journey, unexpected and stumbling as it is, towards the Catholic church. His instinct was to resist … ‘Yet however slim the possibility, the hope of finding acceptance was so powerful that the prospect whipped up waves of keen anticipation in spite of my lingering doubts’ (250). ‘I had finally come home’ (252).

In amongst it all, he writes of what he was looking for in a church to call home:

I looked for basic things: a faith community devoted to worship of God as revealed in Jesus; reverence for the scriptures; apostolic faithfulness; sacramental witness and service; ecumenical openness; freedom from nationalistic ideology; commitment to the family, to peace and justice, and to the common good; theological education that is grounded in tradition and open to the world; and a spirit of charity that forgives, affirms, embraces, and honors without being self-righteous, naive, or gullible (258-259).

I can understand why cradle Catholics hug their Catholic identity with the nonchalant attitude of knowing they belong without the inconvenience of believing. (Contrast this attitude with that of born-again evangelicals, who often parade the fact that they believe without the distraction of belonging to a faith community.) … Catholicism attracted me for reasons very different, but also for reasons very consistent: it offered me peace and acceptance without the requirement of self-approval. I did not have to be self-congratulatory and judgemental of others to know that I am a redeemed and forgiven child of God, which is to say: I can believe and belong at the same time and in equal measure (267-268).

I may not express it like this myself, but it is still helpful to absorb it as he expresses it.

nice chatting

Paul

PS. The best place to begin an encounter with Lamin Sanneh is, without question, his little book Whose Religion is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West. Just 140 pages, it is his response to ten years of questions from his Harvard & Yale students, raising ‘their criticisms and objections to Christianity and to missions’ (249). It is written in a Q & A format. An important book for all students of history and religion, Christian or otherwise.