97. Lutherans in Africa

97.

Brother Joe drives me around town in his carryall van and I see that Monrovia is quite “westernized” though it has a lot of unpaved streets and poor neighborhoods.

There are several new government buildings and a small new university.

The people look fairly prosperous though Joe says there is some political unrest and a very high rate of unemployment.

When we visit the central market, Joe catches a teenage pickpocket trying to steal his wallet. Joe lets him go with a scolding. No one seems to take the attempted theft very seriously.

I discover that wealthy blacks and “Europeans”, as white people are called here, hire houseboys to sleep on their porches at night to discourage robbers-- “rogues” as they call them.

Brother Joe is the pastor of Monrovia’s Lutheran church and on Sunday morning I attend the service, which is quite a shock to me because it is exactly like the services I attended when we were boys in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Somehow I didn’t expect that. I thought it might be somehow more African.

Some of the music is different since the choir uses rattles and percussion instruments as accompaniment, but the worship is the same, which is kind of a disappointment to me.

Change and growth are slow, of course and a “mission”, by definition, is an insertion of a foreign element into a native culture, so I should not have been so surprised. Bedsides, I well remember the glassy-eyed devotion of the Indians I saw in the mountains of Peru to the classical Spanish Catholic Church two centuries after the missionary period of that religious body had ended, so I expect the great-great-grandchildren of these black Africans will probably be reciting Luther’s Small Catechism in English long after the enthusiasm of the present missionizing generation has faded.

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