Cameroon Soundings: Mission Engaging Metaphor

By Jim Van Hoeven

My wife, Mary, and I recently completed a term as Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission volunteers at the theological seminary in Kumba, Cameroon, a town of 150,000 in the country’s Southwest Province.  Established in 1952, the seminary equips women and men for ministry in the Presbyterian Church of Cameroon (PCC). The school has eight full-time faculty and 70 students; 15 pastors selected to return for a fourth year of study, a requirement for a Bachelor of Theology degree. 

We had not been to Cameroon before, although for nearly half of our teaching careers we had worked in colleges, seminaries and ecumenical organizations in Asia, Europe, Latin America and southern Africa, my wife in English and I in ecumenical theology and mission. Part of our work during that period involved organizing and participating in consultations on issues of justice, peace and creation, where we interacted with Christians of other traditions and with people of other faiths.  These experiences deepened a lifelong commitment to God’s plan “set forth in Christ to unite all things in him ...” (Eph. 1:9–10), a plan surely in need of advocates in today’s broken world.

Since our retirement a decade ago we have continued to combine teaching with ecumenical opportunities as PC(USA) mission volunteers, serving at partner colleges and seminaries in the Philippines, Mexico, South Korea, Lithuania and, as noted above, most recently at the Presbyterian seminary in Cameroon.

Cameroon! Portugal conquered and named this diverse tribal territory in the 15th century, calling it Cameroes, the Portuguese word for “crab,” a crustacean that apparently was both very large and plentiful a few centuries ago when the region’s coastal rivers were pure.  In more recent times the territory was again conquered and occupied, first by Germany in the 19th century, and then in the 1920s by both England and France, with England controlling the Southwest region and France the larger remaining areas, occupations that not only extracted resources and exploited people but also fractured the territory, creating a linguistic, political and religious divide that exists to this day.  Despite such tensions, however, in 1960 these two regions united to form an independent “federated” nation, one that evolved finally, in 1972, through a new constitution into the present “Republic of Cameroon.”   

Cameroon/Cameroes/crab!  It’s a good metaphor we think for the country as we experienced it.  Like Maine-style crab cakes (lump meat with little filler!), there is much to enjoy in Cameroon — its natural beauty, topographical diversity, traditional art, and centuries-old cultural, religious, tribal and kinship traditions, but more particularly the vibrant faith and life of the people we came to know and love in the Presbyterian churches and seminary in and around Kumba, people for whom the living God is taken seriously as present in the healing and transforming power of the Spirit, and whose gospel-generated growth and lively spirituality suggests, as many scholars claim, a shifting in our time of the center of Christianity from the North to the South!  All of this we experienced firsthand and savored as never-to-be-forgotten remembrances.    

But cameroes also have pincher-claws that are hurtful when they strike, and in Cameroon today large numbers of its roughly 17 million people are stricken and gravely hurting.  We saw examples of this as well, and painfully so, as selected snapshots from our “Kumba Journal” suggest:

• Swelling streams of unemployed yet hopeful men and women who flood towns and cities looking for any kind of work ... shantytown-like neighborhoods where families live wedged together in tin-roofed shacks that have no plumbing or public sanitation, and where electrical service is spotty at best
• Too many children becoming rag-tag street kids because parents can’t afford schoolbooks and uniforms
• Too many women who make a living buying foodstuffs — bananas, kale, beans — and reselling them at small profits to earn a bit of income with which to feed their families ... destruction of vast areas of prime forest cover
• Pollution of rivers and streams
• Election frauds and corrupt, dysfunctional governance

With apparent good reason, the 2007 report of the “Global Fund for Peace” ranks Cameroon 35th on its list of “Failing States,” just below Colombia and Niger, basing its ranking on such indicators as health, education, economy, corruption, human rights, poverty, environmental damage, among others.  U.N.-based statistics validate the ranking: 47 percent unemployed; 65 percent live on less than $1.70 per day; 54 percent have no access to safe drinking water; 45 percent of the children do not finish primary school; 11 percent (mostly women) are infected with HIV/AIDS; 240,000 children ages 1–15 are orphaned due to AIDS; 81 percent of Cameroon’s remaining unprotected forest has been allocated to multinational logging companies.

In our journal we titled this data “A litany of Pain.”  It was our way of connecting the heartbreaking scenes and numbers with remembered stories of persons we knew or knew about and surrounding them with our faith claims, prayers, and as often happened, our tears; we learned that we could bear such realities only by engaging them with the gospel.  And by such means we came to know, in a way we had not known before, the gospel’s promise that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities ... will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” 

The gospel that gave birth to the Presbyterian Church of Cameroon was framed in Europe’s evangelical missionary movement of the mid-19th century, primarily the work of Swiss Reformed pastors, physicians and others “called and sent” to the region through the Basel Mission. To this day, some distance into the postcolonial period, the footprints of that gospel continue to run deep in the soil of the church, setting markers that still point the Way for its faith and practice.          

That gospel and that Way also frame much of the theological discourse at the seminary.   For the most part, we observed that in both content and method the seminary continues to bear the markings of a traditional Western curriculum, requiring students to appropriate a transplanted theological system that in many substantive ways seemed detached from the realities with which it is supposed to engage — the spread of the gospel and the call to discipleship within Cameroon’s present context and culture.  But we also observed some signs of change, undercurrents of reform that surfaced in faculty and classroom discussions, chapel homilies, and social gatherings.  It is not an uncommon occurrence in Christian history. Over time tradition itself can provide the furnishings for the creativity that theology will require when it moves into different contexts and cultures: paradoxically, conserving sometimes makes possible reforming, and reforming can conserve. As we will note below, there were such reforming initiatives at the seminary.  But first, a brief observation on student life at the school as we lived within it.                

The seminary is situated on a roughly 30-acre campus carved out of a rainforest three miles by dirt road from Kumba’s central market.  The campus had a monastic feel to us.  Drum rolls call the community to worship each morning and evening.  Weekly schedules set prescribed times for classes, study, personal prayer, lectionary devotions, meals, recreation and hard physical work (e.g., cutting acres of grass by hand-held machetes, not power mowers!).  Moreover, students are not permitted to leave the campus without permission from the dean.  Like the 5th century “Rule of Benedict,” such regulated ordering of things seemed to aim at sustaining an alternative form of life, a life of wholeness and moral integrity, of inner and outer peace, the kind of exemplary life expected and needed for Christian ministry in Cameroon at this time. “The requirement for [this kind] of life,” wrote Benedict, “is disciplined human living ... while managing one’s time around the central priorities of worship, study and prayer.”  

There were two courses at the seminary that offered alternatives to the established Euro-centric tradition, both of them having roots in the African soil. One is the so-called “African Christianity Movement.” This movement had emerged in the post-missionary period of the 1960s when African theologians began to reflect on their own context and what it means to be both authentically Christian and authentically African. 

The catalyst for the movement was a general protest over the missionaries’ negative attitude toward primal African religions: missionaries had variously described these as animism, fetishism, totemism, paganism, nature worship, or at best, ancestor worship.  In response to this, an increasing number of African Christians began to view Western Christianity as a de-Africanizing power.  This led African theologians to begin a study of their own religious and cultural roots, which in turn led them to conclude that there is continuity between the Christian present and the pre-Christian past in Africa, that the God of biblical revelation has been worshipped for ages by African people. Among other things, this conclusion challenged the Western assumption that “true” religious history in Africa began with the arrival of the Europeans.  It also opened up new ways of thinking and speaking about the Trinitarian God in African Christianity, and about new and creative African styles of liturgy and worship. 

The “African Christianity Movement” is a work in progress led by a number of the brightest theologians in the African church, including one from the seminary in Kumba — “one lone voice here” is how he expressed it to us.  We observed, however, that his “voice” was getting the students’ attention, influencing not only their vision of themselves as African Christians, but also in providing creative and original understandings for Christian faith and practice. The movement’s admitted task and challenge ahead will be to test its theological findings against the experience of the ecumenical church, and to contribute in creative ways to world Christianity.  

The other alternative course offering at the seminary was “ecumenical theology.” This theology also has a history in African Christianity, specifically with those churches in the ecumenical movement that in various creative ways have integrated the theology of the World Council of Churches (WCC) into their own faith and practice.  For those unfamiliar with the WCC, the only background knowledge needed is that the impulse toward the marginalized has been a consistent theme.  Thus, a critical focus of ecumenical theology is the poor, the powerless, those who are stigmatized, exploited, discriminated against; in short, ecumenical theology engages whatever the pain is.  

About midway through my theology course a student, a woman pastor from a large city, asked, “How can we best do our theology so that the gospel will touch people afflicted with HIV/AIDS?”  She continued by telling a gripping story of a young single mother of three children, a member of her congregation, who after two terrible years of struggle and pain had died in the pastor’s arms late one evening.  “Most of my congregation had abandoned this young mother,” she concluded ... and then she wept. 

For the next couple hours the class discussed the pastor’s question, how can Christian theology engage the HIV/AIDS epidemic? recognizing that her lamentable story in varied forms could be told by every family in Cameroon today.  It seems that every now and then something comes along that changes the way we think about everything, and it quickly became clear to the class that the AIDS pandemic in Africa provides such a formative moment for theology, challenging it into places it has not gone before.

One of the students wondered how the epidemic challenges the Christian understanding of creation and redemption, a question that opened a long discussion on the reach of God's love — and here I summarize the discussion from our journal.  Every human being, without exception, is created in the image of God and loved by God so much that he sent the Son into the world ... What about those who are stigmatized on account of their AIDS affliction?  God’s love still holds; no affliction can ever cancel out the image of God ... even in abandonment there is comfort and hope through the crucified Christ who “loved us and gave himself for us.”  What about the church’s response to the epidemic?  To belong to the church of Jesus Christ is to be part of a body where “if one part suffers, every part suffers with it.”  This means that if one has AIDS, we all have AIDS. It is a churchwide crisis ... does our baptism have anything to contribute to the issue? Among other things, it celebrates the end of differences — Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free, those afflicted/those not afflicted ... we live within and toward the “new creation.” When the drum roll ended the class session, we had barely addressed other related topics such as providence, theodicy, mortality, sexuality, among others, each of them important to a theological understanding of the AIDS epidemic. 

It was a beginning.  And as the course moved on, the students had opportunity to use the same theological method to engage other critical issues in church and state such as power, globalization, gender inequality, religious pluralism, economic injustice, environmental degradation, among others. 

Whether or not “ecumenical theology” or the “African Christianity Movement” will impact positively the traditional gospel and Way of the 19th century missionary era is an open question.  Clearly there is a field in Cameroon for creative theological study that has potential not only for the rediscovery of Jesus Christ for our time, but also for envisioning new and creative ways for the church's “mission to engage metaphor” in the Cameroon context.  In any case, we are grateful for the privilege of learning and teaching at the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Kumba during what seemed to us an exciting, transitional moment in its history.

On the day of our departure, seminary students and faculty began stopping by our home to say their good-byes with hugs and traditional songs.  “Please don't forget us,” they said, “and please tell our story to your church.” It was a moving moment for us, and we promised them on both counts.  This paper in part is written to tell their story.  Please don’t forget them.  And please pray for the church, the seminary, and the people of Cameroon.   

Epilogue: On the day we finished writing this paper, we received e-mails from students at the seminary reporting that there is now “widespread political violence” in Cameroon, partly because of rising fuel prices, but also because the president, Paul Biya, is trying to change the constitution so that he can serve for life. So far 20 deaths have been confirmed.   

Jim Van Hoeven is an honorably retired minister member of Hudson River Presbytery.  He and his wife live in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.  They can be reached by email.