The Challenges of Sacred Charters for World Chrisitanity

The proliferation of new Christian movements problematizes for historians of Christianity the relationship between writing history and constructing what could be called “sacred charters”—the commonly-accepted national or ethnic identity narratives that anchor groups of people in the divine and thereby justify their existence. In this lecture I shall discuss navigating the challenges of sacred charters in African Christianity today, and I shall put my experiences into dialogue with historians of African Christianity a century ago. Discussion of the ongoing challenges of sacred charters will follow.