Author: Oluwadare-Vincent Ibitola & Meshach Salawu
Date: 2026/01/10
This paper examines the multifaceted impact of African Traditional Religion (ATR) on the development of the early African Church, with particular attention to the pre-Chalcedonian period and the formative centuries of Christian expansion across sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on contemporary theological, missiological, and postcolonial scholarship published between 2010 and 2026, this study argues that ATR did not merely constitute an obstacle to Christian mission but functioned as a generative religious substrate through which early African communities encountered, interpreted, reframed, and institutionally shaped Christianity. The paper surveys the theological continuities and discontinuities between ATR cosmologies and early Christian doctrines, the role of indigenous religious concepts in the formation of African liturgical and communal practices, the influence of traditional healing, ancestor veneration, and spirit ontologies on early African ecclesiology, and the ways in which colonial and missionary historiography systematically obscured these dynamic interactions. By foregrounding African religious agency, this paper contributes to the broader project of decolonizing the history of world Christianity and affirming the theological integrity of Africa's early Christian heritage.
Keywords: African Traditional Religion, early African church, inculturation, African Christianity, missiology, postcolonial theology, ancestor veneration, African ecclesiology
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