Theology of the Drum:

a test case for Gospel and Culture

Workshop for the Many Nations 1 Voice Celebration, Calgary

June 24th, 2000

"For even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one
we preached to you let him be eternally condemned!" - Galatians 1:8

[Workshop Goal: to appreciate Aboriginal culture, both as potential
preparation for the gospel and as a good thing in itself.]

Q: What do you mean by the word "culture"? What are the components?

Q: Is it possible to separate the gospel from culture?

This workshop is about culture. How should Christians relate to the culture in which they live?

I used to believe that there is a pure gospel, a pure true gospel that exists in heaven and that we on earth must try to preach that pure gospel without any cultural additions at all. But over the years I have come to see that this is a misunderstanding. I lived in Nigeria for five years and that changed me. I came to see that there is really no such thing as a pure gospel without any human addition or expression of it. That is because we are all humans and we all speak one human language or another.

As soon as you learn to speak a language you have culture, and you have a way of understanding the world. It is a fact that you cannot escape, even if you try. If you have a body then you have culture. It would only be possible to escape culture if you could somehow have a being without having a body, and the only such beings I have ever heard of are angels. Angels then, might be able to preach a gospel unstained by contact with human culture, but even if an angel preaches the gospel to humans then it must use a language that humans understand, and as soon as that happens you have human culture in action. So even angels must use culture to communicate to human beings. And if they do, then how much more do we, without even realizing it!

Q: How important is language to culture?

Language is the primary carrier of culture. Language is one of the two major vehicles that carries culture from one generation to the next.

St. Paul did not require the Greek speaking pagan converts to Christianity to stop speaking Greek and speak only Hebrew. It is not known if anyone in the first century adopted that model of mission. There may have been some Jewish Rabbis who thought that Greeks should stop speaking their language if they really wanted to show that they were Jews, but even that would have been rare. All of this being the case, I have often wondered why it was that Missionaries from European culture ever thought that it would be right to make converts learn English and force them to leave their own language behind, as Canada's natives were forced to do in the residential schools. This model of mission was not at all Pauline, not at all Biblical. Now part of this is no doubt due to the fact that residential schools as a national policy, were entirely a product of national government initiative. Yes there were churches involved in some residential schools before Confederation even. But there was no national policy about them. Later, as late as the 1930s, it became a matter of national government policy to force all young natives into these schools, as the way to assimilate them.

Q: What happens when you wipe out a language? What does that do to a culture?

The government believed that once you obliterate a language you obliterate culture. This was the most damaging aspect of the Canadian residential schools system. All students in it were forced to speak English at all times, and were made to feel ashamed of their language. This was a major part of what African theologians have come to call "anthropological oppression."

The recovery of language is an important part of recovering a sense of self worth and value. in Africa this includes returning to the use of African names for children. Interestingly, it has been found that a major moment in the story of recovery of a sense of worth for a language and culture is the day that a translation of the Bible in a native language is published. Often there is a great resurgence of pride in the culture and language following that event. It is often considered a major cultural point of pride by both the Christians and the non Christians alike.

Part of the oral culture of Africa is the language of drums: drums that talk.

Drums: Dean Shingoose was speaking yesterday of his apprehension whenever drums were heard, because he knew that he wasn't supposed to like them. This is what many people were made to feel under the anthropological oppression I mentioned earlier. Not only here in North America but also in Africa, drums were generally thought of as "pagan" or "demonic" or "uncivilized" in Christian circles. In some parts of Africa the very first missionaries were actually more culturally sensitive than the missionaries who came later. For example, in the Anglican cathedral in Kampala, Uganda at the beginning of Christianity there, when the church was just getting established, they built a huge African drum more than six feet high, to call the people to worship. It used to stand in the bell tower, and served as the equivalent of a church bell. But after several decades some people thought that it would be more "civilized" for the church to have a bell to call people to worship. So in the 1930s a bell was manufactured in England and shipped all the way out to Uganda for use in that cathedral. No one today even knows what happened to that drum. Perhaps the first missionaries who suggested that a drum could be built to call the people to worship were about 70 or 80 years ahead of their time. For it was about that long before missionaries in Africa started to suggest that sort of thing again: that use of indigenous cultural forms which we call "contextualization of the gospel."

Drums as community value. Drums were an integral part of African culture, played at every major life passage: celebration of birth, manhood, marriage and death, as well as all community functions. Drums are played for the benefit of the community, at least in the best of traditional African understandings. In Ghana, it is said that the people prefer the old men as drummers because they have learned how to make the ground reverberate as a sounding board and amplify the sound so that they can conserve their energy and continue to play all night. The younger drummers, the people say, try to impress everybody with a show of speed and loudness, so they get tired early and the community cannot dance all night. So even the use of the drum becomes an expression of selfless service and devotion to the community, reflecting a traditional African value.

Drums and the gospel. Let me tell you a story I heard when I lived in Nigeria. A man told me about a man he knew who said that he became a Christian largely because of the attitude Christians in an African Initiated church had towards drums. It started like this. The man had been born into the African Traditional religion, and in his early years he remembers that his family played the drums and the music that filled his childhood with joy. But when he was a young teenager his family became Muslim. After they converted to Islam they were never permitted to sing those pagan songs again, and he never heard drums used at the Mosque. Why? Because in Islam it is believed that each drum has its own "jinn" or evil spirit. Therefore it is believed that drums must not be used to worship God at the Mosque because the worship of Allah must not be polluted with that of any jinn.

Well one day the man was walking along a path that took him past one of the African churches where drums are used in worship, and he heard a melody coming from inside. Well it stopped him in his tracks because this song was one he remembered from his childhood and it was one he had especially loved and had really missed it when his family became Muslim. So he stepped inside of the church to hear it better, and he was just amazed that these Christians were using drums in their worship of God. What of the "jinn?" Well, the Christians believed that God in the person of Jesus is more powerful than any of the evil spirits. And they believed that this being true then God can take any type of instrument that humans make and transform it for the worship of God. If indeed, we believe that God is stronger than Satan or any of Satan's spirits, then we ought to believe that God can transform any cultural form for His good purposes.

The Muslims said they believed this, but these Christians really lived as if they believed it. This was enough: the man was converted to Christ and remained a Christian. We should note that worldwide very few Muslims convert to Christianity.

What drew this man to Christ was not just the drums, but rather the Christian's attitude towards those drums.

Q: How are drums helpful in your culture?

Summary: Culture is the artifacts and structures devised by a society to enable them to survive in their specific geographical context. As such, culture is neither inherently evil nor inherently good, but is always there. Any culture that survived for as long as the hunter gatherer cultures have survived, though, must have something tremendously resilient in their cultural structures that enabled them to survive so long. Modern white Euroamerican culture, though, has only been around for 200 years, and the jury is still out on whether its current culture can survive its own "success." It is entirely possible that we will make the earth uninhabitable through ecological or other types of man made catastrophes, like man made famines. We need some humbleness on the question of "innate superiority."

=> Christ and Culture: Christ Against Culture, (many evangelicals are in this mode) Christ Over Culture (RC church in the Middle Ages), Christ in Paradox with culture, Christ of Culture (Liberal thought), Christ Transformer of Culture.(Calvin, et. al)

"bring all things under subjection to Christ..." "taking every thought captive."

Brainstorm: How might we transform some of the cultural objects and practices back to their original purpose: for the worship of God?

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We can understand better some of the controversial issues surrounding "Aboriginal spirituality" if we look at some of the recurring themes, in order. Interestingly, many people have observed that there is an overlap with Celtic Christian spirituality in particular.

(1) Creation and Creator

(2) Land - who owns it?

(3) Time - "When God made time He made lots of it."

(4) Hospitality - sharing is a virtue

BIG Q: How have the shifts of worldview in western culture over the past six hundred years affected the way people understand the gospel?

BIG Q 2: What more, then, of the gospel in an Aboriginal context?

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Do you have any questions?

In what ways are "New Agers" distorting things? Romanticization of Aboriginal spirituality is now leading to a commercialization of it for profit. Selling "authentic native sweat lodge experiences" is one aspect of this. Pan nativism leads to situations where eastern woodlands peoples are now using sweetgrass, a Prairie phenomenon originally.

What of views of nature are being presented? We need to be careful here because there is a lot of hype on both sides.

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