Christian Counselling: An African Indigenous Perspective

Africa is in great trouble: the culture is broken, the children live in a vacuum, and personal faith has hardly touched the core of the culture that shapes Africans. Most resources lie untapped, and the few that are exposed have been vandalized, devalued, and stolen. Faced with a broken continent, Africans can respond with anger, striking out at agents of colonialism, or they can choose to utilise their energy in identifying rich resources that still remain in the land and using them to empower a richly blessed people. Christianity has the obligation to engage with society’s heartaches, hearing the people’s cries for wholeness and uniting them to find solutions for their problems. An alienated Church has no message when storms of immorality blow across the land, corruption reigns in government, children as young as four begin using drugs, marriages are shaken, refugees colour the landscapes, and masses of land go untilled because of broken ecosystems from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The calling of the Christian counsellor in Africa today is to reclaim the discarded, to rebuild the broken, and to re-member the dis-membered. Africa can rise up to take a place in the world community; this rising up depends on both the inner power of the African people and the rebuilding of African communities. The Christian counsellor can serve as God’s channel for this healing and rebuilding of Africa.