Perhaps no other issue has been so controversial in recent world Christian relationships as marriage and sexuality, and how it should properly be disciplined in the Christian community.Footnote 1 In 1988 the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion reconsidered the issue of polygamy; in 1998 and beyond the Anglican Communion struggled in the grip of differing views of sexuality, marriage and discipline dividing North Atlantic from African Churches in particular. The Lutheran World Federation was roiled around issues of homosexuality after the decision of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) in 2009 to permit openly gay- and lesbian-partnered individuals to be ordained. The Methodist General Conference grappled, inconclusively, with the issue in 2016. This article examines the origins of an underlying structure of difference in these intra-Church tensions: the practice of church discipline around sexuality and marriage.
Church discipline – denying access to sacramental life or leadership positions to individuals who do not live up to community standards – appears within many examinations of African Christian life, whether historical, theological or sociological, as a natural part of the scenery. It is seen as requiring no comment.Footnote 2 Yet this piece of moral infrastructure, the practice of public church discipline, was not universal in world Christian life in the nineteenth, twentieth and certainly twenty-first centuries. Examining the discourse on church discipline in African Christianity demonstrates its importance in community life across a wide swathe of denominations, eras and locations, an importance that it does not hold in many to North Atlantic contexts even within shared denominational families. Close attention to the specific origins and emphasis of church discipline may bring to light some structural features that bind African Churches together, could bind them with other world Christian Churches which share aspects of discipline, and separate them from world Christian Churches that do not practise discipline in this way.
The near-universality of public disciplinary practice in African Christian history is tied to the emphasis on ‘Christian marriage’ in African Christian life, originating in missionary practice but then taken up by many African leaders and deeply naturalised in African communities in the twentieth century. The connection between Christian identity and ‘Christian marriage’ was generally accepted by all denominations, yet failure to live up to the ideal was so frequent and widespread that discipline became endemic, a foundational structure of Christian community life in widely dispersed cultural, linguistic and geographic contexts. Beginning in the early twentieth century, foreign missionaries expressed concerns about the ways in which the centrality of discipline affected the life of the Christian community, yet were unable to change fundamentally the dynamics of the practice. Among African leaders, discipline might also be challenged theologically and pastorally, yet, again, the practice remained foundational to Christian communal life. Because acceptance of discipline does not break communal bonds, but binds the disciplined and the disciplinary power together, even those who do not live up to the standard of ‘Christian marriage’ none the less participate in the disciplinary discourse that demonstrates sexual practice, bound within ‘Christian marriage’, as fundamental to being a Christian and living a Christian life.
This article briefly outlines the basic European origins of church discipline and its decline in the North Atlantic context, noting the important move from public to private discipline, and then describes the challenges of ‘Christian marriage’ in the African mission context. The nexus of ‘Christian marriage’ and discipline will be examined as a vexed topic throughout Africa and throughout missionary and church establishments. In order to demonstrate the wide geographic and denominational dispersal of this dynamic nexus of sexuality, discipline and Christian identity extensive use is made of English-language sources that discuss historically and culturally distinct areas of Africa.
Church discipline in historical context
Defining and defending the moral commitments of the Christian community through processes of repentance and restoration was a practice from the earliest ages of the Church in public, semi-public and private form. During and immediately after the Protestant Reformation discipline was reinvigorated in Catholic and and in Protestant contexts. In both, access to shared sacramental life (communion or the Lord's Supper) was a major mode of discipline. During the Reformation and Counter-Reformation public and strict church discipline was exercised upon clergy through restriction of office, and upon laity through confession, works of penance and limitation on receiving communion. Various strands of the Reformation placed great emphasis on the necessity for the faithful Church to maintain public discipline. In addition to restrictions on access to communion, practices included public statements of repentance, making satisfaction to injured parties and to the community as a whole, and public statements of restoration when all was complete. Disciplinary sites for the community might include theological dissent, but also such issues as theft, insubordination, lying, swearing, gossip, slander, missing church attendance, drunkenness, laziness and sexual immorality. Discipline was enforced by mutual surveillance of all members of the community, not specifically or solely by the authority of the clergy.Footnote 3
Scholarship on the topic agrees that public and communal church discipline (as opposed to private and pastoral) had disappeared in many European and North American denominations by the mid-eighteenth century. Within many denominational contexts, discipline was increasingly exercised only upon clergy or potential clergy, and the withholding of communion for anything other than sexual sin also had also become rare by the late eighteenth century.
While there is a ‘reservoir’ of disciplinary practice even today in North Atlantic contexts, these seem to be concentrated in fundamentalist or non-denominational Churches, or millennialist denominations such as the Jehovah's Witnesses. The historic Protestant denominations – those called the ‘home churches’ in a mission history context – do not generally practise public discipline and have not done so since the mid-eighteenth century. Exceptions include the Anabaptist Mennonite churches: in the Mennonite churches of the United States, public discipline was still used at least through the 1950s, but even in this context discipline was belatedly following the larger Protestant drift, moving towards more private and pastoral models. Tellingly, in a 1955 survey of church discipline North American Mennonite leaders noted that a full 72 per cent of public discipline was for ‘sexual immorality’ – aside from remarriage, divorce and adultery; this also maps on to the general decline in disciplinary practice, in which the sole remaining area of discipline tends to be sexuality.Footnote 4
In a 1929 study on the decline of discipline in the Church of Scotland, the author determines that church discipline for anything other than sexual immorality had largely disappeared by the early eighteenth century. Sexual immorality almost always concerned women, since ‘the proof was patent’ in their case – that is, they were pregnant outside the bonds of marriage. Even these cases declined precipitously as the century went on, and discipline retreated from the public realm, first into the sessional realm (discipline exercised by the church council of elders, behind closed doors) and then into the pastoral realm, with the minister effectively retaining the only right of discipline, and that to be done privately.Footnote 5 In the North Atlantic context in the twentieth century, discipline became almost completely transmuted into pastoral and marriage counselling, abandoning the realm of public morality in favour of the therapeutic mode – in effect, making the ideal Christian leader a skilful therapist rather than a moral disciplinarian.Footnote 6
The move from public to private discipline is important: in the North Atlantic context from the nineteenth century, even when discipline occurs, it is privately administered. For instance, the Episcopal Church in the United States still maintains canons and rubrics about ‘repulsion from communion’ for those who are scandalously open in evil living, but the use of those rubrics seems to have been rare historically and the expectation, even when used, is that the disciplining of a church member should be kept private.Footnote 7 In 1904, for instance, an American Episcopal bishop, William Paret, wrote regarding repulsion from communion that ‘it is because even the censures and severities of the Church are so ruled by this principle of love, that this action is not made public, but kept almost sacredly private between the pastor and the soul with which he is dealing. It is not to satisfy public sentiment, but to save the soul’. This emphasis on the private nature of discipline is an expectation that reflects a particular cultural context regarding the religious disciplining of mores. In terms of frequency, Bishop Paret also noted that in thirty years of congregational leadership in several American states, he had denied communion only nine times, and that in sixteen years as a bishop he had been notified of only seven instances of discipline in the diocese of Maryland. As Paret was strongly convinced of the importance of discipline, these low numbers suggest the relative infrequency of the practice in the American Episcopalian context from the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 8
It thus appears that in what is now called ‘mainline Protestantism’ in the North Atlantic context public discipline had disappeared as a practice well before the ‘great century’ of missions, and certainly before much Protestant mission work had been done in Africa. None the less, the canonical structure and theological justification for public discipline remained in place far longer than did the practice itself did, and thus could be taken abroad by missions in founding and structuring new church communities.Footnote 9
Church discipline and ‘Christian marriage’ in African contexts
A sample of a Lutheran elders' council from 1919 to 1925 in Mamba, Tanganyika, included ‘6 meetings on female circumcision, 4 on bridewealth, 2 on virginity tests, 2 on rape, 3 on immoral behaviour, 2 on widowhood (and the custom of re-marrying into the lineage of the deceased), 2 on mental illness, 2 on dancing, 8 on sorcery, 3 on competition between several men for one bride, 10 on adultery’. Out of these statistics, almost all of the cases of adultery were related to premarital sex or cohabitation, both cases of mental illness related to the indissolubility of marriage, ‘circumcision’ is a reference to initiation schools, and several complaints overlapped with polygamy.Footnote 10 If this is taken as a representative sample, it seems that public discipline was quite common and that the majority of disciplinary topics in Christian Africa were related to Christian marriage and sexual practice. Was this Lutheran elders' council in fact representative of such a dynamic?
Throughout the nineteenth century Protestant missionaries and African converts from denominations throughout Africa struggled with the nature and practice of marriage and, concomitantly, with proper Christian sexuality. What missionaries considered to be essential to Christian life was sexual practice fully bounded by and identical with heterosexual marriage. Even for those Christian traditions which did not theologise marriage as a sacrament, the ideal of marriage was monogamous, patriarchal and patrilocal, sexually exclusive, indissoluble, voluntarily chosen by the participants, and, by the late nineteenth century, increasingly companionate. This model of marriage was shared across all Christian denominations, one of the foundation pieces of the ideal Christian society which missionaries desired to inculcate in their converts.Footnote 11
Traditional African practices of sexuality and marriage were extraordinarily diverse across cultures, but in many contexts challenged the Christian marriage ideal at multiple points. The most common point of conflict was polygamy, as polygyny (and much more rarely polyandry) was a widespread pattern in African cultures. In addition, some African cultures were matrilocal; some had specific patterns for culturally acceptable sexual practice prior to or outside of marriage; many did not expect marriage to be indissoluble and had specific traditions of marriage dissolution or divorce; some marriages were not chosen by the participants (i.e. the remarriage of widows to the brother of the husband, or levirate marriage, was a feature of some African cultures). To missionaries, in addition, the widespread practice of ‘brideprice’ seemed equivalent to buying a woman as wife, who was therefore a slave; missionaries perceived these relationships as abusive and exploitative rather than companionate. And finally, some African cultures had traditions of ceremonial initiation into adulthood and sexuality (sometimes called ‘circumcision,’ but which involved many other aspects of ritual, teaching, social ordering and practice) which missionaries found unacceptable.Footnote 12
The debate about polygamy was at the centre of missionary efforts to nurture and define new Christian communities and identities, and decisions around polygamy and marriage structured access to sacramental life from the moment of conversion. Converts who desired baptism and were in polygamous marriages posed the first and most obvious problem, and often missionaries would refuse baptism unless the man sent away all but his first wife. The debate generally centred around men, as in missionary discourse about polygamy women were, at least in the nineteenth century, seen as harmed and unwilling participants in the polygamous system.Footnote 13 Missionaries also practised discipline around other aspects of African marriage life, as seen in the Lutheran elders’ debate. In particular, missions disciplined members for participating in initiation and circumcision ceremonies, or for accepting or demanding brideprice.Footnote 14
Some more controversial missionary figures, such as Anglican bishop John Colenso in Natal in the 1850s, argued that polygamists could and should be baptised, but also argued that polygamy would die out and that Christians who become polygamous after conversion should be disciplined. Missionaries also tried to design alternative initiation and circumcision ceremonies in some contexts, which would be more compatible with Christian belief and sexual expectations.Footnote 15
Discipline thus appeared intertwined with conversion and the establishment of Christian communities, as missionaries tried to inculcate a marriage form and expectations around sexual practice for Christians that had little basis or support in traditional cultural systems. While in the North Atlantic context public discipline was no longer practised extensively at this time, as missions, conversion and Christian communal life spread in the African context, a deep and frequent practice of discipline around marriage and sexuality spread with it.
What did African converts think of this emphasis on Christian marriage as the mark of a true Christian, to be enforced with discipline? There is evidence that some Africans questioned the need for disciplining polygamy in particular, leading to the International Missionary Council's study of the question of African marriage practices and continued pleas to reconsider the issue.Footnote 16 Some African Christian leaders accepted discipline but continued in traditional marriage practice, such as Sechele, David Livingstone's single convert, who is credited with converting his Kwena tribe in Southern Africa. Some both maintained the standards of Christian marriage for themselves and enforced discipline on other Africans. Many missionaries and African observers credited the discipline of polygamy as leading directly to the development of competing African-initiated Churches as a form of resistance.Footnote 17
In many parts of Africa in the colonial and post-colonial periods, there were three types of marriage available to Africans: customary, which did not carry the expectation of indissolubility and sometimes permitted polygamy; civil, which expected monogamy but could sometimes be dissolved; and church marriage, which was monogamous and indissoluble. Church discipline was often exercised against those who did not have church marriages; sometimes civil marriage was permitted. Because of the associated expectations of indissolubility and monogamy with civil and church marriage, Africans frequently preferred customary marriage. The most common pattern through the mid-twentieth century, among individuals who were part of historic Protestant and Catholic denominations, appears to be of individuals accepting discipline from the local church, while still often engaging in practices around sexuality and marriage that did not meet Christian expectations.
Recent scholarship also demonstrates that church discipline could be important in different ways for different groups of individuals, and was part of a process of identity formation which set ‘Christians’ apart from others in their communities. Wendy Urban-Mead, for instance, describes the ways in which discipline by the Brethren Church in Christ in Zimbabwe briefly affected women, due to sexual activity prior to their ‘Christian marriage’. They would go through a public restoration process and return to church activities after a relatively short time of excommunication (about a year). Men, on the other hand, might spend large portions of their adult lives apart from the Church, returning only in their old age, as they experienced discipline for sexual as well as political activity. The expectations of monogamy within marriage were experienced as empowering by women, but impossible for men.Footnote 18 In the East African context, the Balokole revival movement in the early and mid-twentieth century, appearing in both Lutheran and Anglican Churches, challenged local expectations of decorum: its adherents loudly and publicly declared their sins of theft, drunkenness, worldliness and sexual activity, and demanded that all who called themselves Christian do so as well.Footnote 19 In both of these cases, the practice of discipline helped to shape an identity as ‘Christian’ which challenged local expectations of proper behaviour. The public aspect of discipline was crucial to this function.
Critiquing church discipline: attempts to untie the knot
The early twentieth century witnesses the beginnings of concern about how the troubled knot of public discipline and Christian marriage might be ‘deforming’ the Church, and awareness of the inequity between expectations of discipline in the North Atlantic context and in the African. Missionaries and African leaders developed both critiques and defences of public discipline, which continued throughout the century. In 1937, for instance, the Methodist A. J. Hocking wrote from Kenya that
It does sometimes cause me grave concern that we demand from our African communicants a far higher moral standard above the common code of their community than we dare demand of our people in the home churches. If we made a proportionate demand at home our churches would be emptier than they are. It is difficult to avoid a sense of guilt, and even to evade a charge of pharisaism, when we condemn the African for practices which cause less suffering and damage than many of the abuses we tolerate in the national and international life of the civilized world.Footnote 20
In the Anglican context Douglas Webster (later Education Secretary of the Church Missionary Society and canon of St Paul's Cathedral) surveyed ‘an African diocese’ twenty years later, in 1957. He reported his concern that
More than once I felt the clergy were more concerned to punish than to restore those who fall. This is another part of their power-complex … I do wonder whether they [sic] Church ought not to be much more lenient towards moral lapses until African marriage customs have really been baptized into Christ. Is it not true that they may fall because of the various inhibitions surrounding child-birth? If these inhibitions existed in England we should have scores of young keen Christians, even clergy, falling into trouble every year … And it seems to me quite indefensible that their children [of church members who have a customary rather than church marriage] cannot be baptized in infancy, especially when both parents are regular worshippers.Footnote 21
It is unclear whether the clergy to whom Webster refers were missionary or African clergy, but early to mid twentieth-century missionaries who were concerned about what they saw as abuse of discipline connected this issue to the desire of African leaders to maintain strict discipline, rather than to missionary leadership per se. Hopkins, again, noted in 1937 that ‘I owe a heavy debt to my African helpers, and we could not carry on five minutes without them. But there have been times when I have had the sneaking feeling that the tone of our sessions has been much more reminiscent of a Sanhedrin of Pharisees than a meeting of Christ's brothers.’Footnote 22
There is evidence that some African Christian leaders did value public discipline highly in the mid-twentieth century, even when they noted its potential for abuse. The Balokole movement in East Africa expected all the saved to publicly decry their own sins, to leave any unacceptable sexual relationship behind, and condemned those missionaries or church leaders who refused to demand such repentance.Footnote 23 In the Lutheran context, some African leaders in the mid-1950s strongly supported strict discipline around Christian marriage. The Revd K. J. Msombi, of the Zulu Mission in Natal, argued not only that discipline was crucial for the African Church, but that missionaries emphasising mercy had done a disservice to African Christians, who responded to discipline rather than feeling genuine repentance. Msombi wrote that ‘It may be that the missionary has not emphasized in his teaching the law of God but has stressed the fact that God is merciful and in so doing even the idea of mercy has not been fully understood by the African Christian. Mercy has no meaning in the absence of law.’Footnote 24 Stefano Moshi, later to become the first President of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania, argued that African pastors ‘feel that [discipline] is a vital part of the church's doctrine, and we regret every relaxation of church discipline in any church’. Church discipline, Moshi wrote, was necessary for reformation of the fallen; to keep the church pure of sin; to preserve the order of the church; and to make the witness of the church to the world ‘clear and unequivocal’.Footnote 25
In the late 1950s Stefano Moshi critiqued what he considered abuses of discipline in the Lutheran Church in Tanganyika, including public humiliation (being assigned ‘disgraceful seats’) in the congregation, requirements to attend catechumens' classes again, manual labour, uneven application between powerful and poor Christians, and a general attitude that punishment was a substitute for repentance. At the same time, he emphasised the importance of discipline as crucial for the lives of Christian disciples as well for non-Christian observers. He also criticised the uneven application of discipline globally as undermining African Churches:
Many educated people, especially those who have been to Europe or America, begin to question whether church discipline is Biblical, because they see that the parent churches do not use such discipline. Therefore they take up very strong opposition against it, and are much offended … We would ask the parent churches not to relax from this important aspect of our theology.
There is no evidence that the ‘parent churches’ considered this request, although Moshi's paper had been written for the Lutheran World Federation's sponsorship of the All Africa Lutheran Church's meeting.Footnote 26
Where in the North Atlantic world discipline had become both rare and private, it was becoming endemic and public in the African context. In West Africa in the 1930s and ’40s the Methodist missionary Geoffrey Parrinder claimed that while missions preferred private discipline, African leaders preferred public: ‘The Native Church, not the Missionary, openly de-churches the offender … while the principle of action by the Native Church is sound, yet most missions prefer for this disagreeable if necessary disciplinary action to be taken privately.’Footnote 27 This differs from the late nineteenth-century vision of discipline given by the American Episcopalian Bishop Paret, who insisted that in his North Atlantic context discipline must be private. Emphasising the importance of the communal and public nature of discipline appears to have been an important aspect of the African pattern of disciplinary practice: it is not only for the individual soul, but for the well-being and witness of the Church.
In 1958 the Cameroon Lutheran missionary Walter Trobisch wrote a detailed, troubled letter to Professor Erich Schick in Basel, asking for guidance on the theological and practical issues that he observed in African church disciplinary practice.Footnote 28 He then wrote an article, published in Practical Anthropology in 1961, where he specifically took issue with Moshi's vision of discipline and its emphasis on discipline as public witness. Trobisch argued that the Bible called for individuals to examine themselves for worthiness, not for ‘church bureaucrats’ to examine them – thus emphasising the North Atlantic move towards private discipline, if discipline existed at all. Trobisch described the ways in which African Churches prepared for holy communion, which might take place only a few times a year, with ‘preparatory services’:
To attend one of these ‘preparatory services’ is to enter into the official bureaucratic atmosphere of a court of law. Not only does the pastor, in the manner of a tax collector, check whether the proper amounts have been paid, thereby purchasing one's right to communion, but the elders sit there like members of an assize court and review the life history of each communicant in a hearing which is often painful and which goes into every detail, in order to judge his ‘worthiness.’ The church considers itself as some sort of bailiff acting for God. The church council becomes a morality squad and the pastor a kind of heavenly prosecuting attorney.Footnote 29
For Trobisch, the emphasis on discipline was led by the vanguard of African Christians, not missionaries. He told the story of a Cameroonian pastor who, during a discussion on the free grace of God, had protested emotionally about the doctrine, asking, ‘Can there be forgiveness without discipline?’ The pastor stated that he would be suspended as a minister if he offered absolution without public penance and punishment for sins.Footnote 30
Yet with all this, Trobisch argued that discipline had failed completely in truly inculcating ‘Christian marriage’ as a gospel value for Africans. He thus embarked on a lifelong career as a ‘marriage missionary by correspondence’, receiving and responding to thousands of letters from throughout Africa and all denominational persuasions, which demonstrated the complexities of bringing Christian marriage into a culture which had very different boundaries and expectations for sexual practice.Footnote 31
Trobisch, like the earlier Methodist missionary Parrinder, claimed that all denominations practised public discipline around sexuality and marriage, and especially around polygamy. Other missionaries, in different denominational contexts, like Hopkins in 1937 and Webster in 1957, noted the connection as well, with growing concern. Adrian Hastings estimated that in some Anglican dioceses in 1960s Uganda up to 87 per cent of adult Christians were ineligible for communion due to irregularity in their marital and sexual histories, many of them permanently ineligible. In some Catholic and Anglican dioceses, only children took the sacraments; once entering into adulthood, marriage and sexual life, many African Christians might expect never to partake fully in church life again, due to the complete incompatibility from a church standpoint between customary and ‘Christian marriage’.Footnote 32
African Christians in the mid-twentieth century could both accept discipline as a fact of church life and express uncertainty about its purpose or legitimacy. In 1952 a Nigerian Presbyterian argued that church discipline effectively kept men from joining the Church, as they would not be permitted to take communion. ‘Where are the men, you ask? Let them partake of Holy Communion, and they will return … the sooner the church relaxes its stringent rule regarding marriage, the better it will be for us all.’Footnote 33 Men from the Brethren of Christ church missions in Zimbabwe had similar experiences of gendered exclusion.Footnote 34 In 1966 a Trobisch correspondent from Uganda was concerned that he could not have a church marriage since he and his partner had already been sexually active:
Is there any saint in Heaven that talked or touched women as Jesus did and never fell into love. For what I know when you put a piece of cloth into the fire it burns … Personally people who can afford this are those who frequent Holy communion. And those who have been well educated by their parents and have been in good schools and learn about morals.Footnote 35
In the 1970s, as decolonisation continued and African leaders took full responsibility for their churches, after many years of acting as the primary local leaders and evangelists of their communities, discipline and Christian marriage continued to be issues of concern. The Tanzanian Lutheran Judah Kiwovele argued that Churches needed to re-examine both marriage and discipline, with attention to whether monogamy was truly required for Christians, a recommendation that was taken up by the All Africa Lutheran Conference in 1973.Footnote 36 The Anglican bishop Henry Okullu of Kenya, writing in 1977, described the ways in which discipline made sexual sins seem to be the worst and most important of all sins, thus introducing shame and stigma into sexual life, particularly for young people. On divorce and indissolubility, he compared the literal emphasis given to the Scripture ‘what God has joined man shall not sunder’ with the lack thereof on the Scripture ‘thou shalt not kill’. He continued, ‘If a marriage has broken down and the couple have divorced, and particularly where the Church would agree to bless a civil union, why not let them marry in church? I feel this would make our pastoral concern much more realistic and complete.’ Okullu described the situation where an unmarried woman became pregnant and married out of desperation as similar to a ‘forced marriage’ because of her fear of the stigma. ‘The lesser of two evils in such circumstances might be to allow the girl to have her baby at home and take her time in finding someone she really loves, to marry her.’Footnote 37
In this sensitivity to the pastoral realities of pregnant unmarried women, who were frequent subjects of discipline, Okullu differed substantially from Trobisch, who despite a general sense of the positive nature of sexual pleasure and a desire to diminish the role of discipline none the less continued to decry female pre-marital sexuality and viewed pre-marital pregnancy as God's punishment for sin. Okullu also recommended providing contraception for young unmarried people, again contra Trobisch, who was eager to share information about contraception with married couples but refused under any circumstances to give it to unmarried people, especially women (even when they wrote to ask him about it). Okullu wrote that
The plain fact is that the alternative [to contraception] is that someone's daughter will have intercourse in Form iv, get pregnant and leave school just before sitting for her East African Certificate of Education … I believe that all of us are not capable of reaching the very high standards that the Bible demands of us and so I believe that it might be unchristian to be indifferent to the predicaments of the weaker members of our society.Footnote 38
Okullu also debated the relationship of the Church to polygamy, ‘the single biggest pastoral problem in Western Kenya’. In reflecting on polygamy as an offence against the Church, he pointed out that many people live promiscuous lives but are not disciplined for it if they are not open polygamists, while open polygamists who are faithful within their marriages are not accepted in the Church and their children are denied baptism. ‘A wife frequently comes to me weeping, “My husband took a second wife before we registered our marriage, but I want to be confirmed and to take communion.” I must admit that in the majority of such cases I have confirmed such people and allowed them to take communion.’ In the ‘much more agonising issue’ of people who become polygamists when already Christian, Okullu opines that poverty can lead people to customary marriage, particularly girls who become pregnant. ‘After some time she remembers she is Christian and would like her children baptised. Then she finds the doors of the church firmly bolted against her. What does she do, she is genuinely seeking reconciliation to her God and her church.’ Okullu noted that sometimes it was the church members and church women, not the minister, who were ‘up in arms’ about accepting polygamists. This openness towards considering a lessening of discipline in terms of polygamy is particularly notable as Okullu was known as a Balokole leader, a Christian who held himself and the community to high standards of public discipline and confession, especially regarding sexual transgressions and polygamy.Footnote 39 The Balokole emphasis on the sinfulness of all and the effectiveness of testimony and repentance could thus translate into pastoral compassion for those who had failed to measure up to the high standards of Christian marriage.
With all of this, however, Okullu was unable to argue against church discipline completely. In an extended reflection upon the nature and use of discipline, he wrote,
This leads to asking the question as to whether the Church should discipline its followers at all. And if the answer is yes, should the denial of sacraments be used for such punishments. A considerable number of people say that the Church is the only community where no one should feel excluded … The second objection raised is that even if the Church must continue to discipline its members it should not use the sacraments as the form of punishment. Some people have come to doubt whether the Church has any rights at all to punish or to excommunicate … Be that as it may, I am not sure that I am ready to support the idea of the Church (or community) without discipline, if we look at it that way (although I am not sure that denial of sacraments, particularly baptism is the right way of imposing that discipline.) The Church, although a community of God's people, is also a human society, the Church is made up of humans who are not individually perfect. There is a sense in which the Church is a human club and those who enter and wish to continue their membership must agree to abide by its canons and regulations.Footnote 40
In 2009 a Lutheran theologian from Tanzania lamented the ongoing use of discipline in his Church, and particularly the ways in which it had been used to punish and shame pregnant girls, thus demonstrating the reach and focus of the practice over the century, and the ways in which it had been taken up by African Christians in the decolonising era. He describes the process as one of oppressive and unChristian abuse of power:
in order for an unwed mother to receive absolution: (1) the woman must take the matter to a church elder; (2) the church elder takes the matter to the parish pastor; (3) the pastor calls the members of the parish committee to meet with the woman; (4) she asks for forgiveness; (5) if her request is accepted, her punishment is to do manual work in and around the church; (6) she must confess her sin before the congregation during the Sunday service; and (7) the pastor will publicly grant her absolution.Footnote 41
It is worth noting that this process includes some aspects of discipline (such as manual labour) that even Stefano Moshi, a supporter of church discipline, argued against in 1960. None the less they remained in use fifty years later.Footnote 42 Kenneth Ross, studying the Christian community in Malawi, also notes the ubiquity of the practice of discipline for both Catholics and Protestants at the turn of the twenty-first century.Footnote 43 Mkumbo states that church discipline (which he critiques) has roots both in missionary history and in traditional religious-social norms, and historians and theologians may want to consider how inculturation blends Christian and African traditional religion practices in different contexts. In the Balokole movement, for instance, it is clear that the practice of public discipline was at least in some cases embraced by African Christians, not imposed upon them. In other cases, resistance, nuance and challenge is the more obvious theme, as with Okullu, John Mbiti and African Christian women such as Faith Lugazia, Elieshi Mungure and Rose Mary Amenga-Etego.Footnote 44
The focus on the construction and support of ‘Christian marriage’ by missionaries in the establishment of African Christian community thus led through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to a multi-sited, multi-denominational focus on proper sexuality as the mark of a Christian and public discipline, including restriction on access to communion, restriction from church leadership, and demand for public repentance and restitution, as the crucial markers of Christian identity. Recognising that this commitment to discipline crosses boundaries of culture, language and denomination can challenge a historiography of mission and conversion in Africa that tends to follow these perceived boundaries. It also points to an important distinction between written disciplinary rubrics, which may well be shared across world Christian formations, and actual local practice associated with discipline and sexuality, which may not be. In particular, the African emphasis on public discipline clashes with the North Atlantic commitment to privacy and individual counselling, even within the same world Christian family or fellowship. Closer historical analysis of these shifts in practice offers a deeper understanding of the ways in which world Christianity has been formed as a global discursive network, and the tensions that continue to shape world Christian relationships over sexuality and discipline.
