A child named Chiamaka carries a sentence about God in her name. Justice Okoronkwo, an Anglican priest in Nigeria, renders it as God is beautiful, and he says names like it existed among the Igbo before Christianity arrived. That fact is the starting point for this guide. African traditional religion knew a supreme God long before missionaries came, but its structure keeps that God out of reach behind deities, mediums and ancestors. The gospel opens the door to the God the tradition already acknowledged and could never approach. You can work through this guide alone in about an hour, or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. Each section has a short task, and the discussion questions come near the end.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project teaching by Okoronkwo, who speaks as an African Christian about his own continent. As you read, notice where he praises the tradition, where he criticizes it, and how precisely he draws the line between the two.
Begin with the map, not the verdict
Most arguments about African spirituality jump straight to a verdict. Okoronkwo starts by describing how the system is built.
He describes it as layered. At the top is the supreme God, creator of heaven and earth. Below that is a crowded spirit world: lesser deities with assigned duties such as farming, fertility and war, nature spirits tied to rivers, rocks and thunder, impersonal forces that rituals and amulets are thought to tap, and the ancestors. Below that is the physical world, with human beings at the bottom. He draws the whole thing as a diamond. It is narrow at the top and wide in the middle, because the middle is where everyday religious life happens.
He also insists that this is a whole way of seeing, present in every part of life. “You cannot separate the African from the spirit,” Okoronkwo says. In his account, spirituality shapes how a person knows things, what a person is, and why a flood or a sickness comes.
Observe: Sketch the diamond on paper. Label the four levels. Then mark the level where most prayers, offerings and fears in this system are actually directed. Keep the sketch, because you will use it again.
What the tradition knew before anyone preached
Okoronkwo names real wealth in African spirituality and treats it as wealth.
The first item is the knowledge of God. “The concept of the divine was not brought to Africa by the missionaries,” Okoronkwo says. His evidence is personal names. Among the Igbo, he explains, everything is understood to come from Chi, and many names are built on it. He makes the same point about Yoruba names. “These are not names that came with Christianity. These are names that existed before Christianity,” Okoronkwo says.
That evidence has a clear reach and a clear limit. Names show that a people were aware of a supreme God and could speak of him as good or beautiful. They do not show how fully the tradition understood his character, including whether he would ever draw near.
Okoronkwo also says African cultures leave no room for moral indifference: “moral neutrality is alien for the African.” He describes a deep commitment to community and quotes a proverb that “it is only a lunatic that laughs alone.” He praises respect for elders, care for families and children, the dignity of hard work, and a world of proverbs, music and art.
Scripture gives a reason to expect something like this. Speaking to a crowd in Lystra who had never heard of Israel’s God, Paul says of God: “Nevertheless he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17). In Athens, Paul says God made the nations “That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27).
Both audiences were Gentiles in the Greek-speaking world, so connecting these verses to African tradition is an application. It is a fair one, because Paul’s claim is general: God has left no people without a witness. His phrasing also matters. The nations feel after God. They sense him without knowing how to reach him. That is very close to the shape Okoronkwo describes.
Try this: Write down a few names from your family, community, or one African language group that carry a reference to God, along with their meanings. What do these names claim about God? Which of those claims would a Christian affirm without hesitation?
Whose African spirituality are we describing?
Every claim about culture should face one question: whose experience is this, and from what period?
Okoronkwo admits the subject resists neat definition and looks different depending on where you stand. His own examples come mostly from Nigeria. He argues that much of what people believe about African spirituality comes from outsiders: missionaries who dismissed it as pagan, colonizers who called it primitive, and global media that reduce it to stereotypes. “The non-availability of a fact is not saying the non-existence of a fact,” Okoronkwo says.
He applies the same caution to the diaspora. He argues that enslaved Africans, cut off from home and fighting to survive, leaned on the protective and harmful uses of spiritual power, so the version many in the Americas inherited is only one slice of a larger whole. Whatever you make of that historical account, the practical point holds. Before agreeing with or rejecting “African spirituality,” find out which practice, which people and which century you mean.
Where the structure leaves a person stuck
Return to your diamond. Okoronkwo’s central criticism concerns what the structure does with what it knows.
“In African cosmology, the supreme God is not accessible,” Okoronkwo says. The highest God is acknowledged but reached only through the middle layer. A person brings sacrifices a medium prescribes, hoping favor will pass upward through the spirits and back down. This creates a particular kind of relationship. “He comes for relief, he comes for what he can get. But in Christianity it is a relationship. God came down to us,” Okoronkwo says.
He follows the same logic into how religion measures a person: what you have done and what offerings can be seen. “So while Christianity will talk about grace, the African traditional religion is highly legalistic,” Okoronkwo says. He also lists what he calls the woes of the system: fear of the deities’ retribution, bondage to the ancestors, mediums whose power goes unchecked, and covenants that are hard to escape once entered.
Okoronkwo’s criticisms target a structure, and the logic is simple. A God you cannot reach has to be approached through someone who claims to know what he wants, and whoever stands in that gap gains power over you.
What the gospel supplies
The Christian answer goes to the exact place where the structure fails. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5). The verse grants that a mediator is needed and names exactly one, a man. The distance between God and humanity is real, and Christ closes it from both sides.
Paul writes to Gentile believers that through Christ “we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (Ephesians 2:18). In context, the “both” refers to Jews and Gentiles, people who had been divided over who could come near God. Hebrews says believers have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh” (Hebrews 10:19-20). That letter addresses Israel’s priesthood and temple, yet its central claim applies here: once Christ has opened the way, the go-betweens are no longer needed.
Okoronkwo presents this as good news for an already spiritual people. “African traditional religion is not about good news, but Christianity is talking about good news,” he says. In his view, the gospel’s appeal is that “in Christianity you are not linking him to ancestors, you’re linking him to God directly.”
Testing the strongest objections
The first objection is historical. Christianity reached much of Africa alongside colonial power, and missionaries often called African religion darkness. Isn’t the call to come to Jesus instead of the ancestors just the old colonial verdict restated?
Okoronkwo agrees with much of that history and names it plainly. He defends a great deal that colonizers dismissed. His line is narrow: seeking favor and power through the spirit world, with African names, morality, community and art left standing. And he refuses to let the injustice justify going back: “African traditional religion has its positive aspects, but to go to God through the deities again to begin to explore those powers is to put yourself in bondage whereas the blood of Jesus has delivered us,” Okoronkwo says.
The second objection comes from inside the tradition, and it is stronger. A practitioner might say the middle layer is a gift. The ancestors keep the dead within the family. Honoring them binds generations together and keeps elders’ wisdom present. In that view, mediation expresses belonging, and the fear Okoronkwo describes is a distortion of the system. The material in this guide cannot fully settle that dispute. It comes from one African Christian’s account, with no practitioner speaking for themselves, and his claim that sacrifices are driven by fear is his judgment of the system. What the access argument can say is this: however warm the middle layer feels, it still stands between the person and the supreme God, and Scripture names Christ as the one who stands there instead.
Okoronkwo also goes further than the access argument. He holds that the spirits people contact are in fact demons, a theological judgment resting on Scripture’s warnings against seeking the dead and other spirits (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) and on Christ’s authority over every power (Colossians 1:16). Jude 3 Project affirms that the spiritual world is real and that Christ has authority over it, and Christians hold a range of views on the more speculative details. The access argument does not depend on settling them. Even if every spirit in the middle layer were harmless, approaching God through them would still treat as necessary a route that Christ has already replaced. That is why Jude 3 Project holds that remembering and honoring the dead is right, while veneration and spiritual contact are not. The love for those who came before can stay. Their role as a doorway to God cannot.
A practice: trace one need through two systems
This exercise turns the comparison into something you can see. Do it on paper, alone or in pairs.
- Choose one ordinary human need: protection during danger, a child for a couple who want one, healing from sickness, or guidance before a major decision.
- On your diamond sketch, trace the route that need would take in the traditional system as Okoronkwo describes it. Write who must be consulted at each level, what must be given, and what happens if something is done wrong.
- Next to it, trace the same need using 1 Timothy 2:5, Ephesians 2:18 and Hebrews 10:19-20. Write who is approached, who opened the way, and what is required of the person asking.
- Compare the two routes. Circle every point in the first route where fear of getting it wrong enters. Is there a matching point in the second route?
- Last, note one way your own habits, whatever your background, look more like the first route than the second. It might be a person, a ritual or a routine you treat as necessary before God will hear you. You do not need to share this.
If you are leading a group, give pairs about fifteen minutes for steps 1 to 4, then compare routes together. Keep step 5 private unless someone chooses to speak. Some participants may have relatives who practice traditional religion, or may have practiced it themselves. Make it clear that the group is examining a system, and that no one’s family is on trial.
Questions for discussion
- Which strength Okoronkwo names in African spirituality has the church in your setting neglected? What would it look like to recover it on Christian grounds?
- Okoronkwo uses personal names as evidence that Africans knew of a supreme God before missionaries came. What does that evidence establish, and what would you need to know about the tradition’s view of God’s character?
- Acts 17:27 describes the nations feeling after God. Where in your own experience, or your community’s history, have you seen people sense God without knowing how to reach him?
- Restate the practitioner’s case for the ancestors fairly enough that a practitioner would recognize it. Then explain how the access argument answers it, and where you think it leaves something unanswered.
- How would you explain to a skeptical friend the difference between Okoronkwo’s critique and the colonial dismissal of African religion? Where might your friend still disagree?
- Okoronkwo distinguishes coming to God for relief from relating to him. Can a Christian’s prayer life become transactional in the same way? What would show that it has?
A question to carry this week
Okoronkwo ends his teaching with one claim: “Jesus is Lord and he’s Lord over Africa.” Take your diamond sketch with you this week and ask one question each time you pray: am I coming to God directly, the way Christ opened, or am I still working through a middle layer of my own?