The blog makes the argument. This study is for the work the argument cannot do for you. It will not hand you a verdict to wave at someone. It will ask you to examine your own heart, your own inheritance, and your own posture before God, so that when this conversation comes to your kitchen table, you bring discernment instead of a reflex.
Go slow. You can do this alone with a journal or out loud with a group. Some of it may touch family you love and grief you have not finished. That is allowed here.
Part 1: Name what you actually inherited
Mashua draws a line that most of us have never drawn out loud: culture is not the same as religion. Some of what was handed down to you is food, language, rhythm, the way your people marry and bury and gather. Some of it carries a claim about who mediates between you and God. Before you can weigh anything, you have to see the two clearly.
Take ten honest minutes and write two lists.
- 1. Things from my culture I love and want to carry: be specific, not abstract.
- 2. Things I grew up around that make a spiritual claim: who gets prayed to, consulted, or trusted to carry a message to God.
Now sit with the line between them. Where is it clean? Where is it blurry? Ndereba gives you a working grid for the second list: inside any tradition there are things that conflict with the faith, things that are neutral, and things that are excellent. Mark each item on your second list with one of those three. Notice how few are easy.
Part 2: Read the texts, not just the verdict
Do not skim these. Read each one out loud, then answer the question under it. The point is not to win an argument. It is to let the Word press on you first.
Read 1 Timothy 2:5: “There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” This is the verse Mashua treats as decisive. Question: a mediator is the one who carries you to God and God to you. Who, honestly, have you been trusting to do that for you? Name it without rushing to the right answer.
Read Isaiah 8:19: “Why should the living consult the dead? Should not my people look to their God?” God asks this of Israel, not Africa. Question: the pull to reach the dead is old and human, not uniquely African. Where in your own grief have you wanted a word from someone who is gone? What would it mean to bring that ache straight to God instead?
Read Hebrews 1:1-2: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son.” Mashua and Byamukama both read this to mean God was never absent from Africa. Question: if God left fingerprints in your people’s history pointing toward Christ, what might one of them be? Where do you already see longing for the God who has now spoken by His Son?
Read Acts 17:22-28, Paul at the Areopagus. He does not torch the Athenians’ altars. He starts with the God they already worship without knowing His name. Question: how is Paul’s posture different from “you are all wrong,” and how is it different from “you were right all along”? What would it look like for you to stand where Paul stood?
Part 3: A heart check, not a position check
This is the discernment work. The temptation in a contested conversation is to sort everyone else and never sort yourself. Answer these in writing, for you alone.
Where am I tempted to demonize a whole culture to feel safe in my faith? Mashua warns that the church already did this once, and it cost people dearly.
Where am I tempted to baptize my whole inheritance because critiquing it feels like betraying my people? “Not everything is right just because it existed,” Mashua says. Does that line comfort me or sting me, and why?
If I am honest, is there a place where I have one leg in Christ and one leg somewhere else? Okoronkwo calls that setting yourself up for a great fall. Where is your weight actually resting today?
Part 4: A practice for this week
Pick one item from your culture you love and that you are confident is good, the food, the music, the gathering, the language. Practice it on purpose this week as a Christian, with thanks. Receive it the way Ndereba and Udofa describe it: as a gift, not a threat. Christianity can handle your blackness, Udofa says. Live one ordinary day this week as proof that you do not have to choose between the two.
Then take one hard or blurry item from Part 1 and do not resolve it alone. Bring it to a pastor, an elder, or a mature believer who knows both Scripture and your culture. Discernment is a community thing, the way Ndereba says a wedding is a community thing. Write down what you will ask them.
Part 5: Discussion questions
- 1. Mashua separates African culture from African Traditional Religion. Where would you draw that line in your own family, and where does it get hard?
- 2. The whole argument turns on one word: mediator. Why does that single role matter so much, and what would someone inside the tradition say back?
- 3. Mashua says the church must own the colonial demonization before it critiques anything. What does owning that look like in a real church today, not just in theory?
- 4. Byamukama says God brought the missionary to Africa, not the other way around. How does starting there change the way you would talk to someone exploring African spirituality?
- 5. Okoronkwo and Mashua are both insiders who landed on the same answer from different shores. Why might an insider’s critique carry weight an outsider’s never could?
Leader notes
This study sits on tender ground. People in the room may have living relatives who practice these traditions, or grandparents they buried with them. Do not let the group turn ancestors into a punchline or a debate trophy. The goal is discernment and love, not a contest. If someone discloses ongoing fear, bondage, or spiritual distress, do not try to fix it in the room. Stay with them, take it seriously, and connect them to a pastor for follow-up care. If anyone surfaces thoughts of self-harm, treat it as urgent and share the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988). Keep the posture Paul kept at the Areopagus: honor the longing, name the God who answers it.
Pair this study with the diaspora-side conversations in the Jude 3 corpus, Justice Okoronkwo on practicing African spirituality and Joseph Byamukama on whether African traditional religions are demonic, so the group hears continental and diaspora voices side by side.
A charge to close
You do not have to choose between your people and your Lord. The God who has always been near your history is the same God who stepped into it in Christ. Carry your culture home with both hands. Weigh the rest with open eyes and a soft heart. And when you reach for a mediator, reach for the One who already holds the seat. He has been present in your story longer than you knew. Now you know His name.