Many Christians carry a church history with a hole in the middle. The story runs from Jesus and the apostles to Rome, then to Europe, then across the ocean with missionaries. Africa shows up only at the end, as a mission field. This guide asks where that picture came from and what belongs in its place. Dr. Vince Bantu, who teaches church history and Black church studies at Fuller Seminary’s Houston campus, gives a clear answer. Christianity was in Africa from the first century, and its absence from the usual story is not an accident of the record. He argues it was pushed out of view, partly by language and partly by a fifth-century church that labeled African churches heretics.
The guide moves in three steps. First you name the version you inherited. Then you examine how it was put together. Last, you test what identity the fuller record actually supports. You can work through it alone in one long sitting, or with a group across two meetings, breaking after the Scripture section. Bring paper and two colors of pen. The main exercise asks you to draw something and then redraw it.
Draw the timeline you inherited
Before reading further, draw a line across a page. Mark the first century on the left and today on the right. Without looking anything up, place on it every Christian person, church, council or event you can recall. Next to each one, write where you learned it: a sermon, a class, a documentary, a book, a relative, a social media argument. Then circle every point that took place in Africa.
Now look at what you drew. Where does your first African point appear? If you have African names on the line, are they Augustine, Athanasius or Tertullian? Ask three questions of the whole drawing. Whose story is this line telling? What language did the people on it write in? Which church approved of them?
Not every reader will draw the same line, and that matters. Someone raised in an Ethiopian or Egyptian Orthodox parish may never have been handed the Africa-less version at all. Bantu notes that the descendants of those ancient communities will tell you they have held orthodox faith all along. Other readers have mostly heard Christianity called the white man’s religion and have never been given an answer. The exercise starts from your actual inheritance instead of assuming everyone received the same one. Keep the drawing. You will need it.
Lost, or suppressed?
When Bantu mentions Philip Jenkins’s book The Lost History of Christianity, he objects to a single word. “I don’t like that title ’cause that ain’t lost,” he says. He prefers to call it suppressed. The difference is real. A lost history slipped away by accident. A suppressed one was set aside. His choice of word is an argument, and this guide asks you to test it, not simply adopt it.
Across the conversation, Bantu points to four ways the record was shaped:
- Language. Whole Christian literatures were written in Coptic, Ge’ez, Syriac and Armenian. Bantu calls it a sign of Eurocentrism that “we are only privy to literature and texts that are written in European languages.”
- Approval. The African writers most people know, such as Augustine and Tertullian, wrote in Greek or Latin and thought in what Bantu calls a Romanized way. In his account, that is why the West kept their books in circulation.
- The heresy label. After the Council of Chalcedon in 451, the Roman church treated the churches of Egypt, Ethiopia and Nubia as heretical. Their theologians, such as Shenoute, Benjamin of Alexandria, Zara Yaqob and Giorgis of Segla, faded from Western memory.
- Repetition. Bantu says modern textbooks still claim these churches denied Christ’s full humanity. He argues that the claim comes from scholars who never read the texts in their original languages, so that “modern European scholars are just kind of taking ancient European scholars at their word.”
Bantu also corrects how the story is numbered. Textbooks call Nicaea the first church council. He says “it’s not the first council, it’s the first Roman Council,” because he holds that Christians in the Persian Empire had already met in councils of their own. Even a word like “first” can carry a whole geography.
Keep one limit in view. These are the historical claims of a trained scholar who reads sources most of us cannot check. A podcast transcript shows that Bantu said them. It does not prove them. His book A Multitude of All Peoples sets out the evidence at length, and that is where to test him.
Redraw the line
Take your second color and add these points to your original drawing. Mark each one either S, for something the biblical text records, or H, for a historical claim Bantu makes that you would need to check.
- An Ethiopian court official is baptized after Philip explains Isaiah to him (Acts 8:26-39).
- Ethiopia becomes a Christian kingdom in the fourth century, during the lifetime of Athanasius.
- Constantine wavers after Nicaea and sends Athanasius, the Egyptian bishop who defended Christ’s full divinity, into exile.
- Christians in Persia hold councils before Nicaea.
- Chalcedon in 451 divides Rome from the churches of Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia and much of Syria.
- Roman persecution of those churches lasts from 451 to about 640.
- Syriac-speaking Christians carry the gospel along the Silk Road to China and south to India and Sri Lanka.
Next to one H point, write what kind of source would confirm it: a translated primary text, a historian who reads Ge’ez, an Ethiopian church’s own records. Then compare your two lines and ask why each new point was missing from the first. Run Bantu’s four explanations against each gap. Some gaps fit them well. Others may not.
Look closely at the first point. The Ethiopian official is not hidden in an untranslated Coptic manuscript. He is in the book of Acts, in any Bible. If he was missing from your first line, then the editing did not happen only in fifth-century Rome. It also happened in how the Bible itself was taught to you. That is a different kind of gap, and in some ways a more searching one.
Read the passages the edit skipped
Read Acts 8:26-39 slowly. List everything the text tells you about the official: his position, his journey, what he was reading, what he asked. Luke writes narrative here. He describes one man’s conversion. He does not tell us when a church formed in Ethiopia, and the passage should not be stretched into a founding date. What it does show is that an African was among the first people the apostolic witness reached, and that he left as a believer: “he went on his way rejoicing” (Acts 8:39).
Then read Acts 10:9-16 and Acts 15:1-21. In Peter’s vision the voice tells him, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common” (Acts 10:15). In its setting, the vision concerns food laws and prepares Peter to meet the Gentile Cornelius. In Acts 15 the apostles and elders decide that Gentile believers do not have to be circumcised and become Jewish to belong to Christ. Bantu extends that principle to culture. That is an application, not the passage’s direct subject.
Test it against the text. What in Acts 15 supports extending the decision beyond circumcision? Then notice what limits it. The council still asks Gentile believers to turn from certain practices (Acts 15:20). Their culture was welcomed, and it was not left untouched.
Finally, read Revelation 7:9, where John sees a multitude “of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” before the throne. This is apocalyptic vision, so read its imagery as symbolic. Even so, the variety of that crowd is plainly part of what John wants his readers to see. Set this verse beside your first timeline. Does the church history you inherited lead toward that crowd, or away from it?
Where the edit keeps happening
Bantu brings the pattern into the present through Ephrem the Syrian. Ephrem was a fourth-century theologian who defended orthodox belief in Syriac poetry built to be sung between a leader and a responding chorus. Bantu says Western scholars have dismissed that poetry as unsophisticated, and he is blunt about it: “It’s crazy how blatant the racism is in a lot of modern European scholarship.” Then he connects it to today: “how many of us black Christians today have been told that black preaching is less theologically robust and less theologically profound than white preaching.” His point is that judging which forms count as serious theology did not end with the ancient councils.
The edit does not only come from outside the Black community. Bantu notes that many Black theologians today treat the very idea of right and wrong belief as a European invention. His answer comes from the ancient record. Ethiopian theologians wrote about orthodox theology in Ge’ez, using haymanot, their word for theology. Giorgis of Segla argued hard against traditional religion and for orthodox belief. Lisa Fields adds a challenge of her own. She argues that some who reject Christian exclusivity as a white idea depend on methods of biblical criticism developed in German scholarship. In her view, that escape route has European roots too. Both points accept that the Africa-less story is wrong. They reject one popular way of correcting it.
What the fuller record lets you stand on
Bantu describes growing up in one of the first hip hop generations on the West Side of St. Louis. He recalls that “I always grew up thinking it was all evil,” as though following Jesus meant rejecting everything about who he was. Christian hip hop artists and Native American Christian theologians, he says, taught him otherwise: “God came so that you could be the fullest of who you are.”
He does not mean that culture is beyond correction. In his words, “the gospel both embraces our culture and it transforms it. Where our cultures are sinful, it transforms it, but it also embraces it because all theology is cultural.” He distinguishes God’s revelation, which is universal, from theology and worship, which are always human responses shaped by a particular place. That distinction keeps the recovered history from becoming a new kind of ownership. Christianity is no more Africa’s property than Europe’s. The record shows that Africans were inside the faith from the beginning, not borrowing it late.
Jude 3 teaches that Christianity is not foreign to Africa and that African and African-descended believers do not have to choose between their heritage and their faith. It also holds that before any adjective, we are Christian. Those two statements belong together. Your identity rests in Christ first, and the history tells you that Christ did not require Africans to stop being African. Lisa Fields describes what the book can give its readers: the ability to say, “I can see myself in this faith.” Bantu adds a balance. He is not telling anyone to stop reading European theology. His complaint is that “it has gotten way too much play in 2000 years of Christian history.”
Questions for discussion
- Compare your two timelines. Which missing point surprised you most, and which of Bantu’s explanations, if any, accounts for its absence?
- Bantu says the history was suppressed, not lost. What evidence in this guide supports that word? What evidence would make “neglected” a fairer description?
- If the Ethiopian official in Acts 8 was missing from your first line, what does that say about how Scripture has been taught where you learned it?
- Bantu extends Acts 10 and Acts 15 from Jewish law to culture in general. Where does that reading hold up in the text, and where would you want to be careful with it?
- Some Black scholars treat orthodoxy itself as a European idea. Restate their concern as fairly as you can before weighing Bantu’s and Lisa Fields’s responses.
- Name one form of worship or teaching you were taught to regard as less serious. On what grounds was that judgment made?
Notes for leading this
Make sharing the first timeline optional. Some people will feel embarrassed by how empty it is, and others will have drawn something very different because they grew up in a different tradition. Neither should feel tested. Do not let the group turn a pastor, parent or teacher into a villain. Most people passed on what they were given.
When the discussion heats up, go back to the redrawn line and ask which points are marked S and which are marked H. That one question keeps the group honest about what is established and what still needs checking. If someone wants to swing from “the white man’s religion” to “Africa’s religion,” point them back to Revelation 7:9 and the crowd John saw.
Before you finish, choose one person from the redrawn line whose name you had never heard before. Bantu recommends starting with Ephrem. This week, find something that person wrote, in translation, and read it. Then add one more point to your line, in your own handwriting, from a source you checked yourself.