In July 1534, Martin Luther put his name to a letter about an Ethiopian visitor. The visitor was a deacon named Michael, and the two men had talked privately about Christian doctrine. Dr. David Daniels, a historian of world Christianity, has spent years on this letter. As he describes it, Luther found that Michael agreed with the Creed held in the West, held the same doctrine of the Trinity, and practiced the Lord’s Supper in a way Luther could accept. Luther asked “good people” to welcome him as a brother.
When that letter was written, Michael’s church was already more than a thousand years old. The church Luther was trying to reform had grown up in Europe. The Ethiopian deacon came from a Christian kingdom that historians date to the fourth century, a kingdom with its own sacred language, its own Bible and its own councils. It belonged to a family of African churches that had shaped Christian theology since the second century. A German reformer meeting an African Christian in 1534 was not a church meeting an outsider. He was meeting an elder.
So there was an African church long before Europe was largely Christian, and its people can be named. Africans heard the first apostolic sermon. African theologians gave the church much of its language about God and Christ. African kingdoms chose the faith, and some Africans crossed the Atlantic already Christian. Followed in order, the record shows where each scholar’s evidence fits, and where each one marks the limits of what can be proven.