Introduction
I was once watching GTV News with a Friend and he told me, Fr. Eric, I have noticed that there is not a single day that one watches the News without seeing a group dancing.
Some people think that a gesture like dancing in the Church building amounts to turning the Church into an entertainment center.
What these people do not realize is that by dancing, Ghanaians or Africans in general, are expressing their culture and who they are as a people.
The Incarnation of Jesus defines the importance of culture in evangelization. This is because in order for God to operate in our realm, God had to become human so that God would communicate Godself to humanity. There is a strong relationship between the Gospel and the culture and there is the need for a spirituality which should enable us to witness to God’s kingdom in the multi-cultural context in which we live. From the very beginning of the preaching of the Gospel the Church has been aware of the process of encounter and engagement with cultures (Fides et Ratio, 70). Culture can reveal true human nature therefore, the preaching of the Gospel must reach every human being in and through their culture.
What is Culture?
Culture is the sum total of the activities, the ideas, the traditions, the ways of life, the beliefs, the linguistic heritage, the rites, customs, the norms, the history of a people that have been learnt and passed on from one generation to the next in a given society. Culture is acquired through formal or informal or non-formal education. It is a human trait.[1]
What is Evangelizaton?
Evangelization, put simply, is the Christian’s call to share the Good News of God’s love and forgiveness, made possible because of Jesus’ dying and rising from the dead.
Effective evangelization requires that one becomes conversant with the culture in which the Gospel is to be preached, therefore, the two are inseparable. They must be seen as two sides of a coin. Let us now examine and take a deeper look at Culture and Evangelization.
Culture
The word “Culture” is defined differently by various disciplines. For instance, we have “a seminary culture,”- This is about how seminary life is lived. “The Culture of silence”- This is a political moment when the military was ruling Ghana and Ghanaians could not speak up. We also have a “prison culture”- This is about how to survive in the prison institution. And John is cultured, means that John is a gentleman. Etc.
The word culture comes from the Latin Cultura, which meant to cultivate the earth, and which for medieval believers probably recalled Adam’s cultivation of the Garden of Eden. Culture, indeed, refers more generally to human activity; society usually more particularly refers to the way groups of people are organized, denoting settled communities that are: associations, power, freedom or voluntary, belong to the domain of what we call society. Worldviews and other such ideational elements controlling the behavior of a society are more properly seen as belonging to the larger sphere of culture.

In the nineteenth century the scientific method in its evolutionary form raised questions about the nature of race, which became the first of the historical business of what we now call anthropology (Originally a branch of history). Franz Boas, an American, is known to be the founder of modern notions of an ideational pattern at the root of culture, and insisted on the historical interconnections among peoples. He understood that culture needed to be studied in their particular and especially in their many interconnections.
In the 1950s anthropologists began to address the symbolic and cognitive dimensions of culture. These anthropologists represented most famously by Clifford Geertz, wanted to explain culture not in terms of some typology but as constitutive process. According to him, religion is also a symbolic system that functions to “synthesize ethos…their most comprehensive ideas of order”[2] These theories of culture might be called mentalist or idealist in that they tend to focus on the subjective side of culture. These have been challenged by the Marxist anthropologists who focus more on the material conditions of culture and the techniques for dealing with the external environment.
The Biblical Framework for Culture
In the first chapter of Genesis, in the call to “fill the earth and subdue it,” we sense that culture, or the keeping and tilling of the land, is a major part of what it means to be in the “image” of God. The original Hebrew carries the idea of “stamping” the ground, a purposeful effort at shaping and wresting symmetry out of the wild vastness of raw creation (Gen 1:28).[3]
There is integrity to creation that gives culture and its artifacts solidity. There is a design to the universe, a pattern and an inner structure that anyone with a highly developed sense of fact can discover. The harnessing of wind and water, the fashioning of tools, technologies and the art- the entire creative and scientific enterprise- is made possible by closely following the structure that God has built into creation.
Culture is affirmed in Scripture as that context in which God accomplishes God’s creative and redemptive work: “God so loved the world.” It is the arena in which the drama of God’s saving history is being played out. We are told that even in its fallen state, culture serves as part of God’s temporal conserving grace. It is Cain who builds a city, and it is his line of descendants who begin to domesticate cattle, forge tools out of bronze and iron, and make music out of pipe and lyre. From a “place of wandering” (“the land of Nod,”) (Gen 4:16).
In both the mythic density of the story of Babel and the reference to the making of nations and their habitations in Paul’s speech to the Athenians, we sense that diversity and the “filling of the earth” is in the plan of God. Instead of living in the monocultural, self-enclosed city, people were meant to spread out and develop various language groupings and settlements. Culture then is a reflection of both human obedience and rebellion against God. These opposite tendencies usually define the tensions characterizing the Christian’s relationship to culture in the present globalized world.
The best of our cultures – the glory and splendor of the nations- shall be brought into the new Jerusalem. In a mysterious way, we shall take with us all our cultural baggage as we all come marching in (Rev 7:9.21:24-26).
[1][1][1] Peter Kwasi Sarpong, Archbishop Sarpong Explains Key Christian Topics, (Accra: SNAM Ltd., 2016), 95.
[2] C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (New York: Basis Books, 1973), 89.
[3] God bless them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that
moves upon the earth.” (Gen 1:28).