Modern African church history and the streetlight effect: biography as a lost key

Research on the continent of Africa—where Christianity is growing most rapidly today and where theologies are proliferating as the Christian Scriptures are brought to bear on questions and perspectives unanticipated by either their authors or their emissaries—can be tedious, time consuming, expensive, and frustrating, so scholars search beneath the reassuring glow of academic streetlights: university and mission libraries, archives and materials collections in Western lands. Not surprisingly, such studies yield more or less predictable Christendom and neo-Christendom histories and theologies.