RT Article
T1 Measuring Success: Western ABC's, Paul's XYZ's & Ubuntu as Markers for Church Growth in Africa
JF Transformation
VO 41
IS 4
SP 350
OP 361
A1 Davis, C. Bryan
A1 Howell, Alan
A2 Howell, Alan
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1908112050
AB Traditional measures of church growth, such as attendance and giving, come from aspects of growth that can readily be counted. These countable measures resonate with cultural assumptions about success, in which more is better. In contrast, the Apostle Paul offers a measure of church growth built around conforming to the kenotic example of Christ, in which Christ emptied Himself of divine power and took on the form of a slave to serve humanity (Phil. 2:6–8). In Paul's paradigm, the necessary indicator of church growth is how well believers follow Christ's example of servanthood by living in Christian community. The present paper uses the communitarian values associated with ubuntu to provide a framework for understanding Paul's kenotic paradigm of church growth in the African context.
K1 Kenosis
K1 Philippians
K1 Ubuntu
K1 Church Growth
K1 Africa
DO 10.1177/02653788241271802