Africa: Diversity of People, Religion, and Culture - Essay Sample

Introduction

Africa is amongst the world continent with a relatively bigger size as it's five times bigger than the United States. Africa contains a great diversity of different groups of people, religion, and culture. In Africa, Christianity has replaced the traditional religion that mostly revolves around the life rights of passages such as birth, initiation, marriage and death and which after death there is believed of the control of the sacred power and according to their believes religion is believed to be able to control those powers. Today Christianity has taken routes in Africa with high growth rate every year which is supposed to be in forty years' time Africa will lead the world with a high population of Christians and has enabled to influence different activities one of them being sports. Therefore the discussion is going to discuss the trends in Christianity and their implication about the purpose of sports in Africa.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

In Africa, there is a number of Christianity trends identified in the discussion which include; Prayer, popular worship and preaching and social values and mission of the church.

Prayer

Prayer is a regular religious service that can be used by human beings to express thanks or a request from God for favors in unfortunate situations (Blazer, 2015). Prayer and sports share the same audience even though games and prayer appear to be two different things since worship is used to build spiritual wellbeing while sports is for entrainment. During competitions, prayer can be used too by both the players and their fans to pray for their team to win. Therefore sports appears to bring people together to pray also despite supporting some other cultural values such as discipline and fairness, which are part of the Christians values(Piedmont, 2007).

Popular Worship and Preaching

Popular worship and preaching are whereby the Christians emphasizes on the teachings of the doctrine as the preacher paraphrase the bible for more fundamental understanding in prominent places(Donovan, 1954). During the time worship and preaching, there is a word of encouragement involved due to the existence of the less fortunate people in our society. These trends suggest about the purpose of sports ministry through the encouragement of players from poor African countries such as Somalia whereby their talents have never been developed due to insecurity in the area that caused government instability to support citizen's talents (Czec & Pearton, 1993). Therefore sports too can encourage the disadvantaged groups in countries and able to nature small members the same way as the existence of smells Christian's believers.

Missions of the Church

There are different church missions of which some of them will lead to cross the border to other parts of the world. Examples of the Cristian's missions may include humanitarian's activities such as food security, health care provisions to the disadvantaged groups. Sports also provide missions that will cross boarder the players to other parts of the world. Through cross border, people learn to interact with others in a different part of the world due to Christians believe that all people are the same before the Lord. Therefore sports missions play a role of advocating for equality in the world as the same as the role played by the Cristian missions.

Conclusion

The discussion introduces the history of African Christianity, trends in Christianity, and the suggestion of Christians on the sports ministry in Africa. The Christians trends identified include prayer, popular worship and preaching, and lastly Cristian missions (Bendroth, 1987). Prayer and sports bring the same audience of people together through prayer. Popular worship and preaching help in encouraging the people while the sports ministry to helps to develop talents of the players and finally the church missions which helps people to cross the border to advocate for equality where areas sports ministry also appears to be part of the department to other continents that allows creating equality of human race.

References

Bendroth, M. L. (1987). Women and Missions: Conflict and Changing Roles in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1870-1935. American Presbyterians, 65(1), 49 59.

Blazer, A. (2015). Practicing Faith. Playing for God, 1-24. doi:10.18574/nyu/9781479898015.003.0001

Czech, Dunning, E., Maguire, J., & Pearton, R. (1993). The sports process: a comparative and developmental approach. Human Kinetics Publishers.

D. R., Wrisberg, C. A., Fisher, L. A., Thompson, C. L., & Hayes, G. (2004). The experience of Christian prayer in sport: An existential phenomenological investigation. Journal of Psychology & Christianity, 23(1).

Donovan, M. (1954). Book Review: Preaching in a Scientific Age. By A. C. Craig. S.C.M. Press. 7s. 6d; Preaching. By W. Russell Bowie. Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, New York. $2.75. Theology, 57(414), 469-470. doi:10.1177/0040571x5405741413

Piedmont, R. L. (2007). Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion. Leiden, Netherlands: BRILL.