Petri Assenga

Towards an African Model of Church As Family: a Socio-anthropological, Ecclesiological and Pastoral Study Based on Family Structures and Community Building Rituals Among the Chagga Petri Assenga

This work is an implementation of the call of the African Synod of Bishops held in Rome in 1994, on the vision of the Church in Africa as ?family of God?, in order to articulate the essence, life and mission of the Church in the African continent still profoundly marked by poverty, diseases, political instability, and ethnical conflicts at the dawn of the third millennium. It is argued in this book that the Church?s evangelising mission in Africa may be very successful if the needs and mentality of the Africans are taken as a starting point and as a constant point of focus. Thus, the African mentality and its ways of expression are explored in this book in the context of the Chagga people in Tanzania. Various ways of being church in the African perspective of family are proposed within the Catholic diocese of Moshi as an instance for the entire African family ecclesiology.