Biblical Counselling and African Cultural Commonalities
Autonomous Original Research
by Alan Lester September 2024
Biblical Counselling and African Cultural Commonalities was driven by my desire to gain a deeper understanding of African culture in order to become a more effective biblical counsellor in the African context. I also sought to enhance the usefulness of others and to provide a model for other biblical counsellors in Africa and beyond. This model would allow them to examine the cultures in which they live and understand them from a theological and biblical counselling perspective.
With this purpose in mind, I embarked on a generative literature review, searching for a biblical counselling focus on culture. I discovered a significant void in the movement’s history, literature, and training. This gap was evident both in the initial twenty years of the early movement and later, even after the movement became self-critical and identified areas requiring new developments. In the absence of a prior biblical counselling analysis of cultural features, I recognised the need to employ cultural theology to better understand culture and enhance data-gathering and interpretation in biblical counselling methodology. I developed a cultural analytical framework that allowed me to analyse cultural features generally, theologically, and as a biblical counsellor.
When selecting African cultural customs to analyse, I found that existing literature, such as African discipleship materials, African Traditional Religion, philosophy, and ethics, while detailed in African cultural issues, did not contain data that met the needs of biblical counselling analysis. Discipleship material tends to be general, long-term, and extensive, whereas this analysis required data suited to the individual, immediate, and intensive approach of biblical counselling. This highlighted the need for new empirical research. I chose a qualitative case study, using semi-structured interviews as the instrument, focusing on African members of participating Gauteng evangelical churches. In designing the research, I also developed a research ethics policy that was approved by a professional ethics lawyer, ensuring it met ethical and legal standards in South Africa.
Given that biblical counselling is still largely unknown in South Africa, it became necessary to construct a biblical counselling epistemology for this new context. I based this on the time-tested Justified True Belief epistemological framework, incorporating Van Tillian transcendental epistemology. The primary reason for studying African Psychology in the literature review was to examine its epistemological foundation. Comparing the new biblical counselling epistemology to that of African Psychology, I concluded that biblical counselling stands on a far firmer epistemological foundation, earning it the right to a valid, independent epistemological jurisdiction in South Africa.
The fifty-two interviews conducted, representing thirteen languages and seventeen churches, revealed a remarkable trend. By a wide margin, interviewees identified African cultural community, secrecy, respect, and marriage as what I term the ‘big four.’ Additionally, there were eleven significantly smaller categories of data, some representing African cultural commonalities and others not. All audio and interview notes were transcribed, categorised, synthesised, and cleaned according to ethical standards before being analysed generally, theologically, and through a biblical counselling cultural analysis.
In conclusion, this research has achieved its intended purpose. It has significantly deepened my understanding of African culture and made me a more effective biblical counsellor. I trust it will also assist others in doing the same and that this research will serve as a model for biblical counsellors worldwide who wish to gain a deeper biblical understanding of the cultures in which they live.
What are readers saying?
I believe that every believer, from every culture, young and old in the faith, will glean a storehouse full of practical wisdom from this book. There is something for everybody, whether you’re looking for a sound technical argument in support of Biblical Counselling or very practical and easy-to-understand advice on every-day relational challenges. While the cultural focus is on a particular group of African Christians, believers from every culture will benefit from the principles that have been laid bare, even if your only exposure to another culture is that of another family in your local church. My prayer is that this book will be used by the Lord to remove all sorts of divisions in local churches, so that we stand united in the Gospel, beautiful to the world, for the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Kevin Lester
Finished! This was SO wonderful and practically insightful. I was introduced to concepts I’d never thought of before and gained clarity on other issues that had been murky. Even just seeing so many concepts tied together in a consistent framework helped put perspective on common threads that are so helpful in ministering cross-culturally.
What I most appreciated was that you took all the cultural concepts back to a biblical lens in a way that used God’s standard (not any specific cultural positions or presuppositions) as the plumb line for evaluation and interpretation. It consistently pointed me to see the beautiful ways that people image God within their cultural practices and also the ugly ways that sin has seeped in and corrupted God’s design. I originally expected this book to be primarily informative and instructional, but (while it was that too) it was overwhelmingly more as it fueled my own worship as my eyes were consistently pointed to the supremacy of the God who is the source of all the beauty and goodness we see on display in cultures.
Thank you for writing this… even if no one else should ever finish it, it was a huge benefit to me and will help me relate to and counsel others better. I can’t wait to see what else comes forth from this! Already sparking ideas for my thesis in a few years!
Sarah Ray (ACBC Certified Biblical Counsellor serving long-term in South Africa from the USA)