Church as Hostile, Host or Home: Perspectives on the Experiences of African Migrants in South Africa

Abstract

Human migration has been on the rise globally and it has fuelled xenophobia and growing intolerance towards migrants in the receiving communities.This article draws from data collected for a PhD thesis and highlights the experiences of African migrants in religious spaces and congregations in Johannesburg, South Africa.The PhD project this article draws from identified Christian religious identities as a form of belonging and explored models for providing care to migrants and refugees by appreciating their agency and ensuring that cross cultural and socio-religious encounters enrich the developmental agenda within host communities.I argue that instead of being hostile to African migrants, host congregations and communities should engage in mutually transformative mission with migrants and appreciate how migration encounters enrich human relations.They give birth to hybrid contextual theologies through the construction, or de-construction, of congregations by missio-ecclesiological and intercultural forces of migration that challenge their vocation and witness.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.