Kinshasa to Host Pan-African Workshop on Small Christian Communities: Aim to Establish Network

Kinshasa to Host Pan-African Workshop on Small Christian Communities: Aim to Establish Network

CANAA || By Father Don Bosco Onyalla, Nairobi || 26 September 2016

A workshop aimed at establishing a network of Small Christian Communities (SCCs) in Africa is scheduled to take place in DR Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, next month.

The weeklong conference, which will run from October 20-27, 2016, is being organized by Missio-Aachen and the Archdiocese of Kinshasa, under the patronage of Laurent Cardinal Monsengwo, the Archbishop of Kinshasa.

According to a message sent to CANAA about the workshop, the network of SCCs to be established will provide a forum for sharing ideas, experiences, knowledge, and a wealth of relevant competences around the reality of SCCs across Africa and in the diaspora.

Creating and hosting a website to facilitate the sharing of information is one of the immediate objectives of the planned workshop, a forum that will make possible the networking of the different SCCs stakeholders.

It is hoped that when the SCC network is created, members will gain access to other possible networks within the Church, making known realities of local Churches and communicating new ways of being Church.

The October Kinshasa conference is a follow up of two previous meetings, one held in 2014 in Ghana’s capital, Accra, and another in 2015 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

The workshop will focus on four thematic areas:

v The Small Christian Community as place of individual and collective witness (martyria).

v The Small Christian Community as place of celebration of the actions of God in history (leiturgia).

v The Small Christian Community as place of a tool to support the challenges of society (diakonia).

v The Small Christian Community as place of living service and the various ministries (oidokome).

There is a free online Ebook available on the Small Christian Communities Global Collaborative Website, which provides some information about SCCs in some countries of Africa here…