A Literature Review Perspective on Christian music in the context of African cultural complexities

Abstract

Christian music in African has overtime gained popularity with the rise of various religious groups using music to appeal to the conscience of their audience because of the love of music as part of the African cultural practices. This article seeks to review various literature to understand how to integrate the biblical understanding of Christian music with the complexities of African cultural singing objective. It has been proofed that Africans by nature are socially enriched through entertainment especially through music (Kwabena, 2000) and thus is believed to be one way of reaching many cultures in Africa especially with the gospel. Couple with the influx of modern music trends, religious singing in general is facing a number of issues including temptation to compromise biblical principles in an attempt to appeal to the African cultural mindset. This has led to differing contextualized Christian music approaches that seem to differ from one culture to another dictated by the African traditional singing perspective on one hand and interests of the many religious singing groups and solo artists on the other hand which have sprung up moving masses after them when performing their artistry. They all have divergent approaches to gospel music and trying to outdo one another and competitively changing tact and dynamically in disregard of the principles of Christian singing as embedded in the Bible. This literature review therefore attempts to incorporate cross-cultural theories, Christian music literature and Biblical counsel in the understanding of African music complexities with a view of aligning them with biblically based music guiding principles and approaches with relevant recommendations highlighted