The conscience of African evangelicalism
Kato was born in Kwoi, northern Nigeria, to a family serving the traditional religion of the Jaba people — his father was a priest of the local shrine. He was converted as a boy, trained in Nigeria, London and finally at Dallas Theological Seminary, and in 1973 became the first African general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals of Africa and Madagascar.
He had roughly two years in the post. In them he argued one case relentlessly: that African Christianity would stand or fall on whether it submitted to the authority of Scripture, and that a theology built primarily on continuity with African traditional religion would end in universalism — everyone saved, nobody needing to hear anything. Theological Pitfalls in Africa names the theologians he thought were drifting, and names them sharply.
He also insisted, in the same breath, that the answer was not importing American theology. He pressed for African evangelical scholarship trained in Africa, and the graduate school he pushed for came into being after his death.
He drowned while swimming off Mombasa in December 1975, aged thirty-nine.
Theology is not a hobby for professors. It is what happens whenever anyone thinks about God, and the only question is whether you do it well or badly. A plain-language map of the subject, its branches, its sources and its purpose.
How God makes himself known, the four classic attributes of Scripture — necessity, clarity, sufficiency and authority — what sola scriptura does and does not mean, and how to weigh a "thus says the Lord" today.
Carey, Judson, Taylor, Slessor, Moon and the century that took the gospel to most of the world — travelling on the same ships as empire. What the missionaries got wrong, what they got right, and why the churches they planted outgrew them.
From Portuguese chaplains in Benin and Warri to Badagry 1842, Crowther and the Niger Mission, Calabar, the Aladura churches, the civil war, the campus revivals and the Pentecostal explosion — and the north, where the story is different again.
What African traditional religion actually holds, why the faith is not a foreign import, where the gospel speaks directly into the tradition, and how to walk with someone out of fear and into Christ.