Environmental Stewardship

African Christianity has grown faster than almost any other branch of the church, yet its ecological theology has lagged behind, and nowhere is the gap felt more sharply than in a copper-mining town like Chingola on Zambia's Copperbelt, where polluted rivers and stripped woodland sit beside crowded sanctuaries. This article asks a focused question. What can be retrieved, for a contextual ecological theology of the Chingola churches, from recent African eco-theology and its global interlocutors? Rather than inventing a theology from nothing or importing a finished system from elsewhere, it works by retrieval, testing each body of work against three criteria: fidelity to Scripture, fit with the Chingola context, and fruitfulness for the church's practice. It surveys the global interlocutors (Moltmann, McFague, Boff, Francis, Habel, and the environmental-justice tradition), the African center (Conradie, Mugambi, Kaoma, Daneel, and Gitau), and the indigenous and Ubuntu resources of African Traditional Religion, naming in each case both what is usable and where the limits lie. A distinction between contextualisation and contextualism guards throughout against the uncritical aggregation that has weakened some African ecotheology. The article closes by gathering the retrieved materials into a set of building blocks for a systematic and public theology of creation in Chingola.

Genesis 1:26-28 has been read in two opposing directions. One reading takes the creation of the man before the woman, and the granting of dominion, as a charter for male authority over women and human mastery over the earth. The other, drawing on African women's theology and on ecological hermeneutics, reads the same passage as the commissioning of women and men together to bear God's image and to exercise a shared and responsible care of creation. This article argues for the second reading and develops it in dialogue with the African philosophy of Ubuntu. It contends that the image of God is relational and inclusive, reaching across colour, gender, and creed, and that the dominion it confers is the responsible stewardship of a gardener rather than the exploitation of a tyrant. Read through Ubuntu, with its conviction that a person is a person through other persons, the passage grounds both the equal dignity of women and an ethic of kinship with the wider community of creation. Set against the gender inequality and ecological degradation of contemporary Zambia and the wider continent, this re-reading offers a contextual theology in which the care of women, of the neighbour, and of the earth belong together as facets of a single human vocation under God.

Genesis 1:26-28 has been read in two opposing directions. One reading takes the creation of the man before the woman and the granting of dominion as a charter for male authority over women and human mastery over the earth. The other, drawing on African women's theology and on ecological hermeneutics, reads the same passage as the commissioning of women and men together to bear God's image and to exercise a shared and responsible care of creation. This article argues for the second reading and develops it in dialogue with the African philosophy of Ubuntu. It contends that the image of God is relational and inclusive, reaching across colour, gender, and creed, and that the dominion it confers is the responsible stewardship of a gardener rather than the exploitation of a tyrant. Read through Ubuntu, with its conviction that a person is a person through other persons; the passage grounds both the equal dignity of women and an ethic of kinship with the wider community of creation. Set against the gender inequality and ecological degradation of contemporary Zambia and the wider continent, this re-reading offers a contextual theology in which the care of women, of the neighbour, and of the earth belong together as facets of a single human vocation under God.

This article offers a constructive answer to a single question: what contextual ecological theology emerges when the contextual, biblical, and traditional analyses of a copper-mining community are drawn together in critical dialogue with African Traditional Religion and Ubuntu philosophy? Working from the ecological situation of Chingola, on Zambia's Copperbelt, where the Kafue and its tributaries carry the residue of decades of extraction, it builds an earthed gospel ordered around five convictions. Creation is sacred space rather than raw material. Ecological justice is a matter of debt redressed rather than charity offered. The human vocation is a participatory custodianship modelled on Ubuntu rather than a mastery exercised over property. The well-being God intends is an integral shalom in which human and ecological flourishing cannot be prised apart. And the church in a mining community is called to a vocation at once prophetic, pastoral, and constructive, grounded in the Christ who holds all things together and sustained by the Spirit who renews creation. Throughout, a distinction between contextualisation and contextualism keeps Scripture in the position of final authority, and the article closes by stating plainly what the gospel affirms, reframes, and refuses in the African inheritance.
Keywords: ecological theology; African Traditional Religion; Ubuntu; ecological debt; sacred space; integral shalom; public theology; Chingola; Copperbelt; contextualisation

Chingola, in Zambia's Copperbelt, is one of the most visibly wounded landscapes in Southern Africa. For close to two decades, the rivers on which its peri-urban communities depend have been fouled by effluent from large-scale copper extraction, with documented harm to water, soil, livelihoods, and human bodies. Over the same period, the churches of Chingola, though numerous, well-attended, and socially influential, have, on the whole, remained conspicuously quiet about this degradation. This article asks what theological problem the conjunction discloses. My argument is that the silence is not, first of all, a failure of activism or information. It is the symptom of a deeper malformation, namely a gospel that has been unearthed and cut off at the root from the doctrine of creation and from any account of salvation wide enough to include the groaning of the land. Reading the situation through African ecotheology (Kaoma, Golo), systematic ecotheology (Conradie), the public-theological tradition (Koopman, Smit, Forster), and Laudato Si', I describe the problem as a single fracture with four faces, at once soteriological, doxological, pneumatological, and prophetic. The closing section sketches a constructive path toward an earthed and public faith, one in which the cry of the land and the cry of the poor are finally heard as a single cry.