Our strategic direction

At CRS-NDI, our research in inculturation is oriented according to the four strategic axes adopted since 2001 by the Regional Episcopal Conference of West Africa (CERAO): communion, liturgy, testimony and service.

These axes are nothing other than those bequeathed to the Church by Christ in whom the strategic axes, implemented by the Father since the Old Covenant, have been concentrated and personalized to be redeployed in the Church, Family of God and Messianic People: the Church iskoinonia and deploys its mission as leitourgia, marturia and diakonia.

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Since it is the whole that must be inculturated, we believe at CRS-NDI that the four strategic axes of the mission must be resituated and reconsidered from the angle of inculturation. This is why we are concerned with culture in all its breadth and with inculturation in its spiritual depth, as well as their organic connection as a condition of the possibility of any mission. It is a question for us, above all, of personal and ecclesial conversion as without which these attributes of the Church (communion, liturgy, witness and service) could be lived in superficiality or in ideological mode.

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The act of evangelization in which any particular Church assumes and prolongs the missionary gesture of the kerygma (first announcement of Jesus Christ to a given people) will always remain for us the basic question: “Brothers, what should we do? and Peter's answer: "Be converted and receive baptism in the name of Jesus Christ……" (Acts 2:37-38).

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As cultural subjects challenged, we each ask ourselves the fundamental question and we personally engage in a process of conversion thanks to which we realize a little more each day the truth of our being, in the truth of the God who reveals himself to us in Christ. This is the first act of appropriating what the missionary has come to announce to us and to our people. Keeping it alive is our own mission at CRS-NDI.

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Through all the research and training that we implement at CRS-NDI, we strive to fully assume this mission of sanctifying culture in its three temporal dimensions: the past, the present and the future.

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• In the direction of the past, we focus on the anthropological structure and its dynamic transmission, which is called "tradition".

• In the direction of the present, we take into account the struggle for life and survival of individuals and societies (development, society, economy, politics, etc.).

• Looking towards the future, we focus on emerging cultures in Africa and the challenges of post-modernity with its claim to want to reinvent the world and humanity (transhumanism, post-humanism). By replacing this futuristic horizon in a broader eschatological perspective, we are working at CRS-NDI to refine the criteria of spiritual discernment of culture, so that no particular culture, however strong it may be, in technique and capacity mastery of the world, confiscates the future of humanity.

The active commitment of each people to prevent the closed totalization of this future horizon of culture, is the most global field on which the dynamic developed at CRS-NDI strives to assume the whole past of African culture and the Africa is taking an active part in the present struggles for the survival and life of individuals and their society.

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In short, the ultimate goal we pursue at CRS-NDI is the living and vital articulation of faith and culture in the full extension of their historical unfolding.