Mercy Amba Oduyoye and her Circle

Theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye tells a story of how when she was a girl attending Mmofraturo, a Methodist girls’ boarding school in Kumasi, Ghana, she and her classmates felt empowered to make scripture their own, so they took interpretive liberty. Since the biblical proverbs were so close to the proverbs of their Akan culture, the girls would recite Akan proverbs in place of the proverbs of the Hebrew Bible. They confidently lived into their hybrid religious identity. For these girls, the sentiment behind the biblical proverbs already lived deeply in Akan culture. Why not translate their own cultural wisdom into biblical language?

Not only did Oduyoye and her classmates hear themselves in the lessons of scripture, they counted themselves equal members of the church. This was quite remarkable, for the girls had been raised in a culture that honors women for their genealogical role in society but expects men to be the dominant decision-makers—and in a faith tradition that places women at the bottom of the theological hierarchy. The confident communal witness of those girls stayed with Oduyoye as she grew up, giving shape to her theological imagination and her passion for ecumenism.

Born to a self-assured woman and a preaching father, Oduyoye has dedicated her life to interrogating the complexity of theological concepts, language, and practice—with both African and Western cultural nuances in view. She consistently raises her voice to insist on men and women’s equality in a culture that endorses values of communal care and wholeness but fails to demonstrate them toward its own women. At the same time, her theological voice asserts the full value of all people in the church. Christian practice, Oduyoye believes, is unstable unless it includes the perspectives of all of the church’s members. This is because all members of creation are entangled with one another in God, who is the center of life.