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Mtata noted that the year 2025 holds significant ecumenical anniversaries that provide a unique opportunity for the church to reflect on and reclaim its prophetic witness in the face of the multiple and interconnected crises.
“The year 2025 offers a unique ecumenical moment to reawaken the church’s prophetic witness,” he said. “It is not adequate to engage with contemporary history without confronting the enduring legacies of exploitation and domination that have defined the West’s relationship with the rest of the world—beginning with the European or transatlantic slave trade and culminating in the colonial era.”
Among other commemorations, the year 2025 marks 140 years since the Berlin Conference, where Western powers carved up Africa for their own gain.
“This unequal global order, rooted in slavery, colonialism, and racism, persists in both implicit and explicit forms,” he said. “One stark example was the refusal of Western nations to equitably share vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic, reinforcing patterns of exclusion and disparity that have shaped centuries of exploitation.”
Mtata noted that slavery and exploitative labor practices, especially for the false luring of racialized groups, continues today in many forms. “Thousands of young Africans have drowned and died in the Mediterranean being lured by the promises of good life in Europe, where they are treated with indignity if they make it,” he said. “Any useful contextual analysis cannot decouple the capitalist, imperial, exploitative, and violent nature of imperial ambitions of our time.”
In its crude form, he noted, imperialism has recently been exemplified by Donald Trump’s claims over Panama, Canada, and Greenland.
“Democracy is now under threat more than ever,” he said. “The new political wave threatens the whole democratic vision as a whole.”
The rightwing political phenomenon has an economic dimension to it, continued Mtata. “Social media and partisan news outlets have exacerbated this polarization, creating echo chambers where individuals are insulated from opposing viewpoints,” he said. “The United Nations and the whole multilateral system were put in place to create conditions peace and coexistence among nations on the basis of the rule of law.”
Mtata concluded by noting that the world is in a crisis. “But there is a bigger crisis in the church because the churches’ response to these crises are based on state or church theology,” he said.
Read the full text "Prophetic Theology, Prophetic Church – in Times of Multiple Crises"